Abstract
An argument is epistemically self-defeating when either the truth of an argument’s conclusion or belief in an argument’s conclusion defeats one’s justification to believe at least one of that argument’s premises. Some extant defenses of the evidentiary value of intuition have invoked considerations of epistemic self-defeat in their defense. I argue that there is one kind of argument against intuition, an unreliability argument, which, even if epistemically self-defeating, can still imply that we are not justified in thinking intuition has evidentiary value.
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Notes
This should be restricted to essential premises, where such premises are ones that are needed if the premise set is to evidentially support the conclusion.
Being epistemically self-defeating is not a monadic property of arguments; it’s a relation between thinkers and arguments. An argument whose conclusion is ‘the author of this paper is not justified in believing anything’ is epistemically self-defeating for this paper’s author only, not its readers. Also, there are other ways for an argument to be epistemically self-defeating that I will not be discussing. For instance, an argument’s conclusion can call into question the form of inference the argument exemplifies, or it can call into question one’s ability to reliably make such inferences, or a conclusion can be a self-defeating proposition (‘this proposition is unjustified’ or ‘p and I am not justified in believing p’).
By speaking of intuitions having evidential value or worth I mean that intuitions are a source of evidence that justify beliefs.
The epistemological principle Pust attacks is this: “Aside from propositions describing the occurrence of her judgments, S is justified in believing only those propositions which are part of the best explanation of S’s making the judgments that she makes.” See Pust (2001, pp. 236, 249–251).
Michael Huemer (2007, pp. 39–41) has argued along similar lines, though in defense of the more general claim that seemings of all sorts have evidential worth (intuitions are just one kind of seeming according to Huemer). For in order to reject the evidential worth of seemings, says Huemer, it is a contingent fact that one will end up epistemically basing their opposition to seemings on seemings. Thus, those who deny that seemings have evidential worth “are in a self-defeating position, in that their views cannot be both true and justified,” (p. 30).
Bealer (1992, pp. 104–108, 119ff). Bealer’s point is not so much that an argument is self-defeating, but that a given epistemological position (namely, an empiricism that rejects intuitions) is epistemically self-defeating in the sense that if it were true, we would not be justified in believing it. Nevertheless, Bealer’s thesis clearly implies that any argument against intuition which employs premises that make use of any basic epistemic classification will be an epistemically self-defeating argument. For convenience, in this essay I will speak as though Bealer’s concern was with epistemically self-defeating arguments.
BonJour (1998, pp. 4–6). BonJour does not often use the term ‘intuition’, preferring instead the term ‘rational insight’ to designate our source of a priori justification. See BonJour (1998, p. 102). Note also the higher-order requirement on inferential justification that BonJour presupposes: it is not enough that an inference makes the conclusion likely to be true or that one competently employ such an inference, one must also have reason to think that the inference at least makes the conclusion likely to be true. Externalists of various sorts will buck such a requirement.
Each of these authors take intuition to be a source of a priori justification. However, not all agree with this view of intuition (See Kornblith 2002, pp. 7–8; Devitt 2010, p. 292). This issue is of marginal relevance here, for all that Bealer, BonJour, and Pust need to run the arguments summarized above is that intuition be a source of justification; it does not matter what type of justification it yields.
For example, Bealer (1998), Pust (2000), Grundmann (2007) and Sosa (2007) each identify intuition with a seeming of a particular sort, where seemings are genuine mental states (Though Sosa identifies this kind of seeming with a particular sort of attraction to assent). Others disagree. For example, Williamson (2004) take intuitions to be judgments (see also Goldman and Pust 1998, p. 179); Lewis (1983) suggests that intuitions are simply beliefs; Earlenbaugh and Molyneux (2009) claim that they are inclinations to believe; and van Inwagen (1997, p. 309) and Lynch (2006) hold that they are either beliefs or inclinations to believe.
Issues of defeasibility and the relativization of justification to believers and to beliefs that share the same content as specific tokens of intuition will be left implicit.
Earlenbaugh and Molyneux (2009) argue against the thesis that intuitions are treated as evidence by philosophers. Although their arguments are worthy of response, the denial of their thesis will remain a presupposition of my paper.
For example, there are Benacerraf-style explanatory worries about intuition since intuition is thought to yield knowledge of abstract facts despite the fact that intuitions are not plausibly causally dependent on such facts. This makes the supposed reliability of intuition seem unexplainable; and if such reliability is unexplainable, it has seemed to some that intuition could not be, or at least should not be thought to be, reliable (For concerns of this sort see Field 1989, pp. 230–239; Boghossian 2000, 2001; Kitcher 2000, p. 75; Devitt 2005, Sect. 3–4). This is what we might call philosophical grounds for thinking intuition unreliable. But there are also empirical grounds stemming from the recent work of experimental philosophers whose studies are said to show that intuition’s deliverances are sensitive to features of one’s situation that have nothing to do with the truth of what is intuited (e.g., the ordering of thought experiments considered, cultural biases, educational background, affective biases), thereby giving us reason to think intuition unreliable (See Weinberg et al. 2001; Nichols et al. 2003; Alexander and Weinberg 2007, esp. 62–63; Swain et al. 2008 for some relevant studies and discussions motivating this concern with intuition’s reliability).
Reliabilist and other externalist stances on justification entail (Sx→Rx). We will discuss the threat (\(\neg {\rm{Ri}}\)) poses independently of (Sx→Rx) at close of this section.
