Abstract
Michael Bergmann seeks to motivate his externalist, proper function theory of epistemic justification by providing three objections to the mentalism and mentalist evidentialism characteristic of nonexternalists such as Richard Feldman and Earl Conee. Bergmann argues that (i) mentalism is committed to the false thesis that justification depends on mental states; (ii) mentalism is committed to the false thesis that the epistemic fittingness of an epistemic input to a belief-forming process must be due to an essential feature of that input, and, relatedly, that mentalist evidentialism is committed to the false thesis that the epistemic fittingness of doxastic response B to evidence E is an essential property of B–E; and (iii) mentalist evidentialism is “unmotivated”. I object to each argument. The argument for (i) begs the question. The argument for (ii) suffers from the fact that mentalist evidentialists are not committed to the consequences claimed for them; nevertheless, I show that there is, in the neighborhood, a substantive dispute concerning the nature of doxastic epistemic fittingness. That dispute involves what I call “Necessary Fittingness”, the view that, necessarily, exactly one (at most) doxastic attitude (belief, or disbelief, or suspension of judgment) toward a proposition is epistemically fitting with respect to a person’s total evidence at any time. Reflection on my super-blooper epistemic design counterexamples to Bergmann’s proper function theory reveals both the plausibility of Necessary Fittingness and a good reason to deny (iii). Mentalist evidentialism is thus vindicated against the objections.
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Notes
Chapters 7 and 8 are excellent additions to the literature concerning dialectical disputes between epistemic internalists and externalists. For critical discussion, see Rogers and Matheson (2009).
Although Bergmann (2006, pp. 55–7) claims that there are nonexternalist epistemic theories (including that of Conee and Feldman) that are neither internalist nor externalist, I’ll use “nonexternalist” to mean any theory of epistemic justification that is not an externalist theory.
Bergmann (2006, p. 48) converts Conee and Feldman’s description of mentalism into a form he finds amenable to doxastic justification, which is his subject: “A belief’s justification is a function solely of (i) which mental states the subject is in and (ii) which mental states of the subject the belief is based on. (i.e., if two possible subjects are exactly alike mentally and in terms of which of their mental states their beliefs are based on, then they are exactly alike justificationally)”.
Bergmann’s commentary suggests that mentalism is committed to the following: necessarily, doxastically justified beliefs are caused by mental states. Not so: Feldman and Conee require basing but do not say that the basing must be causal. Nevertheless, as Kevin McCain pointed out to me, Bergmann’s objection doesn’t depend on the causal claim: the main dispute is whether mental states are necessary for justification.
See BonJour (1985, p. 41). My point is not that such externalists will necessarily think that the two cases stand or fall together; rather, some externalists seem keen to place restrictions on which reliable causal processes are epistemically appropriate, and divine revelation (in the absence of anything mental such as a sense of the divine) is surely among the controversial ones.
Commenting on cases of reliable clairvoyants, Bergmann (2006, p. 141) says that, if we stipulate that their faculties are functioning properly, “… we have to admit that their clairvoyant beliefs are no more strange than our a priori or memory or perceptual beliefs”. But, that is false, since clairvoyant beliefs are ones that just pop into a person’s head helter-skelter, whereas the other kinds are typically related to common experiences (namely, seeing-the-truth experiences, memory experiences, and perceptual experiences, respectively).
Bergmann’s other example: “Imagine alien cognizers who form the belief that there is water nearby via a belief-forming process that bypasses their other mental states. Suppose, for example, that water in the environment of these aliens causes in them the belief that there is water nearby, without using any other mental states as intermediate causes of those beliefs. And suppose, furthermore, that these beliefs are not only reliably formed but also formed in accord with what counts as proper function for these cognizers” (2006, p. 64). As I point out in the text, Bergmann himself thinks that reliable belief formation is unnecessary for justification; and, if you think that the proper function mentioned in the example makes a difference, see my counterexample in Sect. 2.5.
That is, proper function justification implies the same, correct epistemic evaluations with respect to examples that Feldman and Conee use to illustrate the merits of their view.
In this section I summarize relevant parts of Bergmann (2006, Chap. 5).
Bergmann (2006, p. 113) says, “Evidentialists, by endorsing Necessity, give an affirmative answer to (B)”.
