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.
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