If one belief is based on some reasons, but those reasons do not have a basis themselves, then it looks as if what depends on those reasons is no better justified than a belief for which one has no reasons at all.
Richard Feldman, Epistemology
Abstract
In this paper, I will present and defend an argument from the conditional character of inferential justification (the argument from conditionality) against the version of epistemic infinitism Klein advances. More specifically, after proposing a distinction between propositional and doxastic infinitism, which is based on a standard distinction between propositional and doxastic justification, I will describe in considerable detail the argument from conditionality, which is mainly an argument against propositional infinitism, and clarify some of its main underlying assumptions. There are various responses to be found in Klein’s works to this argument, and my aim is to show that none of those responses can be plausibly held without infinitism losing its title to being a genuine non-skeptical alternative.
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Notes
This is the infinitist account of propositional justification. The distinction between propositional and doxastic justification and the infinitist thesis about the latter will be presented and discussed below.
Here is a representative but incomplete list of Klein’s works that defend epistemic infinitism: (1998, 1999, 2000, 2005a, b, 2007a, 2011, 2014). The version of infinitism Klein upholds has gone through a series of transformations throughout these years, but there is a consistent and recurring idea that Klein defends, which I will clarify and argue against below. Klein’s works have inspired a large and still growing literature on infinitism. Here is again a representative but incomplete sample: Fantl (2003), Cling (2004), Aikin (2005, 2008, 2011), Wright (2013), Peijnenburg and Atkinson (2013) and Turri (2009a, b, 2010a). Ad Infinitum (2014), a collection, edited by Klein and Turri, of fourteen papers at the cutting edge of research on epistemic infinitism, deserves special emphasis.
In this paper, I will take the notion of evidential support (and epistemic basis) for granted. For an account of this notion, see, for instance, Connee and Feldman (2008).
Kvanvig and Menzel (1990) characterizes a traditional approach to justification as one that “holds that what is fundamental to justification is some abstract relation between propositions which we can call the evidence relation. Justification obtains for a person’s belief, according to such theories, when these abstract relations are instanced in some specified type of psychological reality” (p. 236). Firth’s conception of the distinction between propositional and doxastic justification embraces this traditional approach.
The definitive characteristic of Firth’s notion of doxastic justification is that it requires believing a proposition on the basis of an epistemically adequate basis (roughly, good reasons). However, Firth also appears to assume that a subject can only believe a proposition on the basis of good reasons if she “reaches” or “arrives at” that belief through being engaged in the activity of justifying it (offering those good reasons for it in conversation or sotto voce). This assumption might appear unnecessarily restrictive: one might believe a proposition on the basis of good reasons even if one’s coming to hold that belief is not caused by an activity of offering reasons in its favor. The cause of a belief state need not be an overt mental activity of offering reasons for having it in order for that state to be based on good reasons: the subject’s basing a belief on good reasons is one thing, and that belief’s being based on good reasons is another thing. (One of Goldman’s examples is helpful here: “My belief that there is a fire in the neighborhood is based on...my belief that I hear a fire engine. But I have not gone through a process of explicit reasoning, saying “There’s a fire engine; therefore there must be a fire” (1967, p. 361). Thus, while it surely appears that there must be an intimate connection between the two [note, for instance, Leite’s remarks: “It would seem, at first blush, that the state of being justified can’t be fully distinguished from considerations pertaining to the activity” (2004, p. 219)], one might still plausibly claim that doxastic justification requires only the latter in the first instance (more on this below).
The nature of the epistemic basing relation is, as is well known, a central problem of epistemology. Its centrality stems mostly from the fact that propositional knowledge requires not only propositional justification but also doxastic justification and the latter is something that can only be correctly ascribed to a belief if it is based on the former. For an excellent survey of the contemporary literature on the epistemic basing relation, see Korcz (2015). For the purposes of this paper, the question regarding the nature of the basing relation can be safely set aside. I will rather try to clarify below how Klein understands doxastic justification and a fortiori the basing relation.
