Pritchard's Reasons Clayton Littlejohn King's College London Abstract: Pritchard's epistemological disjunctivist thinks that when we come to know things through vision our perceptual beliefs are based on reasons that provide factive support. The reasons that constitute the rational basis for your belief that the page before you is white and covered in black marks entails that it is and includes things that could not have provided rational support for your beliefs if you had been hallucinating. There are some issues that I would like to raise. First, what motivation is there for thinking that this sort of view is preferable to a more traditional internalist view that insists that the rational support for our beliefs is always limited to things that are common to the cases of knowledge and subjectively indistinguishable cases of non-knowledge? I suspect that an important part of the motivation for the view comes from worries about skepticism. Second, if we're worried about skepticism, can we resist these skeptical pressures without an appeal to metaphysical disjunctivism? Pritchard's epistemological disjunctivist differs from McDowell's in that Pritchard's epistemological disjunctivist doesn't take up controversial positions in the philosophy of perception. Is this kind of neutrality tenable? Third, should we follow Pritchard in thinking that the rational basis for our perceptual beliefs involves reasons? What specifically is the relationship between cases in which there is something the subject knows and cases in which there is something that is the subject's reason for believing what she does? Introduction Pritchard's right about something that most of his critics will get wrong.1 It doesn't make sense to say that the skeptic is wrong about the scope of our knowledge if we're going to say that the way things really are has no bearing on what reasons we have for our beliefs. Reality has to guide us rationally if we're to know how things are. When it does, we'll have reasons we wouldn't if we were ignorant of how things were and were misled by mere appearances. The non-skeptical views that deny this by denying that our reasons include facts about things in view are just confused when they try to tell us how visual knowledge is possible while denying that we could ever have such 'external' reasons. He's right that when we have perceptual knowledge about our surroundings, we have reasons that provide us with a kind of rational support for our beliefs that's better than the rational support we'd have in the really bad cases (i.e., the cases in which someone like us 'on the inside' is deceived by a demon) and he's right that without this support, we couldn't have knowledge of an external world. As I write this and sip on some bland builder's tea, annoyed that the rain is keeping me from the nearest coffee shop, my belief that my teacup is to the left of my laptop constitutes knowledge and wouldn't constitute 1 The critics I have in mind are philosophers critical of Duncan's work. I didn't have Sandy Goldberg or Ram Neta in mind. In addition to Duncan, Ram, and Sandy, I'd also like to thank Maria Alvarez, Robert Audi, Charles Cote-Bouchard, Christina Dietz, Claire Fields, Craig French, John Hawthorne, John Hyman, Brent Madison, and Tim Williamson for discussion of the issues in this paper. 2 knowledge if I didn't see that it was there. That I see that it's there provides rational support for things that I believe and for things that I could believe. It's a kind of rational support that I couldn't have had if, say, I had been in the bad case and some nasty demon was tricking me into thinking that some delicious coffee I was drinking was just some tepid tea with skimmed milk. Pritchard and I don't disagree about whether things are this way, but we might disagree about why things are this way. I'll take this opportunity to press him to say more about the motivation for his brand of epistemological disjunctivism. Pritchard's (2011, 2012) epistemological disjunctivist thinks that when you know visually, say, that Agnes is on the sofa, you know this because you have reason(s) that provide factive and reflectively accessible rational support for the belief that Agnes is on the sofa. Your reason for believing that she's on the sofa is that you see that she's on the sofa. Schematically, then, the proposal we'll consider is this: ED: In paradigmatic cases of perceptual knowledge, your belief that p constitutes knowledge because your reason for believing p is that you see that p. If this proposal is correct, the good case is a case in which your rational support involves reasons that aren't available to your systematically deceived internal duplicates. If we think about views like Conee and Feldman's evidentialism (2004) or Huemer's phenomenal conservatism (2001), the evidence you have for your visual beliefs is the same in the good cases and bad. They think that your evidence supervenes upon your nonfactive mental states. The first question I want to press Pritchard on is why he thinks that we should prefer his externalist view to familiar internalist views. I'll look at possible answers in §1. In §2, I'll discuss the connection between epistemological disjunctivism and the kind of metaphysical disjunctivism McDowell (1988) defends: MD: In paradigmatic cases of perceptual knowledge when you know visually that p, it appears to you that p because p is a fact that's been made visually manifest to you. The experience in the good case isn't a mere appearance as it is in the bad. When we look at some of the arguments in §1, some of them suggest that epistemological disjunctivism requires metaphysical disjunctivism. I want to press Pritchard a bit to tell us more about whether someone who holds to the traditional view of experience could plausibly maintain that our perceptual beliefs are supported by reasons that provide factive support. In §1 we'll look at some of the debates between people who think that our visual beliefs are based on evidence that supervenes upon our non-factive mental states and people who think that it doesn't. The parties to these debates all seem to agree that our perceptual beliefs are based on reasons. Are they? In §3, I'll explain why I'm skeptical of the suggestion that our perceptual beliefs are based on reasons. 