The Providential Bad Luck of Justification

dialectica dialectica Vol. 65, N° 4 (2011), pp. 483–491 DOI: 10.1111/j.1746-8361.2011.01281.x Introduction: The Providential Bad Luck of Justification dltc_1281 483..492 Anne Meylan† Philosophers have been through the domain of epistemic justification with a fine-tooth comb. Why such zeal? Famously, this diligence stems from their interest in knowledge. More accurately, this assiduousness is explained by the combined facts (i) that justification is part of the factorization of knowledge in terms of justified true belief and (ii) that one of the most prominent problems threatening the justified true belief analysis (JTB) pertains to the condition of justification. What seems wrong in the two original Gettier cases is something in the way the subject is justified in believing what he believes (Gettier 1963). This leads epistemologists to refine their analysis of the condition of justification, generally by strengthening the condition under which a subject’s reasons, evidence or reasoning convey justification.1 The important thing to note is that, during this refinement process, the term ‘justification’ became a term of art. The meaning of the term has been more and more disconnected from its commonsensical one until becoming purely technical. This is especially perceptible with the reliabilist conception of justification (Goldman 1979). According to process reliabilism, a justified belief is a belief produced by a reliable process, i.e. by a process with a high truth-ratio. However, what people normally mean by a justified X is not a reliably produced X. A justified performance is not a performance produced in such a way that its probability of success is enhanced – at least, not according to the commonsensical meaning of the term. The reliabilist conception of justification jars with the commonsensical grasp of the notion.2 The transformation of justification into a purely technical notion brought its loss of intrinsic significance to a head. Trivially, if ‘justification’ is simply the name of what turns a true belief into a piece of knowledge, it is not interesting † Department of Philosophy, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland; Email: anne.meylan@unige.ch 1 The Gettier problem is also frequently described as the problem of finding a fourth condition for knowledge. But the suggested fourth conditions mostly consist of specifications of the condition of justification. See the introduction of Pappas and Swain (1978) for an overview of different modifications of the condition of justification. 2 Actually many philosophers’ conceptions of justification – except perhaps the deontological ones – jar with the commonsensical grasp of the notion. For this reason, Alston would have preferred being able to use another term than ‘justification’. See Alston (1989a, n. 21). © 2011 The Author. dialectica © 2011 Editorial Board of dialectica. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA 484 Anne Meylan independently of its role in the analysis of knowledge. From being the key notion in the JTB analysis of knowledge, justification became an insubstantial notion only meaningful in the service of this analysis, thereby losing any intrinsic interest. 1. Knowledge first It is in this context that Williamson published his 1995 paper “Is Knowing is a State of Mind?”.3 According to Williamson, knowledge cannot be factorized in the way the JTB analysis suggests since knowledge comes first: knowledge is a primary concept on the basis of which some further epistemic concepts – e.g., justification – can be analysed and not the other way round. Williamson’s main thesis could have been the death knell of the philosophical study of justification. If justification is merely a technical notion, which captures what has to be added to true belief in order to get knowledge, to reject the JTB analysis of knowledge amounts to getting rid of the notion of justification by emptying it of its only content. The publication of the present special issue of dialectica demonstrates that justification evades this destiny. Even if justification has no role to play in the constitution of knowledge, the questions pertaining to the nature of justification (e.g., to its standards) remain topical. As Alston (1989c, 1) claimed: Justification will find a place on the agenda quite apart from whether it figures in the analysis of knowledge. In thinking critically about human cognition, we will inevitably be led to reflect on our beliefs and on the conditions under which they are justified, rational, or warranted. This issue of dialectica aims to provide an illustration of the richness of the directions that the study of justification has henceforth taken. Given what has been said, a crucial point obviously regards the independence of justification vis-à-vis knowledge. The first paper of this issue is precisely an attempt to answer Sutton’s arguments supporting the idea that any concept of justified belief is co-extensional with that of knowledge. The independence of the notion of justification with regard to knowledge liberates another field of research that covers the analysis of the concept of justification itself.4 What does it mean for a belief to be justified? A frequent answer is that ‘justified beliefs’ means one and the same thing as ‘permitted beliefs’. This raises the issue of whether beliefs can possibly qualify as permitted. What if they are not things over which we are able to exercise voluntary control? It is