Abstract
Anti-realism is often claimed to be preferable to realism on epistemological grounds: while realists have difficulty explaining how we can ever know claims if we are realists about it, anti-realism faces no analogous problem. This paper focuses on anti-realism about normativity to investigate this alleged advantage to anti-realism in detail. I set up a framework in which a version of anti-realism explains a type of modal reliability that appears to be epistemologically promising, and plausibly explains the appearance of an epistemological advantage to realism. But, I argue, this appearance is illusory, and on closer investigation the anti-realist view does not succeed in explaining the presence of familiar epistemological properties for normative belief like knowledge or the absence of defeat. My conclusion on the basis of this framework is that there is a tension in the anti-realist view between the urge to idealize the conditions in which normative beliefs ground normative facts, and a robust kind of reliability that normative belief can have if the anti-realist resists these idealizations.
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Notes
See for example Mackie (1977), Harman (1986), and Street (2006) for different versions of an epistemological challenge to realism. Schafer (forthcoming) defends the realist from the most damning versions of these challenges, but concedes that anti-realists might have a better time explaining the presence of epistemically desirable features of normative belief.
See Southwood (Forthcoming), Street (2010) for conceptions of Constructivism that begin with a similar starting point with, diverge in other respects from, the conception I will be working with here.
See for example Railton (1986) and Schroeder (2007) for examples of non-Constructivist naturalistic grounding claims. Here and throughout I use talk of ‘grounding’ to pick out a relation of metaphysical dependence. Beyond that, ‘grounding’ talk is neutral between different conceptions of the relation, as well as a metaphysical understanding in terms of determination or constitution instead.
There are additional complications concerning what goes into the full grounding base for universal facts (such as that one ought always to tell the truth) and negative facts (such as that it is not the case that one ought to lie today). I will gloss over these complications here.
Williamson (2007: Ch. 4 ).
See Salmon (1986) for a theory of guises and belief-formation. Here it is best to think of examples like this as involving an agent who thinks that they ought to do this, where the demonstrative refers to the truthful speech-act, and who also thinks that they ought to do that, where the demonstrative refers to the speech-act that John wants to hear.
Here I assume the very plausible premise that—perhaps excepting for rare cases of difficult moral dilemmas—if you ought to \(\phi\), it follows that it is not the case that you ought not \(\phi\).
Setiya (2012: 120) argues against something like the Full Grounding View on the grounds that, if we are reliable in forming normative beliefs, we will implausibly converge in what we think about normative matters. I will not rely on this style of criticism, because (as Setiya is aware) the implausible convergence can be avoided by relativizing normative facts to believers (see Schafer (2014)). Since I do not wish to take a stand on whether the Constructivist’s commitments regarding relativity are plausible or not, I will leave this criticism to the side.
Schafer (2014: 90) suggests this approach.
Note that on this formulation, a normative fact N is grounded in the fact that the corresponding belief is held—this is the fact \(b_{N}\)—plus the fact that \(b_{N}\) satisfies the idealizing conditions including scrutiny. There is alternative view, which holds that the normative fact N is grounded in a counterfactual fact—the fact that if an agent were to be in a state where all of her beliefs satisfy the idealizing conditions including scrutiny, she would have the belief \(b_{N}\). This is an available view, but I will not focus on it here, since (for reasons that will become clear below) it makes the epistemological project harder for the Constructivist to satisfy, since it locates the grounding beliefs in counterfactual worlds.
Rosen (2010: 118).
counter-necessitation is more controversial than necessitation, since it embodies some substantive assumptions about how grounding relates to multiple realizability. (See Schaffer (2015) for more on this issue.) On any approach to grounding (or a cognate notion) on which a fact is grounded in all of its possible realizers, counter-necessitation will hold.
For an extended discussion, see Dunaway (2016).
Insofar as Constructivism has some revisionary consequences for first-order normative claims (see Street (2008)), it pretty much follows that realism won’t explain precisely the same modal connections.
A similar point applies to the arguments in Setiya (2012: 96), who also targets a non-standard epistemic constraint (although, unlike Street, he explicitly labels it a part of the anti-luck condition on knowledge). According to this condition, knowledge requires not only using a reliable method, but its not being an accident that the method one used was reliable. Aside from doubts about whether this is indeed a necessary condition, the condition is dialectially ineffective for anti-realists. It is much more stringent than ordinary anti-luck conditions on knowledge, since some beliefs that are true in all nearby worlds (and thereby have no bad companions) can be formed by methods that are only accidentally reliable. But this condition will not be very successful at convincing realists that their view faces epistemological difficulties. At best they will take Setiya’s discussion to show that they should use something weaker to characterize the anti-luck condition on knowledge. See Schafer (forthcoming: §3) for more on this point.
In addition some normative beliefs are subject to defeaters, even for the Constructivist: for instance when you receive misleading evidence that fish cannot experience any pain, you might thereby acquire a defeater for your belief that it is morally wrong to eat fish (since the basis for this belief has been defeated).
For more on this notion, see Dunaway and Hawthorne (2017).
This line of thought is suggested in Schafer (2014: 90), where he endorses a principle which entails that I can know that I ought to \(\phi\) whenever I know I have an idealized belief that I ought to \(\phi\). Knowing the grounds of my obligations is sufficient for knowing the normative facts about what my obligations are.
