Justification and Knowledge: A Defense of the Identity View

My doctoral research aims to defend the Identity View; that is, the view that one can justifiably believe a proposition if and only if one knows it. The proposed defense of the Identity View consists of three core stages.

Stage 1 argues for the view that knowledge is the epistemic goal of cognition; that is, of cognitive acts managing beliefs. As such, it has two aims. First, it aims to argue that the received view about the epistemic goal is mistaken. In fact, despite having been defended by many epistemologists, the view the view that our epistemic goal is getting to the truth while avoiding error is multiply ambiguous, and, once its ambiguities are disentangled, each of its versions is at odds with intuition, or relies upon principles that are at least very contentious. The second aim of this stage is to give answer to the following question: ‘Which is the function of belief?’; for an answer to this question allows to tell when belief appropriately serves its function, and, then, in turn, which is the goal of cognition. The hypotheses advanced here are, first, that the function of beliefs is to serve as premises for practical reasoning, and, second, that a belief is an appropriate premise for one’s practical reasoning if and only if it is knowledgeable. Therefore, it is concluded that belief appropriately serves its function only when knowledgeable, and, accordingly, the goal of cognition is to generate and maintain knowledgeable beliefs. Interestingly, it follows from worries analogous to those developed for the received view that the right reading of the view that knowledge is the goal of cognition is a distributive reading; that is, there is no single goal of cognition; but, instead, as many goals as there are propositions: for each proposition p, one’s goal is to believe p if and only if one knows p.

Stage 2 of my doctoral research aims to argue that The Identity View is preferable to rival views of justification because it is the most plausible given the assumption that epistemic consequentialism is right. The argument developed in this stage starts from the view that knowledge is the goal of cognition (which is defended in Stage 1), and the consequentialist intuition that belief is epistemically justified only when it promotes the goal of cognition. It follows from these premises that justification must be conducive to knowledge. Because of this, two kinds of views of justification are preferable to the alternatives in the literature: The Identity View and those views according to which justification entails knowledge-conduciveness. The Identity View is preferable to this other kind of views, since, as it is argued, epistemic state consequentialism is preferable to epistemic rule consequentialism, and since the right reading of the goal of cognition is a distributive reading. For, on the distributive reading, there is no single goal by which consequentialists can rank sets of consequences; but a multiplicity of goals, one for each proposition, and so, plausibly, a multiplicity of rakings of consequences, one for each goal.

Stage 3 of my doctoral research aims to show that, all things considered, The Identity View compares favorably with its best-liked rival views of justification. As such, first, this stage aims to review a set of desiderata for views of justification, which are typically considered as intuitively plausible, and which are based upon a set of problems for views of justification, and a set of data that must be explained. Each of these desiderata will be critically assessed to determine whether it should truly be considered as a desideratum for views of justification, and whether it can be jointly satisfied with the other desiderata. More specifically, this stage shows that it is impossible to explain the (absence of knowledge and) presence of justified belief in Gettier cases while also satisfying three desiderata for views of justification. For this reason, a parsimonious revision of the desiderata implies that an explanation of the (absence of knowledge and) presence of justified belief in Gettier cases ought not to be considered as a desideratum. Once the desiderata for views of justification are reviewed and assessed, this stage investigates how well the best and most recent views of justification fare with respect to their satisfaction. It is argued that, while these views struggle with some of the desiderata, The Identity View satisfies all of them.