I do not claim that Bergmann takes mentalism to entail Necessity. He explicitly discusses Necessity as a thesis that evidentialists who are mentalists are committed to. I make the textual point for clarity’s sake.
I think that many evidentialists implicitly endorse Uniqueness. For explicit discussions, see Feldman (2007, p. 205), who endorses Uniqueness; see White (2005), who argues against various anti-Uniqueness views; and see Christensen (2007), who offers some reasons in favor of what he calls “Rational Uniqueness”—“the view that there is a unique maximally epistemically rational response to any given evidential situation”—saying that he finds the view to be “quite attractive”.
For instance, responsible belief theorists can count as mentalists without counting as evidentialists.
Bergmann (2006, p. 134) explicitly acknowledges this, treating the point as a theoretical asset of his theory, since it allows for the correct results concerning the new evil demon problem, whereas reliabilist theories do not.
As I explain in Sect. 3, there is a good reason to deny that this point counts in Bergmann’s favor.
This example has roughly the same structure as one in Long (forthcoming), but here it is used for a different purpose.
In Part V of his commentary, David Hume (1993) suggests that this much of my imaginary creation-and-design story is consistent with what we know of our own world and its human cognizers.
For those who want a story: Although Z is an immature deity whose created world falls far short of a best possible world, Z, having recently been infuriated by the deceptions of his older siblings, has developed a passion for honesty and truth about some matters; and, due to his youthful vanity, Z has designed those cognizers such that their happiness depends in part on their believing that Z exists.
For those who want a story: Z has a reason for the cognizers to believe in the trolls’ existence: such beliefs are designed to have a salutary role in their unconscious dreams, providing some psychological aid in their struggles against the hardship and suffering that Z predicts they will endure due to details of the particular world Z has designed and created.
Other scenarios serve the same point. Simpler Alternative Story (drop the conjunction): Under the conditions described, the cognizers are designed to engage in an inference from p to the content of B2. Weirder Alternative Story (invalid reasoning): The cognizers are designed to engage in an invalid inference, say, if p then q; r (I’m a cognizer); thus, the content of B2.
And perhaps things are even worse in the Weirder Alternative Story (see footnote 19).
Bergmann (2006, p. 170) says that “defeater systems” are “similar to belief-forming systems, except that the result of their operation is belief loss not belief production”.
Since JPF is about belief (and does not mention suspension of judgment), JPF seems to be silent on the justificatory status of Spork’s suspending judgment on the content of B2.
Reflection on the fact that Bergmann builds the defeater system into the relevant design plan for any cognizer prompts the thought that there is little hope of adding a clause to Bergmann’s account of epistemic defeat that will both count Spork’s belief as justified and avoid entailing Necessary Fittingness or an evidentialist-friendly account of epistemic defeat.
According to Plato’s Meno [97e], Socrates says that the difference between true belief and knowledge is “an account of the reason why” (Plato, 2002, p. 90).
Here I rely on straightforward definitions of “rational”: “having reason or understanding” (Webster); “reason, reasonableness” (Princeton WordNet); “of or based on reasoning or reason” (Oxford English Reference). In recent years, some have used “rational” or “epistemically rational” in ways that have nothing at all to do with one’s having reason, but such uses strike me as untoward stretches of the word. In any case, take my point in the text to be that typical evidentialist views of epistemic justification preserve a tight connection between justified belief and reasonable belief.
Spork’s suspension of judgment on the content of B2 is an exception, since JPF says nothing about suspension of judgment.
For further discussion of this point, see Long (forthcoming).
As Bergmann (2006, p. 136) himself points out, on his view it is only “in some evil demon cases [that] the subject’s beliefs are objectively justified…. What is true in most demon cases is that the subject’s beliefs are subjectively justified”. Our topic is what Bergmann calls “objective justification”.
For additional worries that Bergmann’s arguments rely too heavily on his intuitive judgments, see Hetherington (2007).
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Acknowledgments
I thank Earl Conee, Richard Feldman, Jonathan Matheson, Kevin McCain, Jason Rogers, and William Rowley for helpful comments.
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Long, T.R. Mentalist evidentialism vindicated (and a super-blooper epistemic design problem for proper function justification). Philos Stud 157, 251–266 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9635-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9635-8