Abstract
Throughout the history of western philosophy, the Socratic injunction to ‘follow the argument where it leads’ has exerted a powerful attraction. But what is it, exactly, to follow the argument where it leads? I explore this intellectual ideal and offer a modest proposal as to how we should understand it. On my proposal, following the argument where it leaves involves a kind of modalized reasonableness. I then consider the relationship between the ideal and common sense or ‘Moorean’ responses to revisionary philosophical theorizing.
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Notes
See, e.g., Tim Crane, “David Lewis”, in The Independent, October 23rd, 2001.
“A university is characterized by the spirit of free inquiry, its ideal being that of Socrates—to follow the argument where it leads”. Rice University Faculty Handbook, (Spring 1999 edition).
Compare the way in which the Bayesian will claim that having beliefs that are probabilistically coherent is a genuine rational ideal for believers while freely admitting that no actual believer can be expected to fully satisfy it. For an excellent defense of unattainable ideals for rational belief, see Chapter 6 of Christensen (2004), “Logic and Idealization”.
On one traditional conception of the a priori, it is the distinguishing mark of an a priori truth that one is rationally entitled to believe it in the face of any possible evidence. For this very reason, a historically popular charge on the part of empiricists against rationalists is that the latter are dogmatists: the rationalists claim to know certain substantive truths about the world that are simply not susceptible to being undermined by any considerations that might emerge in the course of subsequent inquiry. (The title of Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” is, in part, an attempt to play on this history of criticism for purposes of provocativeness.) Contemporary rationalists, however, typically eschew this traditional conception and emphasize that a priori justification, like a posteriori justification, is defeasible. See, e.g., BonJour (1998).
For an alternative view of the vice of dogmatism, see Audi (1988, pp. 432–435).
A note about terminology is also in order here. In what follows, I will employ the term “dogmatism” and its cognates so that they function as terms of negative epistemic appraisal. In this sense, “dogmatism” picks out a thick epistemic concept, and to call someone a dogmatist is ipso facto to criticize that person (or at least, to offer a negative evaluation of him or her). I believe that this is a common usage in contemporary Western culture, but it is not the only one. For example, “dogmatic” does not function as a term of criticism as it used by either the Catholic Church or Jim Pryor (2000).
A possible example: along with many other people, I hold the belief that men and women are more or less equally intelligent. I also believe that, given the evidence available to me that bears on the question, that is a reasonable opinion for me to hold. (Certainly, I can imagine my evidence being quite different: for example, all the intelligent people I know are women, and all of the unintelligent people are men. But that’s not how my evidence is: in fact, it seems to me that there isn’t any interesting distribution of intelligence relative to sex.) However, I also suspect that my commitment to this belief is at least somewhat dogmatic. That is, I suspect that if evidence began to accumulate that, e.g., women were more intelligent than men, or vice versa, I would cling to my belief in equality, for at least some period of time.
According to Williams: “…there is almost certainly a genuine asymmetry here, tied into the asymmetry that while every belief I have ought ideally to be true, it is not the case that every truth ought ideally to be something I believe: belief aims at truth, knowledge does not similarly aim at completeness” (p. 151). Nozick writes: “It is clear that many things are irrational to believe. It is less clear that some beliefs are so credible that they are mandated by rationality, so that it is irrational not to hold them when you hold no belief about the matter at all” (pp. 87–88). (Compare those in ethics who think that there is a morally significant distinction between acts and omissions.)
Compare Brand Blanshard: “What is creditable…is not the mere belief in this or that, but the having arrived at it by a process which, had the evidence been different, would have carried one with equal readiness to a contrary belief” (1974, p. 413).
Such an account would parallel Nozick’s (1981) “tracking” account of knowledge, according to which (roughly) one knows that p just in case one’s true belief that p is counterfactually sensitive to whether p obtains. On the envisaged account, one is following the argument where it leads with respect to p just in case one’s believing p is counterfactually sensitive, not to the truth of p, but rather to the reasonableness of believing p given the state of the argument at a particular point in time.
As William James wrote in “The Will to Believe”: “A rule of thinking that would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truths if those kinds of truths were really there, would be an irrational rule” (1956, p. 28).
Here I follow Sorensen, who explicitly addresses the “dogmatism” charge (pp. 391–392). But see also Christensen (2010).
For example, a more straightforward fourth condition reads as follows:
(4**) One is disposed to acquire the belief that q in response to its becoming reasonable for one to believe that q.
If we assume that it is reasonable for an individual to believe q if and only if it is unreasonable for him to refrain from believing q, then (4*) and (4**) come to the same thing. However, that assumption is controversial. In particular, it is controversial whether it is reasonable to believe q only if it is unreasonable to refrain from believing q. For discussion of this issue, see White (2005).
Some examples: Rosenberg (1993, p. 701) on van Inwagen (1990); Lewis (2000, p. 154) on Unger (1996); and Russell (1945, p. 78) on the Sophists.
The back cover of Oxford’s 2002 re-issue of Peter Unger’s radical manifesto Ignorance: A Case for Skepticism features a summary of his main conclusions (among them: ‘no one can ever be happy or sad about anything’, ‘no one can ever believe, or even say, that anything is the case’) immediately followed by a glowing blurb from the decidedly non-skeptical Ernest Sosa. The blurb begins as follows: “Unger follows the argument to great depth, wherever it may lead…”.