1. Reasons for Externalism about Reasons Pritchard rejects the idea that when our beliefs are based on reasons, these reasons are the reasons we share in common with all of our non-factive mental duplicates. If you're in 3 the good case and your duplicate is hallucinating in the bad case, you'll have factive and reflectively accessible support for some of your visual beliefs but they will not. You'll believe, say, that Agnes is sleeping on the sofa for a reason and your reason for believing this will be that you see that she's sleeping on the sofa. This view faces a number of challenges, but they've been addressed elsewhere in detail and interested readers can check to see if those challenges have been met.2 For now, I want to consider some of the possible motivations for adopting such a view. Pritchard claims that ED accords with our ordinary practice of offering reasons when we're asked why we believe something or how we know that something is so: For example, suppose I tell my line manager over the phone that my colleague is at work today (thereby representing myself as perceptually knowing this to be the case), and she expresses scepticism about this (perhaps because she falsely believes that my colleague always skips work when she isn't there). In response I might naturally say that I know that she's at work today because I can see that she's in work- she's standing right in front of me (Pritchard 2012: 18). This seems rather plausible to me, although internalists will either contest Pritchard's point or the point's significance. I'd expect the internalists to say that such a remark is perfectly in order, but then say that a subject's reasons ultimately won't include facts that imply the existence of external objects. Perhaps, following Chisholm, they might say that when someone cites such a fact in explaining why they believe something, we would need to press further to find the ultimate evidence, the evidence that supports her basic beliefs. They'll say that when we ask the subject if she has any reason to believe that she actually sees so and so, our subject will say that it seems to her that she does or something along these lines. At this point, they'll say, we've identified the subject's reasons for her perceptual beliefs. We often won't press people in this way because we are often quite confident that people will see things as they actually are, but their reasons are nevertheless always something about seemings or appearances and never imply the existence of external objects.3 While I don't find these internalist views all that plausible, internalists do. I don't think that observations about the kinds of things we'd say in conversational exchanges with people asking us why we believe things or how we know provides much support for internalism, but it doesn't provide overwhelming support for externalism, either. Let me briefly sketch three further arguments that might help bolster the case for an externalist approach to epistemic reasons (i.e., one on which it's possible to believe things for reasons that your internal duplicates don't have access to). 2 See Alvarez (2010) and Littlejohn (2012, 2013b) for discussion of arguments from error and various other kinds of arguments for psychologizing reasons or taking them to be false contents. See Unger (1975) for linguistic evidence that shouldn't be ignored. 3 See Chisholm (1982), Conee and Feldman (2008), or Huemer (2001). So far as I can tell, Chisholm never offers any reason to think that a description of our reasons/evidence has to be neutral on any further claims about the existence of external objects. 4 First, we'll see that Pritchard's externalism is quite plausible once we try to settle some basic questions about reasons: The Possession Question: What does it take to have a reason? The Constitution Question: What do reasons consist of? The Adequacy Question: When is the rational support provided by reasons adequate? Setting the Adequacy Question aside for the moment, let's consider the Constitution Question. If we think about the normative reasons that determine what someone should do, it's pretty clear (I think) that those reasons won't be states of mind and won't consist of false contents of states of mind. If you have a reason to pull over and offer someone a lift, this reason will presumably be that they needed help, which is to say that it's the fact that they needed help. Since it's possible to act for good reasons (i.e., to act for a reason that is itself a good reason to act that way), your reasons for acting or the reason for which you act have to be the kinds of things that could be good reasons to so act. If you pulled over for a good reason, your reason for pulling over is that someone needed help. That's true iff your reason for pulling over is the fact that someone needed help. If your reason for pulling over could be a fact, surely your reason for believing that you should pull over could also be a fact. We often act for the very same reason we think we should act. We shouldn't lose sight of this obvious fact. It's a helpful reminder that all the arguments that purport to show that our reasons for believing things are limited to reasons we'd share in common with our systematically deceived counterparts couldn't possibly show what they purport to. If we think about our reasons for emoting for a moment, we find something similar. If you are surprised that Boris is polling so well, your reason for being surprised is that Boris is polling so well. Your reason for being surprised can only be that Boris is polling so well if your reason for being surprised is the fact that Boris is polling so well. To be surprised that something is so, it is something that doesn't meet your expectations. It's a fact that's unlikely given your evidence, not a state of mind that surprises you. (You can be surprised to discover that you harbor racist attitudes, but that's to be surprised by the fact that you harbor such attitudes. You could equally be surprised to discover that your mother harbors racist attitudes.) Similarly, if you are a right thinking person and you're upset that Boris is polling so well, your reason for being upset is the fact that Boris is polling so well. It's the fact that's your reason for being upset because if something upsets you, it's something you want not to be the case. If you're a right thinking person, you didn't want not to have various attitudes about Boris or Boris' popularity. No, you wanted Boris to do poorly in the polls and the fact that things aren't going your way is why you're upset. If it's possible to be upset that Boris is doing well in the polls, it's surely possible to do things for the very same reason that you're upset and to believe things for the very same reason that you're upset. The very same fact that makes you upset could be your reason for thinking that the people polled are being swayed by irrational factors, for example. Show me an argument that purports to show that it's impossible for such things to be your reason for believing something and I'll show you a parallel and equally facile argument for the conclusion that you couldn't be upset that Boris is polling well. 5 If you want to see what such an argument might look like, here's one. You're upset having just received a rejection from a journal. The referee admits that he hasn't read the material you