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A defense of parrying responses to the generality problem

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Abstract

The generality problem is commonly seen as one of the most pressing issues for process reliabilism. The generality problem starts with the following question: of all the process types exemplified by a given process token, which type is the relevant one for measuring reliability? Defenders of the generality problem claim that process reliabilists have a burden to produce an informative account of process type relevance. As they argue, without such a successful account, the reasonability of process reliabilism is significantly undermined. One way for the reliabilist to respond is to attempt to construct such a theory of type relevance. But another way of responding is to argue that, if finding an account of type relevance is a burden for the reliabilist, then it is also a burden for everyone (or, mostly everyone) else. Thus, the generality problem doesn’t present some unique reason to reject process reliabilism. I call this latter strategy a parrying response. In this essay, I examine the contemporary parrying responses of Michael Bishop and Juan Comesaña, which have both faced recent criticism. I respond to these critics, and argue that parrying responses are far stronger than defenders of the generality problem have appreciated.

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Notes

  1. By warrant, I use this term in the functional sense much like Plantinga does, where warrant is the state the possession of which grounds one’s having knowledge that p so long as she also possesses belief that p and p is true (Plantinga 1993: v).

  2. For an early formulation of a reliabilist account of justification, see Goldman (1979: 13–14) for an account prima facie justification and pg. 20 for the additional no defeater condition (for ultima facie justification). For an account of warrant in which reliability figures as the central grounding feature, Goldman (1986: 44–45) presents a reliabilist theory requiring that an agent’s belief-forming process has both “local” and “global” reliability in order to confer warrant.

  3. See Beddor and Goldman (2015). In their overview of the work done on reliabilist epistemology, they include the generality problem as one of the top six “problems,” or, “objections” to reliabilism.

  4. Feldman (1985) and Goldman (1979) are key figures who highlighted this important distinction for making sense of reliabilism. Most philosophers agree that types, rather than tokens, are the entities that can be measured for reliability. Although recently, Juan Comesaña (2006) articulates a way in which tokens could be evaluated for reliability with respect to some space of possible worlds as a reference class. Even if this way of conceiving measuring a token for reliability makes sense, Comesaña, correctly, recognizes that framing reliabilism like this doesn’t get the reliabilist out of the generality problem. The reliabilist still would have to provide an account of which possible worlds were contained within the reference class used to evaluate the token’s reliability. See Sect. 2.3 for a discussion regarding the close connection between the reference class for measuring reliability and the relevant type.

  5. For example, presumably, [belief formation] isn’t the type that gets evaluated for reliability. Consider someone who, sadly, is a BIV, such that their perceptual beliefs are all systematically false. Such a person, presumably, can still have reliable and justified intuition beliefs in a priori claims. But, if the relevant type for these intuition belief tokens was just [belief formation], then the reliability measurement would be significantly decreased from all of the false perceptual beliefs formed by the agent (since perceptual belief formation is contained within the more general category of belief formation).

  6. See Feldman (1985: 160) for the introduction of the term “relevant type,” which has become standard terminology in the generality problem literature to denote the type exemplified by a token whose reliability measurement determines whether or not a given epistemic property is exemplified.

  7. For examples of relevance theories, see Schmitt (1992), Beebe (2004), Leplin (2007), Wallis (1994), Heller (1995), and Becker (2008) Adler and Levin (2002), Alston (1995) and Lepock (2009), Comesaña (2006), Sosa (1991), Goldman (1986), Greco (2010).

  8. For the most thorough and popular criticism of many of the relevance theories on offer, see Conee and Feldman (1998) and then supplementary critical articles by Brueckner and Buford (2013), Conee (2013), Dutant et al. (2013), Matheson (2015), and Conee and Feldman (2002). According to Feldman (1985), a solution to the generality problem falls into the no-distinctions problem if it types processes too broadly, so that intuitively justified cases of belief formation get ruled as unjustified (or vice versa). A solution to the generality problem falls into the single-case problem if it types processes too narrowly, such that any true belief will come out as justified, and any false belief comes out as unjustified (which is intuitively incorrect). Conee and Feldman (1998) argue that every candidate relevant theory presented in the literature either falls into one of these two problems, or fails to deliver specific verdicts on which type is relevant.

