Abstract
Michael Bergmann has argued that internalist accounts of justification face an insoluble dilemma. This paper begins with an explanation of Bergmann’s dilemma. Next, I review some recent attempts to answer the dilemma, which I argue are insufficient to overcome it. The solution I propose presents an internalist account of justification through direct acquaintance. My thesis is that direct acquaintance can provide subjective epistemic assurance without falling prey to the quagmire of difficulties that Bergmann alleges all internalist accounts of justification cannot surmount.
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Notes
To be more precise, what the subject needs assurance of is the non-accidental verisimilitude of the belief. For the sake of wordiness, I will continue to use phrases such as “the subject’s awareness or assurance of the truth of the belief” to stand in for the more cumbersome locution “the subject’s awareness or assurance of the non-accidental verisimilitude of the belief.”
I will explore a more concrete proposal for weak awareness along these lines below. Minimally weak awareness only denies conceptual awareness of the relevance of the justification-contributor to the belief. So, weak awareness could include some conceptual content as long as it doesn’t require that the subject is conceptually aware of how the justification-contributor is relevant to the justification or truth of the belief.
I am grateful that a referee for this journal pointed out a problem with the initial way I formulated this objection to Crisp. Consequently, I have been able to state this objection more clearly and accurately.
Actually, the situation is more complicated than this. Crisp could allow false intuitions to support other false intuitions as long as at some point the subject would fail to have the potential to form intuitively justified beliefs to justify the series of false intuitive beliefs. For simplicity of presentation, I’ll restrict myself to cases where the subject does not have the potential to form any intuitive beliefs (false or genuine) about false intuitions.
In this respect, they lean towards Conee’s view, rather than Huemer’s.
Rogers and Matheson insist that their defense of strong awareness doesn’t depend on the account of seemings. They suggest that what is needed is any experience that can simultaneously justify a belief and justify itself as a higher order conceptualization of itself as justifying the initial belief. In addition to seeming experiences, they claim that a subject’s conceiving of direct acquaintance could work in the same way as seeming experiences. But this has the same problem that is being raised against seeming experiences in this paragraph. In order for someone to have strong awareness of his conceiving of direct acquaintance in some way relevant to his justification, he must have the concept of direct acquaintance, which requires a kind of conceptual facility most people lack.
It has been brought to my attention that (Hasan 2011) suggests a similar account of weak awareness internal justification through direct acquaintance. While the solutions proposed by Hasan and myself are essentially the same, they have been developed independently. Additionally, the motivations and contributions to this topic are quite distinct. For example, Hasan does not motivate his position by arguing against strong awareness solutions, nor does he provide an analysis of how his account of weak awareness applies to the problem of infinite regress for inferential justification given in Lewis Carroll’s classic piece, “What the Tortoise said to Achilles,” which is considered at the end of this piece. Both articles make unique contributions towards the same solution.
There is some controversy among traditional direct acquaintance theorists as to what exactly can enter into acquaintance relations with the self. While traditional accounts of acquaintance maintain that the self cannot be directly acquainted with physical objects, virtually all would agree that the self can be directly acquainted with certain states of mind such as qualia. Divisions occur among proponents of the traditional view of acquaintance as to whether one can be directly acquainted with universals and concepts like causation. For simplicity’s sake, I will proceed only by taking acquaintance as a relation between a self and sensory states of mind, certain propositional attitudes (like belief), and acquaintance relations that obtain for two states of mind (e.g., the belief that I am in pain and the sensory state of being in pain).
This is my adaptation of (Bergmann 2006a), pp. 26-30. Bergmann does not state his example (as it pertains to direct acquaintance) in one quotable passage, so I’ve taken the liberty to create my own case that I believe captures the same spirit of Bergmann’s objection.
The use of “seems” here and throughout this paragraph do not betray my aforementioned claim that “seemings”—in the technical sense employed by Rogers and Matheson, Conee, Huemer, and other phenomenal conservatists—carry no internalist justificatory force. I am using the term in a different sense. As I have maintained elsewhere (DePoe 2011, especially pp. 358-359), “seemings” may be caused by a person who is directly acquainted with sufficiently strong evidential support for the claim that the subject reports as seeming to be the case. In this particular case, I am reporting the epistemic confidence based on being directly acquainted with my reflective understanding of the concepts and the implications that follow from this understanding. This is the sense in which the term is being used in this paragraph. For ease of reading, I have opted to keep the colloquial phrasing here and later, where I state, “I cannot imagine such an outcome.”
See note 10 for my more technical epistemological gloss on this colloquial phrase.
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Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Richard Fumerton, Ali Hasan, and an anonymous referee from this journal for constructive feedback that helped me improve the content of this article.
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DePoe, J.M. Bergmann’s Dilemma and Internalism’s Escape. Acta Anal 27, 409–423 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-012-0154-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-012-0154-4