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In defence of dogmatism

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Abstract

According to Jim Pryor’s dogmatism, when you have an experience with content p, you often have prima facie justification for believing p that doesn’t rest on your independent justification for believing any proposition. Although dogmatism has an intuitive appeal and seems to have an antisceptical bite, it has been targeted by various objections. This paper principally aims to answer the objections by Roger White according to which dogmatism is inconsistent with the Bayesian account of how evidence affects our rational credences. If this were true, the rational acceptability of dogmatism would be seriously questionable. I respond that these objections don’t get off the ground because they assume that our experiences and our introspective beliefs that we have experiences have the same evidential force, whereas the dogmatist is uncommitted to this assumption. I also consider the question whether dogmatism has an antisceptical bite. I suggest that the answer turns on whether or not the Bayesian can determine the priors of hypotheses and conjectures on the grounds of their extra-empirical virtues. If the Bayesian can do so, the thesis that dogmatism has an antisceptical bite is probably false.

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Notes

  1. Similar positions have been proposed by, among others, Pollock (1986) and Huemer (2001).

  2. My paper attempts to adhere to the original picture of dogmatism presented in Pryor (2000, 2004), which I find plausible.

  3. Many philosophers nowadays maintain that experiences have representational contents, but not just everyone identifies these contents with propositional contents. See Siegel (2011) for an overview.

  4. One can experience as if p without believing p—for example when one knows one is having an optical illusion.

  5. According to the internalist, if p is justified for a subject, all factors that make p justified for her are recognisable by the subject by mere reflection or are identifiable with some of the subject’s mental states. Dogmatism satisfies the first condition at least.

  6. A subject has propositional justification for believing p if, whether or not she believes p or believe p for the right reason, it would be epistemically appropriate for her to believe p.

  7. See Pryor (2005) and Siegel and Silins (2000) for more detailed presentations of these two notions.

  8. For a survey of the different options see Siegel (2011).

  9. See for instance Schiffer (2004), White (2006), Wright (2007) and Siegel and Silins (2000).

  10. The only if direction of this biconditional is controversial (cf. Wright 2011; Moretti and Piazza 2013). I don’t want to press this objection here because it would distract us from more serious difficulties of White’s arguments.

  11. At least in Pryor (2000, 2005).

  12. Schiffer (2004) puts forward a criticism of dogmatism that (insofar as I understand it) is similar to this objection.

  13. In White’s original example you are put to sleep and I write the instructions on the cards. For reasons of stylistic coherence with the rest of my paper I have swapped you with me.

  14. White’s second thought experiment is similar but based on statistical claims: e.g. the percentages of living people who are missing one hand and have a plastic replica or a stump.

  15. All these proposals aim at a formal vindication of the thesis that when I learn E, my degree of justification for ~SH increases. To achieve this, Pryor (insofar as I understand him) replaces the standard credence function with an original superadditive credence function, Weatherson switches to imprecise probabilities and introduces a non-standard conditionalisation procedure, Kung re-interprets the standard notion of incremental confirmation to the effect that a proposition e can confirm a proposition p even if Cr(p|e) ≤ Cr(p).

  16. Also note that Silins (2007, §3.2) concedes that White’s first objection goes through. It will shortly be apparent that I disagree.

  17. It is worth stressing that Silins (2007) gives no explanation (or no good explanation) of how it can be the case that Cr E (P) <  Cr(~SH) if my having a higher degree of independent justification for ~SH is a condition only necessary but not basing for my having some degree of perceptual justification for P. In particular, the interesting philosophical view that Silins outlines in his paper—called rationalist liberalism—entails that my having independent justification for believing ~SH (note: not higher independent justification for ~SH) is a condition necessary but not basing for my having perceptual justification for believing P (cf. Silins 2007, pp. 132–133). (In a nutshell this views says that: (1) E gives me immediate justification for believing P; (2) I can have justification for believing P from E only if I have no reason to suspect that SH is true; (3) if I have no reason to suspect that SH is true, I’m entitled to believe ~SH—i.e. I have independent justification for believing ~SH.) Since rationalist liberalism leaves it indeterminate whether my necessary but not basing independent justification for ~SH must be higher or lower than or equal to my perceptual justification for P, I don’t see how the truth of this view could constitute an explanation (or at least a good explanation) of White’s inequality. One could take the inability of rationalist liberalism to explain this neat inequality to be evidence against it. Silins’s rationalist liberalism has been independently criticised by Kotzen (2012).

  18. Note that I’m not denying that there is an intimate link between experience-based justification and rational credence. What I’m simply suggesting is that the notion of rational credence intimately related to the notion of experience-based justification cannot adequately be modelled by a Bayesian credence function.

  19. This problem affects White’s objections independently of their synchronic or diachronic formulation. In White’s original synchronic formulation Cr E (P), Cr E (SH) and Cr E (~SH) are replaced by the conditional credences Cr(P|E), Cr(SH|E) and Cr(~SH|E), which refer to the credence in P, SH and ~SH that I should rationally have if I believed E to the highest possible degree. Thus, again, P is replaced with E and an experience is replaced with a belief.

  20. And so does Silins (2007, p. 120, note 17).

  21. White’s original passage omits ‘not’ and literally reads ‘it is a fake-hand’. This is certainly a typo.

  22. According to which Cr(R|B) = Cr(R) Cr(B|R)/Cr(B) and Cr(~SH*|B) = Cr(~SH*) Cr(B|~SH*)/Cr(B).

  23. To prevent misunderstandings let’s make the implicit temporal references in B, R and ~SH* explicit. Thus B = ‘It appears to me at t that the wall is red at t’, R = ‘The wall is red at t’, and ~SH* = ‘At t the wall is white but looks red because it is illuminated by a hidden red light’.

  24. White’s second, statistical example can be “defused” by the dogmatist in a similar way.

  25. Refraining from doing so would make S epistemically irresponsible.

  26. Weatherson (2007) might also accept U though I’m not completely sure.

  27. For Kung (2010) a reason for sh is ‘some cognitively accessible state that counts in favor of sh. It does not have to count very strongly in favor of sh; the reason may be far from strong enough to justify you in believing that sh’ (2, edited).

  28. For these varieties see Weisberg (2011).

  29. A basic formulation of it says that given a countable set of mutually exclusive and exhaustive hypotheses, if S’s evidence doesn’t favour some hypotheses over the others, S should distribute equally her credence over all of them. As sh and ~sh are mutually exclusive and exhaustive and S’s all evidence cannot discriminate between them, S’s credence in either hypothesis should be 1/2. Notoriously, the principle of indifference appears to entail incoherent results. White (2010) has attempted a defence of it. See however Dodd (2013)’s rejoinder.

  30. For instance some require Cr to be regular—i.e. to assign 0 and 1 only to respectively contradictions and tautologies.

  31. One might perhaps think of other ways to determine Cr(sh) and Cr(~sh) in absence of evidence. Wright (2004, 2007) for instance contends that even though we have no default evidence for sh or ~sh, we are rationally entitled to accept or trust ~sh. It is unclear however if degrees of acceptance or trust qualify as degree of credence. Furthermore it is quite controversial whether the rationality of Wright’s entitlement is genuinely epistemic rather than only pragmatic (cf. Jenkins 2007; Pritchard 2005).

  32. This is why: by definition of conditional credence Cr(~sh|e) = Cr(~sh & e)/Cr(e) with Cr(e) > 0. It follows from the probability calculus that Cr(~sh & e) ≤ Cr(~sh). As Cr(~sh) cannot be determined, Cr(~sh & e) cannot be determined. Thus Cr(~sh & e)/Cr(e) and Cr(~sh|e) cannot be determined. Since Cr e (~sh) = Cr(~sh|e), Cr e (~sh) cannot be determined either. The same result obtains if conditional credences are taken to be primitive. Suppose T is a tautology. It seems very plausible that if Cr(~sk) cannot be determined, then Cr(~sh|T) cannot be determined. Even if conditional credences are primitive, it holds true that Cr(~sh|e) = Cr(~sh|e & T) = Cr(~sh & e|T)/Cr(e|T) with Cr(e|T) > 0. Furthermore, Cr(~sh & e|T) ≤ Cr(~sh|T). Since Cr(~sh|T) cannot be determined, Cr(~sh & e|T) cannot be determined. So Cr(~sh & e|T)/Cr(e|T) cannot be determined, and neither Cr(~sh|e &T) nor Cr(~sh|e) can be determined. Thus, again, Cr e (~sh) cannot be determined. Note that I’m presupposing that Cr e (e) = 1; so I use standard conditionalisation. One might insist that Cr e (e) should be <1 and that, consequently, I should use Jeffrey conditionalisation. This would substantially change nothing. On Jeffrey conditionalisation Crnew(~sh) = Crnew(e) Crold(~sh|e) + Crnew(~e) Crold(~sh|~e). Since neither Crold(~sh|e) nor Crold(~sh|~e) can be determined, Crnew(~sh) cannot be determined. The reader can verify that nothing would substantially change if conditional credences were taken to be primitive.

  33. The sceptic might attempt to retort as follows: as S cannot determine Cr(p), S cannot determine her degree of default (or independent) justification for p, with the consequence that S’s experience as if p cannot give S immediate justification for believing p. But the chances of success of this retort look very dim. If there is anything like immediate perceptual justification for believing p, this justification is by definition not based on any degree of independent justification for any proposition, thus not even on any degree of independent justification for p itself. To make her point, the sceptic should argue that a condition necessary but not basing for S’s having immediate perceptual justification for believing p is S’s having some degree of independent justification for p. I don’t see how the sceptic could substantiate this claim. If immediate perceptual justification could be analysed in Bayesian terms, the sceptic might contend that a necessary condition for S’s determining Cr e (p) is S’s being able to determine Cr(p) and insist that this condition is not basing. Yet, as I argued in the former section, it is very dubious that immediate perceptual justification can be analysed in Bayesian terms.

  34. Although it is admittedly difficult to provide an analysis of the notion of explanatory power, it is uncontroversial that we can very often establish, on an intuitive basis, that a hypothesis does explain the evidence or that it explains it better or worse than other hypotheses.

  35. In the same way we should take S to have evidence for determining the correlated Cr(p).

  36. Considering that Cr(~sh) = 1 − Cr(sh).

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Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Catrin Campbell-Moore, Lorenzo Casini, Richard Dawid, Dylan Dodd, Anna-Maria Eder, Filippo Ferrari, Stephan Hartmann, Elisabetta Lalumera, Tommaso Piazza, Soroush Rafiee-Rad, Karim Thebault, Lars Weisbrod, Elia Zardini and a reviewer of this Journal for important comments and criticism upon drafts of this paper. Part of my research was supported by a Visiting Fellowship from the Tilburg Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science and a Carnegie Grant from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland. The final draft of this paper was written at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP). I thank the MCMP for hosting me and for providing a stimulating atmosphere to conduct this research.

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Moretti, L. In defence of dogmatism. Philos Stud 172, 261–282 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0293-0

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