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Evidentially embedded epistemic entitlement

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Abstract

Some hold that beliefs arising out of certain sources such as perceptual experience (or testimony, or memory) enjoy a kind of entitlement—as one is entitled to believe what is thereby presented as true, at least unless further evidence undermines that entitlement. This is commonly understood to require that default epistemic entitlement is a non-evidential kind of epistemic warrant. Our project here is to challenge this common, non-evidential, conception of epistemic entitlement. We will argue that although there are indeed basic beliefs with default entitlement status, typically the kind of default entitlement they possess is primarily a matter of the evidential support that accrues to them, both synchronically and diachronically, from wider mental states beyond the specific sensory-perceptual experiences (or memory experiences, or testimonial experiences, etc.) that spawn them. We will call this status evidentially embedded epistemic entitlement—as distinct from entitlement as commonly understood in the literature, which we will call evidentially insular. Epistemic entitlement normally is characterized in the manner set forth in the first paragraph above, viz., as a form of default epistemic warrant that a given belief possesses independently of any other beliefs. We suggest that not all evidential support is managed at the level of belief. Thus, leaves room for the possibility of an epistemically embedded kind of entitlement. Here we develop the needed conception of entitlement drawing on Henderson and Horgan’s ideas of a kind of “iceberg epistemology.”

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Notes

  1. There are actually two parallel literatures in which one finds talk of “epistemic entitlement.” One arises from work such as Burge’s and Pryor’s—and this is our focus here. A second, worthwhile, literature is associated with work by a number of philosophers that has significant roots in the writings of the later Wittgenstein, where one finds talk of “hinge propositions” on which inquiry depends (Wittgenstein et al. 1969). We briefly address this second literature in the “Appendix”.

  2. As Douven and Kelp (2013) note, the general idea of proper bootstrapping that Glymour develops can be reconstructed within alternative accounts of confirmation, such as probabilistic confirmation. See Douven and Meijs (2006).

  3. It is unlikely that the cognitive system explicitly represents—either consciously or unconsciously—the epistemic-normative standards relative to which all this holistic evidential cross-corroboration obtains. Likewise, it is unlikely that the cognitive system explicitly represents those evidential cross-corroboration facts themselves. Much more likely, we maintain, is that the pertinent standards are internalized in the standing structure of the cognitive system, in such a way that they get implemented automatically. We return to this point in Sect. 8 below.

  4. One could embrace this view while also acknowledging that normally the overall intentional content of perceptual experience is so rich that it outstrips the possibility of full articulation. Insofar as certain specific aspects of this overall intentional content figure belief-wise within the cognitive system, the suggestion goes, these tokened experiential aspects are also token beliefs.

  5. In Henderson (2008) one finds some parallel points about iceberg epistemology and entitlement, developed in connection with another common source of beliefs commonly thought to give rise to entitled beliefs: testimony.

  6. Stewart Cohen now maintains that one has a priori warrant for defeasible perceptual inference-rules that link appearance to reality. He writes, “Of course we can ask what makes possible basic perceptual inference rules. And here I think the only answer we can give is that the correctness of an inference rule is a necessary truth about rationality” (Cohen 2010, p. 156). We ourselves consider Cohen’s contention very implausible. Janvid (2009) poses the question of what epistemic value is possessed by epistemic entitlement as standardly understood (i.e., evidentially insular epistemic entitlement), and argues that “the epistemic value of entitlement is either granted at the expense of the epistemic value of justification or the value ends up below the level at which the epistemologists employing the concept of entitlement are aiming” (Janvid 2009, p. 263). In our view, Janvid’s second disjunct obrtains: insular “entitlement” is not valuable enough to qualify as a form of epistemic warrant; i.e., it is not genuine epistemic entitlement at all.

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Correspondence to David Henderson.

Appendix: Entitlement in the neo-Wittgensteinian tradition

Appendix: Entitlement in the neo-Wittgensteinian tradition

This paper is situated within the tradition of philosophical treatments of entitlement like those of Burge and Prior. Here we will briefly consider some potential connections between the position we have defended here and a different recent philosophical literature—viz., entitlement views as propounded, for instance, by McGinn (1989), Williams (2004a, b, 2007), Wright (2004a, b), Moyal-Sharrock (2005), Pritchard (2007), Coliva (2010), and Kusch (2016). This latter tradition has significant roots in the writings of the later Wittgenstein, where one finds talk of “hinge” propositions upon which inquiry purportedly depends and which purportedly have the status of certainty (Wittgenstein et al. 1969). On one construal, defended for instance by McGinn and Moyal-Sharrock, hinge propositions have certainty that, in our terminology, is evidentially insular: it is not a matter of evidence. But on another construal, versions of which are defended by Williams, Wright, Pritchard, Coliva, and Kusch, at least some hinge propositions have certainty that, in our terminology, is evidentially embedded.

