Abstract
Recent discussion of Vogel-style “bootstrapping” scenarios suggests that they provide counterexamples to a wide variety of epistemological theories. Yet it remains unclear why it’s bad for a theory to permit bootstrapping, or even exactly what counts as a bootstrapping case. Going back to Vogel's original bootstrapping example, I note that an agent who could gain justification through the method Vogel describes would have available a “no-lose investigation”: an investigation that can justify a proposition but has no possibility of undermining it. The main suggestion of this article is that an epistemological theory should not permit no-lose investigations. I identify necessary and sufficient conditions for such investigations, then explore epistemological theories that rule them out. If we want to avoid both skepticism and no-lose investigations, we must eschew either Closure or epistemic externalism.
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Notes
Vogel puts this conclusion in terms of the gauge’s “reading accurately.” To me, that suggests a causal connection that Roxanne is not in a position to deduce from the first two premises. My gas gauge is not accurately reading the current female composition of Harvard’s freshman class if my gauge reads 1/2 and one half the class is female. So I have rephrased Vogel’s characterization of Roxanne’s reasoning in terms of more neutral “matching” terminology.
The thought process that led me to this article began with a conversation in which Kenny Easwaran made just such a suggestion.
I am grateful to an anonymous Philosophical Studies referee for suggesting that I explicitly address this concern.
Cohen’s discussion, like Vogel’s, actually concerns knowledge rather than justification. I have adapted his conclusions to the justificatory case.
Cohen is also rather vague on whether Closure endorsement is required for an epistemological theory to generate bootstrapping. At Cohen (2002, p. 320) he writes, “We have seen two related ways in which the problem of easy knowledge arises for theories that allow for basic knowledge—by the closure principle, and by bootstrapping.” The implicit contrast between two ways suggests that bootstrapping susceptibility does not depend on Closure. Yet Cohen’s bootstrapping examples all involve justification-transferring deductive inferences, and the basic knowledge views he surveys embrace Closure.
By Fumerton (1995), for example.
Compare the discussion in Kvanvig and Menzel (1990), as well as Goldman’s version of reliabilism for “ex ante justification” at the end of his (1976).
See Conee and Feldman (1998).
It’s important that our definition of a no-lose investigation employs two times, at the first of which the agent lacks justification for the proposition in question. This addresses a discussion in which Vogel takes up something like the suggestion that what’s wrong with Roxanne’s procedure is that it permits no-lose investigations:
“Point. The problem with Roxanne’s procedure is that it could not have possibly yielded any other result than the one it did, namely, that the gauge is reliable.
“Counterpoint. It is not clear that the putative defect really is one. The process by which I know I am conscious when I am is surely a reliable one, yet that process could not return a verdict other than that I am conscious.” (Vogel 2000, p. 615)
Whatever the “process by which I know I am conscious” is, surely it is available to me whenever I am conscious. So there is no time at which I satisfy the conditions for a no-lose investigation with respect to the proposition p that I am conscious. If I am capable of having any knowledge at a time (and thereby satisfying the second and third conditions), I have justification to believe p at that time and so fail to satisfy the first condition.
The point of our no-lose investigation definition is to characterize a class of objectionable investigations. Vogel’s consciousness case doesn’t satisfy that definition, while his gas gauge case does. So I think Vogel has sold short the suggestion that Roxanne’s procedure is objectionable because it creates a no-lose investigation.
After all, it is the Italian court—what better place to court Italians?
Depending on the epistemological theory in play and the conditions under which it counts testimony as reliable, we might tweak the story’s details so as to make Giacomo’s reports clear the bar. For instance, we might imagine that it is a deep-seated fact about Giacomo that he is a ladies’ man (perhaps this has to do with his relationship with his mother), so that the only close possible worlds in which his tale of wooing Lady Gwendolyn (say) is false are worlds in which he wooed another lady instead, and reports that exploit truthfully to the King. Or we can imagine that whenever any jester arrives at any court he is given orders like the King’s, and that (unbeknownst to the King) all jesters are ladies’ men. In that case, testimony in circumstances similar to Giacomo’s will be broadly reliable, which might make a difference to the justification-conferring status of Giacomo’s testimony. (Thanks to Ted Hinchman for discussion of these points.)
Though “The agent would be rational in assigning a high credence to p” might be one of the notions that could play the role of Jp in our no-lose investigation definition.
Compare the “Evidence for evidence is evidence” principle in Feldman (2006).
See Titelbaum (2008) for more detail, including a discussion of the notion of “context-sensitivity” needed here.