at this point that the discussion concerning the analysis of the concept of 3 4 See also Williamson (2000). It is not unfair to say that William Alston has been something of a trailblazer in this field. © 2011 The Author. dialectica © 2011 Editorial Board of dialectica. Introduction: The Providential Bad Luck of Justification 485 justification connects with the problem of doxastic voluntarism. The purpose of Steup’s paper in this issue is precisely to defend the deontological conception of justification against the objection according to which beliefs are not things that we control. Another dimension of research concerns the traditional question of whether we can take ourselves to be justified in believing results issuing from the exercise of our faculties. As suggested by De Cruz, Boudry, De Smedt and Blancke’s paper, evolutionary theories might help to answer positively. More specifically, a question of crucial importance for philosophers’ methodology is whether the intuitions at work in thought-experiments can provide justification, and under which conditions. Brown’s answer in this issue is that thought-experiment evidence is psychological, but that it is nevertheless able to justify beliefs in non-psychological propositions. Finally, a potentially illuminating question is the following: why didn’t we manage to solve the Gettier problem? What is there about this problem that prevented philosophers from solving it despite decades of efforts? This is the so-called ‘Gettier-problem problem’. A simple way to solve the Gettier-problem problem is to adopt Williamson’s view according to which there is no Gettier problem because there is no analysis of knowledge. Chudnoff’s paper in this issue suggests another solution by exploiting the crucial difference, rarely noticed by epistemologists, between the ‘in virtue of’ and the ‘being sufficient for’ relations. 2. Summaries of the included papers Kelp’s paper is a criticism of Sutton’s identity thesis, according to which justified belief is knowledge (Sutton 2005, 2007). Kelp thoroughly reformulates and looks into Sutton’s three arguments in support of the identity thesis. The first of Sutton’s arguments that Kelp addresses is the so-called assertion argument. The assertion argument crucially relies on (i) the Williamsonian premise that knowledge is the norm of assertion and (ii) the premise that the goal of assertion is the transmission of beliefs. Kelp’s criticism of this argument is twofold. First he argues that Sutton does not provide any convincing reason to prefer the knowledge rule to the justification rule, according to which justified belief is the norm of assertion. The second step of Kelp’s objection against the assertion argument takes on (ii), the premise that the goal of assertion is the transmission of beliefs. The obvious alternative to (ii) is the claim that the goal of assertion consists in the transmission of knowledge. Kelp shows that Sutton’s attempt to block this alternative is unconvincing. Sutton’s second argument supporting the identity thesis relies on the lottery paradox: if we are justified in believing what is very likely, then, for any fair lottery © 2011 The Author. dialectica © 2011 Editorial Board of dialectica. 486 Anne Meylan with exactly one winner and sufficiently many tickets, we will be justified in believing that each particular ticket will lose while being simultaneously justified in believing that one particular ticket won’t lose. That is, we will be justified in believing a contradiction and this is unacceptable. A solution to the paradox consists in rebutting the Lockean thesis that we are justified in believing what is very likely. Refuting the Lockean thesis supports the identity thesis given that the latter provides, according to Sutton, the best explanation of the falsity of the Lockean thesis. Kelp’s criticism precisely tackles the best explanation claim. He shows that there are many different ways of explaining the failure of the Lockean thesis and argues that there is no reason to favour Sutton’s explanation above the others. Sutton offers a third argument in order to support the identity thesis. Here is an outline: (i) We intuitively ought to believe that p when: (a) we have interest in believing whether p, (b) we are justified in believing that p and (c) we are capable of forming the belief that p. (ii) There is no intuitive sense in which we ought to believe a non-knowledge justified true belief. (iii) Hence, there aren’t any non-knowledge justified true beliefs. The second premise might be the most delicate one. Sutton’s strategy to defend (ii) consists in confronting two cases. Each case implements conditions (a–c). In the first case, the belief that the subject could have formed is a non-knowledge justified true belief. In the second case it is a piece of knowledge. Sutton agrees that in both cases we are inclined to say that the subject ought to form the belief that p. But, he argues, in the first case, this is so because the subject could have adopted a true belief. The fact that the belief is justified has nothing to do with it. If this were true, it would look as if premise (ii) had gained some support. Kelp’s objection to Sutton’s strategy proceeds in two steps. First, Kelp questions Sutton’s intuition regarding the first case. According to Kelp, the claim that what matters in the first case is the fact that the belief is true and not that it is justified is, at least, very controversial. Second, Kelp notes that even if we take Sutton’s