Fall 2002

Theory of Knowledge Knowledge and Truth

"Knows" is Factive

Some verbs are what philosophers and linguists call factive verbs. For instance, consider the verb "sees that P is the case." If you can see that P is the case, it seems like P has to really be the case. For me to be able to see that you are nervous, you have to really be nervous. Otherwise, I can't see that you are nervous. I can only seem to see that, or think I see it, or "see" it (in scare-quotes). Similarly with verbs like "discovering" and "regretting" and "overlooking"and "admitting." If I discover that you are dishonest, you have to really be dishonest. Otherwise, I can't discover that you are dishonest. I can only seem to discover that, or think I discover it, etc.

Verbs like "predicting" and "believing" and "reporting," on the other hand, are not factive. If I predict that P is the case, it does not follow that P really is the case.

Now, how about the verb "to know"? "Knows that P" seems to be another example of a factive verb. It doesn't make any sense to say:

If you said that, it would sound like you were contradicting yourself. It'd be okay to say:

Or:

It seems like, for the jury to really know that Sue is innocent, though, it has to be the case that Sue is innocent. You can't know things which are false. You can only seem to know them, or falsely think that you know them.

So this is one important fact about knowledge. If you know that P, it follows that P is true.

One thing it's important to be clear about is that the claim that:

is not enough, by itself, to settle the debate about the Infallibility Principle. The claim that knowledge is factive does not entail that:

The fallibilist thinks that we can sometimes know things on the basis of fallible evidence, but he agrees that knowledge is factive. On his view, you can know P on the basis of fallible evidence, but only if P is also true. If there are other people who believe things on the basis of the same kinds of fallible evidence as you, but their beliefs are false, then their beliefs won't count as knowledge on anybody's view.

This point often confuses people, so make sure that you've thought it through and understood it.

The fallibilist says: to know P, you need to have good evidence for P, and in addition, P has to be true. (The evidence by itself usually won't guarantee that P is true.) The Infallibility Principle says: to know P, your evidence has to be extremely good, so good that no one could have that evidence without P's being true.

Sometimes students think, "According to the fallibilist, if there really is a sun, then your fallible evidence will be enough to enable you to know that there is a sun. But you won't be able to know that you know." I guess they're thinking that knowing that you know requires you to be absolutely certain that you know, and hence, absolutely certain that there really is a sun. But it's not clear why that should be so. If we accept the fallibilist's view that you can know things about the sun on the basis of less-than-certain evidence, why shouldn't we also be able to know whether we have knowledge, on the basis of less-than-certain evidence?

We'll talk about this more later.

The Truth Is "Out There"

I said that in order for you to know that P, P has to be true. Nonetheless, there is an important difference between what's true, on the one hand, and what we know or can know to be the case, on the other.

Let's think about the Matrix. Is the world that Trinity and Cypher experience when they're inside the Matrix, and seem to interact with, "less real" than the world they "awaken to" when they take Morpheus' red pill?

The standard view is that "yes," it is less real. As Morpheus says, the Matrix is "a dream world." The characters are just experiencing a "neural interactive simulation" of eating steak, dodging bullets, and so on. In truth, they never have eaten steak, and never will. It just seems to them that they have. And this would be so even if no one ever discovered that it was so; even if no one ever figured out that the Matrix was just a "dream world."

Philosophers would express this view by saying that facts like:

• whether you've ever eaten steak
• whether your eyes have ever been open
• how tall you are
• how much you weigh

and so on are all objective facts, facts that are true (or false) independently of what anybody believes or knows about them, or has evidence for believing.

Most facts seem to be objective facts. For instance, Mt. Everest is 8850 m tall. That's how far it rises above sea level. And Mt. Everest doesn't care very much about whether we exist or what we know. Mt. Everest would still be 8850 m tall no matter what any of us knew or believed or had evidence for believing.

You might wonder: what if we changed our minds about where to draw the boundaries of Mt. Everest? Wouldn't that make it have a different height? It would not. What we'd have done in that case would be to change what object it is we're talking about when we use the word "Mt. Everest." The old object--the object we used to call "Mt. Everest"--would still have the same height. And that's all that's being claimed by the philosophers who say that the facts about Mt. Everest's height are objective. They're claiming that what height a certain object has is an objective fact, that does not depend in any way upon people's beliefs or knowledge about it. If people come to have different beliefs, then it might be that their words no longer refer to that object. But we're talking about the object itself, not our words.

Compare the following case. My father's name is "Howard." So Prof. Pryor is Howard's son. Now suppose we decide to call you "Prof. Pryor." We can call me something else, say "Seymour." Would that make you now be Howard's son? No, of course not. Would it make me stop being Howard's son? No, it wouldn't do that, either. Whether or not a person is Howard's son is independent of what you call that person. You can call the person "Howie's Boy," if you like. It's still not going to make him Howard's son, if he wasn't Howard's son to start with.

Similarly, there's this one hunk of rock. As a matter of fact, we call it "Mt. Everest," but we didn't have to call it that. We might not have called it anything at all. And how high that hunk of rock is is independent of what we call it or believe or know about it.

Van Inwagen has a good discussion of this in his selection in the coursepack. (He also discusses a case where we change our minds about what to count as "a meter.")

