Abstract
Evidentialism as an account of epistemic justification is the position that a doxastic attitude, D, towards a proposition, p, is justified for an intentional agent, S, at a time, t, iff having D towards p fits S’s evidence at t, where the fittingness of an attitude on one’s evidence is typically analyzed in terms of evidential support for the propositional contents of the attitude. Evidentialism is a popular and well-defended account of justification. In this paper, I raise a problem for evidentialism on the grounds that there can be epistemic circumstances in which a proposition is manifestly and nonmisleadingly supported by an agent’s total evidence, and yet believing the proposition is not justified for the agent. As I argue, in order for an agent to have justification to believe a proposition, it needs to be the case that the belief as possessed by the agent could exhibit certain epistemic good making features, e.g., the propositional content of the belief as possessed by the agent would be supported by the agent’s evidence. As I demonstrate, the fact that a proposition, p, is supported by an agent’s total evidence at a time, t, doesn’t guarantee that a belief in p as possessed by the agent at t could exhibit any epistemic good making features, including having propositional contents (i.e., p) that would be supported by the agent’s evidence. Thus, the fact that a proposition is supported by an agent’s evidence doesn’t guarantee that the agent has justification to believe the proposition.
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Notes
EJ is adapted from (Feldman & Conee, 1985). Earl Conee and Richard Feldman are explicit that EJ is not intended as an analysis of the concept JUSTIFICATION but as a statement of the necessary and sufficient conditions for a doxastic attitude to be justified. In other publications, Conee and Feldman alternately talk of justification as being a function of, determined by, and strongly supervening on the evidence. See the Afterwards in (Conee & Feldman, 2004) for further discussion. In addition, evidentialism is, at times, formulated deontologically as a theory about the doxastic attitudes one epistemically ought to take towards a proposition, insofar as one takes an attitude towards the proposition. As Feldman (2000, p. 679) writes, “[f]or any person S, time t, and proposition p, if S has any doxastic attitude at all toward p at t and S's evidence at t supports p, then S epistemically ought to have the attitude toward p supported by S's evidence at t.” See (Oliveira, 2017) for further discussion of evidentialism as a deontological account of justification.
For ease of discussion, I assume a coarse-grained picture of belief on which the only doxastic attitude types are belief, disbelief, and suspension of judgment.
I treat evidentialism and EJ as equivalent in this paper. However, one may understand the term 'evidentialism' more broadly to refer to a theory type, tokens of which (roughly put) equate reasons to believe a proposition, p, with evidence for p or give evidence—as opposed to, e.g., the reliability of an attitude updating/formation procedure (Goldman, 1979)—pride of place in an account of justification. I am not objecting to evidentialism in this broader sense. I am solely objecting to EJ. In closing, I will gesture at a means of emending EJ to accommodate the objections I raise. The emended account makes the justificatory status of a doxastic attitude, D, for an agent, S, at a time, t, a function of the evidence, S, possesses at t and the evidence S would possess at t were she to possess D and were she to engage in the cognitive activity constitutive of possessing D. The emended account, while being clearly distinct from EJ, still centrally features evidence and, thus, qualifies as evidentialist in the broader sense of the term. Thank you to an anonymous referee for urging me to clarify the scope of my objection.
There are several ways to characterize occurrent thought. For example, as Rose and Schaffer (2013, p. 22) write, occurrent thought, “involves a distinctive phenomenology; there is something characteristic that it is like to enjoy an occurrent belief….” Similarly, one could take occurrent thought to be thought that is phenomenally conscious in Ned Block’s (1995) sense of the term. However, I do not want to be wedded to the claim that occurrent thought possesses a unique phenomenology. We may be able to engage in ‘unsymbolized thinking’ (Hurlburt & Akhter, 2008), that is, occurrent thought in which we are directly aware of the thought’s content without the thought being accompanied by mental imagery, inner speech, etc. For the purposes of this paper, I understand occurrent thought to involve a mental occurrence or event of which we are directly aware. For example, occurrently believing some proposition, p, would be the event of consciously judging p. See (Bartlett, 2018; Crane, 2013) for further discussion.
A central claim of my argument is that if one occurrently tokens a thought (e.g., a belief, supposition, etc.) with the content U, then U must be false, because a thought with the content U is itself about Ulysses. Some to whom I’ve presented the argument have objected to my claim that a thought with the content U is really about Ulysses. The objection goes something like the following: It isn’t sufficient for a thought to be about something, x, that the thought merely make reference to x; further conditions need to be met for a thought to be really about x. Although I am using “about” in a thin sense, if you, the reader, balk at the idea that a thought with the content U is about Ulysses then feel free to replace U with the following,
(U*) I am not occurrently entertaining a thought that deploys my conceptual competence with Ulysses.
