Although there is disagreement about the details, John Pollock’s framework for defeat is now part of the received wisdom in analytic epistemology. Recently, however, cracks have appeared in the consensus, particularly on the understanding of undercutting defeat. While not questioning the existence of undercutting defeat, Scott Sturgeon argues that undercutting defeat operates differently from rebutting. Unlike the latter, undercutting defeat, Sturgeon claims, occurs only in conjunction with certain higher-order contributions, i.e., with beliefs about the basis on which one does or (...) would believe. Sturgeon concludes that Pollock misconceives undercutting defeat. I argue that in the case of defeat of inferential justification, undercutting defeat is a genuine phenomenon and takes roughly the shape Pollock suggests, not needing help from higher-order beliefs or justifications. However, I agree with Sturgeon that for noninferential justification the Pollockian account is in trouble. I try to explain why there should be this difference. This difference in defeaters has important implications for epistemology. In a final section, I use the defeat-related difference between inferential and noninferential justification to argue that there is less noninferential perceptual or testimonial justification than is commonly thought. (shrink)

Epistemic reasons are meant to provide justification for beliefs. In this paper, I will be concerned with the requirements that have to be met if reasons are to discharge this function. It is widely recognized, however, that only possessed reasons can justify beliefs and actions. But what are the conditions that have to be satisfied in order for one to possess reasons? I shall begin by motivating a particular condition, namely, the ‘treating’ requirement that has been deemed to be necessary (...) for possessing reasons. In Sect. 1, I explain and criticize some of the existing accounts of the treating requirement for reason-possession. In Sect. 2, I will suggest a dispositional account of reason-possession in which the treating condition features prominently. Section 3 will deal with the some of the consequences of this account for such issues as the structure of epistemic defeat, the immediacy of perceptual justification and logical knowledge. (shrink)

W. V. Quine famously claimed that no statement is immune to revision. This thesis has had a profound impact on twentieth century philosophy, and it still occupies centre stage in many contemporary debates. However, despite its importance it is not clear how it should be interpreted. I show that the thesis is in fact ambiguous between three substantially different theses. I illustrate the importance of clarifying it by assessing its use in the debate against the existence of a priori knowledge. (...) I show how the three different readings of the thesis can be used to generate three substantially different and philosophically significant arguments against the a priori. I further challenge each one of these arguments against the a priori. (shrink)

It is argued that higher-order awareness is central to one type of everyday rationality. The author starts by specifying the target notion of rationality, contrasting it with other useful notions in the neighbourhood. It is then shown that the target notion relies on first-person awareness of the unfolding of cognition. This is used to explain the kernel of truth in epistemic conservatism, the structure of defeasibility, and the root motive behind the widely accepted distinction between rational inference and trivial entailment.

According to certain views about human ontology, the way we seem is very different from the way we are. The appearances are a threat to such views. Here I take up and defuse the threat to one such view.Pure immaterialism says that each of us is wholly immaterial. The appearances suggest otherwise. I argue that despite the fact that we might sometimes appear to be at least partly material, and that we can be perceptually justified in believing something solely on (...) the basis of having a perceptual experience as of its being the case, none of us is ever perceptually justified in believing that we are even partly material (or that we’re not). Bottom line: we might be able to know whether we’re material, but we can’t know just by looking. (shrink)

Pre-natal genetic enhancement affords us unprecedented capacity to shape our skills, talents, appearance and perhaps subsequently the quality of our lives in terms of overall happiness, success and wellbeing. Despite its powerful appeal, some have raised important and equally persuasive concerns against genetic enhancement. Sandel has argued that compassion and humility, themselves grounded in the unpredictability of talents and skills, would be lost. Habermas has argued that genetically altered individuals will see their lives as dictated by their parents’ design and (...) therefore will not acquire an appropriate self-understanding. How should we view enhancement efforts in light of these concerns? I propose that we begin by adopting a defeasibility stance. That is, I ask whether our belief that genetic enhancements serve in the best interests of the child is reason to genetically enhance, underscoring a sort of epistemic vulnerability. I utilize the epistemological notions of defeasible reasons, undercutting and overriding defeaters in order to better understand and systematically evaluate the force of such concerns. I argue that close examination of both objections using this framework shows that we have reason to enhance, a reason that is defeasible but as yet, undefeated. (shrink)

