Ways of Knowing

I’m currently attending a series of seminars by Quassim Cassam entitled Knowledge and Explanation in which he is discussing (amongst other things) the relation between perceptual terms, like seeing, hearing, and so on, and knowing. Such terms are commonly referred to as ways of knowing, which is a phrase Cassam uses often—in fact, it’s the title of a paper he has written on the subject. Taken on its own, however, this phrase is ambiguous and could have either of the following two senses:

1. A way by which one arrives at a state of knowing.
2. A particular kind or class of knowledge.

Cassam, I take it, favours the first sense according to which, for example, seeing x a way in which we can get into the position of knowing x. Williamson, on the other hand, favours the second, since on his view a way of knowing is a determinate of the determinable ‘knowledge’. Williamson compares ways of knowing to colours in that everything which is some particular colour (i.e. way of knowing) is, ipso facto, coloured (cf. knowledge), and vice versa. Thus a way of knowing is just one particular form or class of knowledge, rather than a way of arriving at a state (i.e. knowledge) that is distinct from the way of knowing.

Sense 1 should also be distinguished from a way of coming to know something, such as reading it in the newspaper. Whilst this might form the basis of an acceptable answer to the question “How do you know?”, it is not a way of knowing in either Cassam or Williamson’s sense since does not know things in the-way-of-having-read-them-in-the-newspaper, but rather by having read them, or, better still, on the basis of testimony.

The precise individuation of ways of knowing is itself a thorny issue, especially on Williamson’s view, since he admits that there may be ways of knowing that have no name in natural language. Cassam, on the other hand, offers the following two tests as a way of identifying whether something is a way of knowing (although these are supposed to be indicative rather than providing a watertight definition):

1. Φ is a way of knowing iff “S knows that P because S Φs that P”, or “S Φs that P and thereby knows that P”, is grammatically acceptable, and
2. “S Φs that P” explains S’s knowledge of P.

This rules out cases like reading something in a newspaper, since what is written in newspapers can easily be false, or of regretting or noting that P as ways of knowing since these do not explain how S knows that P. On Williamson’s view, the latter also count as ways of knowing since they are factive and entail that S knows that P (although one might argue that they are not unanalysable, in which case they would not qualify as Williamsonian ways of knowing). The notion of a satisfactory explanation is, however, doing a lot of work in the second condition, and it is far from clear (to me at least) what the features of such an explanation should be.

A further difference between these two views arises when we consider whether perceptual terms, such as seeing, entail knowing, or whether they leave it open that the perceiver may not know (or believe) what they see. In certain cases of epistemic seeing (‘seeing that’), it is tempting to think that a perceiver may fail to believe what they are seeing, and thereby fail to know it. If this is possible then it provides a counter-example to the Williamsonian view since, if seeing does not entail knowing as a matter of necessity, it cannot be a form of knowing.

Whilst we certainly do say things like ‘I could see that I had the winning lottery ticket, but I didn’t believe it’, it is unclear whether such utterances are supposed to be taken literally in the way that this objection requires. They are, rather, a metaphorical way of expressing extreme surprise or incomprehension, rather than literal disbelief in what one actually sees. A more interesting case would be one in which the subject has good reason to believe that they are, for example, hallucinating, such as whilst participating in a blind clinical trial of a hallucinogenic drug. In this case, the subject may think that they are hallucinating elephants running past the window when in fact they have merely taken a placebo and are seeing real elephants that have escaped from the local zoo. Consequently, they fail to believe that there are any (real) elephants, and so cannot be said to know that there are elephants, since knowing, on most analyses, entails belief.

It is difficult to know precisely what to say about these cases. Does the subject see the elephants but fail to know that there are any elephants, or that they are seeing them, or do they know it without believing that they do? On Williamson’s view, one could even argue that the above scenario constitutes a counter-example to the entailment between knowledge and belief, rather than the one from seeing to knowing. Alternatively, one could argue that such examples do not constitute seeing at all, but are rather some kind of intermediary between seeing and hallucination, for example. In any case, the existence of such cases provides an interesting challenge to the Williamsonian view.

On a purely intuitive level, it seems natural to think of ways of knowing in terms of ways of coming to know—i.e. how one arrives at knowledge—but this intuition quickly evaporates upon further reflection. In the case of memory, for example, it seems that I can know something by remembering, but this is not a way of coming to know, but rather a way of recalling what I already know. Indeed, it is far from clear that remembering is a way of knowing at all, except perhaps in a secondary or derivative sense. Perhaps the above intuition is nothing more than a confusion between these two closely related concepts, and so cannot be taken to be a reliable guide as to which of the above senses is correct. Moreover, once one gets used to the idea, there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with thinking of ways of knowing in the Williamsonian sense, so I guess I have yet to be convinced that any of the above arguments constitute a strong objection to Williamson’s account.