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How Much Philosophy Can a Wet Sidewalk Bear?
How do I know it rained last night? I look outside. The sidewalk is wet. The leaves are dripping. My neighbor says a storm woke her up.
A certain kind of philosopher hears this and starts taking the answer apart. Do I see that the sidewalk is wet, or does it merely appear wet? Which facts are available to me directly? Am I believing it rained because of the evidence, or did I make up a reason after forming the belief? What if I’m dreaming?
These are clever questions. But when does cleverness stop helping? If an account of knowledge needs me to sort my experience into “facts I possess,” “appearances I have,” and “reasons that actually guide my belief,” how am I supposed to use it while I’m trying to find out what happened? The sidewalk does not arrive with a label saying whether it is a manifest fact. That is precisely what I’m trying to determine.
The problem gets sharper when the philosopher says that genuine evidence must be true. Suppose I look through the window and see what appears to be rain. In one case it is raining; in another, a sprinkler has fooled me. The theory says my evidence differs between the two cases. Fine. But from where I stand, what do I do differently? If the difference becomes clear only after I learn the answer, the theory seems better at awarding knowledge afterward than at helping someone investigate.
Then there is the insistence that believing for a reason involves a special kind of awareness of what I’m doing. Why? A child learns which parent’s footsteps are coming down the hall. A nurse notices that a patient’s breathing has changed before she can say exactly what alerted her. A skilled mechanic hears a fault in an engine. Are these people less responsive to reasons because their intelligence outruns their explanations? Perhaps the philosopher can make room for them. But why build a theory that makes their ordinary competence seem like an exception requiring rescue?
I also wonder about the confidence that the rules of good reasoning can be worked out chiefly by reflection. Reflection is valuable. It is also where people become wonderfully articulate about mistakes they continue to make. We are suggestible, tired, socially dependent creatures. Our methods of finding things out live in classrooms, families, laboratories, newsrooms, and friendships. Why should an elegant account reached from the armchair have authority over what those practices reveal about our limits?
And what has happened to the skeptic? If I ask whether everything I see might be deceptive, I may have changed the conversation. Have I changed the evidence I possess? Explaining why a skeptical question unsettles our usual claims is interesting. It still leaves the stubborn question: What gives me reason to trust this experience right now? A map of how we talk about knowledge cannot, by itself, tell me whether I’ve found my way.
I want to keep the questions this philosopher asks. I want to loosen his grip on the answers. Knowing often looks like a continuing activity: noticing, checking, asking someone else, discovering that I was wrong, and learning what to check next time. Why begin with a perfected account of evidence when the most revealing thing about inquiry may be how imperfectly we proceed?
By breakfast, the sidewalk may have dried. I can still ask my neighbor whether it rained. I can check the garden. I can change my mind. That seems like a better place to start thinking about knowledge than a theory that first asks me to prove what, exactly, was available to my mind when I looked out the window.
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