Some people get uneasy when you talk about "objective facts." They say: "Well, what's true for you might be different than what's true for me."

Sometimes all they mean by this is that what they believe to be true is different from what you believe to be true. Well, sure, of course. If I say that it's an objective fact whether or not I've ever eaten steak, I'm not denying that you and I may disagree about whether I've ever eaten steak. Nor need I claim to have more evidence or authority than you about whether I've ever eaten steak. I may be ignorant or mistaken about my past dietary habits. All I'm claiming is that there is a fact of the matter of the matter about whether I've eaten steak. Regardless of whether you or I or anybody else knows what that fact is. And if it happens to be true that I've eaten steak, then it's true, period. It won't be "true for me" but "false for you."

Sometimes it seems natural to talk about a fact's being "true for" one person, but "false for" another. For instance, if I go to the tailor's and try on a new suit, I might say that it's well-fitting. You could respond: "Well, that may be true for you, but it's not for me." What's going on here, though, is not that there's one fact which is true for me and false for you. What's really going on is that there are two facts:

• The suit fits me.
• The suit does not fit you.

And when I originally said "This suit fits well," I failed to specify whether I merely meant (truly) that the suit fits me; or whether I also meant (falsely) that the suit would fit you as well. The first, fully-specified, claim is simply true. It's simply true that the suit fits me. It's not true for some people and false for others. The second, fully-specified, claim is simply false. It's simply false that the suit fits you. It's not false for some people and true for others. Of course, some people might think that it's true, and other people think that it's false. But what we're talking about now is whether it could really be true for some people and really be false for others. Just because you think some claim is true, it doesn't follow that it really is true--not even "true for you." If the suit doesn't fit me, then it doesn't fit me, even if we both somehow convince ourselves that it does fit.

So, too, if I say "Coffee tastes good," and you say, "Well it might to you, but it doesn't to me," we're not talking about a single fact, which happens to be true for one of us and false for another. We're talking about two facts. We're talking about how coffee tastes to me, and how it tastes to you. Each of these facts is perfectly objective. If coffee tastes good to me, then it's simply true that it tastes good to me. It can't be true for me but false for you that coffee tastes that way to me.

All of that is what I called "the standard view." But not everyone accepts the standard view. To understand why not, we need to introduce a few background ideas.

A realist about Xs is someone who believes that Xs really exist, that they aren't mere fictions. Realists about Xs also think that Xs aren't radically different from the sort of thing we thought they were all along. And they think that the facts about Xs are independent of what we believe or have evidence for believing.

For example, a realist about the external world is someone who believes that there really are trees and mountains and so on; he thinks these are real things "out there" in the world, and that they're not just ideas in our mind, or constructions out of our experiences.

Another example. A realist about wealth believes that some people really are rich, and other people really are poor. That is, he believes that people really do have those properties. He needn't think that people who are rich will always be rich, or that they deserve to be rich, or anything like that. A realist about wealth just says that some people really are, as a matter of fact, and at some times, rich, and others are poor.

A reductionist about certain things or properties is someone who thinks that facts about those things or properties can be reduced to, or explained away in terms of, facts about something else. For instance, most of us believe that biology reduces to chemistry. There are no distinctive, brute biological facts. It's really all just chemistry. Facts about wealth might be reduced to facts about people and the ways they interact with each other.

Sometimes reductionists count as realists, and sometimes they don't. It depends on what they're reducing things to. It's hard to come up with any general rule that tells you for all cases whether a given reductionist is a realist or not. If you think that facts about trees reduce to facts about atoms and electrons, then philosophers will still count you as a realist about trees. If you think that facts about trees reduce to facts about what ideas and experiences people are having, then you don't count as a realist. That's too different from what we ordinarily take trees to be.

Let's consider the property of being fashionable. It's plausible that we can reduce this property to certain facts about us: some of our social conventions, and our beliefs and intentions about what will be fashionable. The fashions aren't "out there" waiting for us to discover them. Instead, we make certain clothing styles fashionable, by treating them as fashionable. We have authority about what the fashions will be. Because of that, there are limits to what kinds of mistakes we can make about what's fashionable. We can make isolated mistakes--and some of us make more mistakes than others--but we can't all be systematically wrong about what's in fashion. Rather, the fashions are partly determined by what we believe they are.

Some people think that knowledge is a lot like fashions. They think that facts about who knows what can also be reduced to facts about our social conventions. These people say things like "Knowledge is a social construction." Taken literally, that means that facts about who knows what are dependent on us in the same way that facts about fashions are. Suppose there's this guy Curtis who lives in the East Village and he wears plaid pants from the 70s that look really cool, he has hipster glasses, and so on. He's very stylish. He's also this serious researcher about cell biology. So he knows a lot about cells. Now, if you say that fashions are a "social construction," what you mean is that the rest of us could get together and agree that the plaid pants and all of that will no longer be fashionable. So we can change him from being fashionable to being unfashionable, behind his back. It's plausible that fashions are like that. If you say that knowledge is a "social construction," what that means is that we could also get together and agree that he won't know things about cells anymore. Just because we decided he won't.

