Abstract
In this paper, I explore a question about deductive reasoning: why am I in a position to immediately infer some deductive consequences of what I know, but not others? I show why the question cannot be answered in the most natural ways of answering it, in particular in Descartes’s way of answering it. I then go on to introduce a new approach to answering the question, an approach inspired by Hume’s view of inductive reasoning.
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Notes
See Johnson-Laird (2006). Such theories count as subjectively inaccessible because the researchers’ methodology is to collect statistically significant data from tests (even tests using brain scans) on large numbers of people.
See Dogramaci (forthcoming).
The importance of this first-personal question has been emphasized by a number of epistemologists, perhaps most especially Foley; see Foley (1987), 1993 and 2001). Crispin Wright emphasizes the importance of claims to justification in a number of recent papers; see, for example Wright (2001), 2004, and 2009). And here is a helpful passage from Peacocke (1998) emphasizing the main point:
In the basic, personal-level case in which something is done for a reason, whether it be in thought or bodily action, the reason-giving state must be either conscious, or it could become conscious for the thinker. A reason-giving state need not be actually conscious. If you decide to fly to Paris, you may call one airline rather than another. There need not be any conscious state, one contributing to what it’s like for you, just before or after your decision, which is the reason-giving state which rationally explains your calling that airline. But if this was a minimally rational action, your reason could become conscious if the question arose. In a case in which no reason becomes conscious, when the question arises, and the thinker consequently cannot explain why he chose to call that airline, we have a much-diminished sense of the rationality of the action. The requirement that the reason could become conscious is reminiscent of a Kantian position: “It must be possible for the ‘I think’ to accompany all my representations; for otherwise\(\ldots\)the representation\(\ldots\)would be nothing to me” [B131; my (Peacocke’s) emphasis]. The requirement that the reason-giving state is one which is or could become conscious is intimately related to our conception of an agent as someone with a point of view, and whose rational actions make sense to the subject himself (and not just to other experts) given that point of view. For an alleged reason-giving state which could not even become conscious, this condition would not be met. Any action produced by it would not make sense even to the subject himself. (P. 96)
Note that earlier in the paper (footnote 13), Peacocke says, ‘My own view is that judgements are in fact actions, a species of mental action. Judgements are made for reasons.’ Peacocke thus should be understood as talking about both practical and epistemic reasons.
See, for example, Enderton (1977, pp. 134–5), (including Corollary 6C).
Harman has long argued that logic is irrelevant to the theory of reasoning; see, for example, Harman (1986). See Field (2009) for a recent attempt to defend a normative role for logic against Harman’s objection; and see Harman (2010) for a reply. Harman’s main point is that only recognized relations of implication could be relevant to reasoning, but ordinary reasoners do not recognize any relations specifically as logical, therefore logic is not relevant to the theory of reasoning. I think Harman’s point is correct, and it suggests a view of the kind discussed in the next section of this paper.
The primary basis for this historical attribution is the Rules for the Direction of Mind. Descartes never published the Rules, however it is the only place where he tried to define deduction. There, Descartes holds even the most elementary pieces of deductive reasoning to very high standards:
The self-evidence and certainty of intuition is required not only for apprehending single propositions, but also for any train of reasoning whatever. Take for example, the inference that 2 plus 2 equals 3 plus 1: not only must we intuitively perceive that 2 plus 2 make 4, and that 3 plus 1 make 4, but also that the original proposition follows necessarily from the other two. (Descartes 1985, pp. 14–15)
Additionally, specialists on Descartes’s theory of inference have explicitly attributed the present view to Descartes. See Gaukroger (1989, p. 53): ‘\(\ldots\) Descartes could simply deny that one can define inference in terms which are better understood. But he does not do this. Quite the contrary, he effectively provides just such a definition in maintaining that, in the limiting case [in effect, the fundamental building block of multi-step deductions], inference comes down to the intuitive grasp of a necessary connection between premiss and conclusion.’
Against this interpretation of Descartes, one might draw on Descartes’s claim in several correspondences that his cogito inference is not a ‘syllogism’. One might then use that to argue that Descartes did not generally endorse a Cartesian View of deductive reasoning. For critical discussion of this suggestion, see Williams (1978/2005, p. 71 to end of chapter). Williams argues that even in the cogito, while it is not a syllogism with a major premise that All thinkers exist, Descartes does appeal to a premise that In order to think, it is necessary to exist. Also see p. 177 for Williams’s endorsement of the present interpretation of Descartes’s view of deductive reasoning.
The reliability worry descends from the problem Benacerraf (1973) raised for mathematical knowledge, a problem later sharpened in Field (1989) and (2005). Both the reliability and excessive conceptual demands objections are endorsed in Boghossian (2001), a review of BonJour (1998). BonJour endorses a Cartesian View like Descartes’s own, using both intuition and necessary consequence to fill the place-holders. BonJour, though, understands intuitions very differently than Descartes does, and differently than I will below. (Note that Boghossian has sounded more receptive to intuitions in Boghossian (2009), a later review of another defense of intuitions, Sosa (2007)).
For endorsements of this view of perceptual experience, see Pryor (2000), (2004), and Silins (2008). Note that I am remaining neutral on an important claim that Pryor and Silins disagree about, namely the claim that we can make an argument for the negation of Cartesian skepticism just by citing the fact that we are having certain perceptual experiences. That claim is criticized in White (2006). Silins (2008) accepts White’s objections, and uses them to motivate his view. What I’m endorsing, with both Pryor and Silins, is the claim that our perceptual experiences are what explains why our perceptual beliefs have justification, and subjectively accessible justification at that.
Endorsements of views of intuition, each one similar to the present one in at least some important respect, can be found in Bealer (2000), Huemer (2007), Rosen (2001), Sosa (2007), Yablo (1993), Chudnoff (2011a), (2011b), and Bengson (2010). The “temptation” language is used, with tentative endorsement, in Boghossian (2009). BonJour (1998) and Descartes (1985) take an intuition to involve significantly more than others do.
Even if a proposition is false, I can find it obvious. Not every member of a known paradox can be true, but I can find each one obvious.
Huemer, Chudnoff, and Bengson are intuition-theorists especially concerned with giving a general explanation of both perceptual and apriori justifications by appealing to a single type of state. Huemer (2007) uses ‘appearance’ to pick out the general justificatory state, but this conveys, as does ‘seeming’, a sense of tentativeness that I prefer to avoid, since I think intuitions are very often attributed with ‘I find it obvious that \(\ldots\)’. Chudnoff (2011a) and (2011b) uses the nicely evocative labels ‘presentational phenomenology’ and ‘presentational feel’ to characterize the justificatory state common to perceptual and apriori justification, but he doesn’t offer a useful noun to pick out the state. Bengson (2010) calls the common state a ‘presentation’. This is again a nicely evocative label, but I think it extends the meaning of an ordinary term even more than my use of ‘intuition’ does. (The characterization of perceptual experience as having a presentational phenomenology is also put to good use in a series of co-authored papers on the phenomenology of intentionality by Horgan, Graham and Tienson. See, for example, Horgan et al. (2004)).
I insert ‘ordinary’ here (in the footnoted sentence) and elsewhere as a cautionary qualification, but I am in fact sympathetic to the view that phenomenal temptations are essential to perceptual experience: you cannot possibly have a perceptual experience without being tempted, in a phenomenally conscious way, to form an associated perceptual belief. I am skeptical of examples in which a subject reports that a perceptual experience does not tempt her to form a perceptual belief.
Sosa (2007, p. 48) briefly states his view that a perceptual experience need not ‘attract’ any perceptual belief: but his reason for saying this is his view that if you did not ‘notice’ the scene in front of you, there would be no attraction to form any belief. Perhaps Sosa has in mind a far more substantial notion of attraction or temptation than the one I mean to be working with. In any case, I’m unconvinced by his point about noticing. Compare: while immersed in a conversation, an itch will tempt me, in a phenomenally conscious way, to scratch my knee, totally regardless of whether I notice the itch. Noticing is a matter of access consciousness; temptation, as I’m concerned with it here, is a matter of phenomenal consciousness. (The now famous access/phenomenal consciousness distinction is from Block (1995)).
What about examples where one has an experience known to be illusory, and thus reports no temptation to form any perceptual beliefs? I’m skeptical of the import of such examples as well. One reason for my skepticism is that temptations can often be fully suppressed, and when that’s the case it might be appropriate to assert that you have ‘zero’ temptation to believe something for which you actually have a fully suppressed temptation. For example, when viewing the Müller-Lyer illusion, a subject who has taken measurements with a ruler may say ‘I feel zero temptation to believe the upper line is longer than the lower line’, but I would claim there is still an underlying temptation here. After all, when viewing the illusion, you are not in the exact state of equanimous non-temptation (to believe one line is longer) that you are in when viewing two unmarked lines of equal length.
In any case, for the present paper’s purposes, I could allow that, using some much more out-of-the-ordinary examples, a case could be made for a perceptual experience that generated zero temptation to adopt any perceptual belief. My aim here is only to draw on the intrinsic appeal of the view that perceptual beliefs inherit justification from their associated perceptual experiences, but the appeal of this view come entirely from consideration of ordinary examples (for emphasis of this last point, see Pryor (2005), especially Sect. 3). An outlandish example of a perceptual experience that did not generate a temptation would not be a compelling example of an experience that plausibly generated justification.
Thus, as mentioned in note 13, I am not committed to the anti-skeptical strategy, known as dogmatism, defended in Pryor (2000) and (2004). Dogmatism centrally involves a controversial position about when skeptical hypotheses serve as epistemic defeaters. In this paper, I am taking it as given that I know I’m not a brain in a vat, and only then am I endorsing the view that the phenomenology of perceptual experiences explains why I’m in position to form and claim justification for my ordinary perceptual beliefs. Again, as mentioned in note 13, this view of the explanatory power of perceptual experience’s phenomenology is shared by dogmatists and non-dogmatists, such as Silins (2008). Silins argues that, though we must first know, independently of our perceptual evidence, that we are not brains in vats, the phenomenology of perceptual experience is still what explains our justification for our ordinary perceptual beliefs. (Silins talks of the experience’s being what makes one justified; I read this as an explanatory relation.)
To be complete, we might add that it doesn’t also seem I’m being tricked, it doesn’t also seem the lights are not on, or anything like that. For simplicity, I’m ignoring such potential conflicts among seemings in all these examples.
Moran rightly emphasizes that the actual truth-values of my propositional attitudes are not, in themselves, generally relevant to the deliberative question of what my reasons for belief are. See the discussion of justifying reasons in Sect. 4.5 of Moran (2001).
BonJour explicitly endorses a Cartesian View; see BonJour (1998) and (2001). Sosa does not directly address the question, but on p. 58 of Sosa (2007), he seems to presuppose a Cartesian View. In the course of discussing a case of someone who has reasoned fallaciously, Sosa says,
When we work our way back through the reasoning we eventually hit the fallacy; let it be an affirming of the consequent. At that point it must have seemed intuitive to the reasoner to think something of the following form: that, necessarily, if q, and p → q, then p. In making that immediate inference, the thinker makes manifest his intuitive attraction to its corresponding conditional.
Huemer and Bealer both say almost nothing about the role of intuitions in inference. In a footnote, Huemer simply states, with no elaboration, that his view is that intuitions govern justification in general, not merely non-inferential justification. See the first footnote in Huemer (2007). Bealer’s writing suggests his view is that inferences do not involve intuition. He says: ‘\(\ldots\) [T]here are many mathematical theorems that I believe (because I have seen proofs) but that do not seem to me to be true and that do not seem to me to be false; I do not have intuitions about them either way.’ See p. 3 of Bealer (2000).
One defense of intuitions that is exceptional for extensively discussing and defending a role for intuitions in inferences is Ewing (1941). Ewing’s primary case for intuitions is that they are necessary for inference to be possible at all (see especially pp. 6–8). Ewing rests his case, however, on his very unambiguous assumption of a Cartesian View of reasoning.
See Carroll (1895).
See notes 12 and 21.
The plausible claim that intuitions are unevaluable, and thus regress stoppers, is not beyond questioning, and indeed it has been recently challenged by Sosa (2007, p. 55). But, of course, Sosa’s contemporary argument won’t vindicate anyone’s casual appeal to Lewis Carroll as having made trouble for the Cartesian View.
What ‘recognition’ amounts to on the view won’t matter. And, again, to strictly fit the general form I gave for Cartesian Views, we could say I recognize the holding of the consequence relation that captures the truth condition of the conditional. If you think indicative conditionals don’t have truth conditions (see discussion in Bennett (2003)), instead just consider material conditionals and Philonean consequence.
It’s a good idea to pause here to review an important clarificatory distinction due to Harman; see Harman (1986). Earlier, I talked about rules in proof theories. One such rule goes by the name ‘Modus Ponens’. That is a rule of derivation, a rule that figures in some formal systems. Now, however, when I talk about reasoning by Modus Ponens, I am not talking about a rule of derivation, or any rule at all. I am talking about a certain pattern found in our ordinary reasoning, namely, all those pieces of reasoning where the thinker adopts a belief with the logical form q on the basis of two beliefs with the logical forms p and if-p-then-q. These two things are patently different: one is a rule in formal systems, the other is a pattern found in many bits of ordinary reasoning. Most philosophers take for granted that there exists some rule that guides ordinary reasoning and that bears a close connection with the rule of derivation Modus Ponens. As Harman has shown, it is not safe to assume there is any such rule. My discussion makes no such assumption. All I am interested in is reasoning of a certain pattern, i.e. the class of all those pieces of reasoning whose elements exhibit a certain logical form.
Should I have set up my initial definitions so that a consequence is classified as hard if the inference to it requires any intermediate cognitive accomplishment, No, that would result in a theoretically uninteresting classification, since it would count all or nearly all inferences as hard. For example, every inference to a deductive consequence would count as hard according to any Cartesian, since Cartesians always require an act of recognition. And even non-Cartesians must agree that all inferences require some amount of cognitive preparation. In particular, before any inference can be drawn, the basis from which it will be inferred must be brought to mind in such a way as to enable the inference to instantiate the basing relation. In the dolphin example, the reasoner must bring the premise beliefs to mind in such a way that the inference to the conclusion is based on those beliefs (though this might not require the premise beliefs to be made fully conscious). In the distributive law example, a bit of suppositional reasoning is among the preparations that the inference requires in order to be appropriately based (and again, this might not all need to be fully conscious). None of this is any reason to classify these inferences as hard.
According to some scholars, Hume, Locke and Descartes all held very nearly the exact same intuition-based version of the Cartesian View of deductive reasoning. See, in particular Owen (1999, pp. 91–2) and also see Millican (2002, p. 117 and the preceding section). In a personal conversation, Don Garrett identified himself as someone with some doubts about Owen’s and Millican’s interpretation. Garrett suggested that Locke does not count intuitions in the way that following Descartes would mandate, and that Hume, having no reason to follow Descartes’s more extravagant view, would have followed Locke’s view on such a matter as this. There may be no textual basis for deciding exactly which interpretation of Hume’s view of deductive reasoning is correct. If Garrett is right, then the view of deductive reasoning that I am going to develop is not simply inspired by Hume’s view of induction; Hume may have accepted it himself!