I take it that if one were to occurrently entertain a thought with the content U*, then U* would be clearly false. There is no way to occurrently entertain a thought with the content U* without deploying your conceptual competence with Ulysses.
Traditionally, IRAs are also stipulated to have privileged access to their doxastic attitudes (cf. Richter, 1990). This assumption isn’t necessary for my argument. Additionally, in presenting my argument, some have objected to the common definition of an IRA that I employ on the grounds that if the IRA possesses all and only the justified doxastic attitudes, then she would end up with a host of irrelevant and inconsequential beliefs and, thus, run afoul of something like Gilbert Harman’s Clutter Avoidance Principle: One should not clutter one’s mind with trivialities (Harman, 1986, p. 12). For example, suppose one is justified in believing some proposition, p, then one will also be justified in believing a host of trivial and obvious logical implications of p, e.g., p or the Moon is made of green cheese—assuming, as many do (e.g., Feldman, 2000), that if a person is justified in believing a proposition, p, then the person is justified (minimally) in believing (what constitute for her) obvious logical implications of p. However, surely, an IRA wouldn’t clutter her mind by believing a host of trivial and obvious logical implications of propositions the IRA is justified in believing. Instead of possessing all and only the justified doxastic attitudes at a time, t, the IRA would only possess the justified doxastic attitudes at t that have propositional contents in which she is genuinely interested or has actively considered (or so the objection goes). As Jane Friedman (2018) notes, many theorists (including Feldman, 2000) have voiced (at least a passing) support for something like the Clutter Avoidance Principle as a meta-principle that constrains norms of belief revision; to wit, a candidate epistemic norm that runs afoul of the Clutter Avoidance Principle can’t be a genuine epistemic norm. Nonetheless, as Friedman also notes, what makes the Clutter Avoidance Principle plausible for agents like us is that we are operating with limited cognitive resources, and these resources shouldn’t be wasted on clutter. IRAs, on the other hand, are typically stipulated to possess unlimited cognitive resources. Therefore, it’s not clear that the Clutter Avoidance Principle has any relevance for the doxastic practices of IRAs. However, discussions of ideal rationality and clutter avoidance can be sidestepped by stipulating that the IRA we are imagining for my argument, along with not currently entertaining a thought about Ulysses, is actively considering and interested in answering the following question: “What novels of James Joyce’s am I not occurrently thinking about?” So, even if ideal rationality is thought to conform to the Clutter Avoidance Principle, neither the belief that U nor the belief that not-U will qualify as clutter for our IRA.
When I talk about U being true of an agent, I mean to indicate that the agent isn’t occurrently thinking about Ulysses.
Some may not consider occurrent belief a form of belief at all. If ‘occurrent belief’ is a misnomer, then the IRA can only believe U in manner (ii) or (iii). Outside of (Lee, 2018) not much has been written on the rationality of occurrent belief.
See (Fantl, 2019) for discussion of time-slice epistemologies.
I describe the case in Omissive by stipulating that S doesn’t actually believe p, despite the fact that belief in p is, according to evidentialism, the justified doxastic attitude for S to take towards the proposition. In effect, I’ve set up Omissive to be a case in which S’s doxastic attitudes are suboptimal according to evidentialism. The evidentialist might object that the fact that her theory delivers a seemingly problematic result in Omissive (i.e., claiming that belief in an omissive Moorean conjunction is justified) is a function of the fact that S starts from a suboptimal epistemic position. Belief in an omissive Moorean conjunction would never be justified for an IRA, as an IRA always takes the attitudes that are justified in her circumstances. In other words, an IRA would never find herself in a case like Omissive. One might be tempted by the idea that a similar response could be given for the case of the IRA and U. By stipulating that U is true of the IRA, I’ve, in effect, stipulated that the IRA doesn’t occurrently believe U, because occurrently believing U would be to entertain an occurrent thought about the novel, Ulysses. However, by specifying that U is true of the IRA, I haven’t stipulated that the IRA is epistemically suboptimal (and thus not an IRA). For instance, by stipulating that U is true of the IRA, I have yet to say anything about whether she dispositionally believes U.
A similar objection would be to deny that what an IRA would believe given a total body of evidence, E, is a perfect guide to determining what one has justification to believe given one’s evidence is E. Although the IRA wouldn’t believe U, as doing so would be manifestly irrational, it can still be the case that believing U is justified. However, as I argue in the proceeding, we cannot assess whether an agent has justification to believe a proposition independently of considering possible circumstances in which the agent possesses a belief in the proposition.
If occurrent belief isn’t actually a type of doxastic attitude (despite its name), then evidentialism wouldn’t be in the business of evaluating occurrent belief. In this section, I am assuming occurrent belief is a form of belief for sake of argument.
In talking generally about an agent, S, having justification to do something, x, I do not assume that xing is under the agent’s direct control. My use of “doing something” is meant to cover believing a proposition and, as indicated, possessing an emotion, neither of which I take to be (generally speaking) under an agent’s direct control.
Similarly, under a deontological analysis of epistemic justification, it makes no sense to claim that the IRA is epistemically permitted to believe U only on the condition that she doesn’t believe it. If doing something, x (e.g., occurrently believing U), would, thereby, render x impermissible, x is impermissible, simpliciter. In other words, you are permitted to do something, x, only if there are possible token instances of your xing that are permitted xings.
It would also not advance evidentialism to adopt a semantics on which Counterpossible comes out non-vacuously true (cf. Brogaard & Salerno, 2013). The problem for the evidentialist has nothing to do with whether she can find a way to make Counterpossible come out (non-vacuously) true.
Couldn’t the evidentialist argue along the following lines: Omissive and the case of the IRA both involve agents whose respective evidence changes when appealing to the evidence in forming a justified belief in a manner relevant to what the agents’ evidence supports. So, we ought to place the following restriction on EJ: EJ holds for all cases except those where an agent’s relevant evidence for a proposition, p, shifts when appealing to the evidence in a manner that significantly alters the epistemic support relations between the evidence and p. (Thank you to an anonymous referee for raising this objection.) However, the IRA can appeal to the evidence that she has for U without shifting what her total evidence supports with respect to U. Imagine that the IRA’s total relevant evidence consists in the (propositional contents) of the following two true (justified/known) occurrent beliefs (which are the only two occurrent thoughts the IRA is entertaining),
1. I need to pick up milk from the store.
2. I am only occurrently entertaining this thought and 1 (that is, the occurrent belief that I need to pick up milk from the store).
Neither 1 nor 2 is about Ulysses (or deploys the IRA’s conceptual competence with Ulysses, as discussed in note 7), thereby, U clearly follows from 1 and 2 and, thus, the IRA has very good evidence for U. In appealing to 1 and 2, the IRA doesn’t shift her relevant evidence for U. Her evidence shifts only if she occurrently judges that U! Of course, the IRA doesn’t have to occurrently judge that U; she could adopt a mere dispositional/standing belief in U without occurrently judging that U. However, as I argue in the next section, the IRA would manifest none of (or, at least, not a sufficient number of) the dispositions characteristic of a standing belief in U. The issues I raise for evidentialism do not stem from how an agent’s evidential circumstances would shift if she were to appeal to certain evidence. Instead, the issues I raise arise from what would be constitutively involved in possessing the very attitudes evidentialism deems justified. My ultimate point (as it is developed over the proceeding sections) is that in determining whether an agent has justification to possess a doxastic attitude, D, we need to consider what would be constitutively involved in an agent’s possessing D (e.g., we need to consider the computational/functional roles constitutive of D), as opposed to focusing solely on the propositional contents of D and one’s evidence at a time (as the evidentialist does).
Although philosophers commonly appeal to the distinction between occurrent and dispositional belief, as Eric Schwitzgebel (2019) notes, there isn’t much literature devoted to the distinction. See (Audi, 1994; Crane, 2013; Price, 1969) for discussion. In characterizing dispositional/standing belief in terms of the dispositions characteristic of belief I do not assume a dispositional analysis of belief (e.g., Schwitzgebel, 2002). As discussed later in the section, even a representationalist about belief would agree that in order for one to possess a belief one would need to display a sufficient number of the dispositions characteristic of belief.
The worry that believing these conjunctions would involve an irrational cluttering of the IRA’s mind is addressed in note 8.
Clearly, it would be absurd to argue that one can’t have sufficient evidence for the proposition that it’s not the case that one is occurrently thinking about Ulysses.
In talking about propositional justification and having epistemic reason to believe a proposition we are talking about normative/evaluative reasons—that is, reasons that bear on what an agent ought to believe or the epistemic status of her beliefs as propositionally justified. Normative/evaluative reasons can be distinguished from motivating reasons, which are (roughly put) the considerations an agent cites or appeals to in actually forming her beliefs. Normative/evaluative reasons don’t have to be motivating reasons and vice versa—an agent may possess very good normative/evaluative reasons to believe a proposition, p, and yet because of, say, inattention the agent may never use those reasons to formulate a belief in p (cf. McNaughton & Rawling, 2018).
It’s beyond the scope of this paper to discuss how we ought to idealize an agent when assessing whether she has reason to believe (and, thereby, has propositional justification for believing) a proposition. The details of how we ought to idealize agents are orthogonal to our concerns.
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Munroe, W. Evidentialism and Occurrent Belief: You Aren’t Justified in Believing Everything Your Evidence Clearly Supports. Erkenn 88, 3059–3078 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-021-00490-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-021-00490-x