Abstract
In “Compassionate Phenomenal Conservatism” (2007), “Phenomenal Conservatism and the Internalist Intuition” (2006), and Skepticism and the Veil of Perception (2001), Michael Huemer endorses the principle of phenomenal conservatism, according to which appearances or seemings constitute a fundamental source of (defeasible) justification for belief. He claims that those who deny phenomenal conservatism, including classical foundationalists, are in a self-defeating position, for their views cannot be both true and justified; that classical foundationalists have difficulty accommodating false introspective beliefs; and that phenomenal conservatism is most faithful to the central internalist intuition. I argue that Huemer’s self-defeat argument fails, that classical foundationalism is able to accommodate fallible introspective beliefs, and that classical foundationalism has no difficulty accommodating a relatively clear internalist intuition. I also show that the motivation for phenomenal conservatism is less than clear.
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Notes
I will sometimes use ‘PC’ to refer to the theory of phenomenal conservatism, and sometimes to refer specifically to the principle of phenomenal conservatism given in the next section. Where it matters, I trust the context will make clear which is the case.
But surely, many beliefs (at least dispositional ones) can be justified without being simultaneously based on any actual appearances. How, then, can Huemer hold that appearances are necessary? Huemer might distinguish between appearances and dispositions to have appearances, and hold that the latter can also provide justification (at least within certain constraints). Alternatively, he might take epistemic justification to be diachronic or historical, so that some beliefs can be justified on the basis of appearances already had. Huemer (1999, 2001, p. 194n3) prefers the latter.
According to Huemer, it is possible, in principle, to have an appearance wholly lacking in qualia. This is plausible for some apparent memories and intuitions, but Huemer claims that one can even have perceptual appearances without sensory qualities (2001, pp. 65–70, 77–79). What is essential to perceptual appearances is their representational or propositional content and the “forcefulness” with which this content is presented, that is, “the fact that, in the experience, it seems to one that something satisfying the content of the experience actually exists, there and now” (2001, p. 79, my emphasis). Huemer (2001, p. 89, n. 30) seems to think that a form of “superblindsight” involving appearances is possible; it is possible to have appearances regarding one’s environment despite a lack of sensory awareness. It is possible, in principle, for it to seem to me that there is a cat on my lap without any of the sensory features of color or texture that normally accompany such seemings. Although I would not experience any sensory qualities, when I consider the proposition that the cat is on my lap, it would strike me as true, or seem to me to be true.
The exceptions include cases of believing as a result of self-deception, leaps of faith, or severe mental disorders, which are not relevant because opponents would not base their rejection of PC on such sources. See Huemer (2007, p. 39, n14).
We will discuss a more sophisticated form of CF in the next section.
One might be justified in believing that p even though p does not appear to be true, and may even appear to be false, provided that p could be inferred from other beliefs that appear to be true. One might justifiably believe that a mathematical theorem is true even though it appears false, for one may have a clear proof all of whose premises seem to be true.
Thanks to an anonymous referee of the journal for pointing to some unnecessary complexities in an earlier presentation of the first objection.
Other cases include the possibility of mistaking degrees of heat, mistaking shade of phenomenal color, mistaking the number of speckles in one’s visual field, mistaking a feeling of regret for a feeling or remorse (see Huemer 2006, p. 154), for a similar case of confusing resentment and indignation), and perhaps mistaking the thought that water might not have been H2O with the thought that watery stuff (roughly, liquids with the secondary qualities of water) might not have been H2O (see Huemer 2007, pp. 34–35).
I believe that fallible a priori foundations can be accommodated in a similar way, though some important differences and qualifications may apply.
Fumerton (1995, 2001) takes acquaintance with a fact to be fundamentally a relation between the self or subject and some entity, property, or fact, while BonJour (2001a, 2003) takes direct awareness to be a special feature that is “constitutive of” and “built into” the state of conscious experience itself. Fumerton thus takes the self’s being aware of something to be primary, and a state of awareness is a state of which the subject is directly aware; BonJour takes a state’s being conscious or involving built-in awareness to be primary, and a self is directly aware of something if it has or undergoes a state with this built-in awareness. I want to leave open here exactly what the appropriate fundamental metaphysical or ontological categorization of this direct awareness might be.
See Fumerton’s (1995) discussion of the principle of inferential justification, according to which S is inferentially justified in believing that p on the basis of e only if S is justified in believing that e and justified in believing that e makes probable p.
It is tempting to object that the experience of a red triangle cannot provide justification for such beliefs unless I also believe justifiably that the experience is of a (phenomenal) red triangle. But if as foundationalists we accept that the experience of some phenomenal feature attended to can sometimes justify one’s belief that one experiences a red triangle, and do so independently of any prior conceptualization of the experience as an experience of a red triangle, it is not clear why we should require such a conceptualization in the examples just given either. In light of this, the class of beliefs justified independently of any other empirical belief might be larger than it initially seems.