I hope you realize how stupid that is. Of course, we could decide to say that Curtis doesn't have knowledge any more. But that wouldn't make it so. We could also take away his books and computer, so he won't be able to gather any more evidence. We could even brainwash him so that he forgets everything he knows about cells. What we can't do is make him stop having knowledge, just by agreeing that he won't know things anymore. So knowledge isn't a "social construction," in the way that fashions are.

People sometimes say "knowledge is a social construction" when they don't really mean it. What they really mean is something like this:

Well, that's true. But it doesn't show that knowledge is literally a "social construction," in the way that fashions are.

Here's an interesting way in which what you know might depend on facts about your social community. Suppose I live in a group with lax epistemic standards, and you live in a group with stricter standards. And suppose we both believe that Mt. Everest is 8850 meters tall, on the basis of the same body of evidence. Might it be that I count as knowing that fact, but you don't, because the evidence we're relying on is good enough to meet my society's standards but not good enough to meet yours? This is an interesting question. We'll be talking about it more in coming weeks.

Even if the answer to that question is "yes," though, that still won't show that knowledge is a "social construction." For the views we'll discuss later don't say that knowledge only depends on the epistemic standards of your society. It also depends on other things, such as whether it's really true that Mt. Everest is 8850 meters tall. That fact is not a "social construction." So these views would not make facts about who knows what reducible solely to facts about our social conventions.

Let's consider another very radical kind of reductionist view. This is a view called "verificationism" or "anti-realism." Verificationism about a subject-matter tries to reduce that subject to facts about what evidence there is concerning it. The verificationist thinks that:

For example, a verificationist about weight would say that what my weight is depends on what evidence there is about my weight. It's impossible for all the evidence to go one way, and the facts about my weight to go another. The facts have to be constrained by the evidence. Hence, the verificationist is rejecting the idea that the facts about my weight are objective facts. Sure, he'll say, people sometimes make mistakes about their weight. They sometimes have false beliefs. But these mistakes have to be in principle discoverable and correctable. It doesn't make sense to talk about a situation where everybody is permanently and irremediably mistaken about my weight, where the "real facts" are so well-concealed that no one will be able to ferret them out. If the "real facts" are so well-concealed, says the verificationist, then they cease being facts at all. The only weight I can have will be a weight that it's in principle discoverable or verifiable that I have. (Hence the name "verificationism.")

One kind of verificationism would say that I can have a certain weight, say 100 lbs, only if it's publicly verifiable that I weigh 100 lbs. That is, there has to be evidence acquirable by somebody, somewhere, that demonstrates that I do weigh 100 lbs. A different version of the view would focus instead on what I myself am able to verify. This view would say that it's "true for me" that I weigh 100 lbs. only if I could in principle verify that I weigh 100 lbs. It'd be "true for you" that I weigh 100 lbs. only if you could verify that I weigh 100 lbs. And so on. (Of course, we can also inquire into how much you weigh. Here again the view will distinguish between whether it's true for me that you have a given weight, and whether it's true for you that you have that weight.) We can call this view "personal verificationism," since it says that what's true--that is, true for me--always depends on what I myself would be able to verify. If there's some fact that will forever be concealed from me, then it's not really a fact; at least, not a fact "for me." It may be a fact for other people.

Hereafter, when I talk about "verificationism," I will mean this kind of "personal verificationism."

Suppose there's a character in The Matrix that it's impossible for Morpheus to "waken." Maybe this character believes in the "dream world" too strongly, and would just go insane and die if the "dream" ever started to unravel. Let's call this character Simon. According to the standard view, Simon has many false beliefs about his surroundings. He believes that he goes to work everyday on the 40th floor of an office building, that the sun streams into his office most mornings, that he often eats steak for dinner, and so on. All of these beliefs are false. In fact, Simon has never seen the sun, has never eaten steak, and he's spent his entire life in a small pod. But these are facts that Simon will never know. What's more, he's incapable of knowing them. If Morpheus told Simon the truth, Simon wouldn't believe him; and if Morpheus tried to show Simon the truth, Simon would go insane and die. So there are many truths about Simon's life that Simon will never be able to know.

That's what the standard view says. According to the verificationist, though, if it's impossible for Simon to know something, then that thing can't really be a "truth" about Simon's life. At least, it won't be a truth for Simon. What's true for Simon is that he really does work on the 40th floor of an office building, and so on. (And by this we don't just mean that Simon thinks he works on the 40th floor etc. We mean it really is a fact--a fact for Simon--that he works on the 40th floor of an office building. It may not be true for Morpheus that Simon works on the 40th floor of an office building, but it is true for Simon.)

When students in my classes talk about things being "true for" them, but "false for" other people, they're usually trying to sign onto this kind of personal verificationism. They'll say things like this:

Every year I'm surprised at how many students voice their approval for this view. It's such a weird and bizarre view of reality. A few philosophers may defend the view. But I'd be really surprised if 30% or 50% of my university students really did have such weird and bizarre conceptions of reality.

In fact, though, I don't think they do. At first, they say things that make them sound like verificationists. When I describe verificationism in more detail, they say that's what they believe. But when we inquire further, they're almost always unwilling to accept the consequences of this view. They find it superficially appealing, but once they see what it commits them to, they're unwilling anymore to endorse it.

There's nothing shameful in that. That's what philosophy is all about: discovering what we accept only because it sounds superficially appealing, and what we accept because it's what we fundamentally believe. Fundamentally, most of us do think of the world in the "standard" way I described at the beginning. One of my goals today is to persuade you that you probably think of the world in that way, too. Even if, at the moment, you have some inclination to sign onto verificationism, I bet that the inclination doesn't run too deep. If you're like most people, verificationism will turn out to conflict with too many of your more fundamental beliefs about the world.

Against Verificationism

I'll give four arguments against verificationism. None of these arguments is absolutely conclusive. But their combined effect tends to make most of my students more reluctant to endorse verificationism.

1. As I said before, Mt. Everest is 8850 m tall. Most of us think that Mt. Everest had this height well before there were any human beings, and that it would still have this height even if no human beings or other thinking subjects existed. But it's not clear that the verificationist is entitled to say things like that. If there were no thinking subjects, then there wouldn't have been anybody who could have had evidence that Mt. Everest existed. According to the verificationist, then, there wouldn't have been anybody for whom it was true that Mt. Everest is 8850 m tall. So how can he say that Mt. Everest might still have been that tall, even in situations where no thinking subjects exist?

   Perhaps the verificationist will respond: Granted, in the situation we're envisaging, no one has evidence that Mt. Everest is 8850 m tall. But the evidence is still available. (Mt. Everest will cast shadows of certain lengths at certain times of the day, and so on.) And if people had existed, they could have gathered and used that evidence. Maybe that's enough to make it true that Mt. Everest is still 8850 m tall in the situation we're envisaging.

   Things get tricky here. It's not clear whether this response does entitle the verificationist to say that Mt. Everest might have been 8850 m tall, even if there were no thinking subjects. Rather than pursuing the tricky details, though, let's instead think about examples where the relevant evidence isn't even available.

2. In George Orwell's novel 1984, the character O'Brien at one point tries to convince the protagonist Winston that the Party controls the past because it controls all of the evidence about the past, including people's memories. In other words, if the Party destroys all the evidence that certain people were in NY on a given day, then it's no longer true that those people were in NY on that day:

   O'Brien stopped him with a movement of the hand.

   "Another example," he said. "Some years ago you had a very serious delusion indeed. You believed that three men, three one-time Party members named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford--men who were executed for treachery and sabotage after making the fullest possible confession--were not guilty of the crimes they were charged with. You believed that you had seen unmistakable documentary evidence proving that their confessions were false. There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this."

   An oblong slip of newspaper had appeared between O'Brien's fingers. For perhaps five seconds it was within the angle of Winston's vision. It was a photograph, and there was no question of its identity. It was THE photograph. It was another copy of the photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford at the party function in New York, which he had chanced upon eleven years ago and promptly destroyed. For only an instant it was before his eyes, then it was out of sight again. But he had seen it, unquestionably he had seen it! He made a desperate, agonizing effort to wrench the top half of his body free...

   "It exists!" he cried.

   "No," said O'Brien.

   He stepped across the room. There was a memory hole in the opposite wall. O'Brien lifted the grating. Unseen, the frail slip of paper was whirling away on the current of warm air; it was vanishing in a flash of flame. O'Brien turned away from the wall.

   "Ashes," he said. "Not even identifiable ashes. Dust. It does not exist. It never existed."

   "But it did exist! It does exist! It exists in memory. I remember it. You remember it."

   ...

   O'Brien was looking down at him speculatively. More than ever he had the air of a teacher taking pains with a wayward but promising child.

   "There is a Party slogan dealing with the control of the past," he said. "Repeat it, if you please."

   "'Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,'" repeated Winston obediently.

   "'Who controls the present controls the past,'" said O'Brien, nodding his head with slow approval. "Is it your opinion, Winston, that the past has real existence?"

   Again the feeling of helplessness descended upon Winston. His eyes flitted towards the dial. He not only did not know whether "yes" or "no" was the answer that would save him from pain; he did not even know which answer he believed to be the true one.

   O'Brien smiled faintly. "You are no metaphysician, Winston," he said. "Until this moment you had never considered what is meant by existence. I will put it more precisely. Does the past exist concretely, in space? Is there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects, where the past is still happening?"

   "No."

   "Then where does the past exist, if at all?"

   "In records. It is written down."

   "In records. And----?"

   "In the mind. In human memories."

   "In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?"

   Winston eventually comes to accept this view of reality. But to the reader it's supposed to sound like a lie. And to most readers, it does sound like a lie. Most readers recoil from the picture of reality that O'Brien is giving. If you were really a verificationist, though, then you shouldn't recoil. Rather, you should think that O'Brien is telling it like it is. The Party really does control the past. If they can hide from you all the evidence that certain people were in NY, then they really do make it false (false for you) that those people were in NY.

   Now, O'Brien is part of the Party, and Winston is just a little guy. Plus, O'Brien tortures Winston. So our emotional sympathies are naturally going to be with Winston. But if you really are a verificationist, then your intellectual sympathies here ought to be with O'Brien. If they're not--and most people's aren't--then you should think about why not. Maybe you're not really as much of a verificationist as you think you are.

