Abstract
The uniqueness thesis states that for any body of evidence and any proposition, there is at most one rational doxastic attitude that an epistemic agent can take toward that proposition. Permissivism is the denial of uniqueness. Perhaps the most popular form of permissivism is what I call the Epistemic Standard View (ESV), since it relies on the concept of epistemic standards. Roughly speaking, epistemic standards encode particular ways of responding to any possible body of evidence. Since different epistemic standards may rationalize different doxastic states on the same body of evidence, this view gives us a form of permissivism if different agents can have different epistemic standards. Defenders of the ESV, however, have not paid sufficient attention to what it means to have a particular epistemic standard. I argue that any theory of epistemic standard possession must satisfy two criteria to adequately address the broader needs of the ESV. The first criterion is the normative criterion: a theory of standard-possession should explain why agents are rationally required to form beliefs in accordance with their own (rational) epistemic standard, rather than any other (rational) standard. The second criterion is the applicability criterion: a theory of standard-possession should rule that agents have the epistemic standards we intuitively think they have. I then argue that no extant theories of standard-possession can satisfy both these criteria. I conclude by diagnosing why these criteria are so hard to jointly satisfy. Defenders of the ESV are thus left with a serious obstacle to forming a complete and plausible version of their view.
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Notes
Paradigmatic examples of the ESV in general include (Schoenfield 2013) and (Titelbaum and Kopec ms). More specific versions include certain interpretations of Subjective Bayesianism and the view attributed to William James in Kelly (2013). As we will see later, many permissive writers employ aspects of the ESV when trying to elucidate or defend particular features of permissivism.
As an illustration of how widespread this motivation is, this particular quote from Rosen is cited by Ballantyne and Coffman (2011), Schoenfield (2013), and Podgorski (2016). Other writers who have discussed this motivation (without the Rosen quote) include Brueckner and Bundy (2012) and (Kelly 2013). In addition, (Elga ms) uses the idea of epistemic standards to explain a similar phenomenon, although the paper itself is not about permissivism.
Note that the question of whether rational disagreements exist is different from the question of epistemic peer disagreement. The latter concerns whether an agent should change her belief in any way when she encounters someone with whom she disagrees. It is possible that permissivism is true even though one ought to conciliate in cases of encountered disagreement. Some writers, such as Feldman (2007) tie the two issues closely together. On the other hand, Christensen (2016) has argued that there are reasons to think conciliationism is true which have no connection to whether permissivism is true.
I am assuming that such a belief is a plausible example of a permissive situation (if there are any). This is also the example used by Schoenfield (2013). If the reader disagrees, she is encouraged to substitute her favorite example. Other plausible alternatives include disagreements about controversial subjects in philosophy or science (such as Rosen’s example of paleontology).
In thinking of epistemic standards as functions, I am mainly following Schoenfield (2013, p. 7). This is just for ease of exposition, as nothing in this paper will crucially depend on the metaphysics of epistemic standards.
A possible exception is the theory presented in Foley (1987).
It is an open question what agents with irrational epistemic standards should do. One possibility is that these agents are constantly in epistemic dilemmas, with nothing they do being epistemically rational. Another possibility is that these agents are required to somehow change their epistemic standard to a rational one. This response seems to run into problems with the arbitrariness objection, described below. In any case, this difficult question is irrelevant for our purposes.
See Schoenfield (2013, pp. 8–9) for an in-depth presentation of this general picture.
One might think that having different backgrounds is incompatible with having the same evidence. Generally, defenders of the ESV do not think that the sort of subtle effects that past experiences have on our belief-forming behavior constitute evidence. All sorts of things affect the way actual humans form beliefs. If all of these count as evidence, then two agents never have the same evidence in real life cases. This seems intuitively unacceptable. For a more detailed discussion of this point, see Schoenfield (2013, pp. 4–5).
More precisely, an agent’s epistemic standard is immodest just in case it outputs beliefs that maximize expected accuracy from the agent’s own point of view, compared to the beliefs outputted by any rival standard that the agent can adopt. Expected accuracy is a measure of how close an agent can expect some set of beliefs to be to the truth. Though this notion is usually defined in terms of credences, it is natural enough to discuss an analogous notion for all-or-nothing beliefs. See Lewis (1971) and Moss (2011) for examples of how to understand immodesty in terms of credences and the notion of expected accuracy.
See Horowitz (2014) for a further discussion on immodesty as it relates to epistemic standards.
See Schoenfield (2013, pp. 8–9) for a paradigmatic version of this type of reply. This way of answering the arbitrariness objection is extremely popular in the literature on permissivism. Other examples include Douven (2009), Weintraub (2013), Meacham (2013), Kelly (2013), and Podgorski (2016). The ESV is also mentioned by Ballantyne and Coffman as a plausible form of permissivism in their (2011) paper on the arbitrariness objection, although the view is never directly applied to the problem.
It is worth noting that the arbitrariness problem only applies in cases of known permissivism. Thus, another way to solve the problem is to deny that there can be any such cases. Most defenders of the ESV would not find this palatable, however, as they believe actual examples of rational disagreement (such as those in the Rosen quote) are cases of known permissivism.
In addition, it is worth noting that this criterion is distinct from the question of why an agent cannot rationally change her standard. Even if agents can change their standards, one might still contend that an agent who has some standard S while forming beliefs which are not in accordance with S is making a rational mistake. This latter claim is what is currently at issue.
In Sect. 7 I will consider a skeptical response to the normative criterion.
Schoenfield (2013) and (Elga ms) express versions of this theory. A related theory is a version of subjective Bayesianism where epistemic standards are just an agent’s initial priors, understood as actual (psychologically real) credences toward every sentence in the language.
In fact, it may even be impossible. This may be a further weakness of the belief-theory: it satisfies the normative criterion by making this seemingly possible belief impossible.
Note that if some dispositional theory of beliefs is correct, then the belief theory of standard-possession is a version of the dispositional theory of standard-possession.
Kripke (1982, pp. 28–30) identifies similar problems with dispositional theories of rule-following.
For a classic presentation of this type of view, see Ramsey (2010).
See Lewis (1983, pp. 365–368) for a presentation of the Humean theory. This is, of course, not the only way to idealize belief-forming dispositions. Notably, in the same paper (pp. 375–376) Lewis presents a theory of rule-following that can be adapted for this purpose. This method faces the same problems as the Humean method, so looking at the failures of the Humean method will be enough for the purposes of this paper.
This is important because of Kripke’s famous complaint that an agent’s dispositions at most tells us what she will do, not what she should do (Kripke 1982). Thus, if we had to say that an agent’s standards are just her dispositions, we would be unable to answer even the most general normative question, viz. why should an agent believe in accordance with any epistemic standard at all? However, even if we can answer Kripke’s challenge for epistemic standards, and we understand why we should follow rational standards (rather than irrational ones), there is still another explanatory challenge: why should we follow our epistemic standard rather than any other rational standard? That is, the normative criterion is still not necessarily satisfied.
If we wanted to continue to follow Lewis, for example, we might make a distinction between “natural” and “unnatural” predicates, and then claim that simpler patterns are more natural, and therefore, epistemically better. Even if this can be made to work, it may require metaphysical or epistemic baggage that will ultimately prove too burdensome.
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Acknowledgements
This paper has benefited tremendously from discussions and comments from many people, including an anonymous reviewer at Philosophical Studies, Christopher Meacham, Adam Pautz, Bradford Saad, Joshua Schechter, and participants of the 2016 Dissertation Workshop at Brown University. More specifically, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for pushing me to strenghen my arguments about idealized disposotions in the beginning of Sect. 6.2, and Christopher Meacham for a discussion that resulted in Sect. 7 (and the analogy to decision theory in particular). Finally, I would like to give a Special thanks to David Christensen.
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Li, H. The trouble with having standards. Philos Stud 176, 1225–1245 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1055-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1055-1