Abstract
One important strand of Sellars’s attack on classical foundationalism from Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind is his thesis about the priority of is-talk over looks-talk. This thesis has been criticized extensively in recent years, and classical foundationalism has found several contemporary defenders. I revisit Sellars’s thesis and argue that is-talk is epistemically prior to looks-talk in a way that undermines classical foundationalism. The classical foundationalist claims that epistemic foundations are constituted by the agent’s set of looks-judgments. However, I argue that only a subset of these looks-judgments are even candidates to serve as foundations for the agent’s empirical knowledge, and membership in this subset is determined by the agent’s theory of how the world is. Thus, the epistemic force of the looks-judgments in this subset is dependent on the agent’s theory of how the world is. This means that these looks-judgments aren’t foundational at all, as the agent’s theory of how the world is is epistemically is prior to the epistemic status of these looks-judgments. This is the sense in which judgments about how the world is are epistemically prior to judgments about how things look. This conclusion allows concrete elaboration of another of Sellars’s well-know (although not well-understood) claims: “I do wish to insist that the metaphor of ‘foundation’ is misleading in that it keeps us from seeing that if there is a logical dimension in which other empirical propositions rest on observation reports, there is another logical dimension in which the latter rest on the former”.
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Notes
Throughout this paper, I use the term ‘empirical’ to delineate beliefs and concepts that apply, or are about, external objects; this use excludes beliefs about the phenomenological character of experience and phenomenological concepts. As an anonymous referee for Synthese has pointed out to me, the term ‘empirical’ hasn’t always been used in this way, and so it is perhaps necessary to clarify at the outset this terminological point.
See Koons (2015).
An anonymous referee has questioned whether this is universally true: “I look to the sky and see blue. Is this causally dependent on a theory I hold, on a set of beliefs? Perhaps, but another alternative is that it is the manifestation of a disposition I have to form certain beliefs based on certain experiences—a disposition that isn’t itself a belief and isn’t based on any belief.” While we can certainly talk in terms of dispositions, the deeper point here is that these dispositions are tied to a particular conceptual repertoire—say, that of color—and that is why the disposition results in judgments of color, rather than judgments of temperature, distance, or salinity. And the main thrust of this paper will be that a disposition to form certain beliefs cannot result in prima facie justification unless the concepts embedded in the resulting beliefs are part of an epistemically validated theory. The mere disposition cannot in itself be justification conferring, if the resulting belief deploys concepts that are, at bottom, ones the agent is in generally not justified in deploying in perceptual judgments.
The issue is more complicated that a mere reliance on false or unjustified background beliefs. A child who believes that there will be gifts in her stocking, and believes they will be there because Santa put them there, may well be justified in believing the gifts are there, even though her theory of how they got there is based on false premises. But there is a difference between, for example, having a faulty etiology, and deploying concepts (like ghost or unicorn) which are themselves part of a bad theory. The girl may well be justified in believing there will be presents; she is probably not justified in believing that among these presents, there might be a unicorn. (Assuming, of course, that the girl is not doxastically justified in believing in the existence of unicorns, an issue I address in the next paragraph.)
An experience propositionally justifies a proposition if it provides justification for that proposition, even if it does not lead the agent to believe that proposition. Doxastic justification is more contentious: for some authors, belief B is doxastically justified for S iff B is propositionally justified, and the agent believes B on the basis of whatever propositionally justifies B. However, the present objection relies on a more relativized version of doxastic justification: experience E doxastically justifies belief B for S iff E makes B rational for S in light of S’s ancillary theoretical commitments (regardless of whether E propositionally justifies B), and S believes B on the basis of E.
Anjana Jacob raised this objection in conversation.
This is why I think even Fumerton’s more sophisticated classical foundationalism is susceptible to this criticism. On his view, “one has a noninferential justification for believing P when one has the thought that P and one is acquainted with the fact that P, the thought that P, and the fact which is the thought that P’s corresponding to the fact that P” (Fumerton 2001a, pp. 13–14). While he notes that this formulation implies that foundational beliefs are infallible, he later walks this back in response to criticism from Plantinga, conceding that “one can have noninferential justification for believing that one is in a certain sensory state, where that justification consists in the fact that one is directly acquainted with a different, but very similar sensory state” (Fumerton 2001b, p. 74). The criticism of this paper is that Fumerton overlooks another possibility: one could be acquainted with a sensory state (say, of redness) and instead of having the thought ‘red,’ one could have the thought, ‘presence of demonic spirits.’ Now Fumerton is cast on the horns of a dilemma. On the one horn, Fumerton can say this foundational belief is not justified. It can’t be unjustified merely because the resulting belief is false; Fumerton has conceded the possibility of justified-but-false beliefs. The belief must fail to be justified because it deploys concepts that are not epistemically validated. But this just means, again, that the justification of the theory embedding the concepts deployed in a supposedly foundational belief is epistemically prior to the justification of that belief, rendering it non-foundational. On the other horn of the dilemma, Fumerton can say the belief is justified. But then, as I have been arguing, the belief is not suited to serve a foundational role, since it will be unable to justify further empirical claims (since the belief deploys concepts that are part of a theory—the theory of demons—that is so ill-supported).