Taking the inspiration from some points made by Scott Sturgeon and Albert Casullo, I articulate a view according to which an important difference between undermining and overriding defeaters is that the former require the subject to engage in some higher-order epistemic thinking, while the latter don’t. With the help of some examples, I argue that underminers push the cognizer to reflect on the way she formed a belief by challenging the epistemic worthiness of either the source of justification or the (...) specific justificatory process. By contrast, overriders needn’t pose any such challenge. I also consider some problems for the proposed view, and I put forward some possible solutions. Finally, I provide some details on how undermining defeat works in different cases. (shrink)

One emerging issue in contemporary epistemology concerns the relation between animal knowledge, which can be had by agents unable to take a view on the epistemic status of their attitudes, and reflective knowledge, which is only available to agents capable of taking such a view. Philosophers who are open to animal knowledge often presume that while many of the beliefs of human adults are formed unreflectively and thus constitute mere animal knowledge, some of them—those which become subject of explicit scrutiny (...) or are the result of a deliberative effort—may attain the status of reflective knowledge. According to Sanford Goldberg and Jonathan Matheson (2020), however, it is impossible for reflective subjects to have mere animal knowledge. If correct, their view would have a number of repercussions, perhaps most notably the vindication of a dualism about knowledge, which would frustrate attempts to provide a unified account of knowledge-attributions to human adults, very young children, and non-human animals. I discuss Goldberg and Matheson’s proposal, outline some of the ways in which it is insightful, and argue that it is ultimately unsuccessful because it neglects the inherent temporal dimension of knowledge acquisition. While the article is pitched as a reply to Goldberg and Matheson, its primary aim is to highlight significant connections between the debates on the relation between animal and reflective knowledge, propositional and doxastic justification, and the theory of epistemic defeat. (shrink)

While growing empirical evidence suggests a continuity between human and non-human psychology, many philosophers still think that only humans can act and form beliefs rationally. In this paper, we challenge this claim. We first clarify the notion of rationality. We then focus on the rationality of beliefs and argue that, in the relevant sense, humans are not the only rational animals. We do so by first distinguishing between unreflective and reflective responsiveness to epistemic reasons in belief formation and revision. We (...) argue that unreflective responsiveness is clearly within the reach of many animals. We then defend that a key demonstration of reflective responsiveness would be the ability to respond to undermining defeaters. We end by presenting some empirical evidence that suggests that some animal species are capable of processing these defeaters, which would entail that even by the strictest standards, humans are not the only rational animals. (shrink)

Phenomenal conservatism is a popular theory of epistemic justification. Despite its popularity and the fact that some think that phenomenal conservatism can provide a complete account of justification, it faces several challenges. Among these challenges are the need to provide accounts of defeaters and inferential justification. Fortunately, there is hope for phenomenal conservatism. Explanationism, the view on which justification is a matter of explanatory considerations, can help phenomenal conservatism with both of these challenges. The resulting view is one that respects (...) the internalist character of phenomenal conservatism and its motivating intuitions while providing an intuitive and elegant account of both inferential justification and the justificatory impact of defeaters. (shrink)

Evolutionary Debunking Arguments purport to show that our moral beliefs do not amount to knowledge because these beliefs are “debunked” by the fact that our moral beliefs are, in some way, the product of evolutionary forces. But there is a substantial gap in this argument between its main evolutionary premise and the skeptical conclusion. What is it, exactly, about the evolutionary origins of moral beliefs that would create problems for realist views in metaethics? I argue that evolutionary debunking arguments are (...) best understood as offering up defeaters for our moral beliefs. Moreover, the defeater in question is a paradigmatic instance of undercutting defeat. If anything is an undercutting defeater, then learning about the evolutionary origins of our moral beliefs is a defeater for those beliefs. (shrink)

