R. C. writes,
I hadn't heard of the Dolezal case until reading your blog post. It occurred to me that this case might serve as a counterexample to the standard epistemological position that belief is necessary for knowledge.
I don't know Dolezal's psychological/epistemic state. But suppose she knows that she isn't African-American by race, but she has convinced herself to believe she is so. Would she have knowledge without belief?
Perhaps yes. Or perhaps she doesn't really believe she is African-American by race. Or, perhaps she is double minded: one mind knows and thus believes she isn't, and the other lacks knowledge on the matter but believes she is.
Anyway, I'd be interested in your take.
As I construe his example, the loyal reader is offering a case in which a subject knows that p without believing that p. Thus he is supposing that Dolezal knows that she is Caucasian, but does not believe that she is. If so, we have a counterexample to the standard view that, necessarily, if S knows that p, then S believes that p. On the standard analysis, believing that p is necessary for knowing that p. What the example suggests is that believing that p is not necessary for knowing that p.
We should distinguish between a weaker and a stronger thesis:
1. It is not the case that knowledge entails belief. (Some cases of knowledge are not cases of belief.)
2. Knowledge entails disbelief. (No cases of knowledge are cases of belief.)
I read the following passage from Dallas Willard as supporting (1):
Belief I understand to be some degree of readiness to act as if such and such (the content believed) were the case. Everyone concedes that one can believe where one does not know. But it is now widely assumed that you cannot know what you do not believe. Hence the well known analysis of knowledge as "justified, true belief." But this seems to me, as it has to numerous others, to be a mistake. Belief is, as Hume correctly held, a passion. It is something that happens to us. Thought, observation and testing, even knowledge itself, can be sources of belief, and indeed should be. But one may actually know (dispositionally, occurrently) without believing what one knows.
Whether or not one believes what one represents truly and has an appropriate basis for so representing, depends on factors that are irrelevant to truth, understanding and evidence. It depends, one might simply say, on how rational one is. Now I do not think that this point about belief in relation to knowledge is essential to the rest of this paper, but I mention it to indicate that the absence of any reference to belief in my general description of knowledge is not an oversight. Belief is not, I think, a necessary component of knowledge, though one would like to believe that knowledge would have some influence upon belief, and no doubt it often does.
Now we can't get into Dolezal's (crazy) head, but the following is plausibly ascribed to her. She knows who her biological parents are; she knows that they are both Caucasian; she knows that Caucasian parents have Caucasian children; hence she knows that she is biologically Caucasian. Could she nonetheless really believe that she is not Caucasian?
Perhaps. Belief is tied to action. It is tied to what one does and leaves undone and what one is disposed to do and leave undone. Dolezal's NAACP activities and her verbal avowals among other behaviors suggest that she really believes that she is racially black.
But if Dolezal really believes that she is racially black, when she knows that she is racially white, then she is irrational. Why not say the following by way of breaking the link between belief and knowledge:
D1. S knows that p =df S justifiably accepts that p, and p is true.
D2. S believes that p =df S accepts that p and S either acts as if p is true or is prepared to act as if p is true.
These definitions allow that there are cases of knowledge that are not cases of belief without excluding cases of knowledge that are cases of belief. What is common to knowledge and belief is not belief, but acceptance.
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