argument to show that in the first case the reason why the subject ought to form a belief is that it is true, this is sufficient to state that there is one intuitive sense in which the subject ought to adopt a belief because it is true. But this is not sufficient to defend premise (ii): i.e., to state that there is no intuitive sense in which a subject ought to adopt a belief because it is justified. Kelp’s reply to Sutton’s third argument ends up with the demonstration that there is an intuitive sense in which a subject ought to adopt a belief precisely in virtue of its being justified. When a belief is supported by excellent evidence, it would be highly irrational not to adopt it, even if the belief is false. That is, it is certainly a belief we ought to adopt despite being false. © 2011 The Author. dialectica © 2011 Editorial Board of dialectica. Introduction: The Providential Bad Luck of Justification 487 The last part of Kelp’s paper provides positive reason to think, contra the identity thesis, that knowledge and belief come apart. Kelp presents a range of cases which seem to require a conceptual distinction between knowledge and justified belief. Steup’s paper aims at answering Alston’s objection against the deontological conception of justification (Alston 1989b). According to Alston, justification cannot be understood in deontological terms. Indeed, such an understanding presumes that we exercise voluntary control over our beliefs in the manner we exercise voluntary control over our actions. But, in fact, there is an asymmetry between our beliefs and our actions with regard to their control. We cannot believe anything that we desire believing while we can, in normal circumstances, perform the actions that we desire to perform. This is the involuntarist objection against the deontological conception of justification. Steup’s strategy to defeat the involuntarist objection starts by distinguishing between two kinds of control – viz., executional control and volitional control. Having executional control is to have the ability to enact one’s decision and choices, while having volitional control is to have the ability to control one’s own will. Someone whose legs are paralysed and who cannot move them despite his desire to do it lacks executional control. By contrast, someone who cannot take the lift because of his excessive fear of being confined in small spaces lacks volitional control. He could have stepped into the lift if he had decided to: his problem is precisely that he cannot decide to do it. Which of these two forms of control do we lack with regard to beliefs? Steup’s answer is that we lack volitional control. When a subject faces the evidence that p, it is not that he cannot execute the decision to believe that not-p – it is that he cannot decide to believe that p. The second crucial step of Steup’s strategy consists in arguing that only a compatibilist conception of volitional control allows capturing the aforementioned asymmetry between beliefs and actions with regard to their control. A hard determinist or libertarian conception of control, Steup argues, cannot do this. From there, Steup’s reply to the involuntarist objection follows quite naturally. According to a compatibilist conception of volitional control, my exercising volitional control over the decision to believe that p does not require that I have ability to choose between deciding to believe that p and deciding to believe that ~p. According to a compatibilist conception, my exercising volitional control over the decision to believe that p only requires that my decision to believe that p result from a good cause. Usually, our beliefs result from good causes, like our perception, our memory, etc. Consequently, according to a compatibilist conception of control, most of our beliefs are items over which we exercise control. The second part of Steup’s paper is devoted to rebutting the ‘argument from intentionality’. According to the argument from intentionality, beliefs are not © 2011 The Author. dialectica © 2011 Editorial Board of dialectica. 488 Anne Meylan under our voluntary control given that voluntariness requires intentionality and that beliefs are not intentional, even implicitly. Steup considers various conceptions of implicit intentionality. The upshot of these considerations is that none of these conceptions is able to include our automatic actions – like the action of changing the gears while driving, the action of unscrewing the toothpaste, etc. – in the category of the implicitly intentional items while ruling out beliefs. That is to say, no conception of implicit intentionality is able to explain why our automatic beliefs are voluntary items while our beliefs are not. Does the fact that the human brain is a product of evolution give us a reason to believe that our mental representations accurately reflect the states of the world? This is the question that De Cruz, Boudry, De Smedt and Blancke address in their collective paper. Their answer is ‘yes’. Evolutionary theses, more specifically the thesis of natural selection, can apparently be used to argue that we are justified in believing that our mental representations are reliable. The outline of the argument is the following: Evolutionary argument for beliefs’ justification (i) Natural selection tends to propagate true representations of the world given that fitness-enhancing actions require accurate representations. (ii) Natural selection plays the most important role in the formation of our