Our discussion in the present paper might potentially reinforce this second approach within the neo-Wittgensteinian tradition, especially versions of the approach that treat the category of evidentially embedded hinge propositions as including, inter alia, perception-based propositions about close medium-sized objects, memory-based propositions about salient features of one’s autobiography, and certain kinds of testimony-based propositions. Kusch in particular treats such cases as evidentially embedded. He writes:

[I]t cannot be emphasized enough, precisely because, in these cases, our evidence is so wide, so deep, so multifarious, and so temporally extended, that most if it lies beyond our present point of view. This is why we cannot easily disclose this evidence to others. In other words, the relevant evidence is both overwhelming and yet, in a way, inaccessible. Nevertheless, our confidence in these beliefs is such that no ordinary evidence can generally either undermine or confirm them. It is these features that for Wittgenstein usually make it odd to self-ascribe these beliefs as ‘knowledge’. (Kusch 2016, p. 134)

The account we have advanced here seeks to provide a deeper understanding of the form of evidentially embedded entitlement suggested by Kusch.

Other versions of the second approach to hinge propositions, despite treating some of them as evidentially embedded, nonetheless still posit evidentially insular ones even pertaining to matters like perceptual belief. Our discussion in the present paper might motivate some alteration of these versions—toward expanding the category of evidentially embedded hinge-propositions and contracting the category of evidentially insulated ones.

Crispin Wright, for instance, distinguishes various kinds of hinge propositions. He proceeds from an initial typology discerned from Wittgenstein’s later writings. First, some propositions, such as simple mathematical equalities, are said to be normally insulated from disconfirming evidence (Wright 2004b, p. 42). Second are propositions like the proposition self-ascribing one’s own name; such propositions he regards as evidentially embedded, being “supported by—in normal cases—an overwhelming body of evidence whose significance would have to be overridden if they were doubted” (Wright 2004b, p. 42). Third are certain evidentially insulated “presumptions” that brush aside certain sweeping skeptical worries—e.g., the presumption that one has hands and is not a disembodied brain in a vat (Wright 2004b, p. 42). Fourth are evidentially insulated propositions that he describes and motivates as follows:

[W]henever a cognitive achievement takes place, it does so in a context of specific presuppositions which are not themselves an expression of any achievement to date.

These propositions are not just one more kind of “hinge” as we have understood that term. Hinges, so far, are standing certainties, exportable from context to context (subject perhaps to certain restrictions on the receiving context). Whereas, the present range of cases are particular to the investigative occasion: they are propositions such as that my eyes are functioning properly now, that the things I am currently perceiving have not been extensively disguised so as to conceal their true nature, etc. My confidence in the things which I take myself to have verified in a particular context can rationally be no stronger than my confidence in these context-specific claims.

…. Presumptions of each kind [the third and fourth kinds] will unavoidably lack earned warrant at the point at which they need to be made. (Wright 2004b, p. 49)

Wright’s contention that evidentially unwarranted propositions are presupposed even in cognitive processes like perception-based belief formation rests largely on the putatively objectionable circularity of any attempt to appeal to evidence for them. He writes:

Since there is no such thing as a process of warrant acquisition for each of whose specific presuppositions warrant has already been earned, it should not be reckoned to be part of the ordinary concept of an acquired warrant that it somehow aspire to this—incoherent—ideal. Rather, we should view each and every cognitive project as irreducibly involving elements of adventure—I take a risk on the reliability of my senses. (Wright 2004b, p. 50)

We agree with Wright that belief formation based on sensory experience inevitably involves epistemic risk; there is always a logical possibility that the pertinent sensory experience is radically non-veridical (see Henderson and Horgan 2001, 2011 chapters 3–5). However, our discussion in this paper provides three reasons to think that his picture of context-specific entitlements places too little weight on matters of evidence, and too much weight on putative, supposedly evidentially untethered, presuppositions.

First Reflect, for instance, on the perceptual verdicts that we suggested arise in the search for dry firewood in a dense forest. One is responding to a good deal of background information acquired from innumerable perceptual cases involving successful and unsuccessful attempts to orient oneself in a diversity of environments. As we argued, one’s perceptual processes more or less automatically accommodate such information, much of it possessed in the form of morphological content. Becoming such a trained-up, competent, cognitive agent is a very real accomplishment—something earned. The information now possessed is not some mere presupposition that one spots oneself in order to proceed; rather, it is acquired.

Second As we also argued, one’s individual perceptual judgments virtually always take place within a space of wider perceptual experiences, alongside numerous further perceptual judgments and numerous associated expectations about how one’s perceptual experience will unfold in the short-term future. Collectively, the individual experiences within this wider perceptual-experience space confer enormous amounts of good-bootstrapping, cross-corroborational, evidential support not only upon one’s individual perceptual judgments and one’s perceptual expectations, but also upon the higher-order propositions that Wright claims are evidentially untethered presuppositions (e.g., the proposition that my eyes are functioning properly now).

Third A claim central to discussions of entitlement in the tradition of Burge and Pryor, our own discussion included, is that the entitlement-status of ordinary perceptual beliefs does not depend anyway upon doxastic attitudes one might possess about such matters as the current reliability of one’s senