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.