discuss, but he's nevertheless confident that you're wrong about what the author says in some recent book.4 You'd say that you're upset that your paper was rejected. It's a natural reaction. But then in an effort to cheer you up (?) the internalists could argue that it's impossible to be upset that your paper was rejected: P1. In the bad case (i.e., a case just like the actual case in terms of your non-factive mental states where a Cartesian demon has decided to cause a series of hallucinations that would convince you that you've just had another paper rejected), you can't be upset that your paper was rejected because, well, there was no paper and no rejection. P2. You are upset that your paper was rejected iff your reason for being upset was that your paper was rejected. P3. In the bad case, your reason for being upset wasn't that your paper was rejected. P4. You don't φ for different reasons in the good case and the bad (i.e., It won't be that your reason for φ-ing in the bad case is something and your reason for φ-ing in the good case is something else). P5. So, your reason for being upset in the good case/the actual case isn't that your paper was rejected. C. You aren't upset that your paper was rejected. We know that this argument is unsound. We also know that the considerations that bear on whether it's possible to be upset for reasons that consist of facts about the situation are the very same considerations that bear on whether it's possible to believe things for reasons that consist of such facts. We are, after all, often moved by the very same thing when we are convinced that something is so, convinced to do something, or feel certain ways about things. Because we know that this argument is no good and should see that this kind of argument is good iff parallel arguments work for believing things for reasons, we know that at least one of the premises in the argument above is false and that parallel reasoning to rule out the possibility of believing things for reasons that are facts will fail for similar reasons. Briefly, here are two possible lines of response. First, you could take issue with P4. You could say that while the good and bad cases are cases of φ-ing for reasons, the reasons for which you φ in the good case and the bad differ. This is disjunctivism about motivating reasons. Your reasons for φ-ing will always be facts, perhaps facts you know, but since you know different things in the good and bad cases, your reasons for φ-ing will also differ.5 Applied to the case of visual belief, the disjunctivist about motivating reasons 4 This could be a purely fictional example. Readers shouldn't assume that the example has to do with any referees who describe Pritchard's views from the armchair and reject papers without bothering to look at his recent work. 5 See Hornsby (2007, 2008) for discussion of this view. 6 can say that the subject's reason for believing in the good case that Agnes is sleeping on the sofa is that she sees that Agnes is sleeping on the sofa even though her reason for believing this in the bad case is something else (e.g., that it seems to her that Agnes is sleeping on the sofa). Second, you could take issue with P4 on the grounds that you don't think that the bad case is a case of φ-ing for reasons. On this line, there will be reasons why you φ'd, but there's nothing that could have been your reason for φ-ing in such a case. This isn't disjunctivism about motivating reasons. On this view, you could say that when we have pairs of subjects in the same non-factive mental states who φ, they won't φ for different reasons; rather, if one of these subjects is mistaken about p and one of these subject's reason for φ-ing is that p, the mistaken subject doesn't φ for a reason. In the good case, your reason for believing that Agnes is sleeping on the sofa might be that you see that she's sleeping on the sofa, but in the bad case there's nothing that's your reason for believing this. We can say that the reason why you believe she's sleeping on the sofa is that it seems to you that she is, but this is true because there is an explanatory reason that we can cite in explaining your belief. Not all explanatory reasons are motivating reasons. I'll have more to say about these two responses later, but suffice it to say for now that one of these responses will be sufficient. Let's suppose, then, that your reason for believing things can include facts and that since your reasons for feeling things or doing things can include facts about the situation, the same holds true for belief. That's sufficient to show that internalism is false. Our internalists believe that when it comes to reasons and the rational support that your reasons provide, your reasons are things you share in common with your non-factive mental duplicates. This kind of view seems to be an obvious non-starter if we shift away from belief and think about emotion and will hopefully seem to be a non-starter when we shift back again to the case of belief. If the correct answer to the Constitution Question is the factualist view that says that reasons consist of facts, we can turn to the Possession Question. What does it take to have facts as your reasons, reasons that can guide you in belief and action? Knowledge should be sufficient for possession.6 If you know p, you're nonaccidentally right about p, so it seems that p should be something that could guide you. If you know p, you're entitled to believe p and that entitlement or right comes with the right to include p in your reasoning. It seems that motivating reasons for belief have to wear two hats. You have to be related to it in such a way that you're able to φ for that very reason and here knowledge seems to rule out the accidental connections between belief 6 Most critics of E=K focus on necessity, not sufficiency. See Conee and Feldman (2008), Hughes (2014), Locke (2015), McCain (2014), McGlynn (2014), Mantel (2013), and Silins (2005), for example. For defenses of necessity and sufficiency, see Bird (2004), Dietz (MS), Hyman (1999, 2006), Littlejohn (2013), and Williamson (2000). While some of the objections to necessity focus on the truth-condition, some focus on the role of environmental luck. For discussion of environmental luck and the possession of reasons, see Littlejohn (2014). 