Knowledge and Two Forms of Non-Accidental Truth

Philosophy and Phenomenological Researchdoi:10.1111/phpr.12062© 2013 Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LLC

Knowledge and Two Forms ofNon-Accidental Truth

KARL SCHAFER

University of Pittsburgh

The idea that a belief can count as knowledge only if its truth is not merelya happy accident goes back at least to Plato. Indeed, if the following discus-sion is correct, it may be as old as the concept of knowledge itself. Butnonetheless it has become especially significant in epistemology since Get-tier’s counterexamples to identification of knowledge with justified, truebelief.1 For example, we find Peter Unger—in his characteristically uncom-promising style—offering the following account of knowledge:

For any sentential value of p, (at a time t) a man knows that p if and onlyif (at t) it is not at all accidental that the man is right about its being thecase that p.2

While Unger represents a rather extreme version of this idea, some form ofit is at the root of many contemporary epistemological theories, includingthose that focus on reliability, safety, and sensitivity—as well as manyforms of virtue epistemology. Thus, if anything represents a received truthin contemporary epistemology, it may be the idea that some sort of non-accidentality condition should play a central role in our account ofknowledge.3 As Masahiro Yamada helpfully puts it in a recent paper:

1 Gettier (1963). Russell (1959) is another highly significant twentieth century source ofinterest in this idea.

2 Unger (1968). As will become clear, I think some version of Unger’s formula may wellbe right. But in order to understand what this involves, we need to be very careful aboutthe precise sense(s) in which non-accidentality is relevant to knowledge.

3 In what follows, I tend to speak of things being “no accident” as opposed to them being“lucky”. As should become clear, I think this way of speaking is preferable insofar as itis more neutral with respect to the precise nature of the phenomena at issue—but noth-ing terribly deep hinges upon it.

KNOWLEDGE AND TWO FORMS OF NON-ACCIDENTAL TRUTH 1

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One might hesitate about the claim [by Unger] to sufficiency of this [non-accidentality condition] but the necessity part is certainly correct. It hadbetter not be an accident that the agent’s belief is correct if the belief is tohave any chance of being knowledge: if someone correctly believes that p,pointing out that she was lucky in getting it right is a decisive objection toattributing knowledge that p to the agent.4

In some sense, I have no desire to take issue with this orthodoxy. Of coursea belief can only count as knowledge if its truth is no accident in somesense. In fact, as we will see, there are at least two ways in which knowl-edge is incompatible with “accidental truth”. As I explain below, thesetwo forms of non-accidentality are rooted in the complicated functionplayed by ordinary knowledge attributions. By examining the role that suchattributions play, we can see that knowledge requires both a non-accidentalconnection between a belief’s truth and the knower and a non-accidentalconnection between its truth and the objects or facts that are known. In thisway, knowledge requires both what we might call “subject-directed” non-accidental truth and “object-directed” non-accidental truth.

This is significant insofar as a good deal of the contemporary discussionof these issues proceeds as if there is a single—more or less unified—vari-ety of accidental truth that is incompatible with knowledge. Given this, it iseasy for a focus on the question of whether a given belief’s truth is acciden-tal to obscure important differences between the various ways in whichaccidental truth can matter to whether a belief counts as knowledge. Thus,the recent focus on making sense of the slogan that “knowledge is non-accidentally true belief” seems to me in many ways to be a methodologicalmistake—one that is as likely to mislead us about the character of knowl-edge as it is to illuminate it.

1. Gettier Cases, Justification, and Accidentality

Given the role that Gettier’s famous counter-examples to the justified, truebelief (JTB) account of knowledge have played in the contemporary resur-gence of these ideas, it is natural to begin our exploration of them there. Asis familiar, such examples share a general form. We are faced with a situa-tion in which an individual has a justified, true belief that p—but where thefacts that ground their justification and the facts that explain their belief’struth are unrelated.5 In such cases, the individual’s belief is both justifiedand true, but does not count as knowledge, because the factors that led themto justifiably form this belief are unrelated to the factors that make it true.

4 Yamada (2011), 72.5 Of course, not every counterexample to the JTB account of knowledge has this structure,

as recent discussion of so-called “lottery ticket propositions”, for example, makes clear.

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Given this, the story goes, the truth of their belief is merely accidental, andthe individual in question cannot be credited with knowledge.

At least for any concept of justification that permits them, such casesappear to rule out an account of knowledge that identifies it with justified,true belief. Thus, at the very least, they show that such accounts must besupplemented with some further condition that rules out this sort of “Getti-erization”.6 The account of knowledge that immediately results from such amodification is some form of:

Justified, True, Non-Gettierized Belief: S knows that p if and only if Shas a true, justified, and non-Gettierized belief that p.

In the contemporary literature, it is common to represent such a modifica-tion of the JTB account as a reaction to the discovery—implicit in Gettier’scases—that knowledge is incompatible with accidental truth. But this is amisleading way of presenting the dialectic. For, in fact, there was an impor-tant non-accidentality condition built into the JTB account all along. Whenwe say that an accidentally true or lucky belief cannot count as knowledge,often all we mean is that a mere lucky guess cannot count as such. Andthis, of course, is precisely the idea that the justification condition onknowledge is meant to capture. In other words, when we have a justifiedbelief that p, it is no accident that we believe that p and—under normalconditions—it will also be no accident that this belief is true. For under nor-mal (non-Gettierized) conditions, when we form a justified true belief, thefact that we have formed a true belief can be explained by the justifiedmanner in which this belief was formed. So the justification condition onknowledge itself represents one attempt to capture the intuition that knowl-edge is non-accidentally true belief.

