Knowledge as a social status

The idea (discussed last week) that knowledge can rub off on other people like an infectious disease (in Gareth Evans' phrase) presents a powerful challenge to the individualism implicit in Descartes' approach to knowledge. It suggests that the relation of knowledge and the undermining effects of luck may need rethinking. But it may also prompt a further and more radical idea: that knowledge itself is essentially a kind of social status. Robert Brandom defends just such a view presented as an interpretation of McDowell's view of knowledge as a 'standing in the space of reasons'. Brandom aims to flesh out the idea that knowledge is 'a standing in the space of reasons' which does not reduce to a more basic non-normative state (such as being produced by a reliable process) by describing something like the elements of the JTB account of knowledge in his language of commitments and endorsements. Since undertaking a commitment or endorsing someone else’s commitment is a social act, knowledge is, he thinks, a social status. He says:

I'll talk about standings or statuses in the space of reasons in terms of two fundamental categories: commitments of a certain kind, and entitlements to those commitments. The idea is that occupying the basic sort of standing in the space of reasons is staking a claim, that is, undertaking a commitment of the sort that might be expressed by making a claim or assertion. Presystematically we might think of these as commitments to the truth of various propositions, that is, as beliefs. But I think it will be helpful if we keep talk of truth, propositions, and beliefs offstage for a while. To uphold the fundamental Sellarsian idea about what would be required for these standings to have conceptual content, we must think about them as having two properties. First, it must be part of the conception of these commitments that the issue of one's entitlement to such a commitment can arise. Second, it must be possible for one such commitment to inherit or derive its entitlement from another. Together these mean that commitments can both serve as and stand in need of reasons. That is the sense in which they are being taken to be standings in the space of reasons.

But is this a satisfactory way of undermining the Cartesian picture of a possibly solitary knower?

Because Brandom's paper is a rethinking of one by McDowell, there are two sets of slides. The first summarises McDowell's ideas in ‘Knowledge and the Internal’ but the main ideas should be familiar from the earlier session on McDowell. The second set concerns Brandom.

Reading

- Brandom, R. (1995) ‘Knowledge and the social articulation of the space of reasons’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 55 available on JStor here and on Blackboard.