Abstract
Simon Keller and Sarah Stroud have both argued that the demands of being a good friend can conflict with the demands of standard epistemic norms. Intuitively, good friends will tend to seek favorable interpretations of their friends’ behaviors, interpretations that they would not apply to strangers; as such they seem prone to form unjustified beliefs. I argue that there is no such clash of norms. In particular, I argue that friendship does not require us to form beliefs about our friends in the biased fashion suggested by Stroud and Keller. I further argue that while some slight bias in belief-formation might be permitted by friendship, any such bias would fall within the bounds of epistemic propriety.
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Notes
The exact scope and nature of the epistemic point of view is controversial, but Alston’s account is a prominent one, and nothing significant hinges on the details of his account for current purposes.
I will simply treat supposed positive illusions in romantic relationships as relevantly similar to positive illusions in other friendships. If future empirical work were to suggest that romantic relationships are very different from friendships with respect to positive illusions, the current discussion would need to be revised. Note also that positive illusions and epistemically unjustified beliefs can come apart (as when a person forms an unjustified, but luckily true belief); in the current sub-section I will focus solely on positive illusions.
One could question the epistemic propriety of forming beliefs about the likely quality of a person’s poetry based on the quality of the poetry of others who happen to have read at the same venue. To ensure such propriety, we can assume that the owners of the café have a settled taste whereby the poets they invite typically share a common, bad, style.
By ‘positive belief’ I mean a belief that a friend possesses some valued trait, or has performed well, etc.; similarly, a ‘negative belief’ means a belief that a friend possesses some bad trait, or has performed a wrong action, etc.
What if someone did still feel great satisfaction in unwarranted praise? This would seem to reflect either vanity or low self-esteem on the part of this person. Either way, it does not seem that there would be a genuine, general norm of friendship requiring biased beliefs simply because there is a small set of people with low self-esteem (or who are vain) who would derive some pleasure or reassurance even if they knew such beliefs were unjustified.
That is, our close friendships will typically tend to be quite resilient; we can form negative beliefs about friends, go through rough patches, have disagreements, and so on, without the friendship being undermined. Again, this is a matter of accepting our friends for who they are, recognizing their shortcomings, trying to be supportive, and in some cases encouraging them to improve.
We need not take a stance on the nature of epistemic justification here, beyond assuming that our beliefs can be more or less justified.
Notice how common a phenomenon this is—we are often comparatively lax in forming beliefs about trivial matters; we are much more careful in forming beliefs when these might impact our relationships, careers, and so on. But in each case we could still be satisfying standard epistemic norms.
Reed (2010) draws attention to the following passages as reflecting the widespread commitment to fallibilism: “the acceptance of fallibilism in epistemology is virtually universal” (Cohen 1998, p. 91), and “We are all fallibilists nowadays” (Williams 2001, 5). Note that not all fallibilists do, in fact, accept norms that accommodate mild differences in epistemic behaviour of the kind defended here—my claim is only that their commitment to fallibilism could allow such acceptance. Finally, notice that Stroud focuses on Feldman and Conee’s evidentialism as a paradigmatic, standard epistemic theory. It would be open to her to hold that other standard accounts of epistemic norms could in fact accommodate her proposals; in other words, we could treat Stroud as more narrowly arguing for a clash between the norms of Feldman and Conee’s evidentialism (a prominent and important view) and those of friendship, while allowing that other standard epistemic norms would not be so problematic.
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Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of this paper have been presented at the University of St. Andrews, the Dundee Philosophical Society, and as a Colgate University Humanities Colloquium; I would like to thank all of these audiences for their helpful comments and questions. Parts of this paper were written while I was a visiting fellow at the Centre for Philosophy and Public Affairs at the University of St. Andrews; I would like to thank the Centre and its director, John Haldane, for this support. My work on this paper was also supported by a Picker Grant from Colgate University. Finally, I would like to thank the following individuals in particular for helpful comments and suggestions: Reid Blackman, Sarah Broadie, Lesleigh Cushing, David Dudrick, James Harris, Allan Hazlett, Simon Keller, Jennifer Lackey, David McCabe, Marvin K. Mooney, Claire Sigsworth, Sarah Stroud, Jens Timmerman, Chris Vecsey, Ed Witherspoon, and the anonymous referees of this paper.
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Kawall, J. Friendship and epistemic norms. Philos Stud 165, 349–370 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9953-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9953-0