Abstract
In this paper, I examine Crispin Wright’s most recent attempt to introduce a diagnostic tool for predicting failures of warrant transmission, the so-called ‘Revised Template’. I show that the Revised Template does not, in fact, generate the predictions about warrant transmission failure that Wright thinks it does. I argue that the failure lies, in large part, with the definition of the technical notion ‘presupposition’ which the Revised Template deploys. Through a consideration of Wright’s own ‘general motivation’ for the Revised Template, I extract an alternative characterization of ‘presupposition’ and use this to fuel a diagnostic tool for predicting failures of warrant transmission which, I believe, is both more faithful to Wright’s own general motivating remarks and more successful in predicting failures of warrant transmission than the Revised Template.
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Notes
In each of the examples, the proposition labelled ‘E’ is supposed to give evidence for the proposition labelled ‘A’ in such a way that, in the right kinds of circumstances, E warrants A. Furthermore, A is supposed to entail B but in a way that is allowed to be slightly looser than strict logical entailment.
This is what Dretske took to be the lesson of the example (Dretske 1970).
See, on this question, Alspector-Kelly (2014).
The argument of this paragraph is an attempt to extract the key insights from Wright (2012, 460–465).
Wright makes this point at Wright (2012, 463–464).
This argument is at Wright (2012, 462–463).
Notice that ‘lays claim’ switches us to the level of (what Wright calls) “second-order warrant” (Wright 2011, 87). A child who deploys modus ponens can be first-order warranted in believing the conclusion of the argument she has just made. But the child need not be aware of (or, more precisely, be capable of being made aware of) the bearing of modus ponens on her belief in the conclusion of the argument on the basis of the premises. The debate about warrant transmission, according to Wright, does not concern first-order warrant. Instead, what is at stake are cases where a thinker takes herself to have warrant for some proposition P constituted by some evidence E. In that case, she ought (according to Wright) be capable of recognizing the rational dependence of her belief in the conclusion of the argument on those principles which her argument presupposes. I take everything I say about warrant to be applicable at this second-order level.
For evidence, see footnote 12 below.
One might wonder how we should understand the notion of ‘doubt’ deployed in this definition, and, in particular, how to apply the notion of doubt to a project rather than a belief. Moretti and Piazza (writing on the role of doubt in warrant transmission albeit in a slightly different context) give the following characterization of doubt: “Let us say that a subject s doubts q just in case s either disbelieves or withholds belief about q, namely refrains from both believing and disbelieving q after deciding about q” (Moretti and Piazza 2013a). Applying this to the notion of a cognitive project would presumably generate roughly the following idea: to doubt a cognitive project is, on reflection, to either disbelieve that the project is competent or withhold belief in the competence of the project. Call this strong doubt in a project. Wright’s general discussion of presuppositions contains various remarks such as: “[Y]our prior level of confidence in these conditions [presuppositions] will set a limit on how confident you should rationally allow yourself to be about the overall significance of the investigation, and the good standing of the results that it returns” (Wright 2012, 469). The general tenor of remarks like this suggests that what Wright means when he talks about doubting a project is weaker: doubting a presupposition will rationally require one merely to ‘decrease one’s level of confidence’ in the associated project. This is a weaker condition because one can decrease one’s level of confidence in a project without disbelieving (or withholding belief in) its competence (if I catch my spouse telling a minor lie I might decrease my level of confidence in the project of finding things out on the basis of his testimony, but I am unlikely to refuse to countenance the competence of that project altogether). Call Wright’s sense of doubt in a cognitive project weak doubt. I do not think anything I say below turns on choosing between these two senses of doubting a project.
Wright does not in fact carefully apply the Revised Template to this example. His clearest statement of the claim that sz-b is a presupposition of the relevant project is this:
Dretske’s example illustrates a different ploy ...: whatever S may be, it will always be straightforward to construct a specific sceptical hypothesis whose obtaining would falsify an authenticity-condition for the achievement of warrant for S by a particular kind of cognitive project and whose negation, which will thus also qualify as an authenticity-condition for the project concerned, will actually be entailed by S. (Wright 2012, 468)
Compare also his handling of the case at 2012, 470 and 2011, 90.
Since, according to this first method of individuating cognitive projects, projects are ordered pairs consisting of a question and a procedure, we could presumably generate various other cognitive projects in the case of Standard Zebra. For example, the pair consisting of the question ‘Are there zebras in that enclosure?’ with the method ‘Looking into the enclosure and making a determination about whether those animals are zebras on the basis of their visual appearance’.
I owe the central idea of this paragraph to a reviewer for this journal.
One might think that different choices for the question-procedure pair might help. But it is not obvious that this so. For example, suppose we take the project in Standard Zebra to be the pair consisting of the question ‘Are there zebras in that enclosure?’ with the method ‘Looking into the enclosure and making a determination about whether those animals are zebras on the basis of their visual appearance’. If I doubt sz-b, I am again under no rational obligation, in advance of conducting the project, to doubt the competence of the project should the animals look like flamingos.
One might raise the following concern at this point: part of the motivation for Wright’s generalization to the notion of a cognitive project is an attempt to accommodate cases where A is “conceived as warranted non-inferentially by direct cognitive reception” (Wright 2011, 94). I take it that Wright thinks there would be no suitable E-proposition available in such case. His main stalking-horse at these moments in the dialectic is the epistemological disjunctivism of McDowell, according to which visual perception is a “capacity to enjoy perceptual states in which features of the environment are perceptually there for one” (McDowell 2011, 32). But McDowell is perfectly willing to take it that when one claims (on the basis of exercising one’s perceptual capacities) ‘Here is a hand’ (A) one has a warrant which can be perfectly well described as “that one sees it to be so” (McDowell 2011, 33).
In fact, if we adopt the weak sense of doubt in a project (which appears to be Wright’s preferred sense) canvassed in footnote 11 above, the argument of this paragraph is very simple: if Smith doubts D2 then she certainly ought to decrease her level of confidence in the reliability of taking a view about bt-a on the basis of bt-e.
Strictly speaking, the fact that sz-b does not count as a presupposition does not show that the Revised Template does not predict that warrant fails to transmit in the case of Standard Zebra. For perhaps there is some other way of filling in the Revised Template. The problem is that it is not clear how. Consider, for example,
- D3:
-
Zoos are not typically in the business of disguising one kind of animal to look like another.
D3 is incompatible with (or at least in tension with) “Those animals are cunningly disguised mules”. Furthermore, D3 seems to be a paradigmatic example of the kind of presupposition described in Sect. 1 above. And D3 meets presupposition, including the I-qualification, if we take the relevant project in Standard Zebra to be identified in terms of a question-procedure pair. The trouble is that D3 does not meet the I-qualification if we take the project to be ‘Determining whether, in the circumstances, sz-e constitutes a warrant for sz-a’.
If, as I argued in Sect. 3 above, presuppositions of projects individuated using the question-procedure methodology routinely fail to satisfy the I-qualification, it will not help at all to return, at this point in the dialectic, to that alternative method of project individuation.
I am greatly indebted to a referee for this journal for suggesting this way of formulating the point.
It is not clear to me whether this was implicit in presupposition; some of Wright’s remarks (see, for example, his discussion of the Rats case below) might seem to indicate otherwise.
It seems to me presupposition ii works correctly here: it prevents r-b from counting as a presupposition of the project of taking r-e to constitute a warrant for r-a because doubt about r-b does not, in any circumstance, inevitably rationally require you to doubt that r-e constitutes a warrant for r-a in those circumstances. As we will see below, when Wright unhesitatingly classifies r-b as a presupposition of the project, he is considering a context in which doubt about r-b ought to make you doubt the competence of that project. This suggests that he does not take generality to be built into presupposition (or he has forgotten the importance of that generality).
There is, of course, the further problem that the projects here are individuated using the question-procedure method, rather than the warrant-assessment method.
This is, of course, merely a sufficient condition on failure of warrant transmission: I do not claim that every argument which fails to meet this condition is one which is capable of transmitting warrant.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to two extraordinarily helpful referees for this journal for detailed and extremely insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Thanks also to Jennifer Lockhart for extensive discussions of this material.
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Lockhart, T. Failures of Warrant Transmission: The Role of Presupposition. Erkenn 84, 535–557 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-9970-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-9970-2