Abstract
In this paper I consider whether the reasons on which our testimonial beliefs are directly based—“testimonial reasons”—are basic reasons for belief. After laying out a Dretske-inspired psychologistic conception of reasons for belief in general and a corresponding conception of basic reasons for belief, I present a prima facie case against the basicality of testimonial reasons. I then respond to a challenge from Audi to this case. To the extent that my response is successful, the viability of an important kind of inferentialism about testimonial belief is preserved.
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Notes
Perceptual appearances are thus cognitive events because they essentially involve a subject’s senses presenting the appearances’ contents as true to her; beliefs are cognitive because they essentially involve the subject herself presenting (or being disposed to present) their contents as true, to herself or others; and so on. By contrast, affective mental events are not on this usage cognitive because they need involve no presentation of their contents as true. Simply by desiring or preferring that p, for example, you do not have p presented as true to you, nor do you present (or stand disposed to present) p as true, even if you do present p as something else, e.g. as of some nonalethic value.
Whatever the relation between the two, there can be formations of occurrent belief and formations of dispositional belief. Notice, however, that if a cognitive event serving as a triggering cause of S’s forming the belief that p is itself a belief, that triggering-cause belief must be occurrent, since dispositional beliefs are not events.
The possibility of such regular association may be in part a function of features of human psychology (cf. the way in which projectability for Goodman (1983, ch. IV) turns out to be a function of these features). Although this would mean that questions of whether causal processes are discrete (and thus of which events count as triggering causes of other events) are themselves properly decided partly on the basis of features of human psychology, I find little to be troubled by in such a view. I suspect that few, at any rate, would be inclined to think that the relevant notion of discreteness (or that of a triggering cause) corresponds to an entirely mind-independent natural kind.
A more troubling view would be that questions about whether causal processes are discrete are decidable only by reference to theories that invoke or presuppose the very notion of discrete causal processes, like the conception of epistemic reasons I have provided: such view would seem to render debate about whether the causal processes involved in Pollock and Cruz-style examples are discrete of little evidential value with respect to those theories. I see no good reason to accept this strong theory-dependence view, but (as an anonymous referee rightly points out) I have not argued against it. Even so, it is perhaps worth emphasizing that the theory-dependence view is not entailed by the view that the discreteness of causal processes (or the relevant regular association) is partly a function of features of human psychology.
The belief-forming process will not be simple if it is construed as leading from the occurrent belief about the lettuce to a quirky neurological event and then in turn to the occurrent belief about the football team. But I take the process to lead directly from the occurrent lettuce belief to the occurrent football team belief, where both the process and the cognitive events it includes occur in virtue of neurological events. The quirky neurological event is not on my understanding something that intervenes in the simple process, but rather something that underlies it, i.e. something on which it supervenes.
If an author’s claim is expressed by ⌜p and (if p, q)⌝, and my belief that q is directly based on my having read that claim, so expressed, is my belief that q directly based on my reception of the author’s report that q? (cf. Pritchard 2004, p. 327). At least where it is obvious in context that the author’s use of ⌜p and (if p, q)⌝ is intended to covey a commitment to q, I take the answer to be “yes”.
On my psychologistic conception of reasons for belief, there may well be reasons for testimonial belief that are not testimonial reasons. Testimonial reasons are in effect proximate (because direct) cognitive triggering causes of testimonial belief; but since there can also be distal cognitive triggering cases of testimonial belief, on my psychologistic conception testimonial reasons may be (presumably are) merely a proper subset of reasons for testimonial belief.
Even if nondoxastic cognitive events can both be and have reasons in some more general sense (e.g. “reasons for cognitive events”); we need take no stand on that here.
This rendering helps explain why Conee and Feldman’s (2004) criticism of the belief-dependent/belief-independent contrast is misguided: it’s likely, they say, “that all beliefs human adults form are partially caused by other beliefs,” hence likely that (for adult humans at least) there is no belief-dependent/belief-independent contrast and that all belief-forming processes are belief-dependent (p. 144, n. 13). Although it may be likely that all belief-forming processes have other beliefs as structuring causes, it doesn’t follow that all belief-forming processes probably have occurrent beliefs as their initiating events.
On this rendering, belief-forming processes whose initiating events are neither thoroughly perceptual nor thoroughly doxastic will neither be neither (fully) perceptual belief-forming processes nor (fully) inferential belief-forming processes; but of course they may include perceptual and inferential belief-forming processes.
I should also note that here and throughout I am unconcerned with any inferential process that is not belief-forming. There may be such processes: perhaps, as an anonymous referee points out, the process we describe by saying that someone “inferred a contradiction” (where we obviously don’t mean that the individual formed a belief in the contradiction) is an example. On the other hand, that process may be belief-forming, terminating in the formation of a belief to the effect that a certain proposition is logically incoherent.
Although I will in what follows refer to this as “Audi’s challenge,” it should be kept in mind that it is my reconstruction of the inchoate argument in the above passage.
It hardly counts against these two options that we describe the initiating events of testimonial belief-forming processes as “hearings,” “(visual or tactile) readings,” and so on. Where occurrent beliefs about what others have reported have perceptual appearances as their triggering causes (as on the first option), or where such occurrent beliefs initiate the processes only in the presence of structuring-cause perceptual appearances (as on the second option), they seem quite naturally so described, for they at least typically amount to instances of perceptual belief about—perhaps, if McDowell (1981) is right (cf. Fricker 1987, p. 70; Audi 2011, p. 170, n. 13), instances of perceptual knowledge of—what others have said.
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Acknowledgments
This paper grew out of a contribution to a 2013 Canadian Philosophical Association symposium on reasons in epistemology; thanks to Adam Morton for organizing that symposium, and to symposium participants for their early comments and advice. For their helpful feedback on subsequent drafts of the paper, I am particularly indebted to Tim Kenyon, Jordan Dodd, Eros Corazza, Kirk Michaelian, and two anonymous Erkenntnis referees.
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Matheson, D. Testimonial Reasons. Erkenn 81, 757–774 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-015-9766-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-015-9766-6