Gordon Barnes - How Do You Know? (Hackett Philosophical Dialogues)

How Do You Know?

A D IALOGUE

How Do You Know?

A D IALOGUE

Gordon Barnes

Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

Indianapolis/Cambridge

Copyright 2021 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

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For further information, please address

Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

P.O. Box 44937

Indianapolis, Indiana 46244-0937

www.hackettpublishing.com

Cover and interior design by E. L. Wilson

Composition by Aptara, Inc.

Cataloging-in-Publication data can be accessed via the Library of Congress Online Catalog.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021932233

ISBN-13: 978-1-62466-991-0 (pbk.)

ISBN-13: 978-1-62466-993-4 (PDF ebook)

Epub3 ISBN: 978-1-64792-018-0

Kindle ISBN: 978-1-64792-019-7

David Morrow and Anthony Weston, A Workbook for Arguments: A Complete Course in Critical Thinking , Third Edition.

Anthony Weston and Stephen Bloch-Schulman, Thinking Through Questions: A Concise Invitation to Critical, Expansive, and Philosophical Inquiry .

Ren Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy . Translated by Donald A. Cress.

Certainty . Edited, with Introduction, by Jonathan Westphal.

Plato, Meno . Translation, Introduction, and Glossary by Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage, and Eric Salem.

Contents

The page numbers in curly braces {} correspond to the print edition of this title.

For Marnie

At its best, philosophy is a good conversation. I grew up in a family that loved good conversation, and no one has taught me more than the people I grew up with: Ellen Dodrill, Brenda Thompson, Martha Jones, Robert Barnes, and Laura Harris. Thanks to his great generosity, my brother Bob and I have had great conversations in places like London, Paris, Barcelona, and Madrid. In recent years, I have enjoyed great conversations with my brother-from-another-mother Joe Thompson. In philosophy, I have had three great conversation partners: Matt Davidson, John Kronen, and Joseph Long. I have learned more from them than I could ever recount. Since moving to Rochester, New York, I have enjoyed good conversations with Peter Karpien and Greg Garvey. My wife and I have enjoyed countless conversations around the dinner table with the Liebert family: David and Nancy; Peter and Amy; Tim and Natalie; Heidi, Dave, Abby, and Sarah. One of the best conversationalists I have ever met is Chuck Vanduzee. I could talk to Chuck from dawn to dusk and I sometimes have. Over the last sixteen years, I have had the pleasure of teaching philosophy at SUNY Brockport, and my time there has been filled with great conversations with students. There are too many of them to name here, but I am grateful to every one of them. In a telephone conversation with my editor Jeff Dean, he impressed on me that we live in an age in which knowledge is contested. Throughout this process, Jeff has given me great advice and support. I would never have gotten this done without the constant help and support of our respite workers, and dear friendsTess Cooper, Ashley Samuels, and Bridget Behan. Finally, and most importantly, I am deeply grateful to my wife, Marnie Barnes. Over the last year, when our lives were more difficult than usual, she moved mountains to help me get this done. She read and commented on the entire manuscript and saved me from many mistakes. She is also my favorite conversation partner in the world.

This book is about problems of knowledge that arise in everyday life. If you are not an expert, then how can you know that another person is an expert? What if the experts are politically biased? Should you still trust them? More generally, what attitude should you take to the testimony of other people? Should you treat all testimony as innocent until proven guilty, or is that just gullible? Does the internet make us better knowers, or is it really just a minefield of misinformation? Is it always irrational to believe a conspiracy theory? Suppose you find out that someone who is just as intelligent and well informed as you disagrees with you about something. How should that affect your belief? Should you change your mind or be less confident that you are right? Is it possible to know what is morally right and morally wrong? Is morality something that can be known? These are the questions that are discussed in this book. These issues are fundamentally social. Testimony, trust, and disagreement are in all relations between two or more people. Therefore I have chosen to write in the form of a dialogue. This is a dialogue between three college studentsPaul, Steve, and Maya. Paul and Steve grew up together in a small town, and then they went off to college together. Over the course of their first year in college, Steve changed his mind about many things, but Paul did not. This was largely due to the fact that Steve trusted his professors, whereas Paul did not. Steve sees his professors as experts who tell the truth about the world, whereas Paul sees his professors as biased activists who want to indoctrinate him. So the friendship between Paul and Steve has started to fall apart. The third student in the dialogue, Maya, is a senior who offers to mediate a conversation between Paul and Steve to see if they can work out their differences. Their conversation takes them through all of the topics listed above. This is not a rhetorical exercise. These are difficult questions, and there are no easy answers. In Chapter One, they discuss whether it is possible for a non-expert to know if someone else is really an expert. This leads them to the question of when you should trust the testimony of another person. In Chapter Two, they discuss the reality and relevance of biasboth to trust in others and to trust in oneself. In Chapter Three, they discuss the internet and how it has affected us as knowers. This leads them to a discussion of conspiracy theories. In Chapter Four, they discuss the issue of disagreement between equally intelligent, well-informed people. Finally, in Chapter Five, they discuss the problem of moral knowledge. A paradox that reappears throughout the dialogue is that social trust is epistemologically problematic, yet it appears to be indispensable for the pursuit of knowledge by creatures like us.

{1}

Maya sits alone in her dorm room, trying to study. Across the hall, Paul and Steve are arguing loudly.

Unable to study, Maya gets up from her desk and walks across the hall.