Actores del Esquema Integral de Comunicación al Paciente Oncológico

Some forms of externalism repudiate justification as a condition of knowledge, according to Nozick and Dretske, for example. ¹⁷ Such accounts may provide an interesting account of what it is like for belief to constitute correct information or to track truth, but they provide no account of knowledge. The reason is that no one knows that what she accepts is true when it would have been just as reasonable for her to have accepted the opposite on the basis of her information. A necessary

normative condition of a person knowing that p is that it be more reasonable for her to accept that p than to accept the denial of p on the basis of her information. This condition implies the need for a justification condition of the sort we have proposed.

One may, as Goldman illustrates, combine externalism with the affirmation of a justification condition, but such an account, if it takes account of background information in an acceptable manner, will introduce a coherence factor. Goldman insists, for example, that a justified belief resulting from a reliable belief-forming process must not be undermined by other evidence the subject possesses. ¹⁸ The condition requiring that the belief not be undermined by other evidence is a kind of negative coherence condition to the effect that the belief not be incoherent with

background information. Nevertheless, the source of justification on this account is the reliability of the belief-forming process, that is, the fact that the belief has the sort of history frequently producing true beliefs. As a result of providing a justification

condition, a normative constraint is supplied.

The objection raised against externalism in general still applies to such a theory, however. A person totally ignorant of the reliability of the process producing his belief would not know that what he believes is true, even if he had no information that would undermine his belief. The example of Mr. Truetemp illustrates this perfectly. He has no evidence that his thoughts about the temperature are incorrect. Had he taken time to consider evidence, he would have discovered that his thoughts about the temperature are correct, but he did not consider any evidence concerning the matter, and that is why he does not know that his thoughts about the temperature are correct.

Take a more commonplace example. If I read a thermometer at the local gas station, and it says that the temperature is 104 degrees, I do not know simply from reading the thermometer that the temperature is 104 degrees. I may not have any evidence that it is untrustworthy, but the competitor to the effect that gas station thermometers are often inaccurate is not one I can beat or neutralize, at least not without inquiring about the thermometer. Whether or not the belief-forming

-165-process is reliable, which perhaps it is, I do not know whether the information about the temperature is trustworthy or not. Indeed, I may have no view on the matter. I may believe what I see out of habit, but this is not knowledge. This is a central problem for externalism, to wit, that ignorance of our reliability or of other external relationships leaves us ignorant of whether our information is trustworthy. Trust sharpens the epistemic blade.

The Invincibility Objection

There is another objection to historical reliabilism that leads to an important lesson.

The objection raised by Cohen is that if we are deceived in such a way that we are invincibly ignorant of the deception, we are justified in what we believe, nonetheless.

19 Cohen's example was the Cartesian demon who deceives us in all our perceptual beliefs. The details of the deception may vary, but let us suppose that the demon clouds our senses and supplies us with deceptive sensory data leading us to believe that we perceive the world though we actually perceive nothing at all. Since our perceptual beliefs are virtually all erroneous, the process that produces them is not reliable. Yet, Cohen suggests, we are certainly justified in our beliefs. We may have done the best we could to ensure that we were not deceived, attended to what we observe with the greatest circumspection, and noticed no error. Having done the best we could, indeed, the best anyone could do, we are certainly justified in believing what we do.

The intuition is reinforced by noting the difference between two people, one who examines his sensory data with the sort of care that would keep him virtually free from error in normal circumstances, and one who forms perceptual beliefs so casually that he would frequently err under the best of circumstances. The former puts

together all his information and concludes that he is seeing the path of an alpha particle in a cloud chamber. The other believes this because some person, whom he knows to be scientifically ignorant, has told him that this is what he is seeing. We would wish to say that the former but not the latter was justified in believing that he sees the path of an alpha particle in a cloud chamber, even though both beliefs are produced by processes that are unreliable, given the interventions of the demon.

Externalism might be modified to meet the objection, and Goldman has suggested more than one way. ²⁰ The example shows that it is internal factors, not external ones, that make us justified and explain the difference between the circumspect and casual observers above. The sort of justification appealed to in the example is

personal justification as explicated in the last chapter. The circumspect observer wins the justification round

-166-arising when the skeptic claims that casual observations are often in error by replying that his observation is circumspect and not casual. The casual observer loses that round to the skeptic.

The Absentminded Demon

There is, however, an important lesson to be learned from reliabilism. It is that the sort of justification required for knowledge is not entirely an internal matter, either.

On the contrary, the needed form of justification depends on the appropriate match between what one accepts about how one is related to the world and what is actually the case. To see this, consider a minor amendment in the preceding example in which the demon, in a moment of cosmic absentmindedness, forgets for a moment to cloud our senses with the result that we really perceive what we think we do. If this

moment is one that occurs very briefly as we suddenly awake and is immediately followed by further slumber to conceal the demonic error, we might believe we

perceive what, in this instance, we actually do perceive. I might perceive my hand for the first time and believe I see a hand, only to lose consciousness after this formidable

event. Do I know that I see a hand in that brief moment? I believe I do, but, since such beliefs are almost all false, I am almost totally untrustworthy in such matters as is everybody else, though accepting myself to be worthy of trust.

I am as much deceived about my trustworthiness in this case as I would be when confronted with a convincing liar who tells me almost all falsehoods about some party he attended except for one fact which, in a moment of absentmindedness, he

accurately conveyed, namely, that he arrived before the host. If I accept all that he tells me and also that he is a trustworthy source of information about the event, I may be personally justified in accepting all that he says, but I do not know that the one truth he has conveyed is a truth. I do not know that he arrived before the host. The reason is that my assumption that my informant is trustworthy is in error, even if he has told me the truth in this one instance, and this error is sufficient to deprive me of the sort of justification I require for knowledge. This is the truth about justification contained in reliabilism.