See p. 91 of Owen (1999).
See p. 64 of Hume (2000).
See p. 67 of Hume (2000).
See p. 154 of Owen (1999).
None of this is to say that these inferences aren’t reasonable. Careful attention to the difference between ‘reason’ and ‘reasoning’ in Hume’s vocabulary is crucial here. Although Hume writes that these inferences are not ‘determin’d by reason’, this is, as Owen notes, merely Hume’s way of expressing his rejection of a Cartesian View for induction. They are still ‘a true species of reasoning’, indeed the ‘strongest of all others’. I am thus reading Hume as no skeptic about the epistemic legitimacy of induction. Owen and Garrett similarly read Hume’s as not aiming to raise a doubt about the epistemic legitimacy of induction. See chaps. 6 and 8 of Owen (1999) (especially pp. 118 and 117), and chap. 4 of Garrett (1997) (especially p. 92).
I’m just considering Boghossian’s point in isolation now. As we saw, once my suppositional reasoning objection is added, even inferential deliberation itself cannot be given a unified account.
We could give the rich explanation in terms of just belief-like and desire-like notions if we replace our folk two-place conceptions with the modern three-place decision-theoretic conceptions of credence (degree of belief) and utility. The three-place relations here are between a person, a proposition, and a value between 0 and 1. Indeed, one of the major goals (accomplishments, some would argue) of modern decision theory is to show that when an agent’s preferences meet certain coherence constraints, they can be uniquely modeled by a pair of credence and utility functions for her. For a non-technical and philosophical discussion of such representation theorems, see Christensen (2005). For a thorough technical treatment, see Joyce (1999).
There have been a few attempts to make Bayesianism more realistic by relaxing the assumption, notably Hacking (1967). (The assumption has also been relaxed in the course of attempts to solve Bayesianism’s so-called Problem of Old Evidence, most famously Garber (1983). But, Garber only relaxes the assumption partially: he still requires an agent to be omniscient about the truth-functional deductive consequences in a certain language. See Earman (1992, p. 124) for discussion.) Hacking’s theory allows a rational agent to not know any deductive consequences of things she already knows. Hacking, unfortunately, says almost nothing about, when an agent actually does infer a deductive consequence, how she does so. (He only says one thing about how a rational agent may, in his theory, know a deductive consequence q: Hacking says she may use Modus Ponens to infer it from the known propositions p and p \(\supset\) q. His presentation does leave it open that there are other ways of coming to know a deductive consequence.).
To avoid unnecessary complexity, throughout this paper, I have only talked about outright belief, rather than degree of belief. I am sympathetic, though, to taking degree of belief as the fundamental doxastic state. Temptations to believe come in degrees as well, degrees of intensity. We might eventually hope to explain the fact that temptations to believe come in degrees by associating those degrees of temptation with the degree of belief one is tempted to hold. But still, the relationships among the degrees of belief we have in the various propositions involved in our reasoning are very complex, too complex for me to say much about them here. All I’ll note here is that a straightforward Bayesian story will not be plausible for our purposes, since, as noted, Bayesians assume deductive omniscience, and so they have no theory of deductive learning, which is our interest here.
For expository convenience, I generally talk as if inference always results in the addition of a new belief. Of course, sometimes inference results in the reasoner’s giving up some old belief. In these cases, her conditional intuition involves a temptation to disbelieve.
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Acknowledgments
I especially thank Paul Boghossian and Jim Pryor for help with this paper. Thanks also to Yuval Avnur, David James Barnett, John Bengson, Eli Chudnoff, Hartry Field, Don Garrett, Gilbert Harman, Michael Huemer, Farid Masrour, Elliot Paul, Karl Schafer, Stephen Schiffer, David Velleman, and Crispin Wright.
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Dogramaci, S. Intuitions for inferences. Philos Stud 165, 371–399 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9955-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9955-y