Abstract
McCain’s evidentialism embraces Statism—the view that identifies evidence with mental states—over its denial, where the denial is identified as Propositionalism the two positions in question offer quite different prospects for addressing Sellars’ Problem about the intelligibility of believing on the basis of experience. In Sellars’ mind, this problem provides fodder for a regress argument against experientially-based foundationalism, but that’s not only a bad argument, it skirts the fundamental worry. The more fundamental worry is about adopting a kind of “black box” epistemology on which the only connection between experience and belief is a functional one, the internal workings of which are opaque and mysterious. Propositionalism, by design, is formulated to avoid such limitations. It is designed so that the link from experience to belief makes sense from the perspective of the person whose belief is in question. I argue that Statism, at best, contorts to try to do so.
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- 1.
McCain uses the term ‘Psychologism’ rather than ‘Statism’, but since I want to be able to talk about defenders of the views in question, I prefer to use the terminology of Statism rather than Psychologism, because then I don’t have to refer to defenders of the view as Psychologists! Still a bit of awkwardness in calling them ’Statists’, but perhaps a bit less of it.
- 2.
The argument that mental content outruns propositional content is this: the only way it could be otherwise would be for all parts of a proposition to be things with which the person in question is directly acquainted, in the strong form involved in Russellian epistemology. If there are singular propositions, then Mark Twain was born in Missouri is the same proposition as Samuel Clemens was born in Missouri, but the first belief-report is not the same as the second. And even if there aren’t any singular propositions, it is a hard view to defend that propositional content is always and everywhere narrow content, for reasons concerning the opacity of the semantic content of terms picking out natural kinds. Moreover, if narrow content is understood in intensional terms, it still isn’t fine-grained enough, for mental content is, pretty clearly, hyperintensional. We need not pursue these issues here, however: merely noting them is enough to make clear that a Propositionalist need not endorse the view that all mental content is propositional.
- 3.
The article to which McCain refers is Turri (2009).
- 4.
There is a qualification here that needs to be made, but making it will complicate things to no purpose related to the topic we are discussing. The qualification concerns how to talk about the role of experience for versions of coherentism that insist that experience plays a role in justification, in spite of justification remaining a holistic fact about an entire system of information. There are ways to qualify the claim in the text to accommodate such views (see, e.g., Kvanvig and Riggs 1992 and Kvanvig 1995), but the adjustments will not affect the general point just made, even though the specific language used clothes the view in foundationalist garb.
References
Kvanvig, J. L. (1995). Coherentists’ distractions. Philosophical Topics, 23, 257–275.
Kvanvig, J. L., & Riggs, W. D. (1992). Can a coherence theory appeal to appearance states? Philosophical Studies, 67, 197–217.
McCain, K. (2014). Evidentialism and epistemic justification. New York: Routledge.
Turri, J. (2009). The ontology of epistemic reasons. Noûs, 43(3), 490–512.
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Kvanvig, J.L. (2018). Propositionalism and McCain’s Evidentialism. In: McCain, K. (eds) Believing in Accordance with the Evidence. Synthese Library, vol 398. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95993-1_20
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