I make a case for distinguishing clearly between subjective and objective accounts of undercutting defeat and for rejecting a hybrid view that takes both subjective and objective elements to be relevant for whether or not a belief is defeated. Moderate subjectivists claim that taking a belief to be defeated is sufficient for the belief to be defeated; subjectivist idealists add that if an idealised agent takes a belief to be defeated then the belief is defeated. Subjectivist idealism evades some of (...) the objections levelled against moderate subjectivism but can be shown to yield inconsistent results in some cases. Both subjectivisms should be rejected. We should be objectivists regarding undercutting defeat. This requirement, however, is likely to be problematic for a popular interpretation of evolutionary debunking arguments in metaethics as it can be shown that existing objectivist accounts of defeat do not support such arguments. I end by discussing the constraints of developing such an account. (shrink)

Philosophers disagree about the role of reflection for rationality, understood as the capacity to (properly) respond to genuine, normative reasons. Here, ‘reflection’ means the capacity for self-conscious normative meta-cognition. This article develops and rejects a novel argument – the argument from undercutting defeaters – in favor of the ‘one-level view’ that holds that having the concept of a belief (and of a reason) is necessary for responding to reasons. It will be argued that the ‘two-level view’, which allows for rational (...) subjects that can only non-reflectively respond to reasons, is supported by considerations dealing with the role of responding to reasons for rational action. Rationality is not as unified as the one-level view wants to have it. We start with the non-reflective way of rationally forming beliefs and then grow into the reflective way. (shrink)

Denying the conclusion of a valid argument is not generally permissible if one suspends on one premise of the argument and believes the other premise. This can happen when one’s only critique of an argument is to undermine one premise. There is incoherence there. Here I examine how this is relevant to the debate on evolutionary debunking of our moral knowledge. I argue that one significant line of response to the debunker is unsuccessful: merely undermining the debunker’s empirical claim. It (...) is not rational to respond this way and believe one has moral knowledge. First I present evidence that prominent critics of the debunking argument merely undermine the debunker’s empirical claim. Then I argue for two premises: merely undermining a premise can only justify a middling amount of doubt towards the premise and we should have no more doubt about the conclusion of a valid argument than we do about the premises. Implications of the argument are explored. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a solution to the problem that the need to accommodate the phenomenon of epistemic defeat poses for reliabilism. Defeaters are supposed to remove justification for previously justified beliefs. According to standard process reliabilism, the justification of a belief depends on the reliability of a process that is already completed when a defeater for that belief is obtained. It is hard to see, then, how a defeater can affect reliabilist justification, if that justification, from the perspective (...) of the defeater, lies wholly in the past. What is more, undercutting defeaters plausibly defeat by generating incompatibilities with higher-order propositions :105–118, 2014; Melis in Philos Stud 170:433–442, 2014). This is hard to integrate with reliabilism which explicitly denies higher-order conditions for justification. I argue that both of these phenomena can be accommodated by it via what I call the “Replacement Principle”: when a defeater is obtained, it generates either a logical incompatibility or a doxastic incompatibility. The resulting tension is registered and initiates a reasoning process that compares the epistemic support for the defeater with that for the defeated belief. This process may replace the original reliable formation process as a doxastic base for the defeated belief. If the defeater is not given its due weight in the reasoning process, that process was unreliable and if the defeated belief is retained as a result, it will be unjustified. This is intuitively the right result. Since reasoning is reliable, only if it is rational, the account manages to capture the intuition that disregarding a defeater would be irrational without having to make rationality a condition for justification. Replacement is not only plausible on causal pictures of doxastic basing, but also required in order to allow for the possibility of belief reevaluation in general and is therefore not an ad hoc addition to reliabilism, but rather part of its inherent explanatory resources. (shrink)

Philosophical Issues, Volume 30, Issue 1, Page 54-70, October 2020.

