Abstract
After summarizing the essential details of Anil Gupta’s account of perceptual justification in his book Empiricism and Experience, I argue for three claims: (1) Gupta’s proposal is closer to rationalism than advertised; (2) there is a major lacuna in Gupta’s account of how convergence in light of experience yields absolute entitlements to form beliefs; and (3) Gupta has not adequately explained how ordinary courses of experience can lead to convergence on a commonsense view of the world.
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Notes
Actually, Gupta begins his book by asking a slightly different question, namely “What is the rational contribution of experience to knowledge?” He quickly slides into asking, “What is the contribution of experience to the rationality of belief?” and most of what he says in the book directly addresses this latter question. However, in light of the sorts of issues raised by the Gettier literature, it should be clear that an account of experience’s contribution to the rationality of belief is not yet an account of experience’s contribution to knowledge, since (if our intuitive judgments on the matter are to be trusted) rational true belief can fail to be knowledge. (Still, on the assumption that knowledge requires rational/justified/entitled belief, an account of the contribution of experience to rational belief is plausibly an important first step in an account of the contribution of experience to knowledge.)
I am assuming here that if fact F2 obtains in virtue of fact F1 in one possible situation, then in every possible situation in which fact F1 obtains, fact F2 also obtains. Although this conditional is explicitly denied by moral particularists, it will be harmless to assume it in our present discussion.
The first half of Gupta’s argument against the propositional given relies on the following three premises (among others):
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Propositional Equivalence: For all possible experiences e and e′, if e and e′ are subjectively identical, then \( \Upgamma_{e} = \, \Upgamma_{{e^{\prime}}} . \)
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Propositional Reliability: For any possible experience e, if e occurs and P ∈ Γ e , then P is not false.
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Weak Existential Assumption: For any possible experience e, there exists a possible experience e′ such that (i) e and e′ are subjectively identical, and (ii) e′ is a dream experience, or a hallucination, or some other experience in which the subject is not in touch with an external world of mind-independent objects.
However, some propositional givenists (see, for example, McDowell 2008 and Williamson 2000, Chap. 8) will deny Propositional Equivalence, other propositional givenists (see, for example, Audi 2003 and Pryor 2000) will deny Propositional Reliability, and still other propositional givenists (see, for example, Neta 2009) will deny the Weak Existential Assumption.
(Gupta claims [p. 32, n. 27] that one can run a variant of his argument which does not appeal to Propositional Reliability, but I find this version of the argument much less convincing, especially once one realizes that entitlements are permissions, not obligations: see the end of Sect. 6 below.)
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It has been speculated that Vincent Van Gogh’s epilepsy medicine gave him the medical condition known as yellow vision, which would explain the preponderance of yellow shades in his paintings.
Gupta often insists that what is unique about his view is that he takes the given in experience to be a function, whereas the propositional givenist takes it to be a class of propositions (see p. 79). However, I think this way of characterizing the difference between Gupta and the propositional givenist is misleading. On both accounts the given is a function: for the propositional givenist it is a one-argument function from experiences to classes of propositions, whereas for Gupta it is a two-argument function from experiences and views to classes of propositions. Of course, once we fix on a particular experience, then according to the propositional givenist the given-for-that-experience is a class of propositions. But so too, once we fix on a particular experience and a particular view, then according to Gupta the given-for-that-experience-and-that-view is a class of propositions.
Some choice quotations that tell in favor of my interpretation: “…assuming that I am justified in my view, I am justified in my perceptual judgments” (p. 76); “…given that I have the experience and given that I am entitled to my view, it follows that I am entitled to my perceptual judgments” (ibid.); “…provided that the view that we bring to bear on experience is rational, the resulting perceptual judgments are rational” (p. 163); “…[experience] delivers rational judgments only when it has the aid of a rational view” (p. 164); “…the rationality of our perceptual judgments depends in turn upon the rationality of our view” (p. 215). See also Gupta (2009), where Gupta explicitly rejects the second interpretation of the hypothetical given (p. 339-340) and then explicitly endorses what appears to be the first interpretation: “Experience does not, by itself, entitle us to affirm perceptual judgments; it only does so in conjunction with an antecedent rational view (or a specific rational part of a view)” (p. 340).
An approach to this problem that Gupta does not consider is to have our entitlement to our views partially depend on our entitlement to our perceptual judgments, but also partially depend on some other source of entitlements that is wholly categorical in nature. One proposal along these lines that is still vaguely empiricist in spirit would involve taking us to have a small pool of innate knowledge (and hence non-conditionally justified beliefs) about extremely general features of the world and our epistemic relationship to it, which together with the conditional justification we receive via experience might be enough to erect an edifice of knowledge that includes most of our commonsense beliefs.
This model is of course idealized in many ways. Gupta attempts to remove some of these idealizations in Chap. 7.
In Empiricism and Experience, Gupta starts by considering the case in which our rational being undergoes a denumerably infinite sequence of experiences (pp. 88–101), and then later extends his formalism to the finite case (pp. 101–102). Here I follow Gupta (2006b) in considering the finite case from the beginning, since—as far as I can see—there is no need to take a detour through the infinite case in order to explain Gupta’s basic account of categorical entitlements.
In Empiricism and Experience Gupta calls this function R(v, e) (see p. 88), whereas in Gupta (2006b) he calls it ρ e (v) (see p. 195 of that article). Since I find the ρ e (v) notation more perspicuous, especially when the function is embedded multiple times, I have chosen to adopt that notation here.
