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The transmission of knowledge and justification

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Abstract

This paper explains how the notion of justification transmission can be used to ground a notion of knowledge transmission. It then explains how transmission theories can characterise schoolteacher cases, which have prominently been presented as counterexamples to transmission theories.

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Notes

  1. See also Welbourne (1986).

  2. Faulkner (2011) explicitly denies this and attributes a similar view to Burge (1993). Welbourne (1986), however does appear to endorse transmission as the explanation of all knowledge and justification from testimony.

  3. See McDowell (1982, (1995, (2002) and Pritchard (2012).

  4. I am grateful to Duncan Pritchard for suggesting this idea to me.

  5. I have made this argument in more detail in Wright (2014). Since I argue that, contrary to initial appearances, it doesn’t offer any additional resources in characterising the schoolteacher cases, I will not expand further on the details here.

  6. I think that this notion of transmission is what Burge and Faulkner have in mind. Even if it’s not, it’s still clearly a legitimate account of what transmission theorists can claim.

  7. See, for example, Alston (1996), Goldman (1976) and Papineau (1992).

  8. See, for example, BonJour (1985), Cohen (1984) and Lehrer (2000).

  9. Bergmann (2006) argues for this conception of externalism.

  10. Defenders of (JT1) and (KT1) include Hardwig (1985, (1991), McDowell (1994), Welbourne (1986) and Williamson (2000). Defenders of (JT2) and (KT2) include Burge (1993) and Faulkner (2011).

  11. This is motivated by the thought that my knowing that you know that \({\upvarphi }\) puts me in a position to know that \({\upvarphi }\), but my justifiedly believing that you justifiedly believe that \({\upvarphi }\) does not obviously put me in a position to justifiedly believe that \({\upvarphi }\). See Hintikka (1962).

  12. For more on this kind of case, see Faulkner (2011).

  13. Cf. Audi (2006).

  14. Lackey (2013) makes a similar point in a paper on the epistemology of disagreement.

  15. On the idea that the scientists vouching for the veracity of the testimony is epistemically significant, see Hinchman (2005) as well as Moran (2005) and McMyler (2011).

  16. Lackey identifies Burge (1993, (1997), Coady (1992, (1994), Dummett (1994), Hardwig (1985, (1991), McDowell (1994), Owens (2000, (2006) and Williamson (2000) amongst others as defenders of the idea that what matters is the speaker’s belief in what she says.

  17. Other accounts of how knowledge transmission happens are discussed by Faulkner (2006).

  18. See Wright (forthcoming).

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Acknowledgments

Material from this paper has been presented in Bologna, Edinburgh and Sheffield. I am grateful in particular to Paul Faulkner, Miranda Fricker, Kate Harrington, Rob Hopkins, Joe Kisolo-Ssonko, Sebastian Kletzl, Martin Kusch, Eric Olson, Duncan Pritchard, Kathy Puddifoot and Richard Swinburne for discussion. As well as the above, the two anonymous reviewers for Synthese offered excellent comments that engendered substantial improvements in the paper.

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    Stephen Wright

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Wright, S. The transmission of knowledge and justification. Synthese 193, 293–311 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0760-y

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