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Perception and Virtue Reliabilism

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Abstract

In some recent work, Ernest Sosa rejects the “perceptual model” of rational intuition, according to which intuitive beliefs (e.g., that \( 2 + 2 = 4 \)) are justified by standing in the appropriate relation to a nondoxastic intellectual experience (a seeming-true, or the like), in much the way that perceptual beliefs are often held to be justified by an appropriate relation to nondoxastic sense experiential states. By extending some of Sosa’s arguments and adding a few of my own, I argue that Sosa is right to reject the perceptual model of intuition, and that we should reject the “perceptual model” of perception as well. Rational intuition and perception should both receive a virtue theoretic (e.g., reliabilist) account, rather than an evidentialist one. To this end, I explicitly argue against the Grounds Principle, which holds that all justified beliefs must be based on some adequate reason, or ground.

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Notes

  1. Sosa (2007), especially Chapter 3, “Intuitions”.

  2. ‘Intuition’ is a multiply ambiguous term, signifying either beliefs like the belief that \( 2 + 2 = 4 \), the nondoxastic intellectual experience that is said to justify this belief, or the faculty of (reliably?) forming such beliefs. I will use the term in the first of these three senses and will often use ‘intuitive belief’ as a synonym.

  3. The exact nature of the basing relation is, of course, a matter of philosophical controversy, but the basic notion is clear enough. Much of the controversy (see Kvanvig 2003; Korcz 2000) results from wildly different intuitions regarding Lehrer’s (1971) gypsy lawyer case.

  4. More precisely, they say that propositional justification is entirely determined by the evidence one possesses, while doxastic justification (“well foundedness”) is a matter of a belief’s being based on sufficient evidence.

  5. More precisely: any two agents alike with respect to the evidence they possess are alike with respect to propositional justification; any two agents who are alike with respect to propositional justification and with respect to the grounds of their beliefs are alike with respect to doxastic justification.

  6. The strong evidentialist could try to avoid this result by attempting to make sense of the claim that the aforementioned nonevidential factors actually play a role in determining evidential relations (i.e., what counts as evidence for what, how strong that evidence is, etc.). Feldman and Conee, at least, carefully avoid this tack.

  7. He suggests as much in a footnote in the “Intuitions” chapter (p. 55) and discusses it in more detail in Chapter 2 of Sosa (2009b). His argument here, however, seems to be aimed at Feldman-and-Conee-style evidentialism, rather than the weak evidentialism I introduce earlier. He is concerned primarily to show that the experiential state is not metaphysically sufficient for the (prima facie) justification of the perceptual belief, but a weak evidentialist could accommodate this by claiming that competence figures into the determination of the evidential relations. Sosa’s epistemology of intuitions makes a more radical departure from weak evidentialism. A more detailed and extended defense of a virtue foundational theory of perception appeared Sosa (2009a), where he arrives at some of the same claims at which I arrive independently here.

  8. Strictly speaking, Sosa could argue that the Grounds Principle is correct: every justified belief has a justifying ground, though not every justified thing has a ground, since attractions to believe are justified though ungrounded. Attractions play a role in Sosa’s epistemology very much like that played by basic beliefs in other epistemologies. Clearly there is a revised principle which Sosa rejects and which retains the spirit of the Grounds Principle, enough so that it is convenient to proceed as if it is the more commonly encountered Grounds Principle that Sosa denies.

  9. As Pollock (1986) points out, the isolation objection poses a problem for any doxastic theory (once the infallibility of basic beliefs is given up), not just coherentism.

  10. I argue for this in more detail in Lyons (2009).

  11. To take just one example of introspective fallibility, a famous line of psychological research (e.g., Cantor et al. 1975) seems to indicate that subjects overestimate their own levels of sexual arousal, when the subjects are physiologically aroused by exercise, fear, test anxiety, or the like.

  12. Versions of the second and third of these arguments can be found in Lyons (2009).

  13. See Huemer 2001; Kelly 1999, for two examples.

  14. Or introspection. I should be careful here. I do not deny that there is a nonconceptual experience involved in intuition: some sense of having intuited something. What I deny is that there is a distinct, distinguishable nonconceptual experience for every distinct, justifiable, intuitive belief. This is what proposal (ii) in conjunction with the Grounds Principle would require.

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Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2009 Bled Philosophical Conference. Thanks to the audience there, especially Ernest Sosa, for helpful comments on that version.

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Correspondence to Jack C. Lyons.

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Lyons, J.C. Perception and Virtue Reliabilism. Acta Anal 24, 249–261 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-009-0064-2

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