Anti-Intellectualism about Knowledge, Action and Stakes

 

In this blog (and also at Certain Doubts) there have been several discussions on whether, or to what extent, folk attributions of knowledge are sensitive to practical interests. One issue raised there is whether the folk are tracking knowledge facts predicted by a new theory or cluster of theories in epistemology known as “Pragmatic Encroachment” (McGrath, Fantl, Stanley, Hawthorne, Weatherson, among others). According to this new approach, knowledge is not purely an intellectual notion. It is infused with pragmatic considerations. Recently, Shawn Simpson and I have been running some experiments to investigate this further. In particular, we are interested in a couple of hypotheses which we think support pragmatic encroachment. (These results further support the work I have done before on the topic, which can be seen here: “Knowledge, Experiments and Practical Interests”, but they may be at conflict (perhaps) with some of the interesting work and discussion carried out by May, Sinnott-Armstrong, Hull, and Zimmerman; Buckwalter; Feltz and Zarpentine and Schaffer and Knobe. For a critical review of some this literature, see DeRose or me.)

 

Hypothesis 1. Imagine there are two agents in very similar situations where P is true and who (a) both have the same amount of evidence for P (or stand in the same "intellectual" relation to P), (b) both believe or accept P, (c) both have the same mistaken opinion concerning what is at stake for them concerning P, but the situations differ in what is actually at stake for the agents (one is in a high stakes situation and the other in a low stakes situation). Hypothesis H1 says there are situations that fit the constraints of the pair just described where people are more likely to attribute knowledge that P to the agent in the low stakes situation than to the agent in the high stakes situation. We gathered some evidence which suggests this hypothesis is true. It is worth noting that previous studies that probed for stakes, including my own, did not quite ensure all of (a-c) above are in place. Shawn and I think that (a-c) are important.

Hypothesis 2. The second hypothesis concerns the connection between knowledge and action. Many defenders of Pragmatic Encroachment have argued for principles such as the following: [ACTION] (for P at play) If X knows that P, then it is proper for X to act on P (Fantl and McGrath). H2 is the hypothesis that the folk attribute knowledge and appraise behavior in accordance with ACTION. Our results also support H2.

 

To test (H1) and (H2), we assigned one of the following two vignettes to workers on Amazon Turk living in the United States:

 

LOW STAKES: Peter is a college student who has entered a contest sponsored by a local bank. His task is to count the coins in a jar. The jar contains 134 coins. Peter mistakenly thinks the contest prize is one hundred dollars. In fact, the prize is just a pair of movie passes for this weekend. Peter wouldn’t want them, however, since he is leaving town this weekend. So nothing bad would happen if Peter doesn’t win the contest.  After counting the coins just once, Peter concludes there are 134 coins in the jar. His friend, who also thinks the prize is one hundred dollars says to Peter “you only counted once, even if there are in fact 134 coins in the jar, you don’t know there are 134 coins in the jar. You should count them again”.

 

HIGH STAKES: Peter is a college student who has entered a contest sponsored by a local bank. His task is to count the coins in a jar. The jar contains 134 coins. Peter mistakenly thinks the contest prize is one hundred dollars. In fact, the prize is $10,000 which Peter really needs. He would use the money to help pay for a life-saving operation for his mother who is sick and cannot afford healthcare! So the stakes are high for Peter since if doesn’t win the contest, his mother could die. After counting the coins just once, Peter concludes there are 134 coins in the jar. His friend, who also thinks the prize is one hundred dollars says to Peter “you only counted once, even if there are in fact 134 coins in the jar, you don’t know there are 134 coins in the jar. You should count them again”.

 

Subjects read the following prompt:

Besides giving Peter advice about what he should do, Peter’s friend also said that Peter doesn’t know something. He said that since Peter only counted the coins once, Peter doesn’t know that there are 134 coins in the jar (even if it turns out there are 134 coins in the jar). We are interested in your opinion about this. To what extent do you agree with the following statement: 
“PETER KNOWS THERE ARE 134 COINS IN THE JAR”

 

Subjects were asked to mark their answers on a 7 point Likert scale with ‘0’= ‘strongly disagree’, 3=Neutral and 6(7)=Strongly agree. We found that there was statistically significant difference t(163)= 2.23, p= .027, between the responses to the High Stakes(M=3.058, SD=1.76) and Low Stakes scenario (M=3.68, SD=1.76), d=.35.  This supports our first hypothesis (H1).

 

To test the second hypothesis (H2), we  asked our subjects from the previous probe whether they also thought that Peter should count the pennies again. Here, they only had three options: NO, NEUTRAL and YES. Coding the NO and NEUTRAL in one category and coding the YES in a second category, we can compare the answers to the knowledge prompt above across these two groups. If people tend to act in accordance to the ACTION principle, we should see that subjects in the YES category are less likely (compared to the other group) to agree with the knowledge statement from the prompt above. In fact this is what we found. YES SHOULD (M=3.1, SD=1.69), NO/NEUTRAL(M=3.7, SD=1.9),  t(163)=1.91, p=.029 (one-tailed), d=.3

 

These are two simple examples of the sorts of experiments Shawn and I have been running in the last couple of months. The other experiments tend to also give us results in this direction, as did the experiments I report on the paper I linked above. We can ask several questions about these modest results. (a) Do these results really support (H1) and/or (H2)?  (b) Do they support the idea that folk ascriptions of knowledge pattern in the direction that pragmatic encroachment theories predict for knowledge? and (3) Do they support the epistemic claim that knowledge is sensitive to stakes in the sense of Pragmatic Encroachment? What do you guys think? Shawn and I would very much appreciate any feedback on any of these issues.