Two truisms about empirical justification are that experience plays a crucial role in it and that it is defeasible. There are, of course, different ways of developing these truisms into philosophical theories. I favor one particular view about the role of experience in empirical justification which may be thought to lead to problems in accommodating its defeasibility. My aim in this paper is to argue that the problems are illusory, based on an entrenched misconception how defeaters work.

Modal Security is an increasingly discussed proposed necessary condition on undermining defeat. Modal Security says, roughly, that if evidence undermines (rather than rebuts) one’s belief, then one gets reason to doubt the belief's safety or sensitivity. The primary interest of the principle is that it seems to entail that influential epistemological arguments, including Evolutionary Debunking Arguments against moral realism and the Benacerraf-Field Challenge for mathematical realism, are unsound. The purpose of this paper is to critically examine Modal Security in detail. (...) We develop and discuss what we take to be the strongest objections to the principle. One of the aims of the paper is to expose the weakness of these objections. Another is to reveal how the debate over Modal Security interacts with core problems in epistemology — including the generality problem, and the distinction between direct and indirect evidence. (shrink)

Scott Sturgeon has recently challenged Pollock’s account of undercutting defeaters. The challenge involves three primary contentions: the account is both too strong and too weak, undercutting defeaters exercise their power to defeat only in conjunction with higher-order beliefs about the basis of the lower-order beliefs whose justification they target, and since rebutting defeaters exercise their power to defeat in isolation, rebutting and undercutting defeaters work in fundamentally different ways. My goal is to reject each of these contentions. I maintain that (...) Sturgeon fails to show that Pollock’s account of undercutting defeaters is either too strong or too weak, his own account of how undercutting defeaters exercise their power to defeat is both too strong and too weak, and his claim that rebutting and undercutting defeaters work in fundamentally different ways is mistaken. (shrink)

Jonathan Weisberg has argued that Bayesianism’s rigid updating rules make Bayesian updating incompatible with undermining defeat. In this paper, I argue that when we attend to the higher-order beliefs we must ascribe to agents in the kinds of cases Weisberg considers, the problem he raises disappears. Once we acknowledge the importance of higher-order beliefs to the undermining story, we are led to a different understanding of how these cases arise. And on this different understanding of things, the rigid nature of (...) Bayesianism’s updating rules is no obstacle to its accommodating undermining defeat. (shrink)

Imagination is a source of evidence for objective modality. It is through this epistemic connection that the idea of modality first gains traction in our intellectual life. A proper theory of modality should be able to explain our imagination’s modal epistemic behaviors. This chapter highlights a peculiar asymmetry regarding epistemic defeat for imagination-based modal justification. Whereas imagination-based evidence for possibility cannot be undermined by information about the causal origin of our imaginings, unimaginability-based evidence for impossibility can be undermined by information (...) about the causal origin of the unimaginability. It is argued that an acceptance of S4 over S5 as the true logic for objective modality best explains this epistemic asymmetry. (shrink)

If you put chimpanzees from different communities together you can expect mayhem - they are not keen on treating each other nicely. There is closely related species of apes, however, whose members have countless encounters with unrelated specimen on a daily basis and yet almost all get through the day in one piece - that species is us, homo sapiens. But what makes us get along, most of the time? Morality as such is, perhaps surprisingly, not a mainstream research topic (...) in social psychology. Most textbooks in the field do not even mention the term morality at all (and focus on 'prosociality' instead). This relative lack of 'coverage' might have to do with the difficulty of operationalising 'morality' in a fitting way (more on this below). However, morality certainly is a social phenomenon and therefore the collection of Fargas, Jussim, and Van Lange is certainly a step in the right direction; it offers an extensive overview of the field and is suggestive of the vast potential of studying morality through the lens of social psychology. (shrink)

I extend the Higher-Order View of Undermining Defeat (HOVUD) defended in Melis (2014) to account for the defeat of propositional justification. In doing so, I clarify the important notion of higher-order commitment, and I make some considerations concerning the defeat of externalist epistemic warrants.