What the Gettier cases show is that this condition is insufficient to cap-ture all the ways in which accidental truth is incompatible with knowledge.As noted above, one way of dealing with this discovery is simply to add afurther condition to the standard JTB account. Of course, by doing so, wearrive at an account that has a decidedly ad hoc feel. But for all that, anaccount of this general variety might well be correct. And it provides uswith an important example of the sort of phenomenon I want to focus on:accounts of knowledge that see knowledge as requiring two distinct formsof non-accidental truth.

That the non-Gettiered JTB account has this structure should be easy tosee. After all, as I just observed, the original justification condition onknowledge is best understood as aiming to capture one important sense in

6 Perhaps the most prominent attempt to provide such an additional condition is the “nofalse lemmas requirement”, but I will not pause over the details of such accounts here.


which knowledge must be non-accidentally true. And, of course, the addi-tional requirement that a belief not be Gettierized is meant to captureanother such sense. So on this sort of account, the general requirement thatknowledge cannot be accidentally true decomposes into two distinct non-accidentality conditions: one that requires that the belief be justified andanother that requires that its truth be no accident in light of the manner inwhich it is justified.7

2. Virtue Epistemology and Reliabilism

Of course, this feature of the modified JTB account may seem to be a clearreason to reject it. For surely it would be preferable to develop an accountof knowledge that explained both of these non-accidentality conditions asthe product of a single sense in which knowledge is incompatible with acci-dentally true belief? This is exactly what tracking and safety accounts ofknowledge attempt to accomplish. But before I turn to such attempts, I wantto discuss several other contemporary accounts that—like the Non-Gettier-ized JTB account—imply that knowledge requires two different forms ofnon-accidental truth.

One such account is provided by many forms of contemporary virtueepistemology. Although virtue epistemology comes in many varieties, astandard virtue epistemological picture involves some variant of the follow-ing:

Virtue Epistemology: S knows that p if and only if S believes the truthabout p because S’s belief that p is produced by an intellectual virtue orability.8

Although it may not be obvious, this conception of knowledge also requiresthat a belief be non-accidentally true in two distinct senses. First, there iswhat is often called the “credit requirement”—the requirement that the beliefin question be true (at least in part) because it was produced by one of theindividual’s intellectual abilities or virtues.9 This condition is, in part, meantby the virtue epistemologist to block Gettier-style counter-examples to her

7 Importantly, on this account, the sort of non-accidentality involved in each of these con-ditions is quite different. Thus, while such an account may be true to the letter of theidea that knowledge is non-accidentally true belief, this slogan is potentially quite mis-leading when applied to it, insofar as it obscures the important differences between thesetwo forms of non-accidentality.

8 See, for example, Sosa (2007), Zagzebski (1996), and Greco (2007).9 For reasons familiar from the philosophy of action, this “because” claim must be under-

stood in a particular way for this principle to capture what we are interested in. I returnto this issue below. But compare Sosa’s claim that a belief must manifest an epistemicvirtue if it is to count as knowledge.

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view.10 And it plainly involves a version of the post-Gettier idea that knowl-edge is incompatible with accidental truth. But there is a second place wherea non-accidentality condition appears in Virtue Epistemology: namely, in thevirtue epistemologist’s conception of what it is for a capacity to be a genuineintellectual virtue or ability. For not just any way of forming beliefs counts asa virtue in this sense. Rather, on a standard virtue epistemological account, away of forming beliefs will count as intellectually virtuous only if it has somesort of systematic connection with the truth. So, for example, virtue episte-mologists have proposed that genuine epistemic virtues must be reliable, ormust track the truth, or must produce safe beliefs.11 And all of these condi-tions on what it is to be an epistemic virtue are plainly meant to rule out cer-tain ways in which a belief might be accidentally true over and above the sortof accidental truth that the “credit requirement” rules out.

Thus, on the virtue epistemologist’s picture we have two distinct non-accidentality requirements:

1. Credit Requirement: A belief’s truth must be creditable to somefaculty or method of the believer and so must be attributable to thefaculty or method via which it was formed.12

2. Virtue Requirement: This faculty or method must count as a genuineepistemic virtue—where this requires that it have some sort ofsystematic connection with the truth.

Once again, it remains possible that both of these non-accidentality condi-tions can be reduced to a single non-accidentality condition. And in anycase, unlike the Non-Gettiered JTB account, the virtue epistemologist neednot regard these two forms of non-accidentality as forming a disjunctiveaccount of the nature of knowledge. Rather, as I will discuss below, it isnatural to regard the first of these non-accidentality requirements as buildingupon and making more demanding the second. But nonetheless it remainstrue that Virtue Epistemology involves two distinct senses in which acciden-tal truth is incompatible with knowledge.

Not surprisingly, given the close historical connections between reliabi-lism and virtue epistemology, much the same is true of standard reliabilist

10 Note that the modified version of the JTB view might try to appeal to a similar conditionto achieve this result.

11 Note that these are only meant as necessary conditions on what it is to be an intellectualvirtue.

12 I’ve phrased this requirement quite loosely to allow for epistemic virtues that are wideas opposed to narrow in their dependence on the believer’s social context. For some fur-ther discussion of the interaction between this requirement and the social dimension ofepistemology see below.


views, at least once they are modified so as to meet the challenges posedby Gettier-style cases. Once again such views come in many varieties. Butwhat they all share is the idea that a belief can only count as knowledge ifit is the product of a reliable method or faculty. But, of course, the merefact that a belief is true and is the product of such a method or faculty doesnot guarantee that in this particular case it is true because it is the productof a reliable method or faculty. And where this is not the case, just as wastrue in standard Gettier cases, we can have a reliably formed, true belief thatis not an instance of knowledge because its truth is unrelated to the mannerin which it was formed. Thus, in order to avoid such cases, we must add afurther condition to the basic reliabilist claim that knowledge must be theproduct of a reliable method or faculty:

Reliability: S knows that p if and only if S believes the truth about pbecause S’s belief that p is produced by a reliable method or faculty.13

To be clear, this additional element was not generally explicit in the tradi-tional forms of reliabilism that were prominent during the 1970s and 1980s.And the incorporation of a constraint of this sort of is one of the majorrespects in which virtue epistemological theories represent a clear advanceover earlier forms of reliabilism.14 But looking back on such views with thebenefits of hindsight, and considering how a reliabilist view might be bestdeveloped, it is clear that only a form of reliabilism that incorporates somesuch constraint has any chance of dealing successfully with the full rangeof Gettier-style cases. Thus, it seems plausible that any fully developed reli-abilist view will involve a principle with this general form. And, onceagain, there are two non-accidentality conditions at work in this principle:First, a condition that requires that a belief’s truth be the product of the factthat it is the product of a particular method or faculty. And, second, acondition requiring that this method or faculty be reliable—and so, that ithave a sort of non-accidental relation to the truth.

In this way, although reliabilism is often presented as a reaction toGettier’s counterexamples to the JTB account, the shift from a focus onjustification to a focus on reliability does nothing on its own to block thegeneral class of Gettier-style cases. For reliabilists, just as much as JTBtheorists, require an additional condition on knowledge in order to deal withcases of this general sort. Strikingly, much the same is true of recent

13 For a classic statement of reliabilism, see Goldman (1979).14 Another advance, which we will return to below, is the move from a focus on processes

in general to a focus on methods, faculties, or competences that may be attributed to theepistemic agent. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing me on the relationshipbetween reliabilism and virtue epistemology along these two dimensions.

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attempts to “beef up” reliabilism so as to better capture our intuitions aboutthe incompatibility of knowledge and accidental truth. For example, in hisinsightful discussion of these issues, Yamada sets out to give a thoroughcharacterization of the forms of accidental truth that are incompatible withknowledge, arriving at the following characterization:

Yamada: A true belief that p formed via a method M can only count asknowledge if

(i) the method M used is truth-conducive,

(ii) it is not an accident that one correctly applied M,

(iii) it is not an accident that one is using a truth-conducive method—thatis, the truth-conduciveness of M explains why one is using M.15

For reasons that I will allude to below, I am skeptical that anything asstrong as condition (iii) is required for knowledge. But for present purposes,the important point is that a belief can satisfy all three elements of Yamad-a’s condition and yet still fail to be knowledge for the reasons similar tothose at work in Gettier’s argument. For the mere fact that a true belief wasformed via a method that satisfies these three conditions does not imply thatthis belief is true because it was formed via that method. After all, evencorrectly applying a truth-conducive method, in Yamada’s sense, is no guar-antee of the truth of the resulting belief.16 Rather, even when applied cor-rectly, truth-conducive methods can get things wrong. Thus, we can easilyconstruct cases in which a true belief satisfies Yamada’s conditions, butnonetheless does not qualify as knowledge because its truth is explanatorilyunrelated to the fact that it was formed in a manner that satisfies these threeconditions.

Of course, Yamada only means his condition to be a necessary, not asufficient, condition on knowledge. So this observation by no means showsthat this condition is mistaken.17 But what it does show that Yamada’s con-dition fails to capture all of the forms of accidental truth that are incompati-ble with knowledge. Thus, if Yamada’s aim is to give an exhaustivecharacterization of these relevant varieties of accidental truth, we must judge

15 Yamada (2011), 82.16 Of course, we might develop a notion of “correct application” according to which the

correct application of a truth-conducive method always generates as its product a truebelief. But it is plain from Yamada’s discussion that this is not how he understands thesenotions. And in any case such a conception would concede my main point.

17 Although see below for some concerns about it even as a necessary condition on knowl-edge.


his efforts to be at best a partial success. In this regard, it is particularly tell-ing that, insofar as his account does not deal with all Gettier-style cases, itdoes not fully capture the sort of accidental truth that is its explicit inspira-tion. So even with Yamada’s expansion of our understanding of accidentaltruth, there are important ways in which knowledge is incompatible withaccidental truth that escape his theory.18

3. Sensitivity and Safety

Post-Gettier JTB epistemology, virtue epistemology, and reliabilism, then,provide us with three examples of theories of knowledge that recognize twoor more ways in which knowledge is incompatible with accidental truth.Taken on their own, then, these views suggest that there is no single sensein which accidental truth is incompatible with knowledge. But there areother contemporary views that aspire to more than this—namely, views thataspire to capture all of the relevant forms of accidental truth under a single,unified heading. Foremost among these are accounts of knowledge in termsof sensitivity and safety.

The most prominent defender of a view of the first sort is, of course,Robert Nozick. According to his account of knowledge, a true belief cancount as knowledge only if it tracks or is sensitive to the truth in thefollowing manner:

Sensitivity: S’s true belief that p is knowledge only if, if p were not thecase, S would not believe that p via the method he actually uses to formthis belief.19

As Nozick emphasized, Sensitivity captures many of the intuitions behindviews like reliabilism. And it also deals nicely with standard Gettier-stylecases. For instance, if S’s belief that p is true and justified, but not truebecause it is justified, it will not pass the Sensitivity test. For if p werenot the case, S’s would nonetheless continue to believe that p—since hisjustification for his belief is unconnected with its truth. Thus, although this

18 Much the same applies to Setiya (2013)’s account of accidentality and knowledge,although Setiya does not make any claim to give a complete account of the forms ofaccidentality that are incompatible with knowledge.