 

Comments

[John Dell]

This is such wonderful work. It always excites me to see what you all are up to.

One idea that came to mind reading Jonathan's June 7th comment is how interesting it would be to see the quality of the protagonist changed within the varying stakes scenarios. So, for example, in both the high and low stakes counting cases you could have a college student studying accounting and a college football player. Or, you might go with a professional accountant and a sanitation worker. I think trying to incorporate an expertise element into the vignettes could really add something very valuable. It seems to me that if similar results could be obtained even when the protagonist is a supposed "counting expert" that would really say a lot about the weight the stakes (practical interests) have on the folk's knowledge attributions.

[Wesley Buckwalter]

@Angel, agreed! Maybe we should just run some of these cases with varying levels of epistemic standing/evidence (perhaps John Dell describes one such route concerning reliability among others), and then see at what level stakes sensitivities show up. It would be really interesting to discover that stakes only play a role when evidence is low such that subjects are said to have knowledge, but of course, not very interesting if they only show up just in cases where people don’t think subjects have knowledge either way. In other words, the advocate of stakes better hope that having enough evidence for a participant to comfortably attribute knowledge generally isn’t the precise amount of evidence that has (maybe) been washing out whatever effect that a stakes manipulation has on people's judgments!

About the previous study nulls, people might be interested to know that I may have some evidence sympathetic to your stakes (aka flexi-evidence) hypothesis in bank cases. The result shows the force of something like Lewisean accommodation on people’s judgments when comparing knowledge assertions and denials across the otherwise very same cases. A draft of this is here: https://wfs.gc.cuny.edu/JBuckwalter/Buckwaler%20MAI.pdf

[harvey brockman]

Hi Angel,
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that we distinguish between "knowledge" on the one hand, and "what people say about knowledge" (or maybe: "how people use the word 'knowledge'") on the other. -- With which of these, or in what combination of these, is the epistemological theory, "Pragmatic encroachment", concerned? If "Encroachment" means to be a tool for predicting what 'the folk' will say in response, e.g., to questionnaire vignettes, isn't that obscured by saying, in description of it, "According to this new approach, knowledge is not purely an intellectual notion"? That is, wouldn't something like "According to this new approach, 'the folk' consider stakes when asked to ascribe 'knowledge'" be a happier description?

[anon]

Wasn't that question thrashed about fairly thoroughly way back when?
http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/experimental_philosophy/2010/06/new-experiments-support-the-thesis-that-knowledge-is-sensitive-to-stakes.html

[APinillos]

@Wesley, that looks like a really interesting paper. We should talk about it. @Harvey and anon. Yes, the question on the relevance of folk judgments to substantive theories in epistemology is an important one and one we have discussed before in this blog. I used to like the idea that using 'knowledge' in a manner that is sensitive to stakes was part of one's semantic competence with the term. I am not sure about that now. However, the relevance of folk judgments to substantive questions in this domain can be attained under weaker assumptions. One such assumption is that for simple hypothetical cases (like the vignettes we ran), we should assume that people's attributions of knowledge are correct. In general and for simple cases, people are pretty good at attributing mental states. A discussion of this general topic which addresses Harvey's worries can be found here: http://sites.google.com/site/napinillos/somerecentworkinexperimentalepistemology.pdf?attredirects=0

[harvey brockman]

Hi Angel,
Can you clarify what you mean by "we should assume that people's attributions of knowledge are correct"? Imagine we were concerned with beauty, instead of knowledge: We draw up some vignettes and submit them to the "folk" for scrutiny; do we "assume that people's attributions of beauty are correct?" Or we're interested in justice -- do we "assume that people's attributions of justice are correct?" Won't the "correct" in these cases (incl. that of 'knowledge') be used to refer to either (i) the correspondence of what the folk say (in response to our vignettes) with our epistemological theory ("pragmatic encroachment" or whatever the flavor-of-the-day is), or (ii) WHATEVER the folk do, in fact, say in response to our vignettes (that is, "correct" just is what the folk say: their responses define 'knowledge'.) When you say "In general and for simple cases, people are pretty good at attributing mental states", i understand the implication to be this: Philosophers or psychologists or neurobiologists (or whoever) know what there is to know about 'mental states' -- maybe like arithmeticians know what there is to know about addition -- and when they elicit the views of non-specialists they find out that the folk aren't so bad with 'mental states' themselves. The philosopher's interest, then, isn't in 'mental state' or 'knowledge' per se, but in the degree of correspondence BETWEEN the folks's use of 'knowledge' and the "correct" use of 'knowledge'. This makes sense if the folks's (actual) use of 'knowledge' isn't a criterion for the "correct" use of 'knowledge'. But when i read your description of "pragmatic encroachment" -- "According to this new approach, knowledge is not purely an intellectual notion" -- it is not clear to me whether such epistemological theories are to be used for predicting folk uses of 'knowledge', or for describing what we might call the "structure" of 'knowledge', or -- if both -- how the two are to be "connected-up". D'you know -- i think maybe something that lies behind my questions is the question "Is X-Phi a new (though we might look back at, e.g., the earlier part of Arne Naess's career) approach applied to old questions, or is it a rejection of old questions for new?" I'll take a look at that "somerecentwork" -- Thanks for the link. Regards, hb