7 and fact that would prevent you from being guided by the relevant fact. You have to have authority or warrant and knowledge seems sufficient for that, too. With this much in place, we have a quick argument for externalism. We'll suppose that the skeptic is wrong and that we have knowledge of the external world. If so, we'll know some facts about the external world. If so, we'll possess reasons that consist of such facts. If, however, we had no such reasons, it follows rather quickly that we wouldn't have knowledge of such facts. Non-skeptical internalism is a muddled mess. Now, this argument is certainly available to Pritchard and he should feel free to use it. It doesn't support epistemological disjunctivism, however. There are alternatives on which everything I've just said is true but ED is false. Suppose you think that E=K is true and you think that a subject's reasons will include all and only what they know. On such a view, it's true that you couldn't know p unless you had better reasons available to you than your deceived counterparts would, but it's not clear yet why we'd need to appeal to ED to explain why this is so. If E=K is correct, this is just a trivial consequence of E=K and an anti-skeptical assumption. The argument I've just sketched is really just an argument against internalism, not an argument for any particular externalist view. It's here that I think Pritchard might try to argue that knowledge requires a kind of rational support and that it's only possible to have this support if ED is true. In offering such an argument, we would shift our attention away from the Possession and Constitution questions and try to answer the Adequacy Question. Although this argument doesn't receive a great deal of discussion in the book, Pritchard does seem to offer this argument against internalism. He suggests that when the knowledge of a proposition depends upon having evidential support, the kind of support required is favoring support: FP: If (i) S knows that p, and (ii) knows that q, and (iii) knows that p entails q, S has better evidence in support of her belief that p than for believing that not-q (2012: 76). Better evidence, he says, is evidence that makes the target proposition more likely. This causes trouble for the internalists, he says, because it's not at all clear how the internalist could plausibly claim that we have favoring support for our beliefs about the external world. As they see it, our evidence is evidence we share with our systematically deceived counterparts and it doesn't seem that such evidence favors the hypothesis that we have hands, say, over the rival hypothesis that we're BIVs (2012: 120). It seems that Pritchard's objection to internalism assumes that the reason that internalism implies that we don't have favoring evidence for believing that we have hands is that we'd have the same evidence in the good case and in the bad. This suggests that you couldn't have favoring evidence for the hypothesis that we have hands over the hypothesis that we're handless BIVs unless we would have different evidence in the two scenarios: FD: If S has favoring evidence that better supports her belief that p than for believing not-q, S would have different evidence if p than if not-q. If this is how favoring evidence is understood, it's clear why internalists cannot claim that their account vindicates the intuitions that underwrite FP. 8 Here's one worry about appealing to the favoring principle to support ED. In introducing the principle, Pritchard hedges and says that it's plausible when we consider, "those propositions which, if known at all, one knows in virtue of possessing appropriate supporting evidence" (2012: 76). It's not at all clear whether we should think of perceptual beliefs as being based on evidence. If they aren't, it doesn't seem that FP applies to the cases of non-inferential visual knowledge. If it doesn't apply to these cases, it doesn't seem that arguments from the favoring principle will lend much support to ED. What's needed is some reason to think that perceptual beliefs are based on reasons and some reason to think that the reason has to be something like the fact that you see that something is so. We might turn to McDowell at this point because he seems to provide just such an argument. Consider McDowell's complaints about hybrid accounts of knowledge: In the hybrid conception, a satisfactory standing in the space of reasons is only part of what knowledge is; truth is an extra requirement. So two subjects can be alike in respect of the satisfactoriness of their standing in the space of reasons, although only one of them is a knower... But if its being so is external to her operations in the space of reasons, how can it not be outside the reach of her rational powers? And if it is outside the reach of her rational powers, how can its being so be the crucial element in an intelligible conception of her knowing that it is so--what makes the relevant difference between her and the other subject (1998: 403)? The idea here seems to be that if you're 'in the know', this has to be the result of having reasons that provide the right kind of rational support, support that would constitute favoring support, to use Pritchard's terminology. If you like slogans, the idea would be that facts or reasons are first. The facts/reasons possessed are prior to knowledge and so possession can explain how knowledge is acquired. McDowell's line here seems to be that if there were cases of knowledge without supporting reasons, the subject would have knowledge and so have cognitive purchase of a fact but there would be no story to tell about how the obtaining of this fact could confer any benefit upon the knowing subject. This gets us part of the way there, but why should we think that to know p visually, you need a further reason, such as the fact that you see that p? Why can't we say, following Schroeder, that your reason for believing p when you have a veridical experience as of p is simply p (2011: 215)? It's clear that McDowell thinks it's silly to say that a subject's reason for believing p is simply p, but it's difficult to distill any argument in the work that I've seen.7 My suggestion is that a subject's reason for believing something has to be something that convinced her that something is so. It's not at all clear how p could be what convinced you that p. To be your reason for believing p, it has to be 'the light in which' you took it that there was something good about believing p, but if it played that role, it would seem that you'd have to already be committed to p for p to 7 He dismisses the idea that p could be your reason for believing p in McDowell (2006: 134). 9 convince you of something.8 Thus, if there is something that's your reason for believing p, it's something that isn't p. With this in place, we have a general argument, then, for ED: First Argument for Epistemological Disjunctivism 1. If knowledge is a matter of having cognitive purchase on a fact, the fact cannot be outside of the reach of the subject's rational powers. 2. If the fact cannot be beyond the reach of the subject's rational powers, necessarily, knowledgeable beliefs are based on sufficient reason and the target fact obtains if the subject has sufficient reason to believe that it obtains. C1. So, if knowledge is a matter of having cognitive purchase on a fact, necessarily, knowledgeable beliefs are based on sufficient reason and the target fact obtains if the subject has sufficient reason to believe that it obtains. 