cognitive abilities. (iii) Then the thesis of natural selection provides reasons to believe in the truth of our mental representations. This line of reasoning has raised various adverse reactions in the sphere of evolutionary epistemology. One of the virtues of De Cruz et al.’s paper is its providing a systematic picture of these objections. There are, they claim, two main ways of rejecting the evolutionary argument. The first one consists in denying premise (i), that is, the connection between the truth of the beliefs and their ability to enhance fitness. This can, for instance, be done by reminding that natural selection tends to promote beliefs that yield the highest payoffs and that the latter are not always true. The costs of a false representation – the detection of predator in the environment while there is none for instance – can sometimes be less than the failure of detecting a predator that is present. The second one consists in rejecting premise (ii), that is, the idea that natural selection is playing an indisputable role in the formation of our cognitive abilities. After all, many beliefs do not have any impact on the individuals’ fitness and are, therefore, invisible to natural selection. As the authors note, the relatively high reproductive success of people who are not scientifically literate (like the Amish) suggests that scientific beliefs do not have much impact on fitness. That is, even if you keep the connection between fitness and truth intact, there is seemingly no reason to think that the cognitive capacities resulting in scientific beliefs are truth-tracking abilities. © 2011 The Author. dialectica © 2011 Editorial Board of dialectica. Introduction: The Providential Bad Luck of Justification 489 The problem with these two kinds of objections, De Cruz et al. argue, is that they are self-undermining. Both appeal to evolutionary theses. That is to say, they are objections that deny the capacity of generating truth-tracking results to the very capacities on which they rely. But this is insufficient to save the evolutionary argument since it can also be reproached for its circularity: the evolutionary argument relies on evolutionary theories to justify beliefs in the reliability of our cognitive abilities. But the building of evolutionary theories precisely results from our cognitive abilities. De Cruz et al. present various ways out of the circularity charge. In particular, they suggest strengthening Shogenji’s bayesian and evolutionary solution (Shogenji 2000) by appealing to observations – like the newborns’ ability to recognize their mothers within a few hours after birth – which support the evolutionary hypothesis without being dependent on evolutionary theory itself. In the last part of their article, De Cruz et al. complete their defence of the evolutionary argument by showing how humans surmount their cognitive biases with external tools. Brown’s paper concerns the justification of philosophical results relying on thought-experiments. Specifically, she addresses the problem of the nature of the evidence provided by thought-experiments and defends the psychological view, according to which thought-experiments’ evidence can be psychological propositions while justifying beliefs in non-psychological propositions. More concretely, on the psychological view, the evidence made available by the Gettier thoughtexperiment, for instance, is the proposition that it seems to one that the subject has a non-knowledge-justified true belief. This psychological proposition should be able to justify the belief in the non-psychological proposition that having a justified true belief is not sufficient for having knowledge. The psychological view has precisely been criticized for creating a gap between evidence and the subject matter for which it is supposed to be evidence. The psychological view has been said to promote scepticism about philosophical results given that they mainly concern nonpsychological topics (Williamson 2007). Brown’s paper is mainly devoted to answering this criticism. Her strategy consists in considering various philosophical views, each pertaining to the way psychological perceptual evidence is supposed to justify beliefs in nonpsychological propositions, and in determining which conception is the most promising one with regard to the application to thought-experiments. The upshot is that none of the various internalist conceptions of perceptual justification – in particular none of Wright’s three notions of entitlement (Wright 2004) – offer an adequate model for understanding how psychological evidence can provide justification in the case of thought-experiments. Her ultimate conclusion is that it is coherent for an externalist to accept a psychological view of evidence in some domain and that the gap problem should be solved by relying on an externalist conception of justification. © 2011 The Author. dialectica © 2011 Editorial Board of dialectica. 