19 Nozick (1981). Compare Dretske (1970). Note that Nozick’s account of knowledgeinvolves further elements beyond this condition—some authors use “sensitivity” to referto all of these, but it is more common to use it to refer only to the condition notedabove. Also note that not all Sensitivity theorists require a reference to methods in theirformulation, but as Nozick himself pointed out, some such reference appears to berequired to avoid certain counterexamples. Of course, any such reference raises newdifficulties about how the relevant methods are to be determined. And, as Vogel (2000)argues, it leaves untouched certain natural counterexamples involving inductivereasoning.

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belief is both true and justified, it fails to track the truth in Nozick’ssense.

More generally, at least on one natural reading of the relevant counterfac-tual, when a belief is sensitive, it will be true.20 So it is not possible toapply Gettier’s exact “counterexample recipe” in the manner we did aboveto develop a counterexample to the claim that knowledge is true, sensitivebelief. For this recipe, as applied to sensitivity, would depend on the possi-bility that a belief might be true and sensitive, but not true because it issensitive. And, given the (arguable) entailment from the fact that a belief issensitive to the fact that is true, there simply will not be any cases of thissort.

But perhaps this is too quick? Remember again the virtue epistemologi-cal idea that a true belief can count as knowledge only if its truth can becredited or attributed to the believer in some sense. The line of thoughtabove showed that if the sensitivity of a believer’s belief can be attributedto him, then so too can that belief’s truth—since the latter fact (arguably)follows from the former. But perhaps we can still create a case in which abelief is true and sensitive but does not count as knowledge by imagining acase in which the sensitivity of a believer’s belief (and so its truth) is notsomething that we can reasonably attribute to him?21

Since Sensitivity is a purely externalist condition on knowledge, it shouldbe possible to come up with such cases. For example, suppose we are con-sidering a believer whose cognitive faculties and methods are such that theywould, under normal conditions, be wildly unreliable. And suppose he him-self has no reason to think that such normal conditions do not obtain. Nowsuppose that despite all this his belief that p satisfies Sensitivity solelybecause some powerful external force, be it a demon or a neuroscientist, isprepared to intervene to ensure that he does not believe p when p is false.In such a case, it seems clear that the belief in question should not bejudged to be knowledge. And it seems clear that this is the product of thefact that this belief, despite being true and sensitive, has both these featuresfor reasons that have nothing to do with how the believer himself formsbeliefs. Rather, this belief’s truth and sensitivity are solely the product ofexternal forces that it would be crazy to attribute to the believer in anysense. In other words, although this belief is true and sensitive, it is still an

20 After all, if one’s belief that p is false, then the antecedent in the counterfactual will betrue in the actual world—a world in which one falsely believes p.

21 Of course, some authors—e.g. Lackey (2009)—build on cases of testimonial knowledgeto cast doubt on whether knowledge must always be credited to the knower in any inter-esting sense. I will say more about this below, but I take it that it is relatively uncontro-versial that the sort of “lack of credit” involved in the case I sketch here is incompatiblewith knowledge.


accident that it has either of these properties in at least one of the senses of“accident” that seems to be relevant to knowledge.

One way of making this point would be to note that in cases of thissort an individual’s beliefs are sensitive even though the individual herselfis not disposed to form beliefs in a sensitive fashion. Rather, the fact thather belief is sensitive is the product of external factors that mask orinterfere with her own dispositions so that the end results are beliefs thatsatisfy Sensitivity. But surely if sensitivity is relevant to knowledge at all,this is (at least in part) because knowledge requires that the believer bedisposed to form beliefs in a manner that is sensitive to the truth. Andyet, as we have just seen, this is not always true of a believer who satis-fies Sensitivity.

If this verdict is correct, then Sensitivity cannot be taken to provide uswith an exhaustive account of the ways in which knowledge must be non-accidentally true. Unfortunately, reactions to cases of this sort vary, so it isfortunate that there are a number of familiar objections to Sensitivity thatsuggest that it is simply too strong to be a necessary condition on knowl-edge. For instance, any standard view that accepts Sensitivity, and wishes toavoid skepticism, must reject the claim that knowledge is closed underknown, single-premise entailment.22 And this is true, not only with respectto wild skeptical scenarios—but also with respect to many of the ordinaryconsequences of our everyday beliefs.23 As Jonathon Vogel points out, thisis the product of a more basic worry about such accounts: by focusing ourattention on what would be the case if the proposition we believed werefalse, they often treat propositions that are entailed by a known propositionp as harder to know than p itself—which runs counter to the natural thoughtthat we are always in at least as good an epistemic position with respect toa proposition q as we are with respect to a proposition that entails q.24

22 Consider for example, my knowledge that my car is parked in the parking lot on IvyLane. Plainly this proposition entails that my car has not been stolen from the lot by avisiting Rutgers graduate student. But while my belief that my car is parked in the lotplausibly satisfies Sensitivity, my belief that it has not been stolen and driven away doesnot. For if it had been stolen, I would continue to believe that it had not been. So whilethe first belief satisfies Sensitivity, the belief it entails does not. (Compare Kripke’swildly discussed counter-examples to Nozick.)

23 Duncan Pritchard suggests that we can avoid this result by thinking of the methods inquestion as externally-individuated—so that my method for forming beliefs about theexternal world is not the same as the method of my counterpart in an evil demon world.There is a great deal to be said about this idea, but the obvious worry about suchsuggestions is that they threaten to make Sensitivity requirements trivial by building toomuch into the specification of the relevant methods. Moreover, such responses appear tobe inadequate with respect to Vogel’s induction-based counterexamples.

