Abstract
One challenge in developing an account of the nature of epistemic blame is to explain what differentiates epistemic blame from mere negative epistemic evaluation. The challenge is to explain the difference, without invoking practices or behaviors that seem out of place in the epistemic domain. In this paper, I examine whether the most sophisticated recent account of the nature of epistemic blame—due to Jessica Brown—is up for the challenge. I argue that the account ultimately falls short, but does so in an instructive way. Drawing on the lessons learned, I put forward an alternative approach to the nature of epistemic blame. My account understands epistemic blame in terms of modifications to the intentions and expectations that comprise our “epistemic relationships” with one another. This approach has a number of attractions shared by Brown’s account, but it can also explain the significance of epistemic blame.
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Notes
Not everyone agrees that there is a distinctively epistemic kind of blame. This paper assumes that there is such thing as epistemic blame and examines the prospects of accounting for it in different ways.
Some may disagree and think negative emotional responses such as indignation and resentment are perfectly legitimate responses to people for their epistemic failings. The account of epistemic blame I develop below can accommodate this view.
In Boult 2020, I discuss this alternative framework in the context of defending the very idea that there is a distinctively epistemic kind of blame.
The account does not require that ordinary speakers have the explicit concept of an “epistemic norm violation.” Rather, the contents of blame’s belief-desire pair can be more specific: they can concern failures to conform belief to the evidence, assertions of falsehoods, etc.
Here is one possible case. Tim and Bob are old roommates; they compete over just about everything. One of Bob’s character flaws is that he is a sucker for tabloids. He tends to believe things about celebrities and current events simply on the basis of his favorite tabloid magazine. Tim has just realized that Bob has formed yet another tabloid-based belief. Tim believes that an epistemic norm has been violated (e.g. the rational credibility norm of belief, or the knowledge norm, etc.). He also manifests many of the dispositions to feel and behave that Brown says are typically associated with epistemic blame—he publicly expresses rebuke, and attempts to get Bob to appreciate the reasons he seems to fail to appreciate. But, out of a sense of rivalry, Tim also takes a twisted pleasure in Bob’s tabloid problem. He takes pleasure in Bob’s formation of a shoddy tabloid-based belief. It seems Tim lacks a desire that the epistemic norm not be violated. After all, he takes pleasure in the fact that an epistemic norm has been violated. It also seems Tim epistemically blames the Bob. After all, he believes Bob has violated an epistemic norm, and manifests a range of dispositions Brown claims are typical of epistemic blame.
I am also suspicious of the need to posit weak or overridden desires as a way dealing with cases in which the relevant desire does not seem present. However, I will remain neutral on that issue.
Sher addresses something close to the concern I am raising here in Sher (2006, 112–13). In particular, he argues that he is not claiming that for every person imaginable, the belief-desire pair at the heart of blame will give rise to the dispositions characteristic of blame in all situations. He argues that he does not need such a commitment in order for his account to work. Rather, according to Sher, it merely needs to be the case that for all cases of people with a “standard” (p.112) psychology, the belief-desire pair will tend to give rise to the dispositions characteristic of blame. This is why I have emphasized that the mother-son case is not an unusual case. Doing so, I explicitly distinguish it from the sort of thing Sher considers in the neighborhood: namely, "imaginary" or "far off" cases in which a person has the belief-desire pair, but not the dispositions. My aim here is to point out that the mother-son case seems like a normal sort of case.
Here is a more detailed worry about the explanatory connections Sher himself spells out. According to Sher, the connection between blame’s belief-desire pair and dispositions to reproach and apologize (two dispositions he claims are characteristic of blame) is an instance of a general kind: the connection between desire frustration and getting the next best thing. By reproaching, roughly speaking, we aim to get others to avoid wrongdoing in the future, or to try and be better people in the future. By apologizing for a moral transgression, roughly speaking, we aim to get others to see that we have the relevant desire that we not have done so. Interestingly, by Sher’s own (plausible) lights, it seems this story about reproach can’t be quite right. Sher himself rejects consequentialist theories of blame, for reasons that seem applicable here. In particular, it seems A can blame B, reproaching B, while nevertheless lacking any expectation (or even desire) whatsoever that B will behave differently in the future. Perhaps A simply writes B off, or even wants B to continue failing for some overriding consequential reason. Concerning apology, this strikes me as a strange explanation of why we apologize. Namely, it seems like the wrong kind of reason to apologize to someone. In particular, it seems selfish and self-centered to apologize to someone so that they see you have desire X about morality. A good apology is, perhaps among other things, one that is done because you care about the person you’re apologizing to—because you want them to be better off, which might of course be brought about through letting them know you care. But the former, not the latter, is the primary motivation behind a good apology. On Sher’s theory, it seems the latter is the content of your desire. So, by drawing the particular connections he does between frustrated desires and apologies, Sher may be forced to license bad apologies. Below I discuss whether there might be some parallel worries for Brown when it comes to reproach.
This isn’t to say that the son may not have failed in other ways besides epistemically.