Indeed, in some respects, the stance of the Average Eleatic might seem to be about as bad as it gets. Consider, for example, the contrast between his stance and that taken by Pryor’s (2000) “reasonable dogmatist”. According to Pryor, one can be justified in holding perceptual beliefs even if one is not in a position to offer non-question-begging arguments for those beliefs against the skeptic. On reflection, this is perhaps not such a radical claim: after all, constructing compelling arguments that don’t beg the question against formidable and determined opponents is (one might think) typically a tough road to hoe. Pryor’s reasonable dogmatist is not adept at playing offense against the skeptic, and the claim is that this is compatible with his being justified in believing as he does. By contrast, the Average Eleatic is not adept at playing defense: in that case, it is Zeno who has willingly accepted the burden of proof and offered what purports to be a non-question-begging argument for the revisionary conclusion. All the Average Eleatic must do is raise some doubt about a particular premise or inferential step, but he finds himself unable to execute even this comparatively modest intellectual task.
Indeed, there is a respect in which the cognitively unsophisticated person should be less open to revising her beliefs in response to novel arguments than the more cognitively sophisticated person. In terms of the “inference to the best explanation” model introduced above: the greater one’s cognitive sophistication, the more reasonable it is to expect that one would identify a flaw in a given line of argument if there were such a flaw to be found. In a case in which one critically scrutinizes the argument yet fails to find any flaw, one’s failure is thus comparatively strong evidence that the argument is flawless. On the other hand, the more unsophisticated one is, the less one should be impressed by the fact that one has tried and failed to find a flaw in a given argument: such a failure is comparatively weak evidence for the argument’s flawlessness. In principle then, radically different responses to the same revisionary argument might be appropriate for different individuals, even if neither is able to identify any flaw in the argument. What is a dogmatic and unreasonable response for one might be a perfectly reasonable response for the other.
In this connection, it is interesting to note that a good number of Socrates’ interlocutors remain completely unmoved in their original beliefs, despite having been trounced in debate. On the present account, whether such an interlocutor is genuinely guilty of failing to follow the argument where it leads might very well be something of an open question, and one whose answer depends on facts that go beyond anything that is specified in the fiction of the dialogue.
In the usual case, if it is unreasonable for me to believe p prior to considering your argument for not-p, then it will still be unreasonable for me to believe p after considering your argument. There are unusual cases in which this condition fails to hold, but I will ignore them here.
Indeed, as Kripke (1971) pointed out, even if one initially knows that p, it might be unreasonable and dogmatic to dismiss subsequently encountered considerations that suggest that not-p. For once one is presented with those considerations, one might no longer know that p and thus no longer be in a position to rationally infer that those considerations are misleading (Harman 1973). Of course, if one once knew that p, then p is true, so the considerations that suggest that p is false must be misleading. But one is in no position to reasonably conclude this, once one’s knowledge has been undermined. For good discussions of the Kripke-Harman ‘dogmatism paradox’, see also Sorensen (1988b) and Conee (2001).
Although all of the details of the example are nonfictional, the inspiration for using them in this way is due to Crispin Wright (2004).
The principle is that if S knows that p entails q, and S reasonably believes that p, then S is in a position to rationally believe q.
In the same way, when Euthyphro and Socrates treat “Such and-such actions are pious, and it is not the case that such-and-such actions are pious” as an argumentative dead-end, something that compels revision of previously-accepted assumptions, it is not the fact that this proposition has the logical property of being a contradiction that is essential. Rather, what is essential is the fact that that proposition possesses the epistemic property of being rationally believed to be false at that stage in the argument. (Of course, the fact that it has that epistemic property is presumably not independent of its having the logical property.)
A worry of this kind was raised by both Earl Conee and Lisa Downing. Here and below, those whom I credit with inspiring an objection should not be held responsible for the specific way in which I formulate it.
Still, one might think that a genuine change of subject has occurred at some point—Socrates, at least, really was talking about argument-driven inquiry, as opposed to anything wider than that. However, I think that to say even this much is potentially misleading. In this context, one thing that we should bear in mind is that someone like Socrates would not have been inclined to make much of a distinction between argument-driven inquiry and inquiry in some more general sense, for the following reason. For the ancient Greeks, the construction and evaluation of arguments was the paradigm of theoretical inquiry, in a way that it perhaps no longer is in our intellectual culture. After all, for the ancient Greeks, the paradigms of theoretical inquiry were mathematics (understood as a deductive science in which theorems are derived from axioms) and philosophy; and of course, both of these intellectual disciplines are argument-driven in the relevant sense. In contrast, in our own intellectual culture, observation- and experiment-driven science is the paradigm of theoretical inquiry, which can look quite different from the kind of thing that Socrates and his interlocutors were doing. But imagine an experimental physicist who concludes that a cherished hypothesis is false on the basis of his laboratory observations, after resisting the temptation to explain away the unwelcome data points by embracing ad hoc hypotheses. Surely Socrates and Plato would have been able to recognize in such behavior a case of adhering to the ideal that they championed.
An objection along these lines was put to me by Timothy Schroeder.
This objection was pressed by Josh Schecter.
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at Stanford University, The Ohio State University, the University of Houston, the University of Nevada (Las Vegas), Princeton, the 2010 Bellingham Summer Philosophy Conference at Western Washington University, and at an epistemic normativity workshop hosted by Fordham University. I would like to thank the audiences present on those occasions. Special thanks are due to Earl Conee and Josh Schecter, my commentators at the BSPC conference, as well as David Christensen, Alexander Nehamas, and Daniel Berntson for reading earlier drafts.
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Kelly, T. Following the argument where it leads. Philos Stud 154, 105–124 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9704-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9704-7