24 Vogel (2000).

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Even more importantly, as Sosa and others have argued, Sensitivity istoo demanding in many cases that do not involve single-premiseclosure.25 For example, suppose I toss a garbage bag down the garbagechute in my building and walk away believing that the bag is now in thedumpster in my basement. Provided that the bag did reach the basement,this belief seems to be an excellent candidate for ordinary knowledge.But once again, it will not satisfy Sensitivity, since I would continue tobelieve what I do, even if the bag had not fallen all the way down thechute.

For these reasons, most epistemologists today regard the Sensitivitycondition as overly demanding. But there are related conditions that do notsuffer from these difficulties and yet still hold open the prospect of captur-ing all of the ways in which knowledge cannot be accidentally true in aunified way: the various forms of a safety condition on knowledge.

In its standard form, the safety condition reads:

Safety: S’s true belief that p counts as knowledge only if in all (or most)nearby possible worlds in which one believes that p via one’s actualmethod, p is also true.26

Much like Sensitivity, Safety deals nicely with standard Gettier cases, sincein these cases there is always a close possible world in which the believercontinues to believe what he does (via the same method), but his belief failsto be true. And Safety also captures many of the intuitions behind the relia-bilist’s claim that knowledge must be the product of a reliable method orfaculty. Thus, of all of the principles we have considered, Safety may wellbe the best bet to capture all of the ways in which accidental truth is incom-patible with knowledge.27

This is one of the reasons why Safety-based accounts of knowledge havebecome so popular in recent years. But while there is much that is appeal-ing in the elegance of a condition like Safety, there are also good reasons to

25 Sosa (2007).26 As well as Sosa (2007), see Williamson (2000). I phrase Safety in terms of nearby possi-

ble worlds in order to avoid difficult issues about the semantics of counterfactuals inwhich both the antecedent and the consequent are true. (Once again, there is somedebate about whether a reference to methods is required here, but something of this sortis plainly called for. Of course, if one wishes, one could follow Williamson and put thisin terms of sameness of “basis”.)

27 Note that for a virtue epistemologist like Sosa who also accepts Safety, the truth ofSafety is itself to be explained by appeal to a principle like Virtue Epistemology. So onSosa’s account, the sense that Safety might give that there is a single non-accidentalitycondition on knowledge is in some sense superficial and misleading, at least insofar asSafety is explained in terms of a principle that involves two distinct sorts of non-acci-dentality.


be skeptical about whether Safety actually captures all of the ways in whichaccidental truth is incompatible with knowledge.28

In particular, much as in the case of Sensitivity, there are cases in whichwe have a true, safe belief, which appears not to be a case of knowledge ongrounds of accidental truth.29 To see why, we need once again to considercases in which we have a safe and true belief, but where it seems to be amistake to attribute either its safety or its truth to any meaningful degree tohow the believer formed the belief. Once again, since Safety is an externalcondition on knowledge, it should be possible to come up with such caseswith relative ease. For in order to do so, we simply must consider cases inwhich the safety of a belief is the product of forces wholly external to thebeliever. For example:

The Little Prince: The crown prince, Etienne—purely out of a deep senseof arrogance—believes that he is the strongest boy of his age in Paris. Asa matter of fact, his belief is correct, but solely because his father hasdecreed that no stronger boy should be allowed to live in the city—adecree that the king’s secret police are extremely efficient at carryingout.30

In this case, we have a true belief, and it seems plausible that we have asafe belief as well—since we can make the resolution of the king strongenough and the efficiency of his police force great enough to ensure thatEtienne will not come to falsely believe that he is the strongest boy in Parisin any relatively nearby possible world.

But it seems absurd to credit Etienne with knowledge in this case—sincethe safety of his belief is entirely the product of factors that have nothing towith how he forms beliefs. In particular, in this case, Etienne’s belief issafe, despite the fact that it is formed via a method—sheer arrogance—that

28 Comesa~na (2005) presents a case (the Halloween Party) that can be read as making theconverse point: namely, that an unsafe belief can still count as knowledge if that beliefis formed in a reliable manner and its unsafe character is due to factors that should notbe credited to the individual. (For related discussion, see Neta and Rohrbaugh (2004).)Such cases suggest that Safety is too strong a condition on knowledge because itrequires that one’s methods for forming beliefs be, as Comesana puts it “reliably reli-able”—whereas all that knowledge requires is that one’s methods be reliable. I find suchcases fairly compelling, but since my point is weaker, I leave them to the side.

29 It is also arguable that a Safety condition will only capture the condition between non-accidentality and knowledge in the case of contingent truths. For more discussion of thisissue see Williamson (2000) and Setiya (2013).

30 Rouse (2007) presents a similar case as a counterexample to the sufficiency of Safety.But note that this is not exactly what is at issue here—rather what is at issue is whetherSafety captures all of the forms of non-accidentality that knowledge requires. Vogel(2000) also presents a case (the Oboe Case) against Safety that, while less radical, has asimilar moral.

