Abstract
The notion of entitlement plays an important role in some influential epistemologies. Often the epistemological motive for introducing the concept is to accommodate certain externalist intuitions within an internalist framework or, conversely, to incorporate internalist traits into an otherwise externalist position. In this paper two prominent philosophers will be used as examples: Tyler Burge as a representative of the first option and Fred Dretske as one of the second. However, even on the assumption that the concept of entitlement is sufficiently clarified, accomplishing these results is easier said than done – especially if we also want to ascribe positive epistemic value to entitlement. It will be shown that the epistemic value of entitlement is either granted at the expense of the epistemic value of justification or the value ends up below the level of value at which the epistemologists employing the concept of entitlement are aiming.
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Notes
(Burge 2003, 503).
(Burge 1993, 458).
See the careful analysis conducted in (Casullo 2007).
Concerning perceptual entitlement Burge writes:
Entitlement is epistemically externalist inasmuch as it is warrant that need not be fully conceptually accessible, even on reflection, to the warranted individual. The individual need not have the concepts necessary to think the propositional content that formulates the warrant [...] Justification is warrant by reason that is conceptually accessible on reflection to the warranted individual. (Ibid, 504–5, emphasis in original).
See also (ibid. 528–9 and 547).
See Casullo’s lucid discussion in (Casullo 2007, especially 277–8). Casullo here draws on Alston’s fruitful distinction between access to the ground of the belief that P and access to the adequacy of the ground of the belief that P (Alston 1989a). Casullo adds a third kind of access: access to the epistemic principle governing the ground of the belief that P. The third kind is entailed by the second kind, but not conversely, which presumably amounts to that you might have access to an epistemic principle as well as the ground without having access to the fact that the ground in fact is adequate in a particular case to which the principle applies. In the same vein, one could access the adequacy of the ground of the belief that P without having access to that ground itself in a particular case: one could determine that observing the thief stealing from the cookie jar would be adequate as evidence for knowing who stole from the cookie jar without having observed the actual theft.
Besides the quotation and references given in note 5 above, further evidence for the interpretation that Burge requires, but does not go beyond, access to the ground that P is that when he describes what entitled believers lack he typically lists epistemic concepts like “epistemic, warrant, entitlement, reason, reliable, competence, entails, perception and perceptual state” (Burge 2003, 521). See also the notes Burge attaches to the referred passages in (ibid, no. 1 and 37). Casullo is therefore right when he, in turn, connects the two stronger requirements on access with second-order justification (Casullo 2007, 269–70). Note thus that justification in virtue of its stronger condition includes entitlement. Any contrast made between entitlement and justification in this section should thus be understood as between mere entitlement and justification that includes but goes beyond entitlement.
Burge, for instance, says that “[o]ur entitlement to ordinary perceptual belief is usually sufficient for perceptual knowledge” (Burge 1993, 485). In Casullo’s analysis, Burge comes out on the same side as Alston regarding the internalist requirements of knowledge despite their terminological differences (Casullo 2007, 278).
The above definition is a charitable interpretation of Olsson’s (and other’s) definition of veritism as “the view that true belief, and true belief only, has final or intrinsic epistemic value” (Olsson 2007, 344). Strictly interpreted, this definition would yield the point above concerning the same contributive value of entitlement and justification as a trivial outcome since the value of knowledge in both cases would be zero. Thanks to Jens Johanssom and Jonas Olson for this observation.
However, Pritchard considers the possibility that “there are epistemic standings that are more robust than the epistemic standing required for mere knowing, where these elevated epistemic standings raise the value of the knowing state” in (Pritchard 2007, 100).
One such critic of reliabilism, Swinburne, says in this regard: “[s]o long as the belief is true, the fact that the process which produced it usually produces true beliefs does not seem to make that belief any more worth having” (Swinburne 1999, 58).
(Olsson 2007) where further references to the epistemologists who raise the swamping objection are also given. The empirical assumptions are non-uniqueness, cross-temporal access, learning and generality (ibid, 348). More precisely the defended thesis (RST) says that “[t]he probability that S’s belief that p will stay in place is greater, conditionally upon S’s having a reliably acquired true belief that p, than it would be conditionally upon S’s having a mere true belief that p” (ibid, 347).