3. Here's a third example. Suppose that Todd is a mean man. His luck is hard and he lives in miserable poverty. His next-door neighbor is a meek, deferential woman, Nelly. Todd fancies Nelly but she always resists his advances. So Todd is pleased by the fact that Nelly's luck is even harder, and her poverty even more miserable, than his own. Now, one day let's suppose that an opportunity arises for Nelly to escape her poverty. Perhaps she wins the lottery. Only Nelly doesn't know this yet. Todd intercepts the news. And let's suppose that, out of spite, he keeps the news to himself, and destroys all the evidence. So Nelly will never find out that she won the lottery. She'll never know that she had--and lost--an opportunity to escape from poverty. Now, most of us will feel that Todd has wronged Nelly. He's wronged her by ruining her one chance to escape from poverty, purely out of spite. If you're a verificationist, though, it's hard to say what wrong Todd has done Nelly. According to the verificationist, since Nelly can never know that she had a chance to escape poverty, it won't be true that she ever had a chance to escape poverty--at least, it won't be true for her. Todd hasn't changed in any way the facts for Nelly about whether she's doomed to a life of poverty. So on the verificationist's view, it's hard to see what harm he can have done her. To the extent that you think that Todd has wronged Nelly, then, you should be reluctant to accept verificationism.

4. My fourth argument is more abstract. It concerns the status of verificationism itself. The verificationist says that facts about our lives and environments aren't objective, that those facts all depend in some way on our being able to have evidence or knowledge about them. Now what is the status of that claim? Is it objectively true? If so, then wouldn't there be trouble, because the verificationist is no fan of objective facts? (And why should the verificationist make an exception for facts like this one, if he's not willing to allow the facts about Mt. Everest's height to be objective?)

   Or is verificationism itself something which is only true if we can have evidence or knowledge that it is true? Well, then, what would the evidence be? What sorts of things might be evidence that verificationism is true? (And if there could be evidence that verificationism is true, then wouldn't it also have to be possible for the evidence to go the other way, too, and demonstrate that verificationism is false? But what would that evidence look like? This is all very confusing.)

None of these four considerations are knock-down refutations of verificationism. Clever philosophers have clever things they can say in response to each of them. But they are real difficulties for verificationism. I hope that if you were initially attracted to the view, they'll make you think a bit harder about whether you really do believe it. And if you do still believe it, I hope they'll make you acknowledge that verificationism is far from being obviously true. If one is going to hold the view in good intellectual conscience, there are a lot of difficulties and objections that need to be overcome.

Objectivism and Knowledge

As I said before, some people get uneasy when you talk about "objective facts." They think that if you believe in objective facts, that commits you to thinking you have some superior insight or knowledge to everybody else. But that assumption is false. The view that certain facts are objective has nothing to do with your having a superior epistemic position. If we say that the facts about Mt. Everest's height are objective, we're saying that whatever height it has, its having that height is independent of us and our beliefs and epistemic powers. We needn't also claim that we know what Mt. Everest's height is, or that we are better placed to know its height than other people are. Those are further claims, and they require further argument and defense.

If we say that it's an objective matter whether there are mountains of a certain height, we can go on to say:

1. there are mountains of such-and-such a height, and we know that there are

But we can also go on to say:

2. there aren't any mountains, but there could have been (and if there were any, that would be because of how things were in the world outside us, not because of our beliefs or evidence)

And we can even go on to say, as the skeptic does, that:

3. we can't know whether or not there are any mountains.

All three of those views count the facts about mountains as objective. They think that what it is, or what it would be, for there to be mountains of such-and-such a height is a matter of how certain piles of rock are configured, and has nothing to do with us and what we can believe or know.

Sometimes philosophers use the expression "realism about X" to mean "the view that the facts about X are objective." On this use, the skeptic counts as a realist about the external world. He's a realist who thinks that our epistemic powers are very limited. Other times philosophers use "realism about Xs" to mean "the view that Xs really exist, and the facts about them are objective." That's the way I've been using the term "realism." On this use, view (i) counts as realist, but the skeptic's view (iii) does not, and neither does view (ii).

It's very confusing that "realism" is used in both these ways. van Inwagen proposes using "Realism" with a capital "R" for realism in the first sense, and "realism" with a small "r" for realism in the second sense. I think that's still confusing. Here's what I'll do. I'll use "realism" in the way I've been using it all along, namely, to mean "the view that Xs really exist, and the facts about Xs are objective." I'll introduce a new word, objectivism, to mean "the view that the facts about Xs are objective."

So with this terminology, view (i) is a realist view, but views (ii) and (iii) are not. But all three views are objectivist views. The skeptic and the realist are both objectivists. They agree that whether there is a mountain of a certain height does not depend on us and our epistemic powers.

The verificationist, on the other hand, thinks that whether there really is a mountain of a given height does depend on whether we know or can know there to be such a mountain. He says that:

4. if all the evidence says there's a mountain there, then there really is a mountain there. It's impossible for us to be systematically deluded about such things.