As a side point, it is extremely important that our no-lose investigation conditions concern the agent’s t 1 knowledge about some specific future t 2. That is, the conditions say that the agent knows of some specific future t 2 that such-and-such, rather than that the agent knows there will exist a future t 2 such that such-and-such.
Without a caveat like that one can generate counterexamples to Reflection-like principles such as Avoid Certain Frustration, as Hájek shows in his (2005). One might also be able to generate unobjectionable no-lose investigation examples. For instance, take some numerical property and consider the proposition that it is possessed by at least one positive integer. I might investigate this proposition by taking the positive integers in order one at a time and determining whether the integer in question has the property. If some positive integer has the property, my investigation will eventually reveal that to me (supposing I have an indefinite amount of time available), but if no positive integer has the property I will never gain justification for that negative conclusion. Notice, however, that there is no specific future time such that I know of it that if the proposition is true I will have justification to believe it by that time; it is crucial to the example that I do not know of some specific n that if any integer has the property then some integer less than n will.
The second clause of our amendment is stronger than it needs to be just to ban memory-loss cases, but that added strength helps rule out other putative counterexamples to our main suggestion. For example, on some understandings of propositional justification an agent can lack propositional justification for a proposition because she lacks the cognitive capacity to understand how her epistemic resources bear on that proposition. This will cause trouble both for Epistemic Reflection and for our main suggestion in cases in which an agent’s cognitive capacities (her space of concepts, her ability to follow complex reasoning, etc.) may diminish between t 1 and t 2.
To take an extreme example of diminished capacity, suppose Luke is considering the proposition that there is still good in his father and plans to investigate this proposition by confronting Vader. Luke knows that if the proposition is true, he will have justification for it by the end of their confrontation, but if the proposition is false Vader will kill him. Since the latter eventuality will leave Luke dead, he clearly won’t have propositional justification for his proposition’s negation. So this case satisfies the second condition for a no-lose investigation. Moreover, if we assume that Luke lacks justification for his hopeful proposition before the confrontation, this example meets the first and third no-lose conditions. However, it runs afoul of our stipulation that Luke must know at t 1 that he will retain at t 2 justification for all the propositions that are justified for him at t 1—if he dies, Luke’s propositional justifications will all disappear. (Thanks to Juan Comesaña and Alex Hyun for discussion.)
One might think that no-lose investigations could also be avoided by denying that agents ever have knowledge, or even (perhaps more plausibly) by denying that agents ever have knowledge of the future. After all, our second and third no-lose investigation conditions require the agent to have knowledge at t 1 about what occurs at t 2. However, the “K”s in those conditions could be replaced by “J”s and all of our arguments would still go through—I have used “K”s rather than “J”s only because epistemic possibility is usually understood in terms of knowledge. It is far less plausible to hold that agents never have justification for beliefs about the future.
I am grateful to Jonathan Schaffer for discussions of this view.
It doesn’t matter whether this is an appealing epistemological theory—our goal is to show that it’s possible to escape no-lose investigations altogether by denying Closure.
To see why the agent’s epistemic process will have to report on some matter other than its own reliability, try to imagine a process that reports directly on its own reliability and then ask yourself under what conditions those reports will count as reliable. (For instance, try to imagine a dashboard light whose job it is to report that all the dashboard lights are functioning reliably.)
Note also that it may be possible to construct a no-lose investigation in which all the agent’s inferences are inductive rather than deductive. In that case the Closure-denying reliabilist will also have to deny a parallel principle concerning conclusions inductively supported by justified premises. But I take it the Closure-denier will want to do that anyway.
One might wonder whether the “dogmatist” position defended in Pryor (2000) allows for no-lose investigations. Roughly speaking, Pryor’s proposal is that an agent has automatic prima facie justification to believe the deliverances of particular epistemic processes. For example, if it seems to an agent that she sees her hand, she has justification to believe that she has a hand. (The difference with Wright is that Pryor offers no antecedent warrant to believe that perception is reliable.) It seems to me that dogmatism must ascribe to Negative Self-Intimation, at least for epistemologically informed agents and the epistemic processes covered by the view. If an agent fails to seem to see a hand, she is justified in believing that she has failed to seem to see a hand, and therefore justified in believing that she has failed to receive justification in the manner described by the theory. This (at least partial) embrace of Negative Self-Intimation will innoculate dogmatism against no-lose investigations.
For references on and a brief discussion of the connection between Popper and Bacon, see Klein (2009). Notice also that Nozick’s tracking theory avoids no-lose investigations by denying Closure.