See also (Goldman and Olsson 2009) where the value of repeatability is offered as a response to the swamping objection; that is given the assumptions cited in the previous paragraph, a reliably produced true belief ensures a higher probability of future true beliefs than a mere true belief does. Unlike stability, as we shall see, repeatability may be an epistemic value that entitlement enjoys to some degree. The difference is due to the internalist features of stability as understood by Olsson (see below). Although this is an empirical question, this author is, however, inclined to think that justification enjoys a higher degree of repeatability and, thus, epistemic value in this respect since, just as in the case of stability, the role played by the four assumptions transform entitled beliefs into justified ones.
Even if no higher epistemic value would be secured by stability, Olsson also argues for the higher practical value of stability for reliable true beliefs over mere true beliefs in (Olsson 2007, 347–9). It should be noted that the value in both cases are instrumental rather than contributive value.
Note that Olsson’s empirical assumptions pertain to the method by which the belief is generated and that the third assumption is learning (Olsson 2007, 348), which then amounts to that the subject learns that the method is reliable. Burge says in this regard:
[t]he reliability could be inductively learned by the individual. But then the inductive connection would be the source of warrant – in fact, justification. (Burge 2003, 532).
Olsson calls the assumed ability to keep track of beliefs “a modest internalist requirement on a cognitive agent” (Olsson 2007, 352, italics in original) that is not part of the analysans of knowledge in terms of reliability, but instead figure “as essential elements of the environment in which knowledge attains its maximum worth” (ibid.).
It has been pointed out to this author that an externalist might question this internalist requirement and claim, for instance, that reliably formed beliefs are more stable simply because they are less likely to encounter defeaters. Thanks to Albert Casullo for this example. However, one should note that Olsson endorses a comparative thesis. That a reliable produced belief that fulfills this “modest internalist requirement” is more stable than mere true belief is consistent with a merely entitled belief landing in between these two cases in terms of stability. This relation of epistemic value would even be the intuitively desired result (see below), but establishing this tripartite relation goes beyond anything Olsson has shown and requires empirical investigations that fall outside the scope of this paper. It may be the case that stability has a crucial threshold over which stability ceases to add value and if that threshold is passed by mere entitlement, then we are back at the problem of justification being superfluous, where as if the threshold is only passed by justified beliefs, then the swamping problem remains. Note thus that the target in the dialectic of this paper is not a wholehearted externalist, but precisely a position, which attempts to find room, and positive epistemic value, for both for the externalist notion of entitlement and the internalist notion of justification.
Swinburne’s conviction that internalism is superior to reliabilism in accounting for epistemic value seems to rest on the fact that a subject with a justified belief “is almost always at least half-conscious” of the correct criteria of justification by which she forms her beliefs and thus has more true beliefs than a subject with a reliable produced true belief (or avoids having false beliefs about these criteria as unjustified subjects do?) (Swinburne 1998, 64). This response is not available for subjects with entitled beliefs since beliefs about such criteria concern the adequacy of the ground for the belief and such beliefs are lacking in the case of merely entitled beliefs. Nor is Kvanvig’s view that “justification is valuable independently of the value of true belief in virtue of being more accessible to reflection than is the property of truth” (Kvanvig 2003, 74) available since it is precisely in terms of accessibility that mere entitlement is inferior to justification. Insofar as truth conduciveness can be accessible on reflection, such access would determine the adequacy of the grounds for the belief that P and is thus not accessible to a merely entitled believer.
(Dretske 2000). It should be mentioned that during a workshop in Frankfurt in September 2008 led by Marcus Willaschek (see acknowledgements), Dretske retreated from some of his claims concerning entitlement from that paper in the face of the consequences that this internalist concession brings. The present section has been influenced by the stimulating discussions at that event. See also note 24 below.
(Ibid. 595–6).
(Ibid. 595). Shortly below, Dretske continues:
In light of the fact that his mistake is inextricable and that he, therefore, has no way of finding out his belief is false, the fact that it is false should not count against his right to believe. He is unlucky, a victim of circumstances, and I am not. But if I am entitled to my beliefs, he is entitled to his (ibid. 595–6).
Dretske here mentions the unlucky circumstances the brain in a vat finds itself in, but does not make the move mentioned in the next note (maybe he should have).
