Pluralism Schmuralism: The Epistemic Desiderata Approach

In this post I defend something similar to a version of pluralism about epistemic rationality which has been in the air lately. Alston defends something apparently quite like what I have in mind here, and Rich Feldman reviews the book here. I've not read the book but it sounds like we're defending basically the same central thesis (but with Alston adding some unnecessary stuff). Rich sums up that thesis thusly:

"He thinks that there is no such thing as justification, but there are instead a variety of factors, or epistemic desiderata, that properly enter into epistemic evaluations."

He later quotes Alston:

"the widespread supposition that 'justified' picks out an objective feature of belief that is of central epistemic importance is a thoroughly misguided one."(11)

Technically this is consistent with the negation of what Rich says--Alston might inconsistently put it both ways for all I know--since the way Rich puts it the thesis is that there just isn't *any* such thing as justification and the Alston quote only denies that the term "justified" picks out anything *of great weight* for epistemologists.

I will neither confirm nor deny belief in the existence of a univocal concept of justification. I suspect that the folk notion of justification is too incomplete or incoherent at any rate to imprecise--like most other folk notions--to be of much philosophical interest. The thing that keeps me from fully committing to this are twofold.

1. I find that justification talk, including justification talk about beliefs, is by and large deontological talk. This is certainly the content of *my* conception of epistemic justification prior to studying philosophy (I'm still primarily concerned with this notion).

2. I lack the requisite empirical knowledge of the use of "justification" regarding beliefs.

Richard Foley also expresses this pluralist sentiment; most recently in his _Intellectual Trust_ book:

"The assumption that the properties that make a belief rational (or justified) are by definition [knowledge components] has tempted reliabilists to stretch their proposed accounts of knowledge into accounts of epistemic justification, and that likewise has coaxed...internalists to regard these reliabilist accounts as competitors to their own accounts....[T]here are two different, equally legitimate projects for epistemologists to pursue" (20,21 and see also pp. 4, 12, 13, 27, 28, 31, 35, 36, [38], 39, 40, 43, 44). [For the record Earl Conee pointed out that Goldman proposed a reliabilist theory of justification *before* a theory of knowledge.]

But the second half of Rich's version of Alston's thesis is completely separable from the first part, same for Foley.

Whether for justification or rationality (or whatever) there are two types of theses which often get lumped together.

A. The No Univocal Concept Thesis: Term T does not express a single precise concept (even within the same kinds of contexts).

B. The Multiple Desiderata Thesis: There are a variety of factors, or epistemic desiderata, that properly enter into epistemic evaluations.

The No Univocal Concept Thesis is stronger than it needs to be. The following thesis would do the job.

C. The Too General to be of Use Thesis: Term T's only precise, coherent sense is so general that it "lumps too much together" and is not of philosophical importance in its own right.

I'm inclined to think A is true, but perhaps there's some very general notion that would make C true instead. Either way B is independent and the thesis I'm most interested in.


JUSTIFICATION SCHMUSTIFICATION

It is very hard for me to believe that internalists and externalists are trying to solve the same problem. Clearly many of them *think* they are, but I'm not sure how good that evidence is. Really smart people get distracted just like anyone else. But my point is this:

*Even if* externalists were right about knowledge-component justification, I wouldn't really care. If evidentialist justification isn't part of (what Plantinga calls) warrant (that which "epistemizes" true belief: converts it into knowledge), then so much the worse for warrant. I'm more interested in evidentialist justificatin in its own right than I am with any component of knowledge. (As I've posted here.)

Now some will object to the very use of such phrases as "evidentialist justification." Look, I'm not going to go around writing "that property which evidentialists propose as being identical to the property of justification," it's just not going to happen. I hereby *stipulate* the meaning of the following terms as I intend to use them.

"Externalist justification" = that property, if there be any, which externalists think is identical to the property of justification, if such property there be.

"Internalist justification" = ...substitute "internalist" for "externalist" above and so on for various proposals for an analysis of warrant-component justification.