An anonymous referee for Synthese has suggested the advocate of classical foundationalism might make the following move: “We start with the class of all looks-judgments. This won’t be a consistent set, so we have to do some pruning. You recommend pruning by keeping only those looks-judgments that utilize concepts of an epistemically validated empirical theory of the world, which is inconsistent with foundationalism. What if someone says the right pruning strategy is to accept the maximally consistent set of looks judgments, so that we need not look outside the larger set itself?” I suggest two responses: first, it is not clear that looks judgments can be inconsistent, in any real sense, without important empirical considerations of compatibility and incompatibility. Second, by importing coherentist considerations, this move makes the coherence of the set prior to the epistemic force of any particular looks-judgment, making said judgments non-foundational.
And, in an ironic turn, the foundational beliefs or looks-judgments turn out to be those that are in principle fallible (because the concepts they employ turn out to be part of a theory that could be overturned). I will not make much of this point, though, because not all contemporary foundationalists insist on the infallibility or incorrigibility of foundational beliefs.
However, not all contemporary advocates of classical foundationalism advocate SCF. McGrew does, but Fumerton does not, while others take no clear stance on the issue.
Although I am taking most of my cues in this paper from Sellars, Sellars would not describe our low-level observation reports as theory-laden, since he reserves the term ‘theoretical’ to describe objects that are unobservable. [As Brandom writes, “So observational concepts, ones that have (at least some) noninferential circumstances of appropriate application, can be thought of as inference laden. It does not follow, by the way, that they are for Sellars for that reason also theory laden (2015, p. 104).] For Sellars, of course, this is a methodological distinction rather than an ontological one; an object (like Neptune) can start out as theoretical, and then become observable. But I think the difference between Sellars and myself is terminological rather than substantive. The point I am trying to capture when I call observation predicates like ‘red’ theory-laden is that even the simplest observation predicates are inferentially-articulated in a way such that use of them commits us to certain claims about the way the world is. Thus, if we predicate ‘red’ of something, we are committed to its being colored; we are not thereby committed to its being hot, or cold, or far away. Thus, even use of our low-level observation predicates involves certain empirical commitments (which are always, in principle, contestable), and it is in this sense that I describe these predicates as theory-laden. It would be more accurate, I suppose, to describe them as ‘in-principle-contestable-empirical-commitment laden’, but for obvious reasons I will use ‘theory laden’ as a shorthand for the preceding. I am grateful to Carl Sachs and Ken Westphal for pressing me on this issue.
See Churchland (1979, Chapt. 1).
See note 4 above on my use of the term ‘empirical’ in this context.
Peacocke defines being red in terms of being red’, and holds that ‘looks red’ is an altogether different (and structured) notion.
Peacocke attributes this view to Wittgenstein, but seems to endorse it himself.
For example, Poston (2012).
“One seems forced to choose between the picture of an elephant which rests on the tortoise (What supports the tortoise?) and the picture of a great Hegelian serpent of knowledge with its tail in its mouth (Where does it begin?). Neither will do” (Sellars 1997, pp. 78-79/§38). Burstein (2006) develops the argument that Sellars is neither a foundationalist nor a coherentist.
One might worry that on the present account, a rival theory could only with great difficulty overthrow a well-entrenched theory, since it is difficult to see how one could ever be justified in ‘seeing’ the elements of the new theory. I think that it is a strength of the present account that it helps explain why, precisely, theory change is so difficult and philosophically puzzling. Although theory change is far too large of a topic to undertake here, I take it to be a commonplace in the philosophy of science that novel theories often have trouble gaining epistemic traction against well-entrenched theories; and writers as far back as Kuhn have argued that a new theory cannot take epistemic grip until the old theory is weighted down by many anomalies and is ripe for being overtaken.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Michael P. Wolf and Anjana Jacob for reading a draft of this paper and providing me with helpful feedback. I also received helpful suggestions from several people at the conference “Sellars’s Legacy: Consequences, Ramifications, New Directions” at the American University of Beirut in May 2015. I particularly want to thank Bana Bashour, Mark Lance, Rebecca Kukla, Ken Westphal, Daniel MacBeth, Carl Sachs and Susanna Schellenberg for the valuable feedback they provided me during my session, and in conversation afterwards. Finally, two anonymous referees for Synthese provided me with a good deal of helpful criticism (particularly concerning section IV).
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Koons, J.R. A Myth resurgent: classical foundationalism and the new Sellarsian critique. Synthese 194, 4155–4169 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1134-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1134-9