Epistemic Status as Relative to An Audience but Objective

§3.1

To be known is to be known to someone, and different people know different things. In an argument, premises are being offered to someone as a reason to accept some conclusion. Let’s call the person or people to whom an argument is being given the audience. Clearly, then, in assessing the premises of an argument, what we need to figure out is whether the audience knows them—or, more generally, what their epistemic status is for the audience. When we speak of epistemic status, we always mean the epistemic status of a particular proposition for a particular audience. And the same proposition may have a different epistemic status for different audiences.6

We must take care, however, not to confuse a proposition’s epistemic status for an audience with how firmly the audience believes it. By the firmness of a belief, I mean how steadfast the audience is in holding it. We can think of this as how easy it would be to talk someone out of the belief. The stronger a proposition’s epistemic status is, the more steadfast it is reasonable to be in believing it. It would be unreasonable of someone to get talked out of something he knows to be true. (Indeed, if he was talked out of it, we would probably conclude that he didn’t really know it in the first place.) However, people can sometimes be quite firm in beliefs that have a very low epistemic status. One example would be a fervent racist who, despite all the evidence to the contrary, persists in the belief that the members of other races are inferior to members of his own. Another example would be a self-deceived husband who clings to the belief that his wife is faithful to him, despite strong evidence that she is having an affair.

One way to formulate the distinction between firmness of belief and epistemic status is to say that the former is subjective and the latter objective. Something is subjective if it is determined by someone’s feelings or opinions. It is objective if it is determined by the facts. Though different people know different things, whether a particular person knows something or not is not determined simply by whether he thinks or feels like he knows it, since many people think they know things that they don’t. Nor is something’s epistemic status for someone a matter of his feelings or opinions about it. The epistemic status of a proposition for a given person is determined by facts about such things as the observations he has made and the arguments he has.

When evaluating arguments for certain purposes, is important to consider the (subjective) firmness of an audience’s beliefs. The more firmly the audience believes the premises of an argument, the more persuasive it will find the argument. So, if we were interested in arguments primarily for the purposes of persuading other people, we would have to evaluate the premises with an eye to how firmly the audience believes them. This is how we might proceed in a rhetoric class or if we were considering whether to use an argument in an advertisement or a political campaign. However, this is not why we are interested in arguments in this class. We are interested in arguments because inference is a crucial means of knowledge. From this point of view, what makes an argument good is not that is persuades anyone of anything, but that it puts the audience in a position to know that the conclusion is true (or else brings the audience close to such a position). Therefore, what is relevant to us when assessing premises is not how strongly the audience believes them, but what their epistemic status is for the audience.

And the audience we are primarily interested in is ourselves. After all, we are studying arguments because we want to assess the arguments on which our own beliefs are based and to reach new knowledge. Therefore, when assessing the premises of the arguments we consider in this class, you should be focused on the epistemic status of these premises for you. Do you know the premises to be true? Are you entirely ignorant as to whether they’re true? Or does your state with respect to them fall somewhere along the continuum between knowledge and ignorance? If so, where along that continuum? In asking and answering these questions, you need to keep in mind that whether you know something is not simply a matter of how sure you feel about it, but a matter of how objectively strong your reasons are.