Abstract
This paper continues a recent exchange in this journal concerning explanationist accounts of epistemic justification. In the first paper in this exchange, Byerly (2013a, b) argues that explanationist views judge that certain beliefs about the future are unjustified when in fact they are justified. In the second paper, McCain (2014b) defends a version of explanationism which he argues escapes Byerly’s criticism. Here we contribute to this exchange in two ways. In the first section, we argue that McCain’s defense of explanationism against Byerly’s objection is unsuccessful. Then, in the second section, we develop an independent objection to explanationism from a different direction. If our arguments in each section are sound, then not only do explanationist accounts of epistemic justification judge beliefs that are justified to be unjustified, but they judge beliefs that are unjustified to be justified. Explanationism faces problems on both sides.
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Notes
An alternative approach is to leave the relation as unanlayzably basic.
For other proposals, see Byerly (2013a).
See Conee and Feldman (2008) as well as the interpretive sections in Byerly (2013b) and McCain (2014b). The argument in Byerly (2013b) for why Conee and Feldman should accept the necessity claim entailed by (EXP) has to do with Conee and Feldman’s larger project. It would be a distraction to repeat that argument here, but we will quickly mention that it has to do with the fact that Conee and Feldman are looking for a principle that illuminates why experiences are justifying. About religious experiences, they say, “if perceptual and memorial experiences are justifying … then there is something about them that makes this the case. If religious experience shares this feature, then it, too, is justifying. If it does not, then it is not (97, emphasis added).” This brief sentence cannot, of course, fully capture Byerly’s argument.
While McCain’s defense of (M EXP +E) is somewhat conditional in McCain (2014b), he later (McCain 2013) explicitly argues for a principle that is identical to (M EXP + E). He argues for (EE): “A person, S, with evidence e at t is justified in believing p at t iff either p is part of the best explanation available to S at t for why S has e or p is available to S as a logical consequence of the best explanation available to S at t for why S has e.” p. 302.
See McCain (2014b, 9) All page numbers for McCain refer to the page numbers of a pre-publication draft.
See footnote 4.
There is some disagreement about the structure of abductive arguments. For an alternative proposal about how to understand this structure which may also help avoid the problem of the bad lot, see Psillos (2007).
See Douven (2011).
Thus, we allow for the view advocated by Fitelson (2007) and others that the confirmation relation of inductive logic is different from epistemic relations, such as the support relation.
For a similar defense of the use of abductive arguments against the problem of the bad lot, see Iranzo (2001).
We thank Kevin McCain for his correspondence concerning these potential responses.
An anonymous referee has brought our attention to the fact that this principle is only circular if the bi-conditional is included. This is correct, and our focus here is indeed on assessing explanationist views that would endorse such a bi-conditional.
Or, that is explained by a proposition that entails <p may well not be the best available explanation for S’s total evidence>. We avoid this complication in the text.
If disjunctive hypotheses were rivals, one worries that explanationism would imply that the only uncertain claims we are ever justified in believing are disjunctive claims, since disjunctions of uncertain theories are more likely than their disjuncts.
Salmon (1984) stresses the disvalue of irrelevance in explanations.
See Kitcher and Salmon (1962).
See, e.g., Vogel (1990).
This is especially clear on graded views of epistemic possibility such as Kratzer (1981).
Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting this alternative kind of approach to us.
“We think that being epistemically obligatory is equivalent to being epistemically justified.” (Conee and Feldman 1985, 19)
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Byerly, T.R., Martin, K. Problems for Explanationism on Both Sides. Erkenn 80, 773–791 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9673-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9673-2