It is much less clear that such beliefs are justified independently of any a priori justification. It is not implausible that many if not all empirically justified beliefs depend at least in part on a basic a priori grasp of some kind.
Huemer says that the “problem applies generally to theories that privilege introspection over perception while recognizing the possibility of false but prima facie justified introspective belief” (2007, p. 35). Perhaps Huemer is right that there is no principled epistemic difference between fallible introspective beliefs and perceptual beliefs that would provide a reason for privileging one over the other (though see Fumerton’s comment in n. 29 below). But the acquaintance or direct awareness theorist could, and should, take as more fundamental the privileging of direct awareness over appearances; they should privilege introspection over perception only if and to the extent that beliefs regarding our own minds are more firmly based on direct awareness than beliefs regarding the external world. I am interested in defending a direct awareness view against Huemer’s argument from the possibility of false justified introspective belief, not the view that privileges beliefs about one’s own mind in general over perceptual beliefs.
See Huemer (2007, pp. 33–36). I think these examples capture what Huemer has in mind at least as well, though he focuses on a different sort of example: “It hardly seems that one’s having an intuition with the content that the watery stuff might not have been H 2 O renders it probable that the intuition in question actually has the content that water might not have been H 2 O. Indeed, it would seem that the proposition that one’s intuition has the former content rules out that it has the latter content, in so far as those contents are distinct….” (p. 35).
See Huemer (2006, pp. 152–154), for similar examples.
As discussed in the first section, Huemer insists that appearances are distinct from inclinations to believe. The CF-advocate is not in any obvious way committed to affirming or denying this. If, like myself, you find it difficult to see any clear distinction between appearances and conscious or felt inclinations to believe, then for the purposes of this section you can treat them as more or less identical.
This makes (6) closer to (3), at least on one reading of the condition in (3) that “one’s awareness seems to oneself to be the awareness that Gx.”
It is important to distinguish entertaining the possibility, in the abstract, of going wrong in forming such a belief, and entertaining the possibility of error while attending to the relevant fact. Descartes’s reply to the Cartesian Circle may, on one interpretation at least, provide an interesting precedent. Descartes explicitly distinguishes both in the Meditations and again in the Second Replies between perceiving some truths “clearly and distinctly” while attending to the reasons that support them, and perceiving them in a less transparent, more indirect way, without attending to the reasons that support them. In the latter case, our perceptions or judgments might seem to be true, or we might even recall having shown them to be true, but we could be wrong. On this interpretation, it is the latter apparently clear and distinct perceptions or judgments, and not the former genuinely clear and distinct perceptions, that Descartes thinks we cannot know without prior knowledge that God exists. See Fales (1996, 2ff). for a similar interpretation.
The motivation provided here for principle (6) appeals to the idea of the best explanation available to one. This might suggest that there is a more fundamental principle at work here: If one is directly aware of x’s seeming to be G (or aware of being inclined to predicate G to x), and if the best explanation available to one that x seems to be G is that it is G, then one thereby has at least some defeasible justification for believing that x is G. .
BonJour (2003) defends the view that external-world beliefs can be justified by inference to the best explanation, where the explanatory inference is itself, at a fundamental level, justified purely a priori. I hold it to be at least as plausible that fallible introspective beliefs can be justified in part on the basis of explanatory inferences (loosely speaking, since the “inference” is from non-doxastic states to doxastic ones) that are purely a priori.
See Moser (1989) for a defense of the view that some beliefs about the external world can be justified by virtue of the fact that they best explain the appearances given to us in experience. While I am not sure that Moser’s defense of the view is entirely successful, the position provides a nice example of a view that gives appearances an important role without accepting PC.
As Fumerton (2010) puts it: “I know how to explain the possibility of error in the case of marginal pain while still insisting that the fallible justification I have is direct awareness of my mental state. I can’t come up with any explanation remotely like that in the case of the fallible justification I have for believing propositions about physical objects. In the case of my belief that I am in pain, when I am acquainted with marginal pain, it seems obvious to me that there is nothing other than the mental state itself to which I can plausibly turn in trying to assure myself that I am in pain. In the case of sense experience, it seems equally obvious to me that there is a truth distinct from my claim about the external world which is a plausible candidate for the available evidence from which I can try to infer the relevant truth—the truth describing subjective appearance” (p. 383).
Even if it is granted that it is epistemically justified or rational for us to base our beliefs on appearances, this does not commit one to the view that PC is a true, necessary epistemic principle. The justification could derive from a fundamental principle that one is justified to believe in line with what one has good reasons or evidence to regard as true, together with the contingent fact that we do have good reasons or evidence to think that seemings are generally true. Thus, the fact that it is normally or even always epistemically justified for one to believe on the basis of appearances (absent defeaters) is compatible with denying PC as a necessary epistemic principle.
