Knowledge and Certainty: A Defense of Classical Infallibilism

This page outlines my current book project, Knowledge and Certainty: A Defense of Classical Infallibilism.

Knowledge and Certainty is a defense of the classical conception of knowledge in the Western philosophical tradition, according to which knowledge is a kind of direct apprehension of reality. This conception is infallibilist, in that it implies that S knows that P if and only if P is epistemically certain for S—where a proposition P is epistemically certain for S just in case P is maximally epistemically probable for S, in such a way that precludes the epistemic possibility of P’s being false. I thus call this view classical infallibilism.

In chapters 1-2, I clarify the thesis of classical infallibilism and its implications. Drawing on recent work by Maria Rosa Antognazza and Julien Dutant, I show that classical infallibilism was the near-universal conception of knowledge in the Western philosophical tradition prior to the mid-twentieth century, and that the post-Gettier fallibilist research program, which assumes that knowledge is a special kind of belief, is a historical abberation. But—as I argue in the rest of the book—when tested against the methods and cases of contemporary analytic epistemology, classical infallibilism does surprisingly well.

In chapters 3-4, I argue that classical infallibilism is the best explanation of a wide variety of intuitions about the nature and roles of knowledge. This is because it entails or makes plausible the contents of all these intuitions, whereas contemporary fallibilist theories of knowledge either entail that these contents are false or are much harder to reconcile with their truth.

More specifically, in chapter 3, I argue that classical infallibilists are able to reconcile all contemporary theories of knowledge, in that, if you start with any standard contemporary theory of knowledge, and then require that its central condition (evidential support, reliability, safety, etc.) obtain to a maximal degree, you get a theory of knowledge extensionally equivalent to classical infallibilism. So classical infallibilists are able to explain the intuitive appeal of all of these theories much more easily than fallibilists, who must accept one and deny the rest.

Then, in chapter 4, I present eight more intuitive claims about knowledge, such as that knowledge is evidence and that knowledge is closed under deduction, and argue that, in each case, classical infallibilism either entails or easily allows for the truth of this claim, whereas fallibilism is either inconsistent with it or has a much harder time explaining why it is true.

In chapters 5-6, I address the intuitive data that classical infallibilism apparently has a harder time explaining. The most important of these is that we seem to know many things that classical infallibilism implies we do not know. While my account leaves open precisely what kinds of propositions are certain for us, I argue in chapter 5 that on any plausible answer to this question, many propositions we often take ourselves to know will not be certain for us—for example, propositions about the future. As such, classical infallibilism will imply that we know much less than we tend to suppose.

In chapter 6, I examine how bad this consequence is. I argue that the classical infallibilist can offer plausible error theories for why it often wrongly appears to us that we know more than we do. First, we are often mistaken about what is certain. Second, we often use knowledge-attributions to pragmatically imply that people come close enough to knowing for conversational purposes.

In chapter 7, I weigh the overall evidence for and against classical infallibilism. I argue that, even if the skeptical consequences of classical infallibilism remain somewhat counterintuitive, the costs of these consequences are more than outweighed by the cumulative benefits of classical infallibilism presented in chapters 3-4.