So:

As I said, some philosophers have defended verificationism. But...that's not saying very much. Philosophers have also argued, at various times, for each of the following views:

• Only one thing exists, and it has no parts.
• I am the only thing which exists.
• No people exist, including me. I do not exist, and you do not exist.
• Time does not exist. Nothing ever changes.
• Numbers do not exist.
• Numbers do exist, in fact they are the only things which exist.

and all sorts of other crazy views. None of these views is very plausible. I hope you'll think that personal verificationism isn't very plausible, either. That doesn't mean we shouldn't talk about it. It's OK to discuss and investigate what the arguments for a crazy view might be. Often that can be philosophically illuminating. But I hope that you will have your guard up. I hope that you'll want to see a really damn good argument for verificationism, before you'll be tempted to accept it. (And if you think you have a really good argument, I hope that you'll scrutinize it really closely.)

Many of the philosophers who adopt verificationism do so because they think that it's impossible for a realist to resist the skeptic's arguments. They think that, faced with a choice between accepting skepticism or giving up objectivism, it's better to give up the objectivism.

Well, that will be a central focus of this class, whether it really is impossible for a realist to resist the skeptic's arguments. I hope you will agree that it's important for us first to get a clear understanding of what a realist's theory of knowledge would look like, and what the realist's options are for resisting skepticism, before we give up on objectivism and decide to become verificationists. That's what we'll be doing in this class.

There are other arguments for verificationism, too, coming from the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. Those arguments are much too complicated for us to explore here. You may deal with them in other philosophy classes.

In brief, those arguments go something like this: "If there were objective external facts, then the skeptic is right that we wouldn't be able to have knowledge of them. If we couldn't have knowledge of them, then we wouldn't even be able to think or talk about them. So the only facts we can think or talk about must be non-objective facts, like the ones the verificationist countenances."

As you can see, these arguments also rest on the assumption that it's impossible for an realist to resist the skeptic's arguments. So here too it's a good idea to first understand what are the best things a realist can say in reply to skepticism.

So far, I have been emphasizing how alien the verificationist's view of the world is to our ordinary ways of thinking. To be sure, that is no proof that verificationism is incorrect. But it should put the burden of proof on the verificationist. Philosophical argument might eventually convince us that objectivism is incorrect. But objectivism should at least be our starting point. A sensible way for us to proceed is to assume that our ordinary, objectivist picture of the world is correct, until we encounter good arguments that persuade us otherwise. That is the main reply to verificationism that I will rely on in this class.

At this point, then, I hope to have persuaded you of two points:

Bouwsma

Bouwsma argues for a kind of verificationism in his article in the coursepack. However, I don't think that his discussion does much to make verificationism more plausible.

Instead, it relies on a number of clever rhetorical tricks, and subtle misdirection.

For instance, on pp. 149-50, Tom tells the evil demon that the disagreement between them amounts to this:

Tom says: if the imperceptible "reality" that the demon destroyed was forever inaccessible to us anyway, then what concern can it really be of ours? What the demon (skeptic) is denying us knowledge of is nothing we had ordinary commerce with or interest in, in the first place.

That is an extremely subtle move for Bouwsma to make. Of course, in the picture Tom describes, we shouldn't be very bothered about the stuff that the demon destroyed. So if Tom has presented his disagreement with the demon accurately, then it does seem like Tom has the more sensible position.

But an objectivist would characterize the disagreement between Tom and the demon differently. On the objectivist picture, things look like this:

And here it does seem like the demon has managed to take away something we were ordinarily concerned with.

So be careful when thinking about Bouwsma's discussion. Don't think of Tom as the champion of verificationism, and the demon as the champion of objectivism (specifically, of skepticism). Instead, think about these two pictures of what Tom and the demon are disagreeing about. Bouwsma and the verificationist think that the disagreement is captured in the first picture. The objectivist thinks that the disagreement is captured in the second.

Bouwsma's discussion is disappointing because he doesn't give us any arguments for accepting his picture, as opposed to the objectivist's. Sure, if you think of the disagreement between Tom and the demon in the way that Bouwsma does, then you won't be bothered very much by what the demon does, or threatens to do. But ordinarily we wouldn't think of the disagreement in that verificationist way. That's something that Bouwsma ought to be persuading us to do.

Basically, Bouwsma is assuming verificationism and arguing that, on that picture, the demon hasn't really done anything we should care about. And if so, then the possibility that there's a demon who does those things shouldn't bother us, either. OK. But the really controversial part of that is the verificationist starting-point. What Bouwsma really ought to have done is argue that we should accept verificationism. He ought to have argued that his picture of the disagreement between Tom and the demon is preferable to the objectivist's picture. But he does not do that.

What We Care About

Some will say at this point: well, perhaps my complaints against verificationism have been fair. Perhaps verificationism as a view about what reality is like does go counter to the way that most of us fundamentally think about the world. But at least Bouwsma gets one thing right. The kind of facts he's willing to countenance are really the only facts we ordinarily care about. If there are any truths about Tom's life that he'll never be able to know, then they're not the kind of truths he cares about. All that Tom, or most of us, really care about are what kinds of experiences we're going to have, now and in the future. People who are always dreaming, or who are stuck in the Matrix, can still have pretty good lives, by that score. As Cypher says:

Is Cypher choosing wisely when he decides to go back into the Matrix? Or is he making a foolish and cowardly choice?

When philosophers discuss this question, they usually talk about Robert Nozick's example of an "experience machine," from his book Anarchy State and Utopia

Nozick's view is that most of us would choose not to plug in. He thinks there are things we value over and above what experiences we have. For instance, we value doing certain things, and not merely having the illusion or experience of doing them.