  9. Conee and Feldman (1998: 24). For similar sentiments on the force of the generality problem objection to reliabilism, see Plantinga (1993: 28–29), Matheson (2015).

  10. Here’s an illustrative quote that references the sorts of considerations that are present in the way defenders of the generality problem objection explain how the argument works:

    Of course, the arguments of this paper do not show that no acceptable version of the reliability theory can be constructed. However, it is fair to say that The Problem of Generality is a serious problem for the theory… To make the reliability theory plausible, then, some other way must be found to specify processes, some way that assures that only reliable processes operate in cases in which one's evidence does support a belief adequately and only unreliable processes operate when one's evidence fails to support a belief. While it may be possible to come up with a general account of processes that satisfies this requirement, I believe that the prospects for doing so are not good. (Feldman 1985: 172, emphasis mine)

  11. Reflective justification should not be confused with higher order justification (i.e., justification to believe one is justified in believing p). Here, Bishop is introducing reflective justification as a technical term that refers to a kind of belief formation that he thinks is rather common in normal everyday life.

  12. Technically, the inference pattern in a case of reflective justification could include other supporting premises to the two main ones given here. Also, in the quote on 286, Bishop claims that it is one’s knowledge of the premises constitutive of a reflective justification inference that’s important, rather than mere justified belief. In my own reconstruction of reflective justification, I only require that the agent justifiedly believe these two premises and that the premises are true. I do this for two reasons: First, I think knowledge of the two premises is too demanding for an account of reflective justification. Secondly, my weaker account of reflective justification still gets Bishop’s argument off the ground, and invokes necessary conditions on reflective justification that would also be accepted by those who prefer the more demanding knowledge condition as well.

  13. Bishop (2010: 289).

  14. Thanks to Daniel Immerman for raising this point in discussion.

  15. See Huemer (2001: 99) for a similar formulation.

  16. Consider once again the phenomenal conservative about justification. While there are many phenomenal conservatives about justification, there seem to be fewer phenomenal conservatives about warrant. So, reflective justification can still get traction as a warrant parrying response for many individuals who are phenomenal conservatives about justification.

  17. 2013: 760.

  18. The same also holds for reference classes corresponding to tests.

  19. Given the characterization of the generality problem according to Feldman (1985) and Conee and Feldman (1998), the problem for the reliabilist is that, although we can know the features of a given token, we don’t know how to perform the reliability measurement for that token to determine whether that token confers justification or warrant on the target belief. For the token case of seeing and coming to believe in the presence of a red ball (discussed in the introduction), we don’t know whether to perform the reliability measurement with respect to [belief-formation] in general, or with respect to [perceptual belief-formation], or with respect to [visual-belief formation], etc. But the more precise way to formulate this puzzle is in terms of the reference class corresponding to the token: we don’t know whether the token’s reference class is comprised of particular cases of all sorts of belief formation, or just with particular cases of perceptual belief-formation, or just with cases of visual belief-formation, etc. If we could completely determine the features of a token’s reference class, then this would effectively answer the questions Conee and Feldman raise to get the generality problem going.

  20. Wallis (1994: 251–262), argues that the relevant type and the reference class are distinct, and hence there are actually two questions raised by the generality problem: First, what is the relevant type for a token? Secondly, what is the reference class for measuring reliability for a token? He claims that making progress on the generality problem requires keeping these two questions (and their answers) distinct in our theorizing. Here, however, he doesn’t specifically argue why, methodologically, it is important for addressing these two questions separately. As I’ve articulated above, if one offers an account of the reference class, one thereby also succeeds in offering an account of the relevant type—given that all of the reference class cases share the relevant type description in common.

  21. It is not surprising that Conee’s inductive support theory of reflective justification invokes rather complicated process type descriptions. Inductive support is a sort of probabilistic support. Probability theory comes out of measure theory. When we consider the probability that some state G will obtain, in some way we’re comparing the “measure” of relevant situations in which G obtains with the measure of relevant situations in which G doesn’t obtain. But the “relevant situations” here constitute a reference class, without which all talk of probability won’t make sense. Since any probabilistic judgment necessarily invokes a reference class, Alan Hajek notes that every theory of probability has the reference class problem (2007)—namely, the problem of specifying the reference class for a given probability measurement. Reichenbach (1949) formulates the problem of determining the reference class in terms isomorphic to the generality problem for process reliabilism.