If these specific emotions seem somewhat out of place, replace them with something less extreme, or assume that the exam is a particularly important one.
Brown draws connections between epistemic blame’s belief-desire pair and characteristic dispositions in a way that parallels Sher. According to Brown, if someone experiences “negative feelings such as anger” towards another for their epistemic failing, this can be explained as the manifestation of a typical disposition towards such feelings when one of our desires is frustrated. If someone reproaches another—for example, through verbal expressions such as “How can you believe the president is in New York given that the TV is showing that he is in Washington?!”(Brown 2020, 11)—this can be explained as the manifestation of a disposition to try to achieve the next best thing to an unachievable goal (in this case, that the person not have believed badly), namely, to get them to appreciate the epistemic reasons they have and perhaps conduct their intellectual lives more carefully in the future. It is thus worth pointing out that Brown’s epistemic extension seems to inherit a parallel worry to the one I canvassed above for Sher: it seems we can epistemically blame others without any hope or desire that they appreciate anything, or do anything differently in future (even if it is true that we do desire that they not have believed badly). Perhaps we’ve simply written them off. Since I am ultimately concerned with a bigger picture worry for the general account in both its epistemic and moral varieties, I will leave these matters to one side for now.
It is worth noting that Brown responds to Smith’s mother-son case in Brown (2020). However, I am not convinced that her response addresses the heart of the problem. Brown interprets the objection as a straightforward counterexample in which all of the conditions of the Sher-based account of blame are supposedly satisfied and yet intuitively there is no blame. Interpreted as such, I agree with Brown that the objection clearly misses the mark; after all, the dispositions characteristic of blame (a condition on blame, according to the account) are missing. However, in my view, this feature of the case is precisely the point. As I have presented it—and I’ll leave it open whether my objection here is ultimately the same as Smith’s or simply a new objection—the case is not intended to be a case in which all of the conditions of the Sher-based account of blame are satisfied and yet intuitively there is no blame. Rather, it is meant to be an illustration of how, under very normal circumstances, a person can have the belief-desire pair involved in the Sher-based account of blame without this giving rise to the sorts of dispositions that are characteristic of blame. Again, a central feature of the Sher-based account is that the dispositions characteristic of blame just are a special case of what people do when their desires are frustrated. This is supposed to be part of the explanatory power of the account. The belief-desire pair is supposed to explain why the reactions characteristic of blame are ones we would expect people to have under the relevant circumstances. I hope to have more explicitly brought out the challenge to this explanatory claim of the account.
Strictly speaking, relationships also consist in actual dispositions people have towards each other (in addition to their intentions, for example), as well as the reasons why they have those intentions and dispositions. I will bracket these additional two points for the sake of presenting the basic idea of the account.
The account does not require that ordinary speakers have the concept of an “epistemic relationship”, or the concept of an impairment of such a relationship. Rather, the contents of any blame-relevant judgment can be more specific: they can concern failures to conform belief to the evidence, assertions of falsehoods, etc. These are things that, we will see below, constitute impairments of different sorts of epistemic relationships.
Note that this way of developing the idea of an epistemic relationship does not commit one to “anti-reductionism” in the testimonial justification debate (Greco 2020). Both anti-reductionists and reductionists about testimonial justification can agree that, unless we have good reason not to, we should epistemically trust the word of other epistemic agents. Anti-reductionists can agree, because they maintain that testimony is a sui generis source of justification. Reductionists can agree, because they maintain that we often possess other sources of justification (abductive inference, knowledge of track records, etc.) in support of epistemically trusting the word of others.
This feature of my account overlaps in interesting ways with recent work by Kauppinen (2018). Kauppinen puts “reductions in epistemic trust” to work in a theory of “epistemic accountability”. Interestingly, he denies that there is such thing as epistemic blame.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing this point.
Different descriptions of normative ideals of other kinds of epistemic relationships will afford equally fine-grained explanations of other forms of epistemic blame, should they exist.
For those who are sympathetic to negative emotional response accounts of blame, it is important to remember that we can allow that certain kinds of emotion will normally accompany blame-responses.
Thanks to Adam Piovarchy for helpful discussion, and suggesting this possibility of higher-order intentions and expectations. Scanlon himself anticipates this sort of worry and responds by simply allowing the notion of reaffirmation of intentions and expectations to play a role in his account (2008, 131).
See Menges for helpful discussion of the difference between “emotion stances” and “emotion episodes” in the context of a defense of a Strawsonian approach to the nature of blame.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing this point.
Perhaps this is because I am more confident readers will share my intuition that our epistemic blame responses towards very distant or dead people—if we ever appropriately have them—are different in kind from our epistemic blame responses towards people who occupy some more significant role in the epistemic relationship.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Sebastian Köhler, Davide Fassio, Trystan Goetze, Robin McKenna, Lani Watson, audience members at the COGITO Zoom Work in Progress seminar, and two anonymous referees for very helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Boult, C. The significance of epistemic blame. Erkenn 88, 807–828 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-021-00382-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-021-00382-0