In the owner’s manual to my new (used) car I encountered the peculiar sentence: “Substances used in the manufacture of these components are known to the state of California to be carcinogenic.” Aside from the epistemically odd subject – can states know things? – the use of the term ‘knowledge’ here is at first a little jarring. One wonders how exactly California comes to know something of this sort, and if it has achieved such knowledge, why must it be qualified by geography? Surely if California knows something, Kansas and New Hampshire know it as well!
On second thought, of course, it is clear that this proposition must be the outcome of a legislative process, which ratifies what a majority of the legislature or the electorate take to be compelling clinical research demonstrating the products’ carcinogenic properties. Shy of banning the products outright, the state issues a warning based on what it knows – an informative nudge rather than a mandate. This is in fact a kind of precising legal definition of knowledge, and I think it is a useful one. We might at first have expected the sentence to say “the State of California believes these products to be carcinogenic,” but that way of putting the point seems too hesitant, as though it were a matter of personal opinion (are states persons now, too?) rather than the appropriate cognitive response to a preponderance of evidence.
The reason I think this is a good use of the term ‘know’ is because, though it sounds a little odd at first, it exhibits a healthy grasp of most knowledge as the best inference honestly drawn from the available evidence, regardless of the effect of that inference on convenience or commercial interests. We do not properly restrict the word ‘know’ to those few cases (tautologies, excluded middles…) where we cannot logically be wrong. Climate change deniers are using such an unrealistic standard of knowing to prevent us from taking action. But we know too much already about where that will lead us.
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7 comments:
I'm not sure if the "nudge" idea is useful in this case...I mean, you didn't find out about the carcinogenic material until after you bought the car. Unless the information is made easily available to the public, is it going to do any good? I doubt that many people read their car manuals cover to cover.
This is kind of like how it is known that cigarettes cause cancer. Many foreign countries or airport vendors that sell cigarettes have labels on the products that say "Smoking will kill you," accompanied by large skull-and-crossbone images. These labels aren't saying "Don't smoke" or "Don't buy these," they're saying that it's a fact that if you use tobacco it will ultimately kill you; whether or not people decide to use this knowledge to their advantage is up to them.
But there's another ambiguity, an artifact of the poverty of vivisection: CA knows these chemicals to be carcinogenic; but to whom? Most likely, long-suffering rats. Are the chemicals dangerous to us, too? Who knows? (Poor rats; died for our sins.)
I agree with Shelby that the statement may not be an especially effective nudge, at least in the short term. Since the car is three years old, I'm hoping whatever it is has fully gassed-out by now.
In response to Nick, exploiting the ambiguity between knowledge as evidence-based probability and knowledge as absolute is precisely how the cigarette manufacturers confused people for a long time.
And I agree with David that the means by which this particular knowledge was obtained is morally dubious. As an epistemic matter, I don't think it follows that we (or California) don't know it, however.
perhaps the tests were done by state university professors in the state of california. i agree with nick that the warning labels don't tell people not to smoke, but the people who still do blindly follow the law. when cigarettes become legal for us to smoke at the age of 18, at what point do they become moral for us to smoke? NEVER, what part of legality permits that we "should" actually do something?
But my point is that it remains unclear exactly what it is that CA knows (since they most likely did not experiment on humans); not that I doubt that they know something (about rats, for example).
Strictly speaking, they didn't say in whom the cancer was caused, though since the state of California is not known for its concern for rats it is a fair presumption that they mean humans.
It is also fair to say that the experiments were done on rats or other lab animals, who may or may not be relevantly similar to humans in this respect. It is surely the case that SOME carcinogenic substances, such as radioactive iodine, similarly affect both lab animals and humans, but as you say the inference may well be weak in a particular case, such as this one, where we don't even know what substances they're talking about.
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