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is far from reliable or safe in nearly any vaguely normal environment.31

Because of this, Etienne’s belief fails to be knowledge for reasons that areultimately similar to the reasons why the subject of a Gettier case fails toknow—namely, that while his belief is true (and safe), its truth (and safety)cannot be attributed to him in the sense that knowledge seems to require. Inthis case, to count Etienne as knowing would be to credit him with knowl-edge when the truth of his belief has nothing to do with how he formsbeliefs.32

This is an extreme case, but it illustrates a general point. Someone canhave a safe belief about some matter, even though this belief is based on anepistemically horrible method, when the negative effects of this method arecanceled out by good environmental epistemic luck.33 Just as was true ofSensitivity, when we have a case of this sort, it seems clear that the individ-ual in question does not possess knowledge. And it seems that this is truefor the same general reasons that the subject of a Gettier case does notknow—namely, that in these cases we cannot attribute the truth of the beliefto the believer in any interesting sense.

Once again, we could make this point by noting that, while Etienne’sbeliefs are safe, this is not at all a product of the manner in which he isdisposed to form beliefs. Rather, the safety of his beliefs is wholly theproduct of the manner in which his external environment masks his underly-ing disposition to form beliefs in a radically unsafe fashion. But once again,if safety is relevant to knowledge, it must at least in part be because it tellsus something about how the believer is disposed to form beliefs.

From cases like these, it seems clear that a Safety condition on knowl-edge does not fully capture all the forms of accidental truth that are relevantto the general class of Gettier-style cases, even though it does get the rightresult in many such cases. To be clear, this does not show that Safety is nota necessary condition on knowledge. It only shows that it is not the onlysuch condition—nor, crucially, the only such condition that relates to theways in which knowledge is incompatible with accidental truth. So these

31 Of course, Etienne might also gather inductive evidence about his relative strength andbase his belief on this evidence, but to allow this would be to change the case.

32 Against these claims, one might respond (like Williamson) by appealing to the flexibilityof the notion of a “nearby” possible world. But it is hard to see how this would workunless we made use of our understanding of what the believer can be credited with indetermining the set of relevantly nearby worlds. There is something attractive about thisidea, but it concedes my main point.

33 This remains true if we turn to Sosa’s attempt to flesh out Safety in terms of the ideathat a safe belief that P must be formed on the basis of an indicator that (out-right ordependently) indicates the truth about P. For of course, it is possible to form a belief onsuch a basis and have that belief be true, without it being true because it was formed onsuch a basis. Thus, as Sosa himself is aware, conditions of this sort do not on their ownrule out all Gettier-style cases.


cases are not meant as counter-examples to a view like Sosa’s virtue episte-mology that, while incorporating a safety condition, also incorporates acredit condition into its account of knowledge. As we discussed above,views with this structure already implicitly recognize the diversity of waysin which knowledge appears to be incompatible with accidental truth.

4. Two Roles of Knowledge Attribution

What consideration of these cases strongly suggests is that there are at leasttwo distinct ways in which non-accidental truth is relevant to knowledge.To flesh out this idea, it is helpful to reflect on why there might be severalsenses in which knowledge is incompatible with some form of accidentaltruth.

I want to approach this question via considering the function that knowl-edge attributions play in ordinary language. Such attributions appear to playat least the following two roles:

1. Attributing knowledge to someone involves attributing this belief’spositive epistemic features (first and foremost its truth, but also itsreliability and safety, as relevant) to how the believer formed thebelief.34

2. Attributing knowledge to someone involves identifying them as asource of information worth relying upon concerning the areas inwhich they have knowledge.

Of course, these ideas are not unconnected with one another. In fact, thereis a sense in which we might take the first of them to follow from thesecond. After all, in trying to identify individuals who are reliable sourcesof information, we are interested evaluating individuals as belief-formers.That is, to use the language Hume applies in a related context, we areevaluating them in terms of their relatively “constant and durable” belief-forming dispositions or character.35 Of course, to say this is not to saythat we never care about the environment in which these dispositions arefunctioning. For whether or not a particular disposition should be posi-tively evaluated may depend on the sorts of environments in which itgenerally or normally functions. But it does mean that when some featureof a belief (be it truth, or sensitivity, or safety) is wholly attributable tothe environment of the believer as opposed to the manner in which he is

34 I take the issue here to be closely connected with the manner in which individuals canbe held responsible for the truth or falsity of their beliefs.

35 Hume (2000).

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disposed to form beliefs, it will not count in favor of a positive evaluationof him as a subject of knowledge.

Thus, while the first of these ideas involves a connection between attrib-uting knowledge and giving a believer “credit” for the truth of his belief insome sense, the sense of credit that is relevant here is very weak. This isparticularly important with respect to recent arguments against the claimthat there is a connection between knowledge and credit. For example, asJennifer Lackey has argued, in cases of simple testimonial knowledge, itseems as though an individual can have knowledge that p, even thoughsomeone else has done all the hard “cognitive work” that is responsible forthe truth of their belief. Thus, in such cases, it seems that the vast majorityof the credit for the truth of the belief should be given to individuals otherthan the knower.

If we focus on the question of how “credit” for the truth of this beliefshould be apportioned, this intuition seems to me entirely natural. But if weturn, say, to the less demanding question of whether the truth of suchbeliefs can be attributed to the method by which they were formed, myintuitions about these cases are quite different. For it seems entirely properto attribute the truth of this belief to the fact that the individual in questionformed it via (say) a proper reliance on undefeated testimony. In particular,by forming a true belief in this way, the individual does indicate that hepossesses a disposition for belief-formation that makes him a reliable infor-mant. And so, the positive epistemic qualities of his belief can be attributedto him, in the weak sense that is relevant here.

