Abstract
According to the standard view, a belief is based on a reason and doxastically justified—i.e., permissibly held—only if a causal relation obtains between a reason and the belief. In this paper, I argue that a belief can be doxastically justified by a reason’s mere disposition to sustain it. Such a disposition, however, wouldn’t establish a causal connection unless it were manifested. My argument is that, in the cases I have in mind, the manifestation of this disposition would add no positive epistemic feature to the belief: a belief that is justified after the manifestation of a reason’s causal powers must have already been justified before their manifestation. As a result, those who adhere to the standard causal view of the basing relation face a hard choice: they should either abandon the enormously popular view that doxastic justification has a basing requirement or modify their view of the basing relation.
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Notes
For example, Alston (1989, p. 108), Bondy and Pritchard (2018, p. 3812), Comesaña and McGrath (2014), Feldman (2002, p. 46), Feldman and Conee (1985), Ichikawa and Steup (2012), Littlejohn (2012), Kvanvig (2003, pp. 43–44), Lycan (2012), Neta (2010), Pollock and Cruz (1999, pp. 35–36), Pryor (2001, p. 104), Silins (2007, p. 109), Turri (2010), and Ye (2020).
Silva (2015) relies on an interesting, but controversial (see Oliveira, 2015), analogy between moral and epistemic justification to oppose this claim. A detailed assessment of his idea would lead us beyond the scope of this paper. Let me, however, emphasize that Silva’s proposal is radical in a way that few of us might want to accept. Justification, according to Silva, is closely tied to epistemic permissibility. And epistemic permissibility, in turn, should be treated along the lines of moral permissibility. Moral permissibility, however, is simply independent of the reasons that an agent has for acting. Torturing little babies is not morally justified, whatever my reasons may be. My reasons, or the lack thereof, may bear on the question of whether I am exculpated, but this seems to presuppose that I have done wrong and that my action is not morally justified. An action’s moral permissibility has simply nothing to do with me having certain reasons. In this paper, I will side-step his interesting proposal, and accept that justificationd requires being related to one’s reasons in the right way.
Foundationalists about justification believe that some justified beliefs do not, for their epistemic status, depend on other propositions. To maintain neutrality on the question of whether there such foundational justified beliefs, I restrict my claims to beliefs that are justified by a reason.
This bifurcation is identified beautifully in Wallbridge (2018).
In the relevant literature, these three claims (about basing, justificationd, and knowledge) usually go together, i.e., philosophers either deny or accept these claims wholesale. Lehrer, for instance, frames his paper as a discussion of the basing relation, and then explicitly argues that the lawyer has knowledge and is justified in believing. Bondy and Adam Carter (2020) are an exception in that they affirm that the lawyer’s belief is based on the evidence and that the lawyer has justificationd, but they remain non-committal about the knowledge claim.
Wallbridge (2018) presents a compelling analysis of this bifurcation.
Swain, for instance, argues that a belief can be justified if it is “quasi-overdetermined” (Swain 1981, Chap. 3). The core of quasi-overdetermination is that a belief can be justified if in the closest possible worlds in which both the evidence and the belief exist, the evidence causes the belief.
I have not seen this last point in print, however.
Partial explanation is to be understood widely, in particular, to encompass causal sustaining and overdetermination (see e.g., Sartorio 2013).
The idea that explanation requires causation in the context at hand should not be taken to mean that all explanation is causal explanation. Most philosophers recognize non-causal explanations such as metaphysical grounding (e.g., a disjunction is true because at least one of its disjuncts is true), and deductive explanations (e.g., Tweety the sparrow is grey because all sparrows are grey). In the present context, however, in which we’re looking for ways in which reasons might explain beliefs, these alternative forms of explanations are not serious contenders.
Many causalists have explicitly embraced it and those who haven’t embraced it have either simply denied it (Bondy & Adam Carter, 2020), or they have not addressed it (e.g., Lehrer 1971; Leite 2004). As stated above, I don’t wish to convince the committed non-causalist. Notably, Lehrer (1971, p. 312) aims to provide an answer to the question “how” someone knows a proposition. He says that “[r]easoning gives a man knowledge if and only if it is a correct answer to such a question.” He doesn’t, however, continue to discuss this issue further.
This has been pointed out by Silva (2015).
To be clear, this is a wide scope disposition to ‘affirm the belief when she loses her current sustainer’. It is not a narrow scope disposition to ‘affirm the belief’, when she loses her current sustainer.
The exercise of control seems to be a straight-forwardly causal notion (see Shepherd 2014, p. 396).
It is worth mentioning that this account, although stated, for ease of presentation, in terms of dispositions to cause, could likewise be stated in terms of counterfactuals. First, some philosophers take “dispositions to be reducible to counterfactuals” (Bondy, 2016, p. 550). Evans himself, notwithstanding serious reservations, is open to such a reduction (see Evans 2013, p. 2955). If such a reduction succeeds, then my dispositional account is just a counterfactual account in disguise. Let me here just give a brief sketch of such a restatement in terms of counterfactuals. Consider clause b. Instead of referring to a disposition to cause, we might require that R would non-deviantly cause B if B were to lose its current sustainer. Such an account no doubt needs further fine-tuning. For instance, we would want to allow for cases in which if B’s present sustainer were lost, R would not cause B because some cause other than R would cause it (see e.g., Lemke 1986 for interesting suggestions along this line).
I owe this objection to an anonymous reviewer.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Javeria Perez Gomez, Arthur Schipper, and Aiden Woodcock for comments on drafts of this paper. I am also grateful to Noemi Swierski for her help editing this paper.
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Schönherr, J. Doxastic justification through dispositions to cause. Synthese 200, 310 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03800-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03800-0