Review

Reviewed Work(s): Knowledge and the State of Nature: An Essay in Conceptual

Synthesis. by Edward Craig
Review by: Frederick F. Schmitt
Source: Mind , Jul., 1992, New Series, Vol. 101, No. 403 (Jul., 1992), pp. 555-559
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the Mind Association

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2253905

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 Book Reviews 555

Knowledge and the State of Nature: An Essay in Conceptual Synthesis,

by Edward Craig. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Pp. x + 171.

In this far-ranging and strikingly original book, Edward Craig offers a "practi-
cal explication" of the concept of knowledge grounded in the "state of nature".
Craig proposes a hypothesis about what we use the concept of knowledge to do
and then asks what content we would expect a concept that does this sort of
work to have. He attempts, as one might put it, to ground the semantics of the
concept of knowledge in its pragmatics. Craig's hypothesis emerges from the
idea that the concept of knowledge functions to facilitate the survival, mainte-
nance, and flourishing of human beings in communities. He begins his project
by constructing a concept that functions in the manner suggested by his
hypothesis and then tests the hypothesis by checking whether the constructed
concept fits our intuitions about knowledge or otherwise explains why our intu-
itions diverge. Craig eschews analysis of the concept of knowledge in terms of
necessary and sufficient conditions, offers instead an "explication" (in some-
thing like the Camapian sense of rational reconstruction) by prototypical exam-
ple, and tries to explain the persistent failure of proposed necessary and
sufficient conditions.
Craig's prototype account is not as central to his state of nature approach as
his pragmatic strategy, his decision to inquire into the content of the concept of
knowledge by considering what sort of life-preserving work the concept may do.
It is important to be clear about what is controversial in this decision. Most epis-
temologists have accepted Plato's agenda for epistemology: to analyze the con-
cept of knowledge, whether by necessary and sufficient conditions or by
prototypical example, in order to explain the value of knowledge for human life,
and in particular its value for survival and flourishing. Craig's approach goes
beyond the traditional agenda in three respects: in the order of inquiry, which
takes the characterization of value or function first and then checks how well the
explication fits the concept of knowledge; in its insistence that all features of
knowledge represented in the concept derive from the function; but most impor-
tantly, in analyzing the concept by looking at the function in human life, not of
knowledge, but of the concept of knowledge. I believe Craig does well to go
beyond the traditional agenda in the first two respects, but he may go overboard
in the third. Clearly it would be a howler to inquire into the content of the con-
cept of water (and, even more obviously, into the nature of water itself), by ask-
ing what work the concept of water does in human life (other than the work of
representing water). Carrying on that way would lead one to conclude that being
identifiable by human beings for purposes of drinking and bathing is essential to
the concept of water, while being colorless and odorless is not, and of course
this verges on absurdity. Why, then, should inquiring into the function of the
concept of knowledge in human life be any more revealing about the content of
the concept of knowledge? Craig does reply to this worry: the concept of knowl-
edge, unlike that of water, is constructed by us-by which he must mean that the
concept has its content in virtue of its function. I tend to agree that the concept

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556 Book Reviews

differs from that of water in acquiring some of its content from its function; for
it is an evaluative and perhaps normative concept, and such concepts are
designed by us to get people to have certain properties as axresult of the use of
these concepts, so that the feattires they ascribe to people, and hence their con-
tent, must reflect the properties we are trying to get people to have by using the
concept; they are not designed simply to describe things. Still, there is no reason
to suppose that the concept gets its content solely from its function; and it is
worth noting that whatever content it does get must be constrained by its evalua-
tive and normative character. These reflections raise the question whether Craig
might not be too enthusiastic in his pursuit of a pragmatic strategy.
Craig's particular hypothesis is that the sole purpose of the concept of knowl-
edge is "to serve as a marker for approved sources of information". To be spe-
cific, the constructed concept of knowledge as to whether p is that of the good
informant as to whetherp, or more accurately, as we will see, an "objectivisation"
of that concept. The idea is that we need true beliefs about our environment to
guide action. Hence, we need sources of information that will lead to true belief.
Often the easiest and most immediate way to reach a true belief as to whether p
is to ask a good informant who tells one whether p. The concept of knowledge
serves to flag good informants. By focusing on the concept of good informant
Craig hopes to explain a variety of puzzling phenomena concerning the concept
of knowledge, such as the fact that it is ambiguous whether belief that p is
required for knowledge that p. Craig explains the ambiguity here by noting that
we want informants who will produce (true) beliefs in inquirers, and informants
are more likely to produce conviction if they already have it themselves, so that
we tend to require conviction of a good informant.
The good informant will have some property indicative of true belief-i.e.,
some property X correlated with true belief that is detectable by the inquirer and
that the inquirer knows to be correlated with true belief. Craig argues that the
various proposed analyses of knowledge-Nozick's tracking analysis, Gold-
man's causal analysis, reliabilism--put artificial or incorrect constraints on the
indicative property. He also argues that they run afoul of our intuitions about
knowledge precisely where they deviate from the general requirement of an
indicative property. His argument is persuasive in the case of tracking and
causal analyses, but for reasons I will mention below, it may not be in the case
of reliabilism.
Craig recognizes that the reader may object to the hypothesis that the concept
of knowledge is the concept of good informant on the ground that people can
know things even when they are unwilling or unable to tell what they know, and
even when inquirers cannot detect any property X correlated with true belief.
Craig responds by "objectivising" the concept of good informant. We will want
to be able to recommend informants to others whose powers of detection differ
from our own, and we will not need to be able to detect the informants in these
circumstances, so long as others can do so. We will also engage in group action
where it will be important to rely on others' beliefs as to whether p, derived from

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 Book Reviews 557

an informant, even though we are not ourselves concerned to learn whether p, so

that our communication with the informant will not be necessary. We will there-
fore want to objectivise the concept of good informant by subtracting what is spe-
cially required for being a good,informant for me on a partictilar occasion: the
objectivised concept will not entail the detectability of the property X by every
inquirer, or the communicability of information on every occasion. The trouble
with Craig's defense of his hypothesis, however, is that objectivising can push the
concept of good informant only to the point where the informant will or can com-
municate to someone and has a property X detectable by that person. And this is
not far enough to allow the concept to mimic the observed features of the concept
of knowledge.
What would explain the fact that knowledge can be incommunicable and
undetectable? I would suggest an alternative hypothesis about the concept of
knowledge which Craig nearly notices at one point: it serves not only to pick
informants as to whether p for our own use and that of others, but to pick reliable
believers as to whether p-individuals on whom we can rely to arrive at a true
belief as to whether p, whether or not these individuals can communicate the
knowledge to anyone and whether or not anyone can detect their having X. The
concept of reliable believer is a more likely candidate for the concept of knowl-
edge because, unlike that of good informant, it needs no objectivisation to accom-
modate the undetectability and incommunicability of knowledge. To be sure, we
can pick reliable believers only if we can detect certain of their properties, but
there is nothing in the concept of a reliable believer per se that entails detectabil-
ity. This is not the end of the story, however, since it may be that we wish to eval-
uate informants and reliable believers in such a way that we may acquire the
secret of their reliability-and that will lead us to focus on the reliability of their
methods or processes, a focus emphasized by reliabilism. The key point here is
that there are alternatives to Craig's hypothesis that may explain the central fea-
tures of the concept of knowledge more efficiently than his hypothesis. There are
many uses of the concept of knowledge, and in sizing up the concept there is no
a priori reason to favor its use in picking good informants over its other uses. The
task should be to ascertain what the concept must be like to afford all these uses.
That is bound to present a problem of indeterminacy, just as there is no one shape
a chair must have to seat all kinds of people. New resources must be found to
average over the uses and, arrive at the concept. However, Craig has to taken us
far enough to see how fruitful it is to begin with the pragmatics of the concept of
knowledge and infer its semantics.
Craig's hypothesis may have another problem: it employs a notion of good
informant tailored so that the inquirer who recognizes a good informant will
know, or at least be justified in believing, p, and this may be regarded as a circular
account of knowledge. The concept of knowledge or justification is employed in
selecting the conditions of good informant, and this may cripple a state of nature
explication of the concept, depending on the ambitions of the explication. This
charge will be especially troubling if it turns out that there is no intuitive notion

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558 Book Reviews

of good informant besides that of informant who enables the inquirer to know
On the other hand, even if there is a damaging circularity in the explication, C
can respond that the explication is nevertheless nontrivial: the-claim that the c
cept of knowledge emerges from that of good informant does place important
constraints on the content of the concept and provides an explanation of some
puzzling phenomena about knowledge. And perhaps that is all Craig needs to
claim.
Craig offers a fascinating explanation of skepticism: it arises from the objec-
tivisation of the concept of good informant, in light of the fact that in recommend-
ing good informants we will not always know the purposes to which the
information will be put, and we must therefore set the degree of correlation with
truth of the property X as high as would be required for any purpose-to a prob-
ability of 1. This is an intriguing proposal, but it faces several difficulties, of
which I will mention only one: practical purposes may require setting a lower
rather than a higher probability. If my concern is to know whether there is a tiger
nearby, I may eagerly trade a higher probability of truth for a more rapid response
from my informant. The upshot is that if we do not know the purposes others have
in using informants, we do not know whether to raise or lower the required prob-
ability. In other words, it is doubtful that the concept of good informant can be
objectivised with respect to purposes except perhaps by averaging in a way that
is bound to allow probabilities lower than 1.
Craig makes an important proposal for extending his approach to propositional
knowledge to other modes of knowing-to knowing an object and knowing how
to do something A. I will say a word about his treatment of know-how. Craig
observes that knowing how to do A-say, repair an automobile-does not entail
being able to do it: an old mechanic may know how but no longer be able to do
it. Nor does it entail having a set of propositional knowledge. It does, however,
involve being able either to tell how to do it or show how to do it. Craig's proposal
is that the concept of knowing how to do A emerges by objectivisation from a
concept analogous to that of the good informant-the concept of an instructor of
the task, one who can teach the task by telling or showing how to do it. This pro-
posal explains why knowing how is closely tied to telling and showing how. It
also has the advantage of explaining why knowing how entails having learned
how: we do not know how to breathe or lie down--apparently because we sim-
ply do these things; they are not things we learned how to do. On the other hand,
the proposal runs up against the fact there are things people know how to do-
tell the sex of chickens, for example-even though they cannot tell or show how
to do them. An alternative proposal would explain the latter fact, though not the
fact about learning: that knowing how to do A is having such cognitive capacities
as would normally enable one to do A.
Though I have vented some worries about Craig's specific proposals, I regard
his approach as extremely promising. Craig has written one of the most inspired
works of epistemology in several decades, a compact masterpiece sketching a
new way to do epistemology and brimming with illuminating concrete proposals.

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 Book Reviews 559

The book is powerfully, densely argued, and it is exquisitely written. Any future
work in epistemology must reckon with this unique book.

Department of Philosophy FREDERICK F. SCHMITT

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
105 Gregory Hall
810 South Wright Street
Urbana
IL 61801
USA

La Norme du Vrai: Philosophie de la Logique, by Pascal Engel. Paris: Gal-

limard, 1989. Pp. xxiii + 429. Translated into English as The Norm of Truth,
London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. ?16.95.

Pascal Engel's The Norm of Truth is a critical expose and a comprehensive dis-
cussion of modern developments in logic, together with their philosophical
implications. In this review, I propose to concentrate on Engel's treatment of the
logical constants, on his criticisms of Wittgenstein and Quine, and finally on his
views about the relationship between logic and psychology.
In chapters II, VI and XI Engel analyses the meanings and inferential roles of
the propositional connectives. Two questions arise, one about formal, and the
other about informal rigour. The latter, which will be discussed towards the end
of this review, asks whether the truth-functional connectives adequately capture
the meanings of their alleged counterparts in natural language. The former con-
cerns the methods of formally defining the logical constants. The most usual
approach to determining such constants is by means of truth tables.Though
semantic, this method is still extensional; which explains its failure unambigu-
ously to fix the meanings of the connectives. For example: (p A q) and ((p A q) A
(7+5=12)) have the same truth table, although they obviously possess different
meanings.
As is well known, the semantic approach is closely linked to a realist position
according to which all atomic propositions have determinate truth-values; and the
values of complex sentences are functions of those of their constituents. This is
why anti-realists like Dummett and Hacking try to define the connectives in
exclusively syntactical terms, for example through certain rules of inference.
Engel points out that the syntax cannot be arbitrary. For example, let the connec-
tive "tonk", henceforth denoted by "*", satisfy the following rules:-

A A*B

A*B B

Assuming the transitivity of infere

B

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