Note also what Moser writes: “Propositional justification is basic to doxastic justification in the sense that one’s having propositional justification is a necessary condition of one’s having doxastic justification. Thus, if a person is justified in believing a proposition, then that proposition is justified for him. Doxastic justification, roughly speaking, is justification that depends on the manner in which one’s beliefs are related to the conditions of propositional justification” (Moser 1984, p. 196, emphasis mine).
For an illuminating discussion of the relation between propositional and doxastic justification, see Turri (2010b).
An intuitive problem with this option is that it seems to undermine the very distinction between propositional and doxastic justification. What can possibly distinguish doxastic from propositional justification if doxastic justification does not even require the ability to offer reasons in favor of a belief? However, the issue is not so easily settled. For a defense of the idea that doxastic justification does not even require such an ability, see Harman (1970), a seminal work which is mainly responsible for the establishment of what Leite (2004, p. 221) somewhat pejoratively calls the spectatorial conception of justification.
A distinction relevant to the discussion here is the one Goldman draws between ex post justification and ex ante justification. Goldman (1979) writes: “Let us distinguish two uses of justified: an ex post use and an ex ante use. The ex post use occurs when there exists a belief, and we say of that belief that it is (or isn’t) justified. The ex ante use occurs when no such belief exists, or when we wish to ignore the question of whether such a belief exists. Here we say of the person, independent of his doxastic state vis-à-vis p, that p is (or isn’t) suitable for him to believe” (p. 22). As Goldman further rightly notes, “The distinction between ex post and ex ante justifiedness is similar to Firth’s distinction between doxastic and propositional warrant” (p. 23, fn. 17). Note that according to the reliabilist analysis Goldman offers in the paper, the ex post justification of a belief is, roughly, a function of the reliability of the operation that causes or produces it, one by the application of which the subject arrives at or comes to hold it. If this is so, then given (a strong reading of) the “similarity” between ex post and doxastic justification, Goldman’s reliabilism takes it for granted that doxastic justification is a matter of how a given belief is arrived at.
The problems that afflict a view like this are nicely documented in Evans (2013). Doxastic justification is, roughly, propositional justification plus the basing relation. So, the view at hand holds that a particular belief’s being based on reasons requires the subject’s arriving at that belief as a result of being engaged in the activity of offering reasons. However, according to Evans, such a view cannot account for such phenomena as what he calls backward basing, basing termination, and unconscious basing. Just take the first one, backward basing, the main thrust of which is captured by Evan’s following remarks: “One of the bases of a belief might have been unavailable when the belief was originally formed” (p. 2946). If there is such a thing as backward basing, then a given belief might be properly based on reasons without the subject’s arriving at that belief as a result of being engaged in the activity of offering reasons.
The part omitted with ellipsis in this quotation speaks for Klein’s contextualism about doxastic justification and fully reads as “far forward enough to satisfy the contextually determined standards” (p. 11). This aspect of Klein’s infinitism will be discussed later in the paper. Note also Klein’s following remarks: “[I]nfinitism holds that a particular belief is doxastically justified (at least to some degree) only if there is an available reason and we cite that reason as a reason for our belief” (2007b, p. 26, emphasis mine).
As Aikin (2005) notes, there are actually two versions of the finite minds argument. One rests on the premise that “to run the regress of justification, [the subject] would need infinite time (because the inferences take time to make)”, and the other on the premise that “to run the regress of justification, [the subject] would need an infinite number of beliefs (since those beliefs can’t just get recycled)” (p. 202). Aristotle’s version of the argument is clearly the former. The distinction between these two versions plays no substantial role below.
The distinction here between arguments against propositional and doxastic infinitism corresponds, roughly, to Aikin’s (2005, p. 192) distinction between “conceptual” and “ought-implies-can” arguments against infinitism.