    If we are asked to find the probability holding for an individual future event, we must first incorporate the case in a suitable reference class. An individual thing or event may be incorporated in many reference classes, from which different probabilities will result. This ambiguity has been called the problem of the reference class. (374).

  22. See Conee and Feldman (1985) for a presentation and defense of evidentialism.

  23. By internalism about justification, I merely mean the thesis that internal duplicates are also justification duplicates. See Conee and Feldman for a specific defense of this internalist supervenience thesis for their version of evidentialism (2001: 3–5).

  24. For examples of externalist evidentialist views, see Arnold (2011: 162–172) and, arguably, Alston (1985, 1988).

  25. By an “evidentialist theory of warrant,” I mean a theory that roughly holds that basing p on good enough evidence E is a crucial necessary component to having warrant. These views might also posit an additional anti-luck condition as well.

  26. See Arnold (2011: 144–155) for a defense of the claim that facts are evidence. Arnold distinguishes facts from propositions in the following way: facts are what true propositions are about, and facts can be partially concrete (rather than fully abstract) if some of their constituents are concrete. For instance, the fact that earth revolves around the sun is partially concrete in virtue of the earth and the sun being concrete objects. See Dougherty (2011) and Williamson (2002) for a defense of the view that evidence is propositional.

  27. See Conee and Feldman (2008: 87–88), (2001: 1–5).

  28. See Audi (1994) for helpful discussion on the distinction between dispositional beliefs and dispositions to believe. It is this distinction here that ultimately grounds the distinction between dispositional knowledge and dispositions to know.

  29. Pollock (1986).

  30. This “quick forgetfulness” is to be distinguished from complete forgetfulness. In moments in which we quickly forget things, we still possess the content dispositionally, but for one reason or another there’s a failure of retrieval. With complete forgetfulness, it can no longer be said that the agent possesses that content in any important way. Here, it’s impossible for the agent to retrieve that content upon reflection.

  31. Pinning down exactly what Conee and Feldman think nowadays about evidence possession is a bit more difficult. As of 2001, in “Internalism Defended,” they describe mentalism as having the following implication:

    The justificatory status of a person’s doxastic attitudes strongly supervenes on the person’s occurrent and dispositional mental states, events, and conditions.

    This suggests that they are seeing dispositional mental states as candidates for being evidence one has for a target proposition. By 2008, in “Evidence,” Conee and Feldman seem to not take a stand on the issue of MT verses OT. They say that within the broader evidentialist camp, one can distinguish many precise evidentialist theories by their precise views of evidence possession (2008: 89). Some of these will hold to OT on one end of the spectrum. On the far other end of the spectrum, some evidentialist theories will hold that mental states buried so deeply within a person—that only the most in-depth psycho-analysis will bring them to consciousness—can still count as possessed evidence. And between these two poles, there are (hypothetically) many precise evidentialist theories corresponding to each degree of difficulty in bringing a stored mental state to occurrent awareness. Conee and Feldman don’t take a stand here on which one of these precise theories is correct. Here, I might point out that, if there’s not a special burden for the evidentialist to present a theory of evidence possession, then it is a bit ad hoc, without further explanation, to say that the reliabilist has a burden to present a theory of type relevance.

  32. See Arnold (2011: 173–177), who suggests and defends a similar agential dispositional account of evidence possession.

  33. Granted, this parrying response won’t apply to some phenomenal conservatives, who might say that one’s evidence that justifies a given belief just is a seeming that one occurrently has at the moment of belief formation. Regardless, there are far fewer phenomenal conservatives about warrant, so many more will find the evidence possession warrant parrying response compelling.

  34. Many might view the latter as a particular sort of intuition competence.

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Acknowledgement

Much thanks to Ted Warfield, Daniel Immerman, Mike DePaul, Blake Roeber, and Tom Senor for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

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    Jeffrey Tolly

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Tolly, J. A defense of parrying responses to the generality problem. Philos Stud 174, 1935–1957 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0776-2

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