Compare also our intuitions about observation selection effects—for example, testing the hypothesis that all the fish in a pond are above a certain size by sampling fish from that pond with a net that only catches fish greater than that size.
One might object that the King doesn’t know exactly what information he’s going to get from the jester—he doesn’t, for instance, know which maidens are going to turn out to have fallen victim to Giacomo’s wiles. While it’s curious to suggest that the particular details have this special significance in justifying the general proposition that the jester is a ladies’ man, we can alter the example to remove those details entirely. Suppose that just before the jester begins, the King is called away on urgent matters of state. Later he asks one of his Earls who remained, “Did the jester tell copious tales of seduction?” Granting that the Earl is reliable (and perhaps that the King knows this as well), the Earl’s single-word positive response has just as much justificatory force as the King’s sitting through an evening with the jester would have.
Now imagine that the King knows in advance that he will be called away after giving Giacomo his orders, knows that he will get a report from the Earl later, and even knows his Earl well enough to know exactly what words will be spoken and how the report will sound. Then even before the jester begins the King knows exactly what information he will later receive about the jester’s amorous tendencies. Yet actually hearing that information—actually having the conversation with his Earl—has positive epistemic value for the King. That’s odd.
This is the first time I have invoked the dreaded internalist/externalist distinction in this article. While I mean to be applying some sort of “access” internalism/externalism distinction here, I won’t say more about the distinction except that I trust externalists will be unhappy with both Wright’s position and Negative Self-Intimation. (For Wright’s description of his position as internalist see his (2004, pp. 209ff.).)
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Berit Brogaard, David Chalmers, Juan Comesaña, Kenny Easwaran, Branden Fitelson, Alan Hájek, Michael Lynch, Jonathan Schaffer, Declan Smithies, Elliott Sober, Jonathan Vogel, and an anonymous Philosophical Studies referee; also to audiences at the ANU Philosophy Society, the 2009 Australasian Association of Philosophy conference, the University of Wisconsin-Madison first-year philosophy seminar, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the University of California, Berkeley.
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Appendix
Appendix
The proof below assumes we are in a situation meeting the two stipulations (concerning context-sensitivity and justification loss) made in Sect. 3 above; it also assumes Closure and Epistemic Reflection. It assumes as well that the agent has justification at t 1 for various propositions about her epistemic situation, including the fact that these stipulations and general epistemological conditions hold. This is certainly in the spirit of a view that maintains Negative Self-Intimation, but more importantly it focuses our attention on the epistemological aspects of interest. We are not concerned with how the agent got to the epistemic position she occupies at t 1; we are interested in the features of the investigation that commences at that point. If an epistemological theory allows a no-lose investigation because an agent fails to be informed about the justification conditions for various propositions, that is not a particularly interesting criticism of the theory. If, on the other hand, a theory allows for no-lose investigations even when the agent is epistemologically well-informed, that’s a serious problem.
I’ll present the proof and then explain some of its steps. The goal is to show that against the background just described, the combination of Negative Self-Intimation with our three no-lose investigation conditions entails a contradiction.
(1) | J1(J2(p → J2p)) | (see below) |
(2) | J1(∼J2p → J2∼J2p) | (see below) |
(3) | J1(∼J2p → J2∼p) | (see below) |
(4) | K1(∼J2∼p) | Condition 2 |
(5) | J1(∼J2∼p) | K → J |
(6) | J 1 J 2 p | Closure from (3), (5) |
(7) | J 1 p | Epistemic Reflection |
(8) | ∼J 1 p | Condition 1 |
(9) | F |
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Step (1)
By Condition 3, the agent knows at t 1 that p → J 2 p. By K → J, the agent is justified in this belief as well. By our no-justification-loss stipulation and the agent’s epistemological awareness at t 1, she has justification at t 1 for the proposition that this proposition will remain justified for her at t 2.
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Step (2)
Follows from the agent’s t 1 justification to believe Negative Self-Intimation.
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Step (3)
p → J2p and ∼J2p entail ∼p. By Closure, J2(p → J2p) and J2∼J2p entail J2∼p. Thus if Closure holds, ∼J2p → J2∼J2p and J2(p → J2p) entail ∼J2p → J2∼p. The agent’s t1 epistemological awareness gives her justification for Closure, and the agent has justification at t1 for both ∼J2p → J2∼J2p and J2(p → J2p) (by Steps (2) and (1)). So by Closure, the agent has justification at t1 for ∼J2p → J2∼p.
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Titelbaum, M.G. Tell me you love me: bootstrapping, externalism, and no-lose epistemology. Philos Stud 149, 119–134 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9541-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9541-0