The central aim of this paper is to answer the question of whether Klein provides an adequate response to the argument that I will specify below. To achieve this aim, it is not necessary to delve into the arguments Klein adduces to motive epistemic infinitism. However, the issue is still interesting enough to justify some digression. Klein offers two main arguments to support infinitism. One stems from the purported plausibility of two principles. The principles are what Klein (1999, pp. 298–299) calls the “Principle of Avoiding Circularity” (PAC) and the “Principle of Avoiding Arbitrariness” (PAA). PAC is the thesis that for all x, if a person, S, has a justification for x, then for all y, if y is in the evidential ancestry of x for S, then x is not in the evidential ancestry of y for S. PAA is the thesis that for all x, if a person, S, has a justification for x, then there is some reason, \(\hbox {r}_{1}\), available to S for x; and there is some reason, \(\hbox {r}_{2}\), available to S for \(\hbox {r}_{1}\); etc. According to Klein, the combination of these principles captures “the well-founded intuition that arbitrary beliefs, beliefs for which no reason is available, should be avoided” (p. 299) and “entails that the evidential ancestry of a justified belief be infinite and non-repeating” (p. 299). The second argument Klein offers for infinitism is an argument from elimination—more specifically, that foundationalism and coherentism face insurmountable problems while the proposed objections to infinitism fail. Here is, roughly, what I think about these arguments. The argument from (PAA) and (PAC) to infinitism works only if it assumes that having a reason for a proposition (understood as the object of belief) just means there being another proposition available to the subject from which the proposition in question can be properly inferred (see Ginet 2005a, p. 143); however, if that is so, the argument begs the question against the foundationalist. The argument from the elimination of alternatives is as suspect as any argument from elimination: a defender of one of those alternative views can rightly contest that the proposed objections to their views are not insurmountable at all.
Klein explicitly holds that epistemic infinitism is “the only viable, non-skeptical response” (2011, p. 245) to and “it can solve” (2014, p. 96) the famous epistemic regress problem, a version of which will be presented below. It needs to be emphasized, however, that Klein also stresses at various points that the question of whether epistemic infinitism is an adequate account of justification (i.e. whether it correctly describes the normative rules governing the notion of justification) needs to be distinguished from the question of whether it offers a non-skeptical stance (see for instance Klein 1998, p. 922): the answer to the former might well be “yes” while the answer to the latter is “no”. In this paper, I am more interested in the latter than the former.
Let me make two points about the biconditional character of this thesis. First, \(\hbox {R}_{1}\)’s being justified is a sufficient condition for P’s being justified for the subject on the basis of there being an acceptable path of inference from the former to the latter only on the condition that \(\hbox {R}_{1}\) is undefeated by any other propositions that subject believes. Second, \(\hbox {R}_{1}\)’s being justified is a necessary condition for P’s being justified for the subject on the basis of there being an acceptable path of inference from the former to the latter only on the condition that there are no other propositions than \(\hbox {R}_{1}\) such that the subject believes them and there is an acceptable path of inference from those propositions to P. The thesis should be read with these qualifications in mind.
The central idea operative here is nicely captured by Dancy’s (1985) following remarks: “When we justify belief A by appeal to beliefs B and C, we have not yet shown A to be justified. We have only shown that it is justified if B and C are. Justification by inference is conditional justification only; A’s justification is conditional upon the justification of B and C” (p. 55).
Conditional properties (e.g., in our case, conditional justification) are, on a standard conception, properties the instantiation of which by a particular entity does not merely (materially) imply but is dependent upon their instantiations by some other entities. Clark writes: “The underlying intuition, of course, is that anything whose existence not merely implies but is exclusively dependent upon an infinite succession of similar elements for which there is no independent existence proof does not after all exist. It does not flatly, categorically exist. It only conditionally does so” (1988, p. 372). After noting that “we lack resources within standard logic for distinguishing implication and dependence” (1988, p. 373), Clark moves on to providing an account of the notion of dependence in question. Dependence is a stronger relation than mere (material) implication: the former entails the latter but not vice versa. It is reasonably clear that regresses that stem from mere implication are not problematic. A plausible explanation of why the “regress” of numbers is not especially problematic is that it is merely a regress of implication relations: 1 is a number only if 2 is a number, 2 is a number only if 3 is a number, and so on. 1’s being a number does not depend, in the relevant sense, on 2’s being a number but merely (materially) implies it. The regresses generated by implication entail the existence of the infinite number of objects involved in those regresses; however, the regresses generated by dependence appear to entail that none of the objects involved in those regresses can possibly exist.
For the purposes of this paper, I will assume an intuitive understanding of the notion of dependence. For more discussion on the issue, see Gillett (2003).