490 Anne Meylan Chudnoff’s paper is devoted to solving the ‘Gettier-problem problem’: i.e. the problem of explaining what is wrong with the project of answering the Gettier problem. Chudnoff’s explanation crucially relies on a difference between saying “Q obtains in virtue of P” and saying “P is a necessary and sufficient condition for Q”. More specifically, according to Chudnoff, Q can obtain in virtue of P even though P does not suffice for Q. The example provided to support this thesis is the following: A subject can be justified in believing that there is a red light ahead in virtue of having a visual experience as of a red light ahead without his having a visual experience as of a red light being sufficient for his being justified in believing that there is a red light ahead. As Chudnoff notes, a way of questioning this example is to suggest that the subject is justified partly in virtue of having a visual experience and partly in virtue of not knowing that he has taken a pill that will make green things look like red. Chudnoff’s reply to this objection requires him to say a little bit more about the ‘in virtue of’ relation. The ‘in virtue of’ relation is a non-monotonic relation. It is non-monotonic because a relation of explanatory relevance restricts it. If I am tired in virtue of the fact that I suffer from insomnia, I am not tired in virtue of the fact that I suffer from insomnia and the fact that the pistil is the female organ of flowers. This is because the latter is not explanatory relevant with regard to my tiredness. The second term of the ‘in virtue of’ relation has to be explanatory relevant with regard to the first term. Now, Chudnoff argues, there are at least two standards that a fact has to satisfy in order to be explanatory relevant with regard to another one. (i) C is explanatorily relevant to Q only if C is not vacuous in a way that renders it unable to contribute to understanding why Q obtains. (ii) C is explanatory relevant to Q only if the set of the Cs is not unnatural in a way that renders it unable to contribute to understanding why Q obtains. The upshot of the considerations regarding the ‘in virtue of’ relation is the following: regardless of the condition one adds (in the red light example) to the fact that the subject has the visual experience as of a red light in order to get something sufficient for justification, it will be either vacuous or unnatural. What would make the fact that the subject has a visual experience something sufficient for justification would be explanatory irrelevant and, thereby, unable to occupy the second place in the ‘in virtue of’ relation. With this in mind, Chudnoff considers the fake barns case. First, he takes the following reasonable account of perceptual knowledge to be correct. The simple view If a perceptual experience makes a belief that p based on it amount to knowledge, it does so in virtue of (a) being an experience in which it perceptually appears to you © 2011 The Author. dialectica © 2011 Editorial Board of dialectica. Introduction: The Providential Bad Luck of Justification 491 that p, and (b) being an experience in which you are aware of something x, such that (c) x makes p true. The simple view leads to the problematic result that the subject knows in the fake barns case. This might lead either to reject the simple view or to rebut the intuition that the subject does not know in the fake barns case. You do not have to face this dilemma, however, if you accept that Q can obtain in virtue of P even though P does not suffice for Q. You can rather claim that the simple view is not supposed to identify sufficient conditions for perceptual knowledge. This way of dealing with the fake barns case allows seeing what, according to Chudnoff, is more generally problematic in the project of answering the Gettier problem. The Gettier problem is the problem of finding conditions that are necessary and sufficient for knowledge. This project is problematic because what is necessary and sufficient is not necessarily explanatory relevant. That is, the problem with the Gettier problem is that if the goal is to explain how people get knowledge, it is pointless to try to find necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge since necessary and sufficient conditions are not always explanatory conditions.* References Alston, W. 1989a, ‘Concepts of Epistemic Justification’, in Epistemic Justification. Essays in the Theory of Knowledge, New York: Cornell University Press, pp. 81–114. Alston, W. 1989b, ‘The Deontological Conception of Epistemic Justification’, in Epistemic Justification. Essays in the Theory of Knowledge, New York: Cornell University Press, pp. 115–152. Alston, W. 1989c, ‘Introduction’, in Epistemic Justification. Essays in the Theory of Knowledge, New York: Cornell University Press, pp. 1–16. Gettier, E. 1963, ‘Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?’ Analysis 23, pp. 121–123. Goldman, A. I. 1979, ‘What Is Justified Belief?’ in G. Pappas (ed.), Justification and Knowledge, Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 1–23. Pappas, G. and Swain, M. (eds), 1978, Essays on Knowledge and Justification, New York: Cornell University Press. Shogenji, T. 2000, ‘Self-Dependent Justification Without Circularity’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 51, pp. 287–298. Sutton, J. 2005, ‘Stick to What You Know’, Noûs 39, pp. 359–396. Sutton, J. 2007, Without Justification, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Williamson, T. 1995, ‘Is Knowing a State of Mind?’, Mind, New Series 104, 415, pp. 533–565. Williamson, T. 2000, Knowledge and its Limits, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Williamson, T. 2007, The Philosophy of Philosophy, Oxford, Blackwell. Wright, C. 2004, ‘On Epistemic Entitlement. Warrant for Nothing (and Foundations for Free)?’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 78, pp. 167–245. * I would like to thank Evan Butts for his corrections on an earlier version of this text. © 2011 The Author. dialectica © 2011 Editorial Board of dialectica.