Abstract
This paper offers two new arguments for a version of Reflection, the principle that says, roughly, that if one knew now what one would believe in the future, one ought to believe it now. The most prominent existing argument for the principle is the coherence-based Dutch Strategy argument advanced by Bas van Fraassen (and others). My two arguments are quite different. The first is a truth-based argument. On the basis of two substantive premises, that people’s beliefs generally get better over time and that being a person requires having knowledge of this fact, it concludes that it is rational to treat your future selves as experts. The second argument is a transcendental one. Being a person requires being able to engage in plans and projects. But these cannot be meaningfully undertaken unless one has Reflection-like expectations about one’s future beliefs. Hence, satisfaction of Reflection is necessary for being a person. Together, the arguments show that satisfaction of Reflection is both rational and necessary for persons.
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Notes
I say “future selves” without meaning thereby to imply any metaphysics. “Oneself at future times” would have done as well. See Evnine (2005) for further discussion of this choice.
I am grateful to a referee for making me think about this more carefully.
The idea of treating Reflection in terms of the notion of expertise derives from Gaifman (1988), especially, 200–204.
This has been dubbed the Lockean Thesis by Foley (1993), 140ff.
I do not, however, commit myself to seeing partial belief in terms of probability. So that is another difference between Reflection and SLR, though not one that is material to the arguments of this paper.
The following is a sampling of the literature. For the principle are Van Fraassen (1984); Sobel (1987); Green and Hitchcock (1994); and Skyrms (1997). Against the principle are Christensen (1991); Talbott (1991); and Foley (1994). More equivocal positions are taken by Maher (1993), chapter 5; and Vickers (2000).
By a person I mean a rational, finite agent of the kind of which normal adult human beings are the best and perhaps the only example with which we are acquainted.
The argument is given in Van Fraassen (1984) and is adapted from one given by David Lewis in favor of conditionalization (which, as Van Fraassen (1995) shows, implies a slightly more generalized version of Reflection). Lewis’s presentation of the argument was not published until (1999), but it had entered the literature through a presentation of it in Teller (1973).
White’s conceit is actually more complicated than this and clearly incoherent for reasons unrelated to those I discuss in the text. Merlin’s living backwards is supposed to explain his knowledge of the future. For that to work, he must not be moving forwards in time but getting younger, as I pretend in the text, but getting older, like everyone else, while going backwards in time. But that, in turn, would be inconsistent with how he is represented by White: the order of the phonemes in the English sentences he speaks, for example, is the same as for everyone else.
This idea occurs throughout his work. An extensive discussion is in (1984).
The example is from Christensen (1991).
It is also, it should be pointed out, consistent with treating oneself as an expert in this particular case. The definition of treating someone as an expert, recall, required us to adopt her belief only if we did not, in learning of that belief, also learn some reason why we should not adopt it. This condition is clearly activated in the case described.
Like Rovane (1998), 59–64, I think that our ordinary conception of what a person is is probably too confused to avoid conflicts of intuition over analytical claims such as the one I go on to make in this paragraph. But I cannot adequately defend here either the claim in the text or the meta-claim in this footnote.
Above, I mentioned as a way in which amelioration of beliefs might fail to obtain the possibility that a malevolent demon might destroy the world but continue to produce in us the kinds of experience we would expect to have anyway. If one had reason to believe such a hypothesis might obtain in the future, it might be thought that this would provide a counter-example to the epistemic constraint on personal identity suggested here since there is, unlike in the UBS case, little intuitive support for the judgment that personal identity would not be preserved. (This worry was urged on me by Elia Zardini.) I am not sure what the best response is to this objection but I offer the following somewhat tentatively. If the hypothesis is that the demon puts the beliefs straight into one’s head, so to speak, then there is, if not transformation into a different person, at least some kind of loss of self since there is no autonomy in the belief-forming process. If, on the other hand, the hypothesis is that the environment is so manipulated that our normal interactions with it become radically misleading, then it is not the case that our beliefs are being formed in ways we would not consider reasonable. The fault would lie elsewhere than with the method of belief acquisition. No doubt there are further variants of the hypothesis that may raise further problems.
Adapted from Talbott (1991). Talbott was, as far as I know, the first to point the way to these kinds of issues.
As noted, I do not insist that methods with privileged access must be infallible, nor that it is impossible for me to be wrong and the doctor to be right in such cases. A similar caveat applies to the astronomer case.
Skyrms (1983) suggests another dimension along which formal, probabilist epistemology might want, and be able, to incorporate more information that is external to one’s current degrees of belief.
The only way to represent facts about how a hypothesized future belief is acquired in the probabilistic formalism is to specify them explicitly as part of the hypothesis. Reflection would thus look like this: P\({_{a,t}(\hbox{Q}\vert \hbox{P}_{a,t^{\prime}}}\) (Q)=r and S)=r, where S can specify a method on the basis of which a assigns a probability of r to Q at t′. In fact, the standard kind of counter-examples to Reflection are all of this form since their plausibility depends on hypothesizing, for example, not only that I will believe later tonight that I can drive safely, but that I will believe this as a result of having had ten drinks. (Some cases are not exactly like this, but they involve future beliefs, such as that I am the Messiah, that by current lights I could only believe if I were crazy. Hence the hypothesis implies such an extra claim even if it is not explicit.) However, as Vickers (2000) points out, a demand that one satisfy Reflection cannot be confused with a demand that one satisfy the above expansion in full generality. If S states simply that Q is false, then it would obviously be irrational to satisfy the expanded schema even in cases in which it would not be irrational to satisfy the original one. Thus, to allow information to enter about method of belief acquisition, one would have to express Reflection by the expanded schema, restricted to cases in which S says something only about method of belief acquisition. This, I believe, is pretty much equivalent to where I have ended up in the text.
I draw extensively on Bratman (1987) in the following.
Strictly, the transcendental defense requires also the premise that we are persons in the relevant sense. I take this to be obvious.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I,i and Sartre (1969), 433–556 may be of this view.
This way of putting things may be too crude. Perhaps one ought to say something like this: if A intends to x, then that provides a prima facie reason for thinking A will x. In any case, it is not necessary in this context to characterize exactly the way in which intentions influence our future actions.
I briefly discuss a value-based analogue of Reflection in (2003).
Indeed, one argument deployed by Christensen (1991), 240–241 against the Dutch Strategy argument for Reflection is that a version of it could be used equally to require that a person never change her beliefs at all.
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Acknowledgements
Otávio Bueno, David Christensen, Hilary Kornblith, Peter Lewis, Harvey Siegel, William Talbott, Lisa Warenski and a referee for this journal have all provided a lot of help with the progress of this paper.
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Evnine, S.J. Personhood and future belief: two arguments for something like Reflection. Erkenntnis 67, 91–110 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-007-9044-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-007-9044-3