The Epistemology of Risk

The primary purpose of analytical enquiries is knowledge production. So too, in the risk field. When analysing risks, the overriding aim is to make us more knowledgeable about risks. Epistemologists standardly conceive analytical knowledge as propositional. The purpose is to generate knowing-that knowledge, hence knowledge stating that something is the case. Until the landmark article of Edmund L. Gettier in 1963, propositional knowledge was widely assumed to consists of three elements: justification, truth and belief. After Gettier through a couple of examples demonstrated how beliefs can be justified as well as true without signifying knowledge, the tripartite account of knowledge is widely considered to be inadequate. A widespread approach for countering the critic has been to add a fourth knowledge criterion to prohibit wayward lines of justification. In the risk field, however, leading scholars have made a case for subtraction rather than amendment. Instead of adding a fourth criterion, the claim is that in the risk domain there is nothing more to knowledge than justified beliefs. The purpose of this paper is to assess the cogency of this proposal. Noticing the truth-forbidding features of the risk, disconnecting knowledge from truth in the risk domain, is clearly an inviting move. All the same, it is also a highly challenging move in which the single most important objection is that it gives rise to a threatening circularity. When arguing why the best justified belief is to prefer, the only option available seems to emphasize its justifying merits, thus, to assume what the argument is intended to prove. Resultingly, the viability of a two-partite justified belief concept of knowledge crucially depends on the prospects of successfully overcoming the problem of circularity. In this analysis, three different strategies for overcoming this problem will be examined. The first strategy will be to deny the claim of circularity, the second strategy will be to deny the viciousness of the circularity whereas the third strategy will be to deny the claim of the circularity to be non-transcendent. As will be shown, the third strategy offers the most promising response. But it is also a response that comes with the caveat of undermining the distinctiveness of the two-partite concept. According to this response, the justified belief perspective is only truth negating without disconnecting knowledge about risk from the realization of some other epistemic good.

Keywords: Knowledge, Justification, Truth, Circularity, Reliabilism.