3. Knowledge is a matter of having cognitive purchase on a fact. C2. Knowledgeable beliefs must be based on sufficient reason where you have sufficient reason to believe p only if your reasons entail that p obtains. 4. If knowledgeable beliefs must be based on sufficient reason and you have sufficient reason to believe p only if your reasons entail that p obtains, your reason for believing p will either be p itself or some further fact that entails p. 5. It must be a further fact because the stuttering inference does not generate knowledge. C3. If your belief in p is a knowledgeable belief, your reason for holding that belief is some further fact that entails p. In the case of visual belief, the only natural candidate is the further fact that you see that something is so. Let's consider a second argument for ED. The previous argument tries to show that knowledgeable beliefs have to be based on reasons and then argues that only a certain kind of reason could play the required role to turn a belief into a knowledgeable belief. This argument aims to establish the same conclusion, but from a different starting point. Second Argument for Epistemological Disjunctivism 1. Perceptual beliefs are beliefs based on reasons because when we ask subjects who hold such beliefs why they believe the relevant target propositions or ask how they know the target propositions, the question has application and subjects are well positioned to offer a rationalizing explanation. 8 The 'light in which' is McDowell's (1978) gloss. 10 2. If your perceptual belief that p is based on a reason and believing for this reason explains why your perceptual belief constitutes knowledge, that reason has to provide factive support for believing p. 3. The potential reasons for believing p that provide factive support are the fact that p or some further fact that entails p. 4. Your reason for believing p cannot be p. C. If your belief in p is a knowledgeable belief, your reason for holding this belief is some further fact that entails p. Let me note an important difference between these arguments. The first tries to derive a claim about the kinds of reasons that support visual beliefs from some general claims about the requirements for knowledge. The second tries to derive a claim about the kinds of reasons that support visual beliefs by offering a reason for thinking of visual beliefs as being based on reasons along with some further claims about what the adequacy of support amounts to. I'll discuss these arguments in §2 and §3 respectively. 2. Let's Get Metaphysical! A crucial premise in our first argument for ED is this: KR: All propositional knowledge involves believing something for a reason.9 It's important to stress that the kind of reason that matters here is motivating, not merely explanatory. All motivating reasons that explain our actions or attitudes are explanatory reasons. If something was your reason for buying more gin or believing that you're out of olives, it's a reason why you buy more gin or believe that you're out of olives. The converse isn't so. A reason why your deceived counterpart believes that she has hands is that it seems to her that she does. A reason why your deceived counterpart believes that she has hands is that she's deceived by a demon. That's not her reason for believing what she does! There are epistemic constraints on motivating reasons, but not on explanatory reasons unless those explanatory reasons are also motivating reasons. That's because motivating reasons are supposed to capture the light in which a subject's response struck her as being appropriate, good, or fitting. If we assume KR, there's a quick and easy argument from the non-skeptical assumption that we have some visual knowledge to the claim that our relevant visual beliefs are based on reasons. With that in place, we can then argue that only certain kinds of reasons could provide adequate support for these beliefs. In their own ways, McDowell or Pritchard could argue that we need factive support for such beliefs if they're to constitute knowledge. Since your reason for believing p cannot be p, there must be some further fact that provides rational support for p and the epistemological disjunctivist suggests that that fact is the fact that you see that p. Some authors say that your reason is that it seems that p or that it appears to you that p and while that's a different fact to the 9 See McDowell (2002) for a discussion of whether the proposition known could itself be the reason for which you believe. 11 fact that p, it's not a fact that could provide sufficient support for believing p if McDowell and Pritchard are right. The question to consider at this point is how it's possible to believe something for the reason that you see that p. One suggestion is this. The subject knows that she sees that p and then reasons from the premise that she sees that p to some conclusion, such as that p is true. While this might be possible, this isn't the proposal on the table. If this is our model, we need a story about how the subject knows that she sees that p. KR tells us that she knows that she sees that p only if there's something she knows that's her reason for believing that she sees that p. The considerations from above tell us, in turn, that this is some further fact, one that provides factive support for believing that she sees that p. It's not at all clear what this would be. It doesn't matter what this fact is, really, for we can ask again whether this fact is known or not. If not, we need a story about how this fact gets into the subject's 'evidence box'. If it's known, we need a further fact again. If at every point the possessed reason is possessed by virtue of being known, a regress results. It's best to try to avoid that regress now and reject the idea that the subject needs to know that she sees that p for this to be her reason for believing something. If we can't appeal to knowledge to explain how the subject's reason for believing something could be that she sees that p, the natural alternative is experience.10 It's by virtue of having a certain kind of perceptual experience that she can believe something for the reason that she sees that something is so. On the traditional view of experience, to see that something is so, I suppose one must have an experience as of p and p must be the case. Some further conditions would have to be met to ensure that this is a case of seeing that p and not a case of veridical hallucination. If seeing that p is the kind of thing that puts a subject in a position to know that p and being in such a position requires that you have a rational basis for your belief that's going to establish a non-accidental