Moser’s following remarks are worth noting here: “My main contention...is that the correct way to portray the infinitist’s non-circular infinite justificatory regress in which every member, including its terminus \(e_{0}\), is purportedly justified by the next member (and not by any external information) is as follows:
..., if justified \(e_{n}\) justifies \(e_{n-1}\),..., if justified \(e_{1}\) justifies \(e_{0}\).” (1985, p. 70)
Compare what Aristotle writes in the Posterior Analytics: “Now since the required ground of our knowledge...of a fact is the possession of such a syllogism as we call demonstration, and the ground of the syllogism is the facts constituting its premisses, we must not only know the primary premisses...beforehand, but know them better than the conclusion: for the cause of an attribute’s inheritance in a subject always inheres in the subject more fully than the attribute...So, since the primary premisses are the cause of our knowledge...it follows that we know them better...than their consequences, precisely because our knowledge of the latter is the effect of our knowledge of the premisses” [1941, 72b25–33, quoted by (Klein 2014, p. 104)].
Klein (2011, p. 248) explicitly divides the (complex) thesis expressed by Ginet into its simpler components, naming one Non-Originating Principle (“Reasoning, alone, cannot produce epistemic warrant”) and the otherInheritance Principle (“Reasoning can transmit the requisite epistemic warrant for knowledge from other beliefs”). According to Klein, these are “two core presuppositions underlying the regress argument as put forth by foundationalists without which the argument could not succeed” (p. 248).
Kajamies’s (2009) observations are relevant here: “There is something very appealing about the view that incurably conditional support is not genuine support. If the support for each proposition \(P_{x}\) in [an infinite] sequence is incurably conditional, i.e. if its each proposition is conditionally supported by its successor, no satisfactory answer can be reached as to whether these conditions are satisfied [i.e. whether any of those propositions in the sequence is genuinely supported], even in principle...I believe that we have a deep intuition according to which the question ‘Is \(P_{i}\) supported?’ cannot be satisfactorily answered by ‘Yes it is if \(P_{j}\) is supported’. We should be able to reach...a ‘Yes’ or a ‘No’, but no such answer is reachable if the support for each \(P_{x}\) is incurably conditional” (pp. 531–532).
This point has also been made by Ginet (2005a).
Klein writes: “The infinitist, like the coherentist, takes propositional justification to be what I called an emergent property that arises in sets of propositions. In particular, the infinitist holds that propositional justification arises in sets of propositions with an infinite and non-repeating structure such that each new member serves as a reason for the preceding one. Consequently, an infinitist would seek to increase the doxastic justification for an initial belief—the belief requiring reasons—by calling forth more and more reasons. The more imbedded the initial belief, the greater its doxastic justification” (2007b, p. 26, emphasis mine). The reasoning here is a non-sequitur. If (PAR) is true, then what can plausibly derived from warrant-emergent propositional infinitism about doxastic justification is warrant-emergent doxastic infinitism, according to which doxastic justification arises only if the subject has completed tracing the infinite evidential path ‘laid out’ by propositional justification.
The thesis that inference itself can create justification, which Turri (2014) calls inferential creationism, is, at least prima facie, very counterintuitive. Some of its implausible implications has been pointed by Ginet (2005a, b) and Bergmann (2014). If inferential creationism is true, then, Ginet writes, “we seem to get the result that one could start with a belief (or sets of beliefs) that is totally unjustified, because it lacks any inferential justification, and by spinning out a long enough chain of inference from it reach a belief that has the degree of justification required for knowledge” (p. 155). In the similar vein, Bergmann writes: “Suppose you have two beliefs, B1 and B2, both of which are not justified at all, because neither of them is based on any reasons or evidence at all. And suppose also that B2 implies B1. Can B1 become justified to some degree solely in virtue of your later inferring it from the still unjustified belief B2, which implies it? It seems clear that the answer is “no.” (p. 43). For a defense of inferential creationism, see Turri (2014). Peijnenburg and Atkinson (2013) provides “a detailed procedure for the emergence of justification that enables us to see exactly how justification surfaces from a chain of reasons” (p. 546). My objection below to localized propositional infinitism is not directed to its commitment to inferential creationism: I will argue that even if we take inferential creationism for granted, localized propositional infinitism is beset by a serious problem.