Against this, one might follow Lackey in insisting that no “credit condi-tion” can be weak enough to allow for such cases of testimonial knowledgeand strong enough to rule out all Gettier-style cases. But this objectionrests on the idea that the “credit condition” is meant on its own to dealwith all of the ways in which knowledge is incompatible with accidentaltruth. And if the comments above are correct, this is not the proper way ofconceiving of the role of this condition. For while the connection between“credit” and knowledge seems to explain one of the basic ways in whichaccidental truth and knowledge are incompatible, it does not explain allsuch ways—especially not when considered on its own.36 Thus, there is noreason to think that postulating a weak “credit” condition of the sort atissue here would make it impossible to deal effectively with Gettier-stylecases.

In this way, although the precise formulation of the first of these ideas isno simple matter, it seems to me very plausible that one of the normal

36 In particular, in the “fake barn” cases Lackey discusses, the belief in question simplylacks some of the positive epistemic features that the second (reliability) condition onknowledge requires—e.g. it is highly unsafe.


functions of knowledge attribution is to give the believer credit for the truthof her belief in this weak sense.37 And, as already noted, the connectionbetween knowledge and credit (or attributability) immediately generates onesense in which knowledge must not be merely accidentally true. For giventhis connection, the fact that the believer is getting things right must besomething that we can attribute to them. And this requires that the truth ofthis belief be the product of features of the believer that are such that shedeserves credit for what they produce (whatever these may be).

This aspect of knowledge attribution, then, generates one of the senses inwhich accidental truth is incompatible with knowledge. In much the sameway, the second function of knowledge attribution generates the other notedabove. In particular, while the details of any such account are controversial,it is extremely plausible that one function of knowledge attribution is toidentify individuals and beliefs that we can rely on in our theoretical andpractical reasoning. In other words, one of the functions that such attribu-tions play is the identification of “reliable” sources of information, in thenatural sense of “reliable” according to which someone is reliable just incase they can be relied upon.38 Once again, just how these connections areto be spelled out is the subject of much debate. Personally, I am somewhatskeptical that it will be possible to give a very illuminating general accountof the sort of “reliability” that is relevant here.39 But whether or not this isthe case, this generates a second sense in which accidental truth is incom-patible with knowledge. For when we are looking to identify such sourcesof information, we will be generally concerned to identify individuals whosebeliefs and methods satisfy some condition in the neighborhood ofconditions like Reliability, Sensitivity, and Safety. Thus, with respect to thissecond function of knowledge attribution, we will only treat someone asknowing that p, when his belief has a non-accidental connection with thetruth of the sort these conditions require.

37 Although this is an idea that has been stressed by much recent work in virtue epistemol-ogy, I believe it remains underexplored in a number of important respects. For example,the idea that knowledge requires credit in this way provides a natural explanation ofwhy we are more hesitant to claim that we know we are not a brain-in-a-vat than we areto claim that we know that we have hands. For, even if both of these beliefs are true—and even if they are both, say, equally safe—it can easily seem as though we deserveless credit for getting the former right than we do for the truth of the latter.

38 There are many variations on this theme. For a particularly important example, see Craig(1990).

39 In short, this is the product of the intuitive idea that “reliable” here just means “shouldbe relied on”, together with a natural skepticism about whether we can give a simple,reductive account of when a source of information has this status. Also note that whilethis way of thinking of “reliability” fits very naturally with broadly expressivist accountsof knowledge attributions, it in no way requires them.

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Thus, if we take these two functions of knowledge attribution together,we arrive at two senses in which knowledge cannot be accidentally true:

1. If a belief is to count as knowledge, it must be reasonable toattribute the truth of that belief, as well as the positive epistemicfeatures that are relevant to condition 2, to the believer.

2. If a belief is to count as knowledge, that belief must satisfy somesort of intuitive “reliability” condition—be that a matter of safety orreliability or something else less reductive.

As noted above, the first of these conditions requires that there be a non-accidental connection between the truth of a belief and the subject of thatbelief. Thus, we may refer to this condition as articulating a “subject-direc-ted” form of non-accidental truth. The second condition, on the other hand,requires that there be a non-accidental connection between the truth of thebelief and the objects or facts it concerns. So it is natural to describe this asan “object-directed” form of non-accidental truth. In this way, our two con-ditions indicate that knowledge involves non-accidental connection betweena belief’s truth and both that belief’s subject and its object(s).

Taking these constraints together, we arrive at the following idea: inorder to be knowledge, both a belief’s truth and its “reliability” (in thebroad sense at issue here) must be explained by the way in which thesubject formed it in a manner that makes it reasonable to attribute thesefeatures of this belief to the subject. Or, perhaps better, in order to count asknowledge, a belief’s truth must be explained by the fact that the subjectformed that belief in a fashion that produces beliefs we can rely on.

That having been said, I want to remain officially agnostic about exactlyhow the two conditions noted above are related. For example, one mighttake one of them to be more fundamental than the other. Or one might takethem both to be based on a more fundamental and more general concern forthe truth. Thus, as should already be clear, one need not view these twoconditions as two parts of a disjunctive account of knowledge �a la the Non-Gettiered JTB account. Rather, as the comments just made should indicate,and as is true for the virtue epistemologist, it is perfectly possible to viewone of these conditions as forming a natural unity.

Nonetheless, if this is right, then contrary to much of the post-Gettierliterature, the sort of non-accidental truth that is relevant to dealing withmany Gettier-style cases—that is, non-accidental truth of the first sort justnoted—is not the same as the sort of non-accidental truth that conditionslike Sensitivity and Safety are best regarded as addressing. For insofar asthe problem in many Gettier-style cases is that the subject does not deserveany meaningful degree of “credit” for the truth of his belief, neither


Sensitivity nor Safety is sufficient to capture what is fundamentally at issuein such cases. In short, in order to deal with the general class of Gettier-style cases, we in fact need to appeal to both of the two forms of non-acci-dental truth noted above.

