Abstract
Here I will re-purpose Nozick’s (1974) “Experience Machine” thought experiment against hedonism into an argument against Veritic Epistemic Consequentialism. According to VEC, the right action, epistemically speaking, is the one that results in at least as favorable a ratio of true to false belief as any other action available. A consequence of VEC is that it would be epistemically right to outsource all your cognitive endeavors to a matrix-like “True Belief Machine” that uploads true beliefs through artificial stimulation. Rather than reflecting, inferring or inquiring, all of your beliefs would be the product of updates coming from the machine. This implication of VEC is counter intuitive. I will spend much of the paper considering defensive maneuvers and showing them to be lacking. The problem with going in for the True Belief Machine seems to be that the subject forfeits her autonomy. There has been much work lately on the virtue of intellectual autonomy and some of it has the potential to explain what is epistemically amiss about plugging into the machine. However, I will argue that the proponent of VEC cannot appeal to it without abandoning her preferred order of explanation.
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Notes
The joke is from Loader (2013).
Epistemic utility theory (e.g. Joyce 1998, 2009, Leitgeb & Pettigrew 2010, Easwaran 2013, Easwaran & Fitelson 2015, Pettigrew 2013; 2016) is a form of epistemic consequentialism that focuses on credential states rather than full belief. They hold that accuracy (as determined by their preferred scoring system) is what is fundamentally valuable. Then Bayesian updating is derivatively valuable insofar as it is conducive to greater accuracy scores. I will focus on full belief in this paper, although my argument could be extended to deal with other states with a mind-to-world direction of fit.
See Brandt (1979).
Neil Sinhababu told me in conversation this is his preferred response.
Kawall (1999) makes a similar move defending mental-state theories of well-being from Nozick’s thought experiment.
Thanks to Kathryn Pogin for raising this point.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for pointing out the need to be clear about this.
Thanks to Sandy Goldberg for pressing me on this point.
Thanks to Baron Reed for pressing me on this point.
Cf. Ahlstrom-Vij and Dunn (2017) for a carefully qualified answer.
For example, the subject can’t have defeaters for the beliefs they produce for those beliefs to be justified (Goldman, 1979).
Ahlstrom-Vij (2013) argues that the swamping problem isn’t really a problem at all for veritists. For my purposes here, that is fine. I am offering a different but similar problem.
For an argument that it is not, see Berker (2015). It doesn’t matter for my purposes if he is right.
Cf. Proust (2013).
See Sosa (1991;2007), Greco (2003; 2010; 2013), Pritchard (2010; 2012); Turri (2011); Carter (2014).
See Pritchard (2010), Greco (2010).
Thi Nguyen (2019) argues that a certain kind of autonomy, “delegational autonomy”, involves the prudent outsourcing of some of our intellectual projects.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing me on this point.
Here I am assuming this is consistent with veritism just to imagine a best-case scenario for the veritist.
See Hills (2016) for a defense of this claim about understanding.
I’d like to thank Sandy Goldberg, Regina Hurley, Jennifer Lackey, Nate Lauffer, Jonathan Matheson, Luis Oliveira, Kathryn Pogin, Baron Reed and two anonymous referees for helpful comments and conversations.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Sanford Goldberg, Jennifer Lackey, Nate Lauffer, Kathryn Pogin, Jonathan Matheson, Luis Oliveira, Baron Reed and two anonymous referees for helpful comments and conversations.
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Paulson, S. Epistemic Normativity & Epistemic Autonomy: The True Belief Machine. Philos Stud 180, 2415–2433 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-01987-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-01987-7