The general version of Schafer’s principle is: “The judgment/assertion that P is warranted just in case the judger/asserter is a position to know that P is true\(_{S}\) relative to his normative perspective.” (p. 90) Here ‘true\(_{S}\)’ marks the relational version of truth which Schafer employs, that holds between a proposition and an agent’s perspective. Schafer here uses the notion of ‘warrant’, since for technical reasons this general norm cannot connect relative truth with knowledge: knowledge of a proposition entails that the proposition is true simpliciter, and so a principle which claims that an agent can have knowledge of a proposition whenever that proposition is true\(_{S}\) from that agent’s perspective would make any knowable proposition true simpliciter. So Schafer’s norm in general form concerns the non-factive epistemological property of warrant instead. However in the first-personal case, this technical worry does not arise: if it is true relative to my perspective that I ought to \(\phi\), there is no barrier to my claiming that I know that I ought to \(\phi\), and hence that it is true simpliciter that I ought to \(\phi\). In what follows, I will use first-personal normative claims when discussing views similar to Schafer’s to avoid these complications.
Schafer (2014: 90).
Berker (2014: 243) points out that the Constructivist’s resources for explaining normative knowledge appear to only work when we focus on first-personal normative beliefs. (See also Chrisman (2010).) Since the belief that you ought to \(\phi\) is grounding in what you believe about \(\phi\)-ing, we can no longer be assured, merely by the facts about what grounds normative fact, that my belief that you ought to \(\phi\) is true.
One advantage to grounds transfer is that it presents a response to this objection. In principle there is no insurmountable difficulty in knowing someone else’s psychological states, though how I come to know them might be different from the route by which I come to know my own psychological states. If knowledge transfers over grounds, as grounds transfer claims, then third-personal psychological knowledge can give rise to knowledge of third-personal obligations.
Since I will end up rejecting grounds transfer, this response to Berker will not in the end be satisfactory. The Constructivist may have to concede that her epistemological project is more limited than originally promised: instead of showing that Constructivism explains how all the normative facts can be known, it is better advertised as showing how each agent can come to know the obligations that apply to her. This would still be an interesting advantage over the realist, if it could be achieved, and I will pursue the question of whether Constructivism can even achieve this more limited goal in the next section.
cf. Hawthorne (2004).
We could make the conditions more stringent by including absence of belief as sometimes entailing bad companionship. See Manley (2007). But here this will make the Constructivist’s epistemological project even harder, so I will ignore this complication.
More formally, we can suppose that in the actual world the belief \(b_{N}\) survives ideal scrutiny, and one knows that \(b_{N}\) survives ideal scrutiny. The question is whether the normative belief \(b_{N}\) is itself knowledge—this doesn’t follow immediately from the fact that one knows that \(b_{N}\) survives ideal scrutiny. If one knows that \(b_{N}\) survives ideal scrutiny, then one has no false beliefs about the subject in nearby worlds. But some of these worlds will be worlds where one has no beliefs at all about whether \(b_{N}\) survives ideal scrutiny. In some of these worlds, one will still have normative beliefs about whether N holds, and some of these beliefs will be false. So the normative belief \(b_{N}\) in the actual world has bad companions, and is not knowledge.
Schroeder (2007) makes a similar point.
Berker (2014).
Perhaps the proponent of the Partial Grounding View can argue that, while realists can avail themselves of the same line of thought if one were to know the realist’s view about what grounds normative facts, the realist’s grounding thesis will be harder or even impossible to know. This is an alternative route that is worth exploring. But it deserves emphasis that it faces significant hurdles, since the Constructivist’s grounding thesis appears quite counterintuitive with respect to ordinary moral thought, and consequently does not look like the kind of thing that will be easier to know than alternative appearance-saving proposals about the grounds of normative facts. Schafer (forthcoming: 80) discusses some of the hurdles for this line of argument.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting this alternative.
In addition, a version of Berker’s point still applies: realists can make equally good use of grounds transfer \(^{*}\). Whatever the realist holds that there are some grounds for normative facts. For exactly the same reason as before, grounds transfer \(^{*}\) will entail that agents who know these grounds, and infer normative facts from them, will have normative knowledge.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting that this point also might be raised in connection with automatically true.
Enoch (2010: §5.1) summaries this point.
See Lasonen-Aarnio (2010) for discussion of a related idea.
A Constructivist could exploit a slightly weaker condition that robust ideality, but the same point applies. Some normative beliefs that are not held in ideal conditions are still true. These are beliefs about one’s obligations that would continue to be held in the nearest world where one’s beliefs do survive ideal scrutiny. So in principle the Constructivist could hold that some non-robustly ideal normative beliefs have no bad companions, because their content is the same as the nearest normative beliefs that do survive ideal scrutiny. Call such beliefs guidedly ideal. The important feature of guidedly ideal beliefs is that while they are not held in ideal conditions in all nearby worlds, they are still true in all nearby worlds.
In principle the Constructivist could claim that, while nothing in her view explains why moral knowledge is possible for beliefs that are merely ideal, beliefs that are guidedly ideal are candidates for knowledge. (Since guided ideality is not as stringent as robust ideality, this view could perhaps be said to be more helpful to the Constructivist’s epistemological ambitions.) But again it is no surprise that it is possible that normative beliefs can be free of bad companions in special circumstances; in order for the Constructivist to tie this feature of guidedly ideal beliefs to a distinctive feature of her view, she would need to somehow show that Constructivism explains why we frequently hold guidedly ideal beliefs.
See Street (2008) for more on idealizations in Constructivism.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to an anonymous referee, as well as audiences at the University of Oxford Moral Philosophy seminar, University of Sydney, Australian National University, the St. Louis Ethics Workshop, the Higher Seminar in Theoretical Philosophy at Uppsala University, Saint Louis University, and the London Institute of Philosophy Language, Epistemology, and Metaphysics Seminar for helpful discussion of previous versions of this paper.
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Dunaway, B. Epistemological motivations for anti-realism. Philos Stud 175, 2763–2789 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0981-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0981-7