connection between the believer and the fact, the fact that p has to be related to the experience as of p in an appropriate way. These further conditions wouldn't have any bearing on how the experience was individuated, however, for the experience is conceived of something that's common to the good case and the bad. According to McDowell, experiences so conceived could not do the epistemological work required of them: 10 This is not a capitulation to 'experience-first' epistemology of the kind defended by Dougherty and Rysiew (2014). They think that experience is epistemically prior to knowledge and that it is epistemically first. We could say instead that reasons are epistemically prior to knowledge (although, I would resist this) and the remarks above are sufficient to explain why it's a mistake to follow Dougherty and Rysiew in identifying reasons with experiences rather than facts. (For a defense of the conception of reasons as facts, see Alvarez (2010) and Dancy (1999).) There are further reasons not to identify reasons with experiences. Experiences are concrete events and as such are things that have temporal locations. Reasons stand in logical relations. There's nothing concrete that stands in a logical relation and there's nothing that has a temporal location that stands in logical relations. Events are also coarse-grained particulars. As Neta (2008) reminds us, coarse-grained particulars aren't suited for the role of reason because they cannot rationally constrain belief or degrees of confidence. 12 The root idea is that one's epistemic standing ... cannot intelligibly be constituted, even in part, by matters blankly external to how it is with one subjectively. For how could such matters be other than beyond one's ken? And how could matters beyond one's ken make any difference to one's epistemic standing? ... But the disjunctive conception of appearances shows a way to detach this "internalist" intuition from the requirement of a non-question begging demonstration. When someone has a fact made manifest to him, the obtaining of this fact contributes to his epistemic standing on the question. But the obtaining of the fact is precisely not blankly external to his subjectivity, as it would be if the truth about that were exhausted by the highest common factor (1998: 390). The worry, then, is something like this. Since we can't use knowledge to explain the possession of factive reasons for our visual beliefs, we need to appeal to experience to explain how it is that we have such reasons. The traditional view of experience says that a subject's experience in the good case is nothing more than what's present in the bad, which suggests that the crucial requirement for having factive support for your perceptual beliefs is 'blankly external' to the subject's mental life. It's placed outside the reach of the operation of her rational faculties, and so cannot be the something that provides the favoring support needed to put a subject in a position to know that something is so. If we look for motivation for epistemological disjunctivism in McDowell's arguments against the hybrid conception of knowledge, it's not surprising that the arguments against the cogency of the hybrid conception of knowledge turns out to cause trouble for the traditional conception of experience. With KR in place, we need something that isn't propositional knowledge to understand how we possess reasons that constitute the rational basis for such knowledge. If experience is going to do the work, it seems that the traditional conception of experience must be rejected. While Pritchard is certainly right that there's no inconsistency in accepting ED whilst rejecting MD, it's not clear how we could get hold of the reasons that ED tells us constitutes the basis of our visual knowledge unless MD is correct. One question to press epistemological disjunctivists like Pritchard on is this. Unless you're willing to embrace McDowell's metaphysical disjunctivism, how could your beliefs be based on the reason that you see that something is so? If you want to resist this kind of metaphysical disjunctivism (which I think there's good reason to do), it looks like you'd have to respond to McDowell's epistemological argument for metaphysical disjunctivism.11 My worry is that the responses that might undermine his argument for MD would have to show that the traditional conception of experience is cogent and that any such defense of the traditional conception of experience could do double duty as a defense of the cogency of the hybrid conception of knowledge. 11 While I have no objection to metaphysical disjunctivism, I have concerns about McDowell's version of metaphysical disjunctivism. See French (2016) and Travis (2013) for discussion. 13 There's a further potential problem with the envisaged argument. While many epistemologists believe that our visual beliefs are based on reasons, few believe that they are based on factive reasons. These epistemologists will want to know why our visual beliefs have to be based on reasons that provide factive support and we've seen two ways that Pritchard might explain the need for such reasons. First, he might argue that alternatives to ED aren't adequate because they don't explain how we could have favoring support for our beliefs. Second, he might appeal to McDowell's arguments against the hybrid conception of knowledge. The strategy would be to argue that certain conditions are necessary for visual knowledge on the grounds that these conditions are required for knowledge as such. My main concern here is that whether we go with Pritchard's favoring principle or go with McDowell's argument, it seems that a crucial step in the argument for ED will be something like this: Infallibilism: All propositional knowledge requires believing something for entailing reasons.12 Now, it's one thing to say that all propositional knowledge requires believing something that you have entailing evidence for. E=K gives you that and it doesn't lead to any untoward skeptical results precisely because it doesn't commit you to KR and doesn't require that the entailing evidence you'd have that supports a known proposition is some further fact that could have been your basis for believing the target proposition. Infallibilism as it's understood here requires something more because it says that you couldn't come to know something unless your reason for believing it entailed the target proposition. As we've seen, your reason for believing something is always a further fact, so this bit of cleverness isn't available to the defenders of ED. If we shift our focus away from the case of visual belief to cases of inferential knowledge, it certainly looks as if Pritchard's favoring principle or McDowell's rejection of the hybrid conception of knowledge will result in a kind of inductive