Similarly, even if the activity of philosophy and dialectic depends on or presupposes a methodology according to which one ought to consider what “seems true” in motivating and evaluating various positions and theses (Huemer 2001, p. 107), it doesn’t follow that those engaging in such an activity presuppose that PC is true. It may be that anyone engaged in such an activity also has good, prima facie reasons to take how things seem to them as true, at least when these seemings are the result of careful attention and reflection, and that one ought to believe what one has good reason to take to be true.
The requirement is often motivated by reflection on cases like BonJour’s case of Norman the clairvoyant (BonJour 1985, p. 41; see Huemer 2006, 149ff. for a similar example). If Norman believes that the President is in New York, but there is nothing available to his perspective that provides a reason to believe that the President is in New York, then he is not justified in believing this; even if his belief is a result of a reliable or truth-conducive clairvoyant ability, if Norman has no reason to think he has such an ability, and no other reason to trust his belief, then, intuitively, he is not justified. After all, there is nothing in Norman’s perspective that distinguishes this belief from a false or accidentally true belief. The central intuition is sometimes expressed in deontological or responsibilist terms (BonJour 1985, pp. 8, 42; Goldman 1999; Huemer 2001) and nondeontological/nonresponsibilist terms (BonJour 2001b; Fumerton 1995).
Bergmann (2006) argues that internalist views like CF are vulnerable to a fatal dilemma (one that is similar to the Sellarsian dilemma pushed forcefully in BonJour 1978, 1985). To be justified in believing something, the subject must either conceive of some direct object of awareness as relevant in some way to the truth of one’s belief, or not. Bergmann argues that the former leads to a vicious regress of increasingly complex beliefs or conceptual acts, while the latter does not satisfy the internalist intuition that the belief must be true or likely from the subject’s perspective. For a reply on behalf of CF, see Hasan (2011).
Notice that it won’t do to merely bring into my perspective some proposition to the effect that that p is true, that p seems true, or that p strikes me as true. For again, it is not clear why this makes the relevant difference to my perspective, whereas my merely thinking or entertaining the proposition p is true, p seems true or p strikes me as true does not.
The reader might be concerned about an infinite regress of representations, or representational states, looming here, but that is not the concern I want to raise, so let’s assume for sake of argument that there is a reasonable way to avoid any vicious regress.
Perhaps some will be tempted to respond on PC’s behalf by appeal to a track-record argument for thinking that these appearances are likely to be true: “It seems to me that there is a table here, and that’s true. It seems to me that 2 + 2 = 4, and that’s true. It seems to me that I exist, and that’s true. When I think about examples like this, it seems to me that…most of them are true” (2007, p. 53). In each case, the claim that “that’s true” is supported by the relevant proposition’s seeming to be true. Huemer appeals to a track-record argument to show “from within the theory of justification in question” that “we are justified in believing that most of the beliefs that are justified according to the theory are true” (2007, p. 53). But in the present context, appealing to such a track-record argument is too little too late. The worry is not that such track-record arguments are circular in some vicious way, or that they cannot transmit any justification—we can grant, for sake of argument at least, that this form of circularity is not vicious. Rather, it is that any such argument can provide one with a reason to believe its conclusion only if one already has a reason to accept its premises, and what we are still looking for is a good reason for a subject to accept its premises.
Compare a classical foundationalist’s version of the track record argument: I’m acquainted with the fact that I am conscious, and that’s true. I’m acquainted with the fact that I’m appeared to redly, and that’s true. I’m acquainted with the fact that 2 + 2 = 4, and that’s true. When we ask whether acquaintance with a fact provides the subject with a reason to think that the corresponding proposition “is true,” the answer is a straightforward yes. After all, in such cases one is acquainted with the truth-makers for the relevant propositions. Or consider more sophisticated classical foundationalist view that require the subject to be directly aware of or acquainted with the correspondence between propositions and the facts that are their truth-makers, or acquainted with some relation of making probable between certain propositions and the facts that are their probability-makers. While one might worry that we don’t have such acquaintances, or don’t have enough of them to justify belief in the external world, there is no puzzle about why a subject who is acquainted with the truth-making or probability-making facts themselves has a good reason to think that the propositions made true or probable by these facts are indeed true or probable.
This is how Huemer puts it initially, when discussing the case against reliabilism (p. 150). He is a bit less explicit about this when arguing against the acquaintance theory (pp. 152–153).
See Hanna (2010) for some concerns with Huemer’s attempt to distinguish seemings from doxastic states.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Richard Fumerton, Ted Poston, John DePoe, Sam Taylor, and an anonymous referee of the journal for helpful comments and discussion.
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Hasan, A. Phenomenal conservatism, classical foundationalism, and internalist justification. Philos Stud 162, 119–141 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9751-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9751-0