Abstract
This paper examines the prospects of a prima facie attractive response to Fantl and McGrath’s argument for pragmatic encroachment. The response concedes that if one knows a proposition to be true then that proposition is warranted enough for one to have it as a reason for action. But it denies pragmatic encroachment, insofar as it denies that whether one knows a proposition to be true can vary with the practical stakes, holding fixed strength of warrant. This paper explores two ways to allow knowledge-reason links without pragmatic encroachment, both of which appeal to defeat. The first appeals to defeaters of reasons. If you know the bank is open tomorrow, what you know is available as a reason, but it may be defeated by considerations concerning the stakes. The second appeals to defeaters which do not defeat reasons but which nonetheless do something similar: they make the action recommended by those reasons vicious. In a high stakes case performing the “risky” action would be vicious even if it is justified in the sense of being supported by undefeated reasons. What is defeated is a virtue-based epistemic status rather than reasons or justification. I argue that neither proposal halts the march from a knowledge-reason link to pragmatic encroachment.
Highlights
In contemporary epistemology, pragmatic encroachment is the thesis that whether one knows a proposition can vary with pragmatic factors, such as the practical stakes, Synthese (2018) 195:3051–3064 holding fixed the strength of one’s warrant with respect to the proposition.1 Consider the train cases from Fantl and McGrath (2002)
This paper examines the prospects of a prima facie attractive response to Fantl and McGrath’s argument for pragmatic encroachment
Pragmatic encroachment isn’t merely a curiosity about particular cases; it is a consequence of an important connection between knowledge and reasons for action, namely that when one knows p, p is epistemically qualified— warranted enough—to be a reason one has for action
Summary
To block the argument at step (2), we want a defeater that meets certain conditions:. Unless one is going to accept pragmatic encroachment and claim that in the high stakes train case one doesn’t know the train is a local, saying that the train is a local isn’t warranted enough to be among one’s reasons to board commits one to denying KR. By KJ, the fact that it’s a local is warranted enough to justify you in boarding in the low stakes train case. To deny (4) one must think that if you start out in a low stakes train case, no matter how high the stakes rise, holding your warrant for the fact that it’s a local fixed, you will remain justified in boarding the train (rather than playing it safe by checking further).. In the high stakes train case it seems the only sensible thing to do is to back off somewhat from the claim about conclusive reasons to board—rather than to embrace it but insist that one cannot act for such reasons
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