It may not be apparent why (DA) includes considerations of justification, for the above summary of the Bealer–BonJour–Pust strategy did not clearly include such considerations. The reason is that it is no concession to an opponent to grant the truth of some proposition p without also granting justification for it at least where p is to serve as a premise in some chain of reasoning. For the purpose of reasoning from premises is the transmission of justification from premises to conclusion, and no reasoning can succeed at transmitting justification to a conclusion without having justified premises.
This is clearly the case in the argument from (1) and (2) to (3). Whether or not this is the case in the argument from (4) to (3) depends on the correctness of BonJour’s conviction that (i) in order to be justified in believing the conclusion of an argument from premises one must have reason to think the premises make the conclusion at least likely to be true, and that (ii) intuition alone can give one such a reason.
One might wish to emend (i) in the following way:
(i*) The contradictory of any justified proposition that is justified in virtue of being deduced from other justified propositions is itself unjustified.
This qualification may be added to avoid concerns about Uniqueness: the thesis that one’s total evidence determines a unique rational doxastic attitude towards any proposition. For even if Uniqueness is false and it is therefore sometimes epistemically permissible to either believe or not believe p on one’s total evidence, it remains implausible to think that when one’s total evidence entails p and one has deduced p from one’s evidence that it can be epistemically permissible to not believe p. See White (2005) for a defense of Uniqueness and Brueckner and Bundy (2011) for criticism.
I do not take (i) to extend to inconsistent propositions generally since recognition that two propositions are inconsistent may be well beyond one’s ken. I do not think this the case with contradictions because their form (p and not-p) makes their inconsistency plain, at least for my target audience.
This closure principle gives a sufficient condition for when one has justification to believe, as opposed to when one justifiedly believes, the conclusion of a deductive inference. If our concern were with justified belief in the conclusion we would have to strengthen the antecedent of Closure so as to include justified belief in the premises, belief in the conclusion, and that one’s belief in the conclusion satisfies whatever epistemic basing constraints there are, and perhaps other conditions as well to help deal with the lottery and preface paradoxes.
Roughly, a defeater for p is something that prevents one from having ultima facie justification for p. One has a rebutting defeater for p when one either believes that p is false or has an undefeated reason to believe that p is false. Surely if one had (undefeated) justification for premises that clearly entailed \(\neg p, \) then one would have a reason to believe that p is false.
A referee pointed out to me that some might think that (8) cannot be justified if we are working in a context that takes (Sx→Rx) and (\(\neg {\rm{Ri}}\)) for granted because they clearly imply (\(\neg {\rm{Si}}\)) and, presumably, one depends on intuition for their justification to believe (6). Notice, however, that one’s actual justification for (6) is not impugned by the fact that one has assumed (5) for a conditional proof. Conditional proofs are like ordinary proofs in that one is allowed to include in the proof anything one has (undefeated) justification to believe as a premise. In the present conditional proof the assumption is (5) whereas the premise the defender of intuitions takes themselves, or should take themselves as I argue, to have justification for is (6). Thus, one’s actual justification for (Si) remains intact–provided that one does not actually acquire justification for both (Sx→Rx) and (\(\neg {\rm{Ri}}\)), thereby making them more than mere assumptions.
Roughly, one has an undercutting defeater for p if one either believes or has reason to believe that their (supposed) source of justification for p does not make p likely to be true. And if one has justification for (\(\neg {\rm{Ri}}\)) then one does have such a reason for any proposition whose only support is its being the content of an intuition.
By undermining (\(\neg {\rm{Ri}}\)) we thereby undermine the further claim that is part of (DA), namely, that we have (undefeated) justification for (\(\neg {\rm{Ri}}\) ).
In this paper we have focused on the epistemically self-defeating character of the Unreliability Argument and have been dealing with ‘intuition’ in a non-discriminatory way by ignoring the possibility that, say, intuitions in some domains are reliable while others are not. For instance, perhaps when it comes to math and logic, intuition is reliable but when it comes to metaphysics and ethics it is not. It must be observed that any attempt to defend the Unreliability Argument in this manner must alter its premises and conclusion in some way so that the conclusion does not indict all uses of intuition. The particulars, of course, depend on just how one attenuates their opposition to intuition. Notice that any emended argument will have a conclusion like the following:
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(11)
Intuitions of domain D are not a source of evidence that justifies beliefs.
And given that (11) is itself an epistemological proposition, it seems that any argument in support of it will have to employ some general epistemological principle (akin to (Sx→Rx)). And, as Pust and Bealer have pointed out, it is difficult to see how else one could justify any such principle without at least some epistemological intuitions having evidentiary value. If this is right, then we could not be too restrictive concerning which intuitions have evidentiary value for whatever reasons there are for thinking, say, moral and metaphysical intuitions are unreliable (e.g., pervasive disagreement among certain groups) are also reasons for thinking that epistemological intuitions are unreliable. So, in the end, one might expect non-skeptical opposition to intuition to be quite moderate, allowing for quite a range of intuitions. But assessing the various arguments and positions one might take concerning intuition’s reliability and justificatory power goes beyond the concern of this paper, which was to assess the usefulness of the self-defeat argument for intuition vis-a-vis the Unreliability Argument.
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(11)
Ironically, this is a fact we can appreciate only if intuitions have evidentiary value given that I’ve relied on various intuitions to justify my arguments in this paper.
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Acknowledgments
Special thanks are owed to Michael Lynch, Patrick Greenough, and Joel Pust who provided me with detailed feedback on an early draft. Further thanks are owed to Donald Baxter, John Troyer, an anonymous referee at Philosophical Studies, and audiences at the University of Connecticut and Notre Dame.
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Silva, P. Epistemically self-defeating arguments and skepticism about intuition. Philos Stud 164, 579–589 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9870-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9870-2