skepticism. As suggested earlier, it looks like McDowell's rejection of the hybrid conception of knowledge commits him to something like Pritchard's favoring principle on the reading offered above. It looks as if McDowell and Pritchard agree that knowledge requires favoring support in the sense that it requires an evidential basis for your knowledgeable beliefs that you couldn't have unless you were in a position to know the relevant target propositions. In cases of inductive inference, we have no such evidential basis. It doesn't seem that the mere lack of such a basis guarantees that you're not in a position to know, but if you can know something by means of inductive inference, it certainly looks as if this is knowledge without favoring support. None of the criticisms discussed here are directed at ED. What I've done in this section is look at some potential strategies for defending ED, argued that they would seem to commit us to MD, and argued that the strategies appeal to some principles about knowledge that seem to generate a kind of skepticism about induction. The challenge that proponents of ED face is that of providing a better motivation for ED, one that avoids the difficulties associated with McDowell's view by virtue of his apparent 12 See Brueckner (2005) for further discussion. 14 commitment to MD and his apparent difficulties dealing with cases of inductive inference. 3. Knowledge, Reasons, and Basing If you have concerns about the epistemological assumptions underwriting the first argument for epistemological disjunctivism, we might try to argue from some more modest assumptions. Rather than argue from general assumptions about the kinds of reasons you'd have to base your beliefs on to have knowledge, we might try to argue that the case of visual belief is a case of believing something for a reason, argue that this reason has to be distinct from the fact believed, and argue that there's no good reason to insist that this reason is one that's available to your deceived internal duplicates. The starting point for the second argument is the claim that when we have visual knowledge, our perceptual belief is based on reasons. There's something that's your reason for believing that, say, Agnes is sleeping on the sofa, and ED tells us that if you know that she's sleeping on the sofa, it's that you see that she's sleeping on the sofa. I'm open to the idea that we believe things, do things, or feel things for reasons that consist of facts about the situation, but it's not clear why we should think of visual beliefs as being based on reasons. As someone attracted to E=K, I'd think that the reason that it seems quite natural to say that perception provides us with reasons is that perception provides us with knowledge. I wouldn't take the further step and say that perception provides us with knowledge by providing us with reasons that we might possess without possessing perceptual knowledge as E=K tells us that cases of non-inferential belief aren't cases of believing things for reasons. What's wrong with this picture? Why should we think of visual belief as being based on reasons? The problem with my preferred approach cannot be that it doesn't have any positive story to tell about how we acquire non-inferential knowledge. If you're looking for a view on which perceptual knowledge doesn't require basing beliefs on motivating reasons, we're spoiled for choice. There is a line that's popular amongst some action theorists, which is that every intelligible, intentional action is done for a reason. These are the actions where Anscombe's (2000) special 'why?' question has application and the answer to such questions specifies the agent's reason for doing what she did. If we apply this to the case of belief, we might say that every intelligible, rational belief is something believed for a reason. This isn't just to say that in every case of intelligible, rational belief there is a reason why the subject believes what she does. The point is the stronger point that in every such case, there's something that's the subject's reason for believing what she does. In the case of action, there must have been something that was the agent's reason if the action is to be intelligible. In the case of belief, there must have been something that was the subject's reason if the belief is to be intelligible. It is the kind of thing that the subject would offer if asked why they believe something or how they know something. And it's here that Pritchard's earlier observation matters. If Pritchard is right, and I think he is, that we often appeal to external reasons in explaining why we believe something or how we know something, perhaps we have the start of an argument for ED. In explaining how I know that Agnes is sleeping on the couch, I'd say that I see her there. In the cases 15 where I can cite such a thing in support of my belief, I'll have visual knowledge. In the cases where I'm mistaken in thinking that I could cite such a thing, I won't. If this is right, it seems we've identified some reason for thinking that visual beliefs are based on reasons. With this much in case, it looks like we have some reason to prefer ED to the Williamsonian view I prefer for the key difference between these views seems to be that the Williamsonian view denies that visual beliefs are based on reasons whereas ED doesn't. As we saw earlier, there's a straightforward argument for thinking that it's only views along these lines that can avoid skepticism, so we have the makings of an impressive argument for ED. While I suspect that most readers will side with Pritchard here in thinking that visual belief is based on reasons, let me note that there's a prima facie troubling implication of ED when coupled with the following thesis: RR: If S's belief about p is rational or intelligible, S's belief about p is based on a reason. Think about the bad case in which a subject believes Agnes to be sleeping on the sofa because the subject is hallucinating. I don't think the subject's belief in such a case is justified, but it does seem intelligible or rational. Perhaps Pritchard would agree. If he does, RR implies that the bad case is a case of believing something for a reason. What could the subject's reason be? If it's the bad case, we cannot describe the subject's reason as the fact that the subject sees that something is the case and we cannot describe the subject's reason as the fact she believes being the case. Maybe it's the fact that it seems to her that Agnes is sleeping on the sofa. Whatever it is, it's crucial that the subject's reason in the bad case isn't the subject's reason in the good. ED tells us that the subject's reason in the good provides factive support for a fact that isn't a fact in the bad. Thus, it looks like RR combined with ED leads to disjunctivism about motivating reasons: MRD: If a subject φ's for the reason that p in the good case but p is false in the bad, the subject φ's for a reason in the bad case, but the reason isn't that p. While some do defend MRD, the view strikes me as being extremely problematic. For a start, it strikes me as odd to suggest that there might be differences between the pairs of subject's reasons for φ-ing in the relevant cases because the subject's reasons are supposed to capture the light in which these subjects φ. If these subjects are non-factive mental duplicates, they'll believe that their reasons for φ-ing will be the same. It's one thing to be mistaken about explanatory reasons, but it's quite another to be mistaken about motivating reasons. In the bad case, the subject's experience doesn't faithfully represent how things are. How does this failure explain the subject's failure to understand her own reasons for φ-ing? There's a second problem here, which is that those who want to say that both subjects φ for reasons while allowing that they φ for different reasons has to say that these subjects φ for different reasons even though there is no difference in their non-factive attitudes or the psychological processes involving such attitudes. While I think it's a mistake to say that rationalizing explanations are purely psychological, there are psychological constraints on what an acceptable rationalizing explanation should look like. One plausible constraint is that for any difference in pairs of subjects' motivating 16 reasons, there must be some difference in their non-factive attitudes, a difference in how they take things to be. Let me note one further problem with MRD. I think that MRD doesn't actually do very well when it comes to helping us understand how the relevant range of subjects and their attitudes count as intelligible or rational. This is clearest in the case of emotion. If subjects felt things for the kinds of reasons that MRD suggests, they wouldn't be intelligible and they wouldn't be irrational. Let's consider again the facile argument for internalism about motivating reasons sketched above. Some of us want to describe good cases like this: GC1: Agnes' reason for believing that we're out of gin is that she sees the bottles are empty. GC2: Agnes' reason for heading out the door is that we're out of gin. GC3: Agnes' reason for being upset is that someone drank all the gin. Focus on GC3. We imagine a case in which Agnes is mistaken about the gin. We can't say that this is a case in which Agnes' reason for being upset is that someone drank all the gin because this is a case in which, say, there's plenty of gin left in the cupboard. We describe it as follows: BC3: Agnes' reason for being upset is that she believes that someone drank all the gin. That can't be! What makes Agnes upset is something she's aware and something she doesn't want to be or happen. Agnes doesn't want not to believe that someone drank all the gin. What Agnes wants is gin and if she's upset that something is so, it's something to do with gin, not her beliefs. If we applied MRD to the case of emotion, we end up ascribing reasons to Agnes that make her unintelligible and quite unreasonable. If Agnes is reasonable and her attitudes are intelligible, she couldn't be upset that she believes something about the amount of gin in the flat. Similarly, if Agnes is reasonable and her actions are intelligible, her reason for going to the store won't be that she believes that we're out of gin. This isn't the kind of thing that calls for a trip to the store or calls for more gin. Moreover, if Agnes is reasonable and her attitudes are intelligible, her reason for believing that we're out of gin won't be that she believes the bottles to be empty. She doesn't just believe that we're out of gin, mind you, she believes it with the very same degree of confidence that she does in the good case. Someone who would believe that we're out of gin to the same degree of confidence on the basis of this very different sort of evidence is not reasonable. I suspect epistemologists would recognize this if they thought more about the case of emotion, but it's been a sadly neglected case.13 What that case reminds us is that our reasons are what convince us that something is so, convince us to do things, and make us feel things. What convinces us that something is so are the facts that figure in our reasoning just as what makes us happy, sad, upset, or angry are the facts we have in mind. What convinces us that something is so is not necessarily the same thing as what explains why we're convinced and running these two things together lends spurious credibility to 13 See Gordon's (1987) discussion of knowledge and emotion. 17 the kinds of silly views on which our reasons are always mental things. I suspect MRD rests on a similar sort of conflation. The assumption is that because something made Agnes think that she's out of gin, her beliefs must have been based on a reason. No, not necessarily. Upon reflection she might think that it is, but that's no guarantee. What is guaranteed, if you accept the principle of sufficient reason, is that there's a reason why she believes what she does. That's not the same thing, however, it might be the kind of thing that helps us see why her actions and attitudes are intelligible or rational in spite of the fact that they aren't based on reasons. If I'm right and the case of emotion shows that MRD is mistaken, it looks like the considerations that cause trouble for MRD cause trouble for RR. What makes an emotional response based on a mistaken belief rational isn't that the emotional response is based on a reason. Once we see that, we should start to wonder why we should think that the case of visual belief is a case of believing something for a reason. 14 The motivation for thinking this has proven to be unreliable. As I said earlier, if we give up on the idea that our visual beliefs are based on reasons, there are still things we can say to explain how such beliefs could constitute knowledge. One could, for example, say that much of our visual knowledge results from the operation of recognitional capacities under appropriate conditions where these capacities produce knowledgeable belief as an output without taking reasons as inputs. Such a view would have some of the advertised virtues of ED and I don't yet see what this approach is missing. What I want to know is the reason to introduce reasons into the story as the rational basis for visual knowledge. References Alvarez, Maria. 2010. Kinds of Reasons. Oxford University Press. Anscombe, G.E.M. 2000. Intention. Harvard University Press. Bird, Alexander. 2004. Is Evidence Non-Inferential? Philosophical Quarterly 54: 253–65. Brueckner, Anthony. 2005. Fallibilism, Underdetermination, and Skepticism. 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