At least in the straightforward sense. One might attempt to save truth conduciveness in the face of the example with the brain in a vat by adding a normality constraint on the contexts in which the belief should be truth conducive. The entitled belief that P would thus be truth conducive in “normal” contexts or worlds. Various externalist safety or sensitivity constraints are versions of this move. Transglobal reliabilism is another ingenious alternative. See (Henderson and Horgan 2006) and (Henderson et al. 2007). Burge provides a transcendental argument for the conclusion that normal environments are privileged in assessing entitlement where the key step in the argument is that such contexts help to determine the nature of the content of the mental states such as belief (Burge 2003, 533–7). Burge thus connects externalism within epistemology with his well known externalism about mental content. All these alternatives of course reconnect entitlement with truth conduciveness and do not therefore do justice to the initial internalist intuition that we try to capture here.
In most deontological accounts of justification, truth instead enters as the goal of an intellectual obligation like that we should strive for maximizing our true beliefs. See (Alston 1989b, especially 201). However, some epistemologists regard entitlement, or some other epistemic concept, as being constituted by both a truth conduciveness condition and some independent deontological condition. This author believes that one lesson to draw from the problems raised in this section concerning entitlement is that such a wedding yields an unhappy marriage. The right way is instead to let the normative status depend upon truth conduciveness – just as Burge does when he ties epistemic goodness to truth as representational goodness in (ibid, 505–6). See also (Janvid 2004).
(Dretske 2000, 598).
(Ibid, 601–2.)
(Ibid, 603) italics in original.
It does not seem to reflect Dretske’s own position either for a number of reasons. He consistently describes entitlement in more positive terms. For instance, it seems strange to say that someone who knows that P merely is blameless in believing that P. (Recall that knowledge entails entitlement according to Dretske.) (see next note).
As this author understood him, Dretske retreated from some of his claims concerning entitlement at the workshop when he realized that his concession to internalism concerning entitlement ought to make him concede in turn that the internalist notion of justification is an even better epistemic state to be in, which squares badly with his otherwise externalist epistemology where justification is superfluous. It seems difficult to deny that an epistemic subject that exercises her epistemic abilities in defeating challenges and so on reaches a higher epistemic state, and a corresponding increase of epistemic value, than someone who does not (see next note). This concession to the internalist notion of justification is also in tension with his view that you are entitled to believe everything that you know since the entitlement seems to downgrade knowledge.
In this regard Burge says:
To have the entitlement, the individual need not, however, have a warranted belief that defeaters are not in play. Such a requirement would make entitlement unattainable for higher animals and young children. It is enough that the individual lack a reason to avoid relying on the perception (Burge 2003, 544).
One should note that, just as in the case of warrant, it may be necessary to distinguish between stronger and weaker forms of access to defeaters where being able to defeat a challenge requires a stronger form of access in terms of conceptual abilities, just as in the case of justification, than merely taking a (-n overriding) defeater into account by giving up the targeted belief. This is, however, an interesting issue that deserves a paper of its own.
Dretske stresses that entitlement is defeasible and prima facie. In his comment on Dretske’s paper, Williams points out “[a]n appropriate challenge cancels entitlement, which can be re-established only by producing reasons that defeat the challenge. Defeasability and justificational commitments go together” (Williams 2000, 610; italics added). Williams thus answers the question Dretske poses in the title of the paper, whether there are epistemic rights without duties, with a qualified no – a subject may initially enjoy a right by default, but loses this right if she cannot perform the required duties when her right is (properly) challenged.
Can a brain in a vat ever be justified in any of its beliefs about the external world according to Dretske? To answer yes seems too large of a concession to internalism (albeit more in line with the initial internalist intuition), but to answer no is in tension with the line of reasoning in note 24.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Albert Casullo, Fred Drestske, Steven Luper, Erik Olsson and Jan Willner for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Earlier versions of this paper have also been presented at the higher seminar in practical philosophy in Stockholm, at a colloquium in Frankfurt and at the Bled Conference “Epistemic Virtue and Value” in June 2009. This author is grateful to the participants at those events for comments and discussion, especially my commentator Jonas Olson, Jens Johansson and Torbjörn Tännsjö on the first and the DDD group (Claudia Blöser, Claudia Cuadra, Hannes Ole Matthiessen and Marcus Willaschek) on the second occasion. Work on this paper was funded in part by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft project “Defeasibility and Discourse Dependence” at the University of Frankfurt am Main.
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Janvid, M. The Value of Lesser Goods: The Epistemic Value of Entitlement. Acta Anal 24, 263–274 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-009-0061-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-009-0061-5