Gupta’s official presentation of the categorical given involves defining a number of notions (virtual identity, convergent revision processes, surviving views, etc.) that I have not mentioned here. However, there is no need to introduce these concepts in order to present Gupta’s main proposal about what makes a rational being categorically justified in believing a given proposition, as the following quotation makes clear: “…at any stage n, the [rational being] has an absolute obligation to accept all that is common to the views … that survive at stage n” (p. 98). See also Gupta (2006b), p. 198, n. 26.
If v is a view and C is a class of propositions, let v ∪ C be the view that results when the propositions in C are added to v.
In particular, I have serious doubts that experience on its own is enough to achieve convergence with regards to mathematical claims, logical claims, moral and other normative claims, and meta-philosophical claims. Gupta sets aside these cases when laying out his framework in Empiricism and Experience (see, for example, p. 4, n. 1, where he says that he will not be considering our knowledge of mathematics), but a full-blown defense of empiricism would of course require extending that framework to these other cases, which are precisely the sorts of cases that have proven the most resistant to an empiricist treatment over the centuries.
Presumably there will always be a non-denumerably infinite number of acceptable starting views, but for ease of exposition it will be harmless to engage in the fiction that the number of admissible views is finite.
In the body of this paper I have put forward an interpretation of Gupta’s account of the hypothetical given according to which entitlements to views plus experiences yield entitlements to perceptual judgments, both because I think this is the interpretation that best fits his text (see n. 8), and because it is a natural way of understanding Gupta’s claim on pp. 80–82 that the epistemology of the given in experience is analogous to the epistemology of valid argument schemata such as modus ponens, given the (not unheard of) assumption that the epistemology of valid argument schemata works as follows: if one is entitled to believe the premises, then one is entitled to believe the conclusion. However, since the epistemology of valid argument schemata is a controversial matter, Gupta could attempt to resist my argument in this section by endorsing a different epistemology of valid argument schemata, and by extension a different account of the hypothetical given.
For example, one currently popular account takes the rational relation between premises and conclusion in a valid argument schemata to take the form of a wide-scope requirement, such as
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wide-scope logical requirement: S is rationally required (if she believes the premises, to believe the conclusion).
(On the wide-scoping program, see Broome 1999 and the references contained in Schroeder 2004.) An analogous interpretation of the hypothetical given would be as follows:
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wide-scope hypothetical given: S is rationally required (if she has experience e and holds view v, to believe Γ e (v)).
Moving to a wide-scope version of the hypothetical given frees us from a model whereby justification flows from inputs to outputs, so the problem I have been discussing in this section disappears. However, two new problems appear: first, since it is always possible to obey the proposed wide-scope requirement by suspending judgment on (the relevant parts of) the view in the antecedent, we now need a story about why it is irrational to suspend judgment in order to explain why convergence yields categorical requirements on belief, and second, since it is always possible to obey the proposed wide-scope requirement by shifting to a radically different set of beliefs, we now need to argue that it is never rational to hold a solipsist or brain-in-a-vat view, not just that it is unacceptable to start by holding such a view, or else convergence on ordinary external-world propositions will never occur.
Thus I believe that the problem I identify for Gupta in this section really takes the form of a dilemma: if he endorses a model for the hypothetical given whereby entitlements transmit from antecedently held views to newly held perceptual judgments when one has a given experience, then my argument from the body of the paper applies; whereas if he endorses a non-transmission model for the hypothetical given (such as that provided by the wide-scope interpretation), then he loses the resources to explain why we can’t move to a solipsist view (or suspend judgment) after a single experience.
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This example is a variant of one proposed by Ned Hall during the question session of a talk by Gupta at Harvard in the spring of 2006. After the bulk of these comments were written, I discovered that Ram Neta makes a very similar point about a very similar example in Neta (2009).
Perhaps there is room to quibble about these claims I have just made: maybe, for example, a world in which one is deceived by a somewhat evil demon counts as the-same-in-fundamental-respects as a world in which one is deceived by a very, very evil demon, or maybe a world inhabited by a solipsistic brain-in-a-vat is not fundamentally different from a world inhabited by a group of collective brains-in-vats. However: (i) now I am starting to lose track of what makes one account of the world or the self fundamentally the same as another (after all, these changes in view seem as fundamental as Gupta’s standard example of a fundamental change in view, namely a shift from a flat-Earth to a spherical-Earth view [see pp. 90, 161]); and (ii) as this sort of response is pressed further and further, there is a worry that any change in our commonsense view in response to experience will now no longer count as a fundamental change, so that the rigidity of solipsistic, brain-in-a-vat, and deceived-by-an-evil-demon views will be preserved only by making commonsense views rigid as well.
Diehard Quineans might insist that mathematical and logical beliefs are revisable in light of experience, but even they must concede that the epistemic rules by which we revise our web belief avoid the tribunal of experience, since those rules constitute what it is for us to face the tribunal of experience.
On the general issue of how much permissiveness is acceptable within one’s epistemology, see White (2005).
This essay is a slightly revised version of my contribution to the Author-Meets-Critics session on Anil Gupta’s Empiricism and Experience at the December 2008 meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association. For helpful discussion of the issues raised by Gupta's book, many thanks to Christopher Frey, Anil Gupta, Ned Hall, Christopher Hill, James John, and Ram Neta.
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Berker, S. Gupta’s gambit. Philos Stud 152, 17–39 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9435-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9435-1