Moreover, even at this level of generality, we can say a good deal aboutthe sorts of accidental truth that are incompatible with knowledge. For exam-ple, consider the second non-accidentality condition just noted—namely, thecondition that was associated with the identification of reliable sources ofinformation. With respect to this aspect of knowledge attribution, all that willmatter to us when determining whether someone’s beliefs count asknowledge is whether their methods for forming beliefs are reliable in thebroad sense noted above. Thus, with respect to this condition, how thisreliability is to be explained seems only to be relevant insofar as it gives usinformation about how reliable these methods are likely to be.40

Moreover, at least some of the considerations that are relevant to thissecond non-accidentality condition—such as the reliability or safety of amethod or faculty—are often inacccessible to the believer in the vague, butintuitive, sense that drives internalist intuitions in epistemology. Thus, thepresence of this condition on knowledge helps to explain why there shouldbe deeply externalist constraints on when someone counts as having knowl-edge in the ordinary sense of this word.

The first non-accidentality condition, on the other hand, helps us dealwith a different set of cases in which knowledge is intuitively absent. Forexample, suppose that John accepts some highly complex but ultimatelytruth-conducive method M, but does so on obviously irrational grounds—such as a recommendation of M by the National Inquirer. Intuitively thebeliefs that John forms via M do not count as knowledge. And this seemsto be a the product of the fact that it would be unreasonable to attribute thetruth-conduciveness of this method to John in the sense discussed above. Ofcourse, there are many other cases where the relevant question of “credit” isfar less clear. For example, suppose that I have a highly reliable, basic,innate faculty that provides me with intuitions about some subject matter—say, morality. And suppose I form a belief through normal reliance on thisfaculty. Whatever else might be true of such a case, it seems reasonable tome to attribute the truth of this belief to me as a believer, if in fact it is true.And this seems to be the case however the reliability of this faculty is

40 Contrary to Yamada (2011)’s third condition and Setiya (2013). Of course, further formsof accidentality may provide us with evidence that some faculty is likely to be unreli-able. For an argument of this sort in the moral case, see Street (2006). For an argumentagainst mathematical Platonism that takes this form see Benacerraf (1973). In both cases,my comments here are not meant to undermine the arguments in question insofar as theyrun through the sort of reliability condition on knowledge that I agree is plausible insome form.

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ultimately explained.41 For instance, it seems to me reasonable to give mecredit for the truth of this belief whether or not the reliability of this facultyis ultimately the product of some grand cosmic accident. Rather, it is suffi-cient for the truth of this belief to be attributable to me that its truth is aproduct of the reliability of one of my basic faculties for forming beliefs.Thus, contrary to what accounts like Yamada’s suggest, what explains whythis faculty is reliable is simply irrelevant to the status of such beliefs asknowledge.42

Following our earlier discussion, we can strengthen this point by notingthat any case like the described above is one in which I am disposed toform moral beliefs in a reliable fashion (at least insofar as I am disposed torely on this faculty). Thus, this case is very different from the cases we con-sidered in which an unreliable disposition was masked by external factors.In short, the factor that made it unreasonable to give me credit in thosecases, or in the case just discussed, is not present here.

That having been said, I know that my intuitions about this case are notuniversal. Fortunately for me, this is hardly surprising on the account I havebeen developing. After all, such complicated cases raise non-trivial issuesabout when the truth-conduciveness of a method may be reasonably attrib-uted to the believer who uses it. Thus, the account being developed herepredicts that reactions to such cases will vary, at least to some degree. Whatis more important for present purposes is that this first non-accidentalityconstraint introduces an “internalist” aspect to knowledge attribution. Forhowever exactly we cash out the relevant notion of “credit” or “attributabili-ty”, it is plausible that this first condition will require that the believer standin some sort of “special relationship” with the fact that the method he isrelying on meets the second non-accidentality condition. Of course, as thecase of highly reliable methods that are both innate and basic indicates, thisspecial relationship may not require that the believer has the sort of accessto these facts that traditional forms of internalism require. But nonethelessthis condition will rule out the attribution of knowledge to individuals—likethe National Inquirer reader above—who adopt a reliable method on obvi-ously irrational grounds. So such a constraint will generate at least some ofthe intuitions about knowledge that are associated with traditional forms ofinternalism. In this way, in addition to the points already made, the abovereflections on knowledge and non-accidentality help to illuminate whyknowledge attributions should be associated with intuitions that point in

41 Again pace Yamada (2011) and Setiya (2013).42 In making this point, I am echoing themes that should be familiar from classical compa-

tibilist discussions of free will and responsibility. For example, compare again Hume(2000)’s famous claim that it is sufficient to make someone responsible for an action thatit be produced (in the right way) by one of her “constant and durable” character traits.


both a broadly externalist and a broadly internalist direction. Of course,there is much more to be said about both of the dimensions of non-acciden-tality I have distinguished here. But if these comments are correct, it is herethat an exploration of these issues should begin.43

References

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43 This paper has benefitted from helpful comments from a number of people, some ofwhom I am sure to forget here. Especially notable among these are Yuval Avnur, SinanDogramaci, Thomas Kelly, Joe Milburn, Kieran Setiya, Ernest Sosa, Robert Steel, andan anonymous referee. Thanks are also due to the Princeton Center for Human Valuesand the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for helping to fund this research.

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Unger, Peter. (1968) “An Analysis of Factual Knowledge.” The Journal ofPhilosophy 65 (6): 157–170.

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Zagzebski, Linda. (1996) Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature ofVirtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.


Knowledge and Two Forms of Non-Accidental Truth

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