Klein seems to agree when he writes: “Now, if knowledge required actually completing the series, knowledge would not be possible. But why suppose that knowledge requires the highest possible degree of warrant or absolutely credible belief? As the series lengthens, warrant or credibility increase. Nothing prevents it increasing to the degree required for knowledge” (2005a, p. 138).
One might wonder whether the two principles, viz. (PAA) and (PAC), endorsed by Klein (1999) can provide independent motivation for the “infinitism” part of localized propositional infinitism that is rendered obsolete by the “localized” part. (My take on these two principles is briefly stated in fn. 15 above.) My answer is “no.” What makes localized propositional infinitism localized in the relevant sense not only renders propositional infinitism pointless but is also in clear tension with (at least) one of Klein’s two principles, namely (PAA). Localized propositional infinitism is the view that propositional justification for a proposition emerges as soon as there is a reason available to the subject for that proposition and this is the case even if there is no reason available to the subject for that (first) reason. And, PAA is the thesis that for all x, if a person, S, has justification for x, then there is some reason \(\hbox {r}_{1}\), available to S for x, and there is some reason, \(\hbox {r}_{2}\), available to S for \(\hbox {r}_{1}\); and so on (Klein 1999, p. 299). PAA holds, and localized propositional infinitism explicitly denies, that a necessary condition for there being propositional justification for a proposition is there being a reason available to the subject for the (first) reason that supports that proposition. So, if my thesis that the way Klein rejects warrant-emergent doxastic infinitism, combined with (PAR), commits him to localized propositional infinitism is not mistaken, then Klein needs to abandon (PAA). (An interesting fact is that Klein does not even mention (PAA) and (PAC) in his more recent expositions and defense of epistemic infinitism (see, e.g., (2011) and (2014), those two principles that play such a central role in (1999), the paper that effectively started his infinitist crusade. I believe their sudden disappearance is telling, and my conjecture is that Klein is aware at some level of their tension with localized propositional infinitism that he is committed to.) Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing on this issue.
The heart of the objection here is nicely captured by Ginet’s following remarks: “Klein seems to...[hold] that the longer the chain of inferential justification for a given belief the greater the justification created, and that, if the chain is long enough (but still finite), the justification can “increase to the degree required for knowledge.” This seems to give us the result that knowledge does not require infinitely long chain of inferential justification after all: infinitism gives way to inferentialism [the definitive claim of which is stated by (L)]” (2005b, p. 155). As Ginet puts it elsewhere in the same article, “inferentialism drives out infinitism” (2005b, p. 154).
One might suspect that the very same reasoning here also applies to Klein’s warrant-emergent propositional infinitism specified above: if, one might say, warrant-emergent propositional infinitism rejects (IJC), then if (IJC) is responsible for the initiation of the regress of justification, then rejecting (IJC) results in losing whatever rationale there might be for holding warrant-emergent propositional infinitism. However, some complications arise here. It is important here to note the difference in reasons why warrant-emergent propositional infinitism and localized propositional infinitism reject (IJC). (IJC) is the thesis that inferential propositional justification is only conditional justification in the sense that a proposition’s being inferentially justified is dependent on (or arises in virtue of) another proposition’s being justified (see fn. 20 above). According to warrant-emergent propositional infinitism, (IJC) thus understood is to be rejected (partly) because propositional justification, be it actual or conditional, does not emerge at all among a set of finite number of propositions among which there are inferential relations. However, rejecting (IJC) in this way is consistent with there being a regress of justification because there is a distinction between implication and dependence and also because a regress of justification might ensue not only from the latter but also from the former. However, according to localized propositional infinitism, (IJC) is to be rejected because actual propositional justification emerges among a set of finite number of propositions inferentially structured in an appropriate way. Rejecting (IJC) in this way entails not only the falsity of the dependence claim (IJC) but also the falsity of an analogous implication claim. If this is so, rejecting (IJC) in this way results in the loss of both of the grounds of a potential regress.
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Demircioglu, E. Epistemic infinitism and the conditional character of inferential justification. Synthese 195, 2313–2334 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1529-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1529-2