This usage is neutral w.r.t. theses A and C above. If I get the time to gather the evidence to assert A and C I'll be happy to do so, but that's not so high on my "to do" list. However, B is a very important thesis for epistemology today. Indeed, I think the aversion of the so-called "death of epistemology" is largely do to the wider-spreading recognition of that thesis.

In related news....Just the other day on Prosblogion someone asked a question regarding what precisely made Alvin Plantinga more rational than terrorists (I think the idea was that we were supposed to assume this was true and the puzzle was to state what made this so). I suggested that there were many dimensions along which one might evaluate someone as a cognitive being and adverted to divers notions of rationality including "Foley-rationality". My old mentor Jon Kvanvig said in response, not for the first time, that we mustn't multiply concepts without necessity though he agreed with the point I made in general.

I of course agree because that dictum is an instance of the more general Principle of Parsimony (often called Ockham's Razor which, as a kind of Thomist, bothers me since Aquinas articulated is clearly in ST I.2.iii.(i):

We mustn't multiply entities without necessity.

Which is a principle I hold quite dear.

I could argue that it *is* necessary to multiply concepts of rationality because the English word "rational" is imprecise and in need of regimenting. If, as I doubt, "rational" expresses a single concept it would be something quite general and unhelpful as *good from a cognitive standpoint*. So either the concept of rationality is incomplete in which case we need divers explications--in Carnap's sense--of the concept or it is quite general in which case we need to distinguish various species of it. Either way we need to multiply conceptions of rationality (I take it that multiplying concepts entails multiplying conceptions). The idea that there is a single notion of rationality that is both coherent and helpful strikes me as wildly implausible.

However, since I don't even know what a concept *is* and since I don't have expert knowledge of relevant linguistic data I'll not make that argument. Fortunately for the kind of "pluralism" I want to defend I don't need that thesis.

Jon furnishes infallible proof that the two theses are separable for unlike Alston and Foley (and me) Jon takes no truck with Thesis A but his emphasis on value-driven epistemology has promoted Thesis B and along with it the renewal of epistemology in the 21st Century.

On Reading _Epistemic Luck_

Reading Epistemic Luck was so much fun I'm sad it's over. I know I'll return to it again and again. Many thanks to Duncan for his helpful feedback and patience with my probing.

Even though I've obviously got many disagreements with particulars, I think Duncan is spot on in highlighting the particular value of reflective knowledge and the frustration of the impossibility of full reflective justification (see Alston on epistemic circularity).

Duncan's assigned me some further reading and I'm going to plunge into it, for I'm quite committed to value-driven epistemology.

Pritchard on Hinge Propositions

On p. 226 of Epistemic Luck Duncan defines a hinge proposition thusly:

"P is a hinge proposition iff P is as certain as anything in the context."

I take it that this means that it is not the case that there is some proposition Q such that Q is more certain than P (rather than for any proposition Q P is more certain than Q).

Then on p. 242 he says, speaking of such hinge propositions as that I have hands:

"one cannot offer grounds in support of one's belief in a hinge proposition--because these grounds will be more questionable than the belief that they are meant to be grounds for."

Given the definition of a hinge proposition (hereafter HP) there is technically the option that they are equally questionable, but presumably that wouldn't help.

Assuming that the middle term of demonstration here is the essence of HP's it seems Duncan is assuming the following sort of principle (which I think Rich pointed out in discussion).

(*) G can ground P only if G is more certain than P.

Depending on what certainty is, I think (*) is quite questionable and will be rejected by many traditional internalist foundationalists. The reason is that certainty seems to attach only to propositions whereas traditional foundationalists will allow for entirely non-doxastic grounds. ("Entirely" because A. the grounds are not themselves doxastic states, B. nor are they they the conceptualized objects of a conscious doxastic state. I.e. they can be an experience as if P where the host does not hold the belief I have an experience as if P.)

Furthermore, the statement quoted above seems false apart from reliance on (*). Consider:

Rod: I have hands.
Skip: What are your grounds for that belief?
Rod: I see that I have hands.

Rod's suggested grounds don't seem more questionable that his original assertion. But maybe this smacks of McDowell account Duncan argues against in this chapter. So consider this variant.

Rod: I have hands.
Skip: What are your grounds for that belief?
Rod: I have an experience as if I have hands.

Again, Rod's second statement does *not* seem "more questionable than the belief [it is] meant to ground." Its role of justifier relies on the truth of an epistemic principle connecting such experiences with justified beliefs with the same content, but *that* surely isn't the kind of problematicity that Duncan has in mind.

To demand that a subject be able to justify the rules which justify his beliefs would be to walk right into the trap that the Tortoise lays for Achilles in Carroll's dialog (Carroll's Paradox).

On Agrippa's Trilemma

Chapter 8 of Luck is on skepticism. Duncan first presents the metaepistemological skeptical challenge, then classical Pyrrhonian methodological skepticism.

Here's the trilemma:

If challenged on a claim to know, one has open to them the following options:

1. Refuse to respond.
2. Repeat a claim made earlier.
3. Say something new.

Duncan glosses these options this way:

1'. Make an undefended assumption.
2'. Reason in a circle.
3'. Embark on an infinite regress.

I'm not sure 1'. is the best way to interpret 1, but my focus is on 2'.

Consider this statement from Carnap quoted in Chisholm's "The Myth of the Given":

"When an experiential sentence is accepted 'on the basis of direct experiential evidence,' it is indeed not asserted arbitrarily; but to describe the evidence in question would simply mean to repeat the experiential statement itself."

This is not exactly "coherentism" as the term is usually understood and which 2'. would suggest, but it does satisfy 2. of the Pyrrhonian Problematic above represented in Agrippa's Trilemma. (though see my comments on the potential fuzziness of that line here)

Chisholm's defense of the doctrine of the given is masterfully summed up by Matt McGrath:

"Having made the statement "There lies a key," if one is asked 'What is your justification for thinking that?,'' one must provide an answer, but eventually, in the chain of questions, a claim about one's present experience will be challenged: 'What is your justification for thinking you have such-and-such experience?' To this, Chisholm thinks one can do no better than to answer: 'My justification is that I have such-and-such experience.'" (Sosa and Kim, Epistemology, p. 105)

The main objection to this is the Sellers Dilemma and I think the best responses have come from van Cleve, Alston, and Sosa, but that's another matter.

So I don't think that 2'. is quite the right take on 2.

On Reasons in Support of Spontaneous Beliefs

This is another example of a universally quantified statement that seems counter-instanced in broadly Chisholmian epistemologists.

On p. 216 Duncan writes:

"No one seriously holds that one needs reasons to support one's spontaneous belief [such as that one is cold]..."

But evidentialists think that all beliefs need reasons in support of them, whether doxastic or non-doxastic. So suppose someone believes I'm cold. Now either that belief is caused by an experience of being cold or inferred from some other supporting belief such as that I'm standing in the rain in a tee-shirt and I've got goose bumps or some such thing. If it does, then that's all well and good, but if not isn't it *clear* that something's wrong. Wouldn't the person be irrational at some level if there was *nothing* that supported the belief?

On Having Evidence Against Skepticism

On p. 210 of Epistemic Luck, Duncan writes:

"Everyone agrees that we lack internalist justification for believing in the denials of sceptical hypotheses..."

When I read that I thought my eyes must be deceiving me. There are still some Chisholmites around who definitely think otherwise, and their not *all* at Rochester! :-)~ Rich and Earl certainly think otherwise--they've recently discussed such matters in the "bookend" essays in the _Evidentialism_ book: the first and last chapters, which constitutes the newest material in the book. Also, as they mention there, Jim Pryor espouses the same view in his "The Skeptic and the Dogmatist".

The broadly Chisholmian idea is that there are true epistemic principles which connect certain kinds of experiences to certain kinds of beliefs. When we have those experiences we have evidence for certain beliefs they cause whether we think about it or not. So, for example, if it is true that

(EP1) If it seems to S that P then S has a reason for P

then if it seems to S that S has hands then S has a reason for S has hands. By applying the appropriate closure rule, we derive that S has a reason for It is not the case that I'm a handless brain in a vat.

The nature and identity of such principles (if there are more than one) is a big topic, but that's another story.

I feel like I must be reading him wrongly there, but I don't see where I could be going wrong.