Abstract
On some versions of evidentialism, only evidential reasons can be normatively relevant to belief. An opposed philosophical view (pragmatism) denies this. Unfortunately, the debate between these contrasting views quickly ends in a stalemate because while evidentialists typically point to the difficulty of believing for practical reasons, pragmatists respond by citing cases where people seem to hold beliefs in the absence of evidence. Recently, however, some pragmatists have adopted a new strategy that seeks to combine the evidentialist insight that only evidence can cause belief with the pragmatist claim that practical considerations can be motivating reasons for belief. By assimilating the pragmatist cases that are said to implement the new strategy to those involving deviant causal chains, this paper will argue that the strategy is undermined by the problem of the basing relation. Finally, a positive account of the epistemic significance of practical considerations will be suggested that stops short of seeing them as reasons for belief.
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Notes
See Meylan (forthcoming) for a careful classification of different versions of pragmatism.
Leary (2017).
There are several reasons not to stop with the norm-of-correctness challenge to pragmatism. As mentioned earlier, my main aim in this paper is to examine the pragmatists’ new strategy. This is because if this strategy really works, it will diminish, to a great extent, the force of the other objections to pragmatism as it promises to incorporate some of the insights of evidentialism. Secondly, I take the motivational challenge to be a more powerful objection to pragmatism than the norm-of-correctness challenge as the latter does not address the new pragmatist strategy. Finally, as I have made it clear, my argument against Leary’s response to the norm-of-correctness challenge assumes the distinction between the ‘wrong’ and ‘right’ kind of reasons. Although there is wide agreement that there is such a distinction, there is not much agreement about how to delineate it. These considerations make it necessary to develop the motivational challenge as the most powerful argument against pragmatism in general and the new pragmatist strategy in particular.
Parfit (2001).
Leary (2017).
Jones (2003).
Ibid., p. 194.
Ibid., p. 195.
Davidson (1963).
Wedgwood (2006).
Davidson (2004).
Pollock (1986).
See Vahid (2020).
Turri (2010).
See Vahid (2016) for a full defense of this view.
I argue for this position in Vahid (2016) show how both the standard as well as Turri’s non-standard account of propositional and doxastic justification actually confirm my proposal by turning out to correspond to different analyses of dispositional sentences involving the notion of justification.
.
For a full analysis of these and other cases see Vahid (2020).
There may, however, be cases where the relevant dispositions do not asymmetrically depend on one another. So, we need a principled account of the basing relation to decide what the beliefs are based on. It should be said, however, that some philosophers (Evans 2013) have tried to turn this point about asymmetric dependence into a full-blown account of the basing relation.
(DT)S’s belief that p is based on r if and only if S is disposed to revise her belief that p when she loses r.
But, as I have argued elsewhere (2020), this account does not work. Here is a counterexample to (DT). Suppose I am in my office on the university campus. A colleague of mine, who also happens to be an expert bird watcher, informs me that he has just seen a number of white ravens in the garden on the campus. I do not know much about birds but, based on my past experiences, firmly believe that all ravens are black. Although I normally defer to my colleague’s views about birds, this time I find his testimony so incredible that, to check for myself, I run to the garden, slip and, while falling down on my back, see some white ravens in the tree above me and come to believe that there are white ravens in the garden. Let us also stipulate that although, on this particular occasion, I have not accepted my colleague’s testimony as a basis for my belief, I am nevertheless fully inclined to revise my belief in case he changes his judgment about the birds he has seen. For example, if he tells me that he has made a mistake by mixing up a rare species of pigeons for white ravens, I would certainly be disposed to revise my inexpertly formed belief about the existence of white ravens in the garden. So here we have a case where I am disposed to revise my belief about white ravens upon losing a particular reason (my colleague’s testimony of having seen white ravens) while that belief is, by hypothesis, based on a different reason (seeing raven-like white birds in the tree). This shows that being disposed to revise one’s belief in response to losing a particular reason is not sufficient for the belief to be based on that reason. (DT) is inadequate as it stands.
Leary (2017, p. 9, my emphasis).
Rinard (2019, p. 1944, my emphasis).
Indeed, the cited examples of (NPS) often involve emotions of some kind. There is always something very important at stake in such cases if the relevant belief is not formed. In the Pascallian cases, the absence of belief in God is usually said to result in eternal damnation (despair), anxiety, absurdity, or misery while belief God is said to result in happiness, feeling peaceful etc. The same goes for cases where the absence of belief in, say, one’s recovery from illness facilitates death and misery, or when the lack of belief in the innocence of one’s friend for a crime results in the loss of friendship and brotherly love, etc.
See, for example, Stroud (2006).
Ibid., p. 505.
Jordan (2006, pp. 173–74).
Wainwright (1995, p. 3).
Rinard (2018, p. 17, my emphasis).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Muhammad Legenhausen and an anonymous reviewer of this journal for helpful and insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Vahid, H. No practical reasons for belief: the epistemic significance of practical considerations. Synthese 200, 104 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03474-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03474-8