Notice that Nozick is talking about the question:

• What do we actually value?

not the question:

• What should we value?

Some readers may be willing to concede that we should care about more than our own experiences. (It's so selfish!) But it may appear that, as a matter of fact, our own experiences are all we really do care about--at least most of us. (Perhaps there are rare exceptions, like Ghandi and Mother Theresa.)

It's interesting that in The Matrix, we're at war with the machines. And people who are "plugged in" are being used by the machines as batteries. When they've outlived their usefulness, they get destroyed and their organic matter is recycled. That's a pretty ugly scenario. It's part of what makes being plugged in seem so undesirable to Morpheus and Neo and other characters who understand what's going on. The movie doesn't tell us whether they would still regard being plugged in as undesirable if the scenario had been different: e.g., if the machines were benevolent and they had constructed the Matrix solely in order to make our lives more pleasant.

Nozick thinks that most of us do value more than our own experiences. So--even if the Matrix had been made for us by benevolent machines--he thinks there's something we'd miss out on by plugging in, something that's important to us.

Many students resist this. They think that most people value only their own experiences; and they assure me that even if they're wrong about other people, they're at least right about themselves. They value only their own experiences. These students think that Cypher is making a perfectly sensible and reasonable choice, when he decides to plug back into the Matrix.

When I ask students why they think this, what usually emerges is the following picture of human motivation.

Ultimately, they say, everyone always acts for selfish motives. Whenever we do something on purposes, it's our own purpose that we're trying to achieve. We're always pursuing our own ends, and trying to satisfy our own desires. All that any of us are really after in life is getting more pleasant experiences for himself, and avoiding painful ones. Sometimes it may seem that we're doing things for other people's sake. For instance, we give money to charity, we buy presents for our children, we make sacrifices to please our spouses. But if you look closer, you'll see that even in cases like those, we're still always acting for selfish motives. We only do such things because it makes us feel good and noble to do them, and we like feeling noble. Or we do them because when people we care about are happy, that makes us happy too, and ultimately what we're after is that happiness for ourselves. Hence, since the only aim we have in life is to really just to have pleasant experiences, Nozick's experience machine gives us everything we want, and it would be foolish not to plug into it.

Now, I grant that some people may be as selfish as this picture says. But I doubt that many people are. The picture rests on two confusions, and once we clear those confusions up, I think there's no longer reason to believe that the only thing that any of us ever aims for in life is to have pleasant experiences.

The first confusion is to equate "pursuing our own ends, and trying to satisfy our own desires" with "acting for a selfish motive." To call a motive or aim "selfish" isn't just to say that it's a motive or aim that I have. It says more than that. It says something about the kind of motive it is. If my motive is to make me better off, then my motive is a selfish one. If my motive is to make you better off, then my motive is not selfish. From the mere fact that I'm pursuing one of my motives, it doesn't follow that my motive is of the first sort, rather than the second.

Ah, you'll say, but if my aim is to make you better off, then when I achieve that aim, I'll feel good. And this good feeling is really what I'll have been trying to obtain all along.

This is the second confusion. It's true that often when we get what we want (though sadly not always), we feel good. It's easy to make the mistake of thinking that what we really wanted was that good feeling. But let's think about this a bit harder. Why should making someone else better off give me a good feeling? And how do I know that it will have that effect?

Consider two stories. In story A, you walk into a room that contains a marble statue of a sphinx and a golden sphere. You feel this inexplicable and unpleasant itch. Someone proposes the hypothesis that the itch is caused by the sphere being to the left of the sphinx. So you go up and move the sphere to the right of the sphinx, and your itch goes away.

In story B, you walk into the same room, and don't like the fact that the sphere is to the left of the sphinx. For some reason, you would prefer it to be on the other side. So you go up and move the sphere, and you feel pleased with the result.

In story A, your aim was to make yourself feel better, and moving the sphere was just a means to that end. It takes experience and guesswork to figure out what will make you feel better in that way. In story B, on the other hand, no guesswork or experience seem to be necessary. Here you're in a position to straightforwardly predict what will bring you pleasure. You can predict this because you have an aim other than making yourself feel better, you know what that aim is, and usually you feel pleased when you get what you want. Your aim is to have the sphere in a different place. Your feeling of pleasure is a consequence or side-effect of achieving that aim. The pleasure is not what you were primarily aiming at; rather, it came about because you achieved what you were primarily aiming at. Don't mistake what you're aiming at with what happens as a result of your getting what you're aiming at.

Most often, when we do things to make other people better off, we're in a situation like the one in story B. Our pleasure isn't some unexplained effect of our actions, and what we're really trying to achieve all along. Our pleasure comes about because we got what we were really trying to achieve; and this makes it understandable why it should come about when it does.

Once we're straight about this, I think there's no argument left that the only thing anyone ever aims for in life is to have pleasant experiences. Some people do aim for that, some of the time. But many cases of giving to charity, making sacrifices for one's spouse, and so on, are not done for the pleasure they bring to oneself. There's something else that one is after, and pleasure is just a pleasant side-effect that sometimes comes along with getting the other things one is after.

Nozick said that most of us do value more than our own experiences, that there are things that we value that we'd miss out on if we plugged into the Matrix. I think Nozick is right. He's right about me, and he's probably right about you, too. We can easily find out. I've devised a little thought-experiment as a test.

Suppose I demonstrate to you that I and the rest of the class are very good at keeping secrets. For instance, one day when one of the students, let's say George, is absent, we all make lots of fun of him. We read his philosophy papers out loud and laugh really hard. We do ridiculous impersonations of him. And so on. It's hilarious. But of course we only do this behind George's back. When George comes back to class the next week, nobody giggles or snickers or anything like that. You're completely confident that we'll be able to keep our ridicule a secret from George. He'll never know about it.

Suppose I also demonstrate to you that I am a powerful hypnotist. I can make people forget things, and once forgotten they never remember them. You're convinced that I have this power.

Now that you know all of that, I offer you a choice. Option 1 is I deposit $10 in your bank account, but then the class will make fun of you behind your back, the way we made fun of George. If you choose this option, then I will immediately use my hypnotic powers to make you forget about making the choice, being teased, and all that. From your point of view, it will seem that the bank made an error and now you have $10 more in your account than you had before. So in terms of what experiences you will have, this option has no downside. You won't even have to suffer from the expectation of being secretly teased, because I'll make you forget the whole arrangement as soon as you make your choice.

Option 2 is we keep things as they are. I pay you nothing, and the class is no more or less likely to make fun of you behind your back than they were before.

So which would you choose?

When I offer my students this choice, I find that at least 95% of them choose Option 2. They think that the teasing would be a bad thing, even though they'd never know it was going on.

If you also find Option 2 more attractive, then that's support for Nozick's claim. The experience machine wouldn't give you everything you value. Option 1 gives you no experiences of being teased. But you don't just want to have experiences of not being teased. You value really not being teased.

So why then does Cypher's choice seem more appealing than my Option 1?

One reason is the escapism factor. Dreams and immersive role-playing are fun. They do give us some things we value. And if the experiences we have when dreaming are pleasant, so much the better. So plugging back into the Matrix will give us some of the things we value in life.

But that doesn't mean that we'd also value a life consisting only of dreams, or that a dream-world would give us everything we value. I think Creme Brule is delicious, but that doesn't mean I want to go on a Creme-Brule-only diet.

Also, we have to compare what we'd get by plugging into the experience machine to what we'd get if we don't plug in. I've only been arguing that we'd miss out on some things we'd value if we plugged in. I'm not saying that it would never be reasonable to plug in. In some cases, the good of being plugged in could outweigh the bad. If the real world is miserable and nasty enough, it may make sense to plug in. Perhaps for Cypher, the real world is too nasty. All I'm saying is that plugging in won't give us everything we want. Our experiences aren't all that we value. So there is some bad to plugging in.

Consider another thought-experiment. Your life seems to be pretty good right now. You have a decent place to live, some people act as if they're you're friends, your cat is sometimes affectionate and doesn't misbehave too much, etc. Now suppose a genie came along and offered to reveal to you what the world is really like. It may be just the way it seems. It may be a lot better: a lot more people may respect and love you than you realize. It may be a little worse: one of your "friends" may like you a bit less than he pretends to. Or it may be much worse: perhaps no one really likes you, not even your cat. Perhaps you're uglier and more boring than you seem to be. Etc. The genie will tell you which of these is the way things really are, for the low price of only $10. Afterwards, the world will continue to seem the same way it always has.

Would you take the genie up on his offer? If so, then it sure looks like you attach some value to knowing what the world is really like, over and beyond how it seems to be.

Some may hesitate to take the genie up on his offer, because they're worried that the world is really much worse than it seems, and that knowledge would wreck their enjoyment of things for the rest of their lives. So let's suppose the genie assures you, beforehand, that the world is not radically different from the way it appears. It may be just the way it seems, or it may be a little bit worse. He'll tell you which, for the special discounted price of only $1. Now will you take him up on his offer?

Not everybody would. Some people may prefer not knowing. But I think a lot of us would happily pay $1 for this kind of knowledge. Again, this makes it look like we attach some value to knowing what the world is really like, over and beyond how it seems to be. This is worth at least $1 to us.

The clever student may say at this point: The experience of seeming to discover that the world is "really" the way it seems to be, and not worse, is itself a pleasant and reassuring experience. What we're really paying $1 for is the hope of getting that pleasant experience.

In reply, I ask: Why is that experience a pleasant one? Ordinarily, having the experience of getting X will be pleasant only because we value getting X, itself. If I didn't care to know what the world was really like, but only cared about how the world seemed to me, then why should seeming to discover what the world is really like be a pleasant experience for me?

I think most of us do care what the world is really like, over and beyond how it seems to us and how we have evidence for thinking it is. That's why we'd be willing to spend a little money to find out what the world is like. It's why we wouldn't consent to being teased behind our backs, even in exchange for a little extra money.

So I hope to have persuaded you of this final point:

I haven't been able to say, though, how much we care about this. It's hard to know what the right balance point is. How bad does the real world have to be, before it makes sense to make Cypher's choice, and plug back into the blissful experience machine? I have no answer to this question.

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