Abstract
This article addresses and resolves an epistemological puzzle that has attracted much attention in the recent literature—namely, the puzzle arising from Moorean anti-sceptical reasoning and the phenomenon of transmission failure. The paper argues that an appealing account of Moorean reasoning can be given by distinguishing carefully between two subtly different ways of thinking about justification and evidence. Once the respective distinctions are in place we have a simple and straightforward way to model both the Wrightean position of transmission failure and the Moorean position of dogmatism. The approach developed in this article is, accordingly, ecumenical in that it allows us to embrace two positions that are widely considered to be incompatible. The paper further argues that the Moorean Puzzle can be resolved by noting the relevant distinctions and our insensitivity towards them: once we carefully tease apart the different senses of ‘justified’ and ‘evidence’ involved, the bewilderment caused by Moore’s anti-sceptical strategy subsides.
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Notes
Moore’s (1939) original “proof” derives the existence of an external world from the existence of a hand. The difference to the example used here is irrelevant for present purposes.
Further complications are necessary, such as the condition that x retain her knowledge of the premises throughout the competent deduction of q from p. I shall ignore these subtleties for the sake of simplicity.
Wright uses the phrase ‘has a warrant’ rather than ‘is justified’. The difference is, however, purely terminological. See, for instance, Wright (2008, p. 30), where he says: “Let a warrant for a belief be, roughly, an all-things-considered mandate for it: to possess a warrant for p is to be in a state wherein it is, all things considered, epistemically appropriate to believe p.” Now, many will feel the urge to claim that, on this characterization, one possesses a warrant for p iff one knows p: knowledge is the norm of belief. Cp. Williamson (2000).
(Wright 2002, p. 332).
See Wright (2002, pp. 336–338).
Cp. Wright (2010, p. 206): “the inference from (i) ‘The animals in that cage are zebras’ to (ii) ‘The animals in that cage are not cleverly disguised mules’, when the warrant for the first is given by casual observation too crude to distinguish the animals in vision from cleverly disguised mules, is arguably a failure of transmission: it is not that one can have a casual observational warrant for (i) but no warrant for (ii), but rather that it is only when (ii) (and a range of kindred propositions) are presupposed that casual observation warrants (i).”.
Note that, if our evidence for the zebra conclusion and the red table conclusion supervenes on our perceptual experiences, which, by assumption, do not discriminate between the good and the bad case, then we do not have an independent justification in those cases. If, however, we allow for what I have, in the main text, called ‘background knowledge’ concerning the zoo or the furniture store, why, then, should we not also allow such propositional background knowledge with respect to the Moorean Argument? For instance, why should we not be allowed to infer from our knowledge that we are reading a philosophy paper right now that we are not merely brains in vats? For a more detailed argument along these lines see Sect. 4 of this paper.
Wright sometimes (see his 2004, p. 206) writes as if he assumed that we know ¬sh, while admitting in other places that his account amounts to a “sceptical solution” to sceptical puzzles, by which he means a solution on which “we do indeed have no claim to know, in any sense involving possession of evidence for their likely truth, that certain cornerstones […] hold good.” See Jenkins (2007) for a careful interpretation and criticism of Wright’s view.
Wright (2004, p. 175).
Wright is, in fact, more guarded, claiming that we only have entitlements to accept ¬sh, but not to believe ¬sh. I ignore the issue here, but see Wright (2004, pp. 175–178) for discussion.
Note again that Wright does not accept that our belief that ¬sh is justified. He only claims that we are justified (entitled) to accept ¬sh. One has to wonder whether such a view can provide a satisfactory response to the sceptic. For Wright’s view on this question see his (2004, pp. 175–178).
See, for instance, Wright’s (2004, p. 183) explication of what he calls “strategic entitlement” in terms of game theoretically dominant strategies.
A referee for this journal points out that (EES) is implausible, as it entails both that p evidentially supports itself and that the conjunction (p ∧ q) evidentially supports p. I am not too worried about these consequences, but it should be noted that the issue can be averted by reformulating (EES) in terms of an appropriately defined notion of non-circular evidential support (for further discussion of circular evidential support, see Williamson (2000, p. 187)).
See Williamson (2000, chap. 9) for arguments in support of (K ⊂ E). Note also that, for the purposes of the argument here, we might retreat to (K ⊂ E)’s weaker cousin (KK ⊂ E)—that is, the principle according to which all propositions that one knows to know are part of one’s evidence. To see why this weaker principle would also spell trouble for Wright, note that, on the assumption that we know that we know that we have hands, the proposition that we have hands would be part of our evidence, and could thus justify or serve as a proper basis for our belief that we are not handless brains in vats.
I do not mean to suggest that contemporary Mooreans dogmatists have no story to tell about the transmission failure intuitions. Those accounts are just not the topic of this paper.
The biconditional cousin of (RAT) would fail because it would not place any constraints on belief formation and sustenance: unreliably based beliefs could count as knowledge.
Again, note that this claim is not meant to offer a definition or an analysis of knowledge. Rather, it merely records the obvious fact that if one knows p, one can eliminate certain counterpossibilities to p.
The problem with talking about propositions as alternatives is that if we take ¬op, for instance, to be a relevant alternative to op, then it becomes unclear which exact ¬op-worlds our evidence has to eliminate: all of them? Surely not, for that would lead to scepticism. Only some of them? Yes, but which ones? Surely, the only clear answer here is that only the epistemically relevant counterpossibilities must be eliminated. But that is precisely what I have called a ‘Lewisian’ conception of relevant alternatives in the main text. Thus, Lewis’s formulation of Relevant Alternatives Theory is more precise and clearer than Dretske’s, for Lewis also provides a clear account of evidence and the elimination of a possibility by one’s evidence. I ignore the fact that Lewis’s version of the view is contextualist.
If sh entails ¬op, then the sh-worlds form a subset of the ¬op-worlds, and thus, the epistemically relevant sh-worlds form a subset of the epistemically relevant ¬op-worlds.
For a different approach to entitlement see Smith (2012). Smith models the notion of entitlement in terms of possible worlds, too, but does so via an analysis of the epistemic support relation in terms of Lewis’s notion of a variably strict conditional.
Note that an exception will be necessary here for certain disjunctive necessary truths: if one has an RA-justification for p, and q is necessarily true, then one also has an RA-justification, rather than an entitlement, for the disjunctive proposition (p ∨ q), despite the fact that there is no world in which ¬(p ∨ q), and thus no epistemically relevant world in which ¬(p ∨ q).
We still need to explain that our belief that ¬sh is properly based. That explanation will be given in the following section.
I assume that such worlds are epistemically relevant because they are rather close to our actuality. I shall not engage in an explication of the notion of epistemic relevance in this paper, but rather presuppose an intuitive grasp of the notion. Cp. also Sect. 5.
It might be thought that it is implausible that a notion of epistemic justification—namely, that of RA-justification—is not closed under competent deduction. This worry will be addressed below in Sect. 4.
I am indebted to the referees for Philosophical Studies for bringing my attention to this issue.
If one falsely believes that p, then one’s actuality is a ¬p-world. And since one’s actuality is always relevant and uneliminated, it follows that, if one falsely believes p, there is one ¬p-world that is relevant and uneliminated: one’s actuality. Consequently, one doesn’t have RA-justified for p, if p is false.
Note, however, that having an RA*-justification that op doesn’t presuppose or entail having an entitlement that ¬sh. That particular Wrightean intuition must be modelled in terms of RA-justification.
Wright (2004, p. 205) offers a somewhat baroque account of epistemic entitlement, distinguishing in a seemingly ad hoc way between what he calls strategic entitlements, entitlements of cognitive project, entitlements of rational deliberation, and entitlement of substance. In fact, Wright himself is quite guarded with respect to this account when admitting, for instance, that his “discussion […] is bound to leave many loose ends” and should be understood as merely an attempt “to outline a prima facie case for a number of different possible species of entitlement.” (Wright 2004, p. 175). Wright also (ibid.) points out with respect to his notion of entitlement of substance that he has merely “gestured, in the most promissory and indefinite way, at the possibility of—and need for—[the notion of] entitlement of substance.”.
See, for instance, (Cohen 1988, p. 99).
For a more traditional evidentialist account of epistemic justification see Conee and Feldman (1985). In this paper, I shall work with (PEJ) for the sake of simplicity.
See Turri (2010) for an opposing view, on which propositional justification is to be accounted for in terms of doxastic justification.
See also Silins (2005, pp. 87–88) for this view, and cp. Tucker (2010, p. 507): “Suppose that Harold’s belief in P is doxastically justified by his evidence E; he notices that P entails Q; and then he subsequently deduces Q from P. It is natural to identify Harold’s reason for accepting Q as P, not E. Since we are supposing that P entails Q, P is presumably a warrant for Q. But if P is Harold’s reason for Q and is itself a warrant for Q, it doesn’t seem to matter whether the deduction transmits warrant, that is, whether the deduction makes E into a warrant for Q.”
One might insist that the Wrightean intuition is that one and the same epistemic property is transmitted across some pieces of deductive reasoning, but not across others. If that is the intuition, then it is, on the account defended here, simply wrong. However, one might wonder whether our intuitions concerning Moorean arguments are in fact as fine-grained as this objection assumes: surely, our pre-theoretical intuitions are that Moorean arguments are peculiar or defective in a way in which more paradigmatic cases of deductive reasoning aren’t, or that being warranted in the argument’s conclusion presupposes having an antecedent warrant for its premise (i). There is reason to doubt, however, that our pre-theoretic intuitions support the claim that one and the same epistemic property is transmitted across some deductive arguments but not others.
As Pryor (2004, p. 363) puts it, “anybody who had doubts about [the] conclusion [of Moore’s argument] couldn’t use the argument to rationally overcome those doubts.”
Note that one can accept that there are some relevant alternatives to p that are uneliminated by one’s evidence without explicitly believing any such proposition: the attitude in question amounts to accepting that one doesn’t know p because one’s evidence isn’t good enough.
See Bergmann (2004, p. 719), who also argues that a thinker loses her knowledge that p as soon as she starts doubting whether p. However, Bergman does not employ a relevant alternatives conception of knowledge, such as (RAT), in accounting for this datum.
An alternative explanation relies on a contextualist semantics for ‘knows’ and the notion of an epistemically relevant alternative, claiming that what is epistemically relevant varies with context. On this view, a speaker’s doubting ¬sh in a context C will entail that some sh-worlds are taken seriously in C, which in turn will render those sh-worlds epistemically relevant. Presumably, Lewis (1996) himself would be attracted to such a view, but see also Blome-Tillmann (2009).
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Acknowledgments
For comments on earlier versions of this paper I am indebted to Yuval Avnur, Berit Brogaard, Philip Ebert, Thomas Grundmann, Esa Diaz Leon, Dustin Locke, Luca Moretti, Ram Neta, Jim Pryor, Robert J. Stephens, Martin Smith, Chris Tillman, Ralph Wedgwood, Crispin Wright, Masahiro Yamada, and audiences at the University of Manitoba and at a workshop at the Munich Centre for Mathematical Philosophy. I am especially grateful to two anonymous referees for this journal for providing extensive and valuable comments on an earlier version of the paper. Research for this paper was generously supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Fonds Québécois de la Recherche sur la Société et la Culture.
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Blome-Tillmann, M. Solving the Moorean Puzzle. Philos Stud 172, 493–514 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0315-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0315-y