Skip to main content

Tracking Theory of Knowledge, Part I

Image result for bloodhound dog

This will be the first item in a three part series about the tracking theory of knowledge. I'll be talking about it in the form given it by Robert Nozick, in Philosophical Explanations (1981) though Nozick owed a considerable debt to Fred Dretske.

According to Robert Nozick's tracking theory of knowledge, I know p (some proposition) if:

1) p is true
2) I believe p
3) If p were not true I would not believe it, and
4) if p were true I would believe it.

The fourth point seems oddly worded, because of course the first point already said that p IS true for purposes of our further discussion, so why the hypothetical language by the time we move to the fourth?

Well, the awkward language is necessary to resolve certain hypotheticals that bothered Nozick, and because combining (3) and (4) helps fix in our minds the underlying metaphor of tracking.

One common example: a lottery ticket. I don't remember if Nozick himself invoked lottery tickets or if I encountered this example else, but it doesn't matter. The point is that Nozick wants to say that we don't acquire knowledge simply by following the odds. My friend bought a lottery ticket. I know there are a million of these tickets sold for every winner. Based on my knowledge of the odds, I tell him, "You've bought a losing ticket." My lottery playing friend will surely tell me "you don't know that."

Given one plausible view, he is right: I don't know that. If the lottery is fairly run, no one knows the winner until the actual drawing is held. More pertinent to Nozick's formulations: if he happens to be the lucky anomaly who holds the winning ticket, I wouldn't believe it because my disbelief is based on the probabilities, and this would be an improbable event. Yet improbable events do happen. There are lottery winners, so there are instances in which someone held the winning ticket the previous day. Thus, Nozick's fourth condition, listed above, makes it clear that probability is not enough for tracking. If the improbable event were true, I have to be in a position to grasp that it is true before I can call my view on p knowledge.

We can understand this if we understand what Nozick was trying not to say. He didn't want to say that knowledge is simply "justified true belief," because the Gettier counter-examples had spooked him. He also didn't want to say that knowledge is true belief caused by the object of the belief. There are lots of problems with that formulation, including problems with underlying notions of cause and effect themselves. So ... he said that knowledge is true belief that tracks its object, and we have propositions (3) and (4) to explain the tracking, while (1) and (2) are a more straightforward nod to lexicography.

More tomorrow.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak