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Notes
Two terminological remarks. First, I use “experience” to abbreviate “perceptual experience”, a category that encompasses hallucinations and illusions as well as veridical perceptions, but excludes bodily sensations such as pains and tickles. Second, whether “evidence”, “justification” and “rational support” can be used interchangeably (as I do here) is controversial. For instance, Lycan (1988) argues that conservative principles of theory-choice can provide rational support for a theory without providing evidence for it, and Foley (2008) distinguishes between several normative notions in the vicinity. I leave it to readers who oppose the conflation to assess which epistemic normative notion, if any, is best suited to the discussion.
For more on this amusing episode in the history of embryology see Pinto-Correira (1997).
Payne (2001). The stipulation is probably contrary to fact. In an unpublished follow-up study done by Payne, participants were given the same primes and other stimuli as in the original experiment, but after each trial, they were asked how they reached their verdict on whether the stimulus was a tool or a gun. They were given as much time as they wanted to choose between three options a, labeled by SEE (if they ‘saw the stimulus or part of it’), KNOW (if they did not properly see the stimulus but just knew what it was), or GUESS (if they felt they were just guessing whether they had been shown a tool or a gun). Participants who selected SEE did not make categorization errors, whereas participants who made stereotype-consistent errors (misidentifying tools for guns) overwhelmingly selected KNOW for those trials. If we take participants’ reports of their own experiences at face value, then these results count against the suggestion that there is cognitive penetration of a simple kind that produces a gun-experience.
I apply the notion of cognitive penetration to perceptual experience, whereas in discussions by Fodor (1983, 1984) and Pylyshyn (1999), the notion is applied to early vision. When Pylyshyn (1999) argues that vision is cognitively impenetrable, he is saying that early vision is exclusively the output of a module in Fodor’s (1983) sense, and as such is not the product of other cognitive states (though its outputs maybe influenced by perceptual learning). Cognitive penetration in my sense is thus compatible with cognitive impenetrability in Fodor’s and Pylyshyn’s, so long as the contents of visual experience are not exhausted by the outputs of early vision.
The term “zaplike” is less perspicuous (though more exciting) than “a-rational”, since it invites us to focus on the fact that the hallucination is caused by a process we’re not aware of and can’t control. But the same can be true of cognitive penetration. Both kinds of etiology can unfold beneath the first-person radar. The heart of the distinction is the status of those processes as rationally assessable or not.
To a first approximation, process reliabilism holds that the justificational status of a belief depends on how it is caused or causally sustained, and identifies the justified beliefs with beliefs that are caused or sustained by processes that lead to a high proportion of true beliefs.
More generally, I set aside whether any experiences with a-rational etiologies are epistemically downgraded.
One could define up a notion of justifiedness applies specifically to experiences, tracking the epistemic role they can play in rationally supporting beliefs. Chalmers (2012) briefly considers a notion of ‘proto-justification’ that operates in something like this way. For my purposes here, the theoretical role of proto-justification is too close to that of the notion of propositional justification to be useful. But if one had use for such a notion, it would then be natural to think of experiences as not only proto-justified but also as standing in their own kind of basing relation to their etiologies, whether they are “checkered” or not (on checkering, see Sect. 2).
Sosa (2007, p. 46), Ultimately Sosa distances himself from this picture.
Some versions of epistemic conservatism would deny that such beliefs are unjustified, if the subject has no clue that the beliefs are based in these ways. I’m setting these views aside here. They could provide a line of defense of phenomenal conservatism against criticisms stemming from cases of cognitive penetration described at the start. Such criticisms are developed in Siegel (2011) and Lyons (2012). For criticisms of epistemic conservatism, see Christensen (1994).
Regarding the pliers-gun experiment, it is an open empirical question what kind of state or disposition the priming in the pliers experiment activates. A thorny question is whether the process leading from the prime to the perceptual experience is a-rational.
Many internalists and externalists alike acknowledge the force of this intuition (see Goldman 1986, 1988), though it is rejected by McDowell (2008), who seems to hold that when compared with introspectively indiscriminable veridical experiences, hallucinations always provide less justification. For discussion see Siegel and Silins (2013).
If experiences have self-representational contents, such as ‘there is a red square and I am having an experience as of a red square’, then an epistemic downgrade with respect to the first-order content could be isolated from an epistemic downgrade with respect to the higher-order contents. Self-representational contents of various sorts are defended by Searle (1983), Chalmers (2004), Kriegel (2009), Siegel (2006b).
Some theorists would say that a belief’s content C* is close to an experience content C, if C* is a ‘conceptualization’ of C. (Compare Peacocke (2004, Chap. 3) on ‘canonical correspondence’ between non-conceptual and conceptual content). Others, such as McDowell (1994), hold that experiences could not justify beliefs unless the contents of experience could be believed without any additional transformation. Self-ascriptions of experiences are also close to the contents of experiences, even if the experiences are not self-representing.
Besides cases of ‘conceptualization’ as Peacocke understands it and self-ascriptions, there is another way in which the content C of experience might be close to a proposition for which it provides justification, without being identical to it. Suppose that if you see Franco sitting down, the content of your experience would be the same whether you’re seeing Franco or Franco’s twin. Arguably your experience provides justificatory support for believing a proposition about Franco. Seeing Franco sitting can give you excellent reason to believe that Franco is sitting. This case is discussed in Silins (2011).
The last qualification is needed because in principle, S could have independent evidence for p, and her belief could be based on that evidence as well as on E. In such a case, B might be doxastically justified, thanks to its dependence on the other basis.
For different usage, see Turri (2010), who argues that one has propositional justification for believing p only if one has a way of forming a doxastically justified belief that p as well.
I thank David Christensen for the following example. Suppose I base my mustard-belief on a mustard-experience, but I have a defeater (I learned yesterday that my houseguest has placed lots of fake food items in my fridge), and because of intense mustard-desire and wishful thinking, I completely ignore the defeater. So far, the belief is formed badly. But suppose I also have a defeater–defeater: what I know about the houseguest’s religious convictions entails that he would never play tricks involving something yellow, and my knowledge of his religious views has nothing to do with why I ignored the defeater. My forming and maintaining my mustard-belief has a bad etiology, in that it isn’t causally sensitive to my other beliefs in the right way. But arguably, because the defeater–defeater is in place, the mustard experience provides propositional justification for believing there’s mustard.
We can also consider how the linking thesis fares, if PJ is defined in terms of DJ, as John Turri proposes in a recent paper:
Necessarily, for all S, p, and t, if p is propositionally justified for S at t, then p is propositionally justified for S at t because S currently possesses at least one means of coming to believe p such that, were S to believe p in one of those ways, S’s belief would thereby be doxastically justified. (p. X)
Even with the definitional priority going in this direction, checkered experiences that lead to doxastically unjustified beliefs don’t have justificatory force. Turri is mainly concerned to identify conditions under which a subject (at a time) has any propositional justification for p at all, rather than with the conditions under which a particular reason or type of mental state, such as experience, counts as providing propositional justification. Even if we suppose that the subjects in the pliers-gun example do always “currently possess at least one means” of forming the gun-belief, it seems clear that none of these means will include the checkered experience, given that by hypothesis, basing the gun-belief on the checkered experience made it doxastically unjustified.
Turri wants to emphasize the importance of using your evidence well in belief-formation (and adjustment), not just in possessing it. His moral is that it isn’t enough to have good reasons or evidence; you have to utilize them properly in reaching your belief. This move does not vindicate the idea that even after an experience becomes checkered, it can still be utilized properly.
Like all glosses on the basing relation, problems arise with this one if adjustability is made into a sufficient condition for basing (if adjusting X makes you adjust B, then X is a basis for B). For instance, getting new higher-order evidence about one’s belief or its basis (such as evidence that experts disagree, or that you reasoned to B improperly) might make it rational for you to adjust B, yet intuitively shouldn’t be counted as part of B’s basis. Thanks for Jim Pryor for discussion.
This claim allows that an ill-founded belief might fail to transmit its ill-foundedness, when surrounding beliefs make it justified. (For discussion, see Feldman and Conee (2001). For instance, suppose an inattentive classmate tells you that that Plymouth is the state capitol of Massachusetts, but you forget that that’s how you came to that belief. Meanwhile you have a false but justified higher-order belief that you learned the state capitols from proper schooling. According to Feldman and Conee, the Plymouth-belief is justified, even though ill-founded. But even they could agree that sometimes, ill-founding makes a belief doxastically unjustified, and that such beliefs formed on their basis will thereby be ill-founded as well.
Compare Sosa (2007, p. 46): “Experiences are able to provide justification that is foundational because they lie beyond justification and unjustification. Since they are passively received, they cannot manifest obedience to anything, including rational norms, whether epistemic or otherwise.”
Perhaps we are also subject to norms specifying when we should rely on our experiences, on pain of irrationality. For instance, if you have no reason to disbelieve or refrain from endorsing your experience, doing so anyway is arguably unreasonable. For discussion, see Jackson (2011).
In the case of belief, being prepared to rely on a proposition in non-suppositional reasoning and action may be partly constitutive of believing it, whereas the analogous constitutive claim about experiences is almost certainly false. But even if this difference is granted, it does not entail a difference in the norms governing which propositions and experiences we should rely on.
A fanciful example is given by Plantinga (1993) who imagines a climber who gets doxastically frozen: while rock-climbing, his beliefs about where he is and what he is doing become frozen, so that he continues to believe that he is on a mountain hanging on to rocks with birds circling overhead, even though (in an effort to help him unfreeze) his friends have brought him to an opera. As Plantinga describes the case, the climber has a series of visual and auditory experiences of the sort people have when they go to the opera, but these experiences make no impact on what he beliefs (he does not even self-ascribe them), and he continues to believe that he is rock-climbing. Depending on one’s theory of belief and experience one might question the coherence of this example. But at least on a smaller scale, it seems possible for subjects to ignore experiences in their formation of beliefs, just as they ignore other kinds of evidence. For instance, if there are completely inattentive experiences, and such experiences can rationally support their contents, then they provide a realistic example. For discussion, see Silins and Siegel (2013).
Part of what complicates the issue is the live option that some transitions between propositionally structured states are arguably a-rational (think of the schizophrenics conclusion that the end of the world is coming from their beliefs that the chess board is arranged thus-and-so), and some associations between non-propositionally structured elements may be rationally assessable (associating danger with mice may be irrational, rather than a-rational). The structural difference between the elements in the transition may not settle which status the transition has.
This expanded notion of an etiology of beliefs suggests that it would be useful to expand the notion of doxastic justification as well, to preserve the idea that all beliefs have some epistemic status. Some beliefs might not have been formed, and aren’t or maybe even can’t be adjusted at all, because they are part of a cognitive infrastructure. Such beliefs might include the first-person belief that you exist, belief that the external world exists, beliefs in intuitive physics or other components of ‘core cognition’, or beliefs (in the form of knowledge) concerning what you’re doing when you’re doing it. Despite the special status these beliefs may have, they can still have an etiology in the expanded sense. And if doxastic justification is having epistemically good etiology, then even these beliefs could in principle count as being doxastically justified. (On core cognition and its status as part of cognitive infrastructure, see Carey (2009). On knowing what you’re doing, see Setiya (2008)).
For discussion, see Gigerenzer (2001).
A complication: if even after the zap, you believed you had no way of knowing what color lemons ripen to be, that belief would arguably be a defeater for the zapped belief. So if you persisted in believing that lemons ripen red, then the lemon-belief would be irrational, not because of it’s a-rational etiology, but because you were ignoring a defeater. We can eliminate this confounding source of irrationality by adding to the thought-experiment that God’s zap also makes you believe (de dicto) that you have some way of knowing what color lemons ripen to be.
Mandelbaum (2010) argues that a wide range of beliefs are formed and maintained a-rationally, drawing on belief perseverance studies (Wegner et al. 1985) as well as the Anchoring heuristic discussed by Tversky and Kahneman. Subjects who are asked to give numerical estimates (about how old Gandhi was when he died, for example) incorporate numerical information that they know to be irrelevant (such as their social security number) when the irrelevant information is salient. Mandelbaum argues that these processes are a-rational on the grounds that it is difficult to find anything that remotely resembles any paradigm of reasoning—even bad reasoning—in reconstructing the process by which participants arrive at their answers.
Browning and Jones (1988). On thought-insertion, see Frith and Frith (2003). The metaphor of projection on a screen comes from a patient quoted by Mellor (1970): “I look out the window and I think that the garden looks nice and the grass looks cool, but the thoughts of Eamonn Andrews come into my mind. There are no other thoughts there, only his…. He treats my mind like a screen and flashes thoughts onto it like you flash a picture.”
Siegel (2006a).
Bar (2004).
Levin and Banaji (2006).
This suggestion might develop the idea that perception is passive whereas belief is active.
There is some evidence that perceptual learning can be triggered by emotion responses like this. Pollak and Sinha (2002) found that physically abused children “accurately identified facial displays of anger on the basis of less sensory input than did controls”, which suggests that as the result of their exposure to threats by adult caretakers, they get better at detecting anger. The study did not speak to whether the learning also led to false positives.
Pollak and Sinha (2002), op cit.
Goldstone (2013).
Thanks to Marte Otten for discussion of this type of experiment.
For discussion of this issue, see Siegel (2013).
In earlier terminology, the experience just described will not provide immediate justification for gun-beliefs since the justification for believing that a gun is present will depend on both the experience and the background belief linking the low-level contents of the experience to guns.
In the preformationism case, since the experience represents a specific embryo, whereas the penetrating belief is that sperm cells in general contain embryos. In the mood case, it’s questionable whether the mood has any contents at all (perhaps it is instead a disposition to respond to a range of situations with negative affect and beliefs associated with discouragement), but even if they do, those contents are presumably not contents ascribing colors to things.
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Acknowledgement
I’m grateful to many audiences for responses to this paper, which I gave as a talk (often called “The Epistemic Impact of Reasoning in the Basement”) at ANU, Barcelona, Barnard, Brandeis, Brown, the Chapel Hill Colloquium, Toronto, Cornell, Miami, NYU, St Andrews, Texas, and Western Ontario. Special thanks to Stew Cohen, Eric Mandelbaum, Nico Silins and Jonathan Vogel for extended discussion, Keith Payne for sharing his research, and John Bengson, Selim Berker, David Christensen, Josh Dever, Carrie Jenkins, Matthias Jenny, Simon Leen, Jim Pryor, Eric Rowe, George Salmieri, Josh Schechter, Scott Sturgeon, Jonathan Weisberg, and Ru Ye for their helpful reactions.
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Siegel, S. The epistemic impact of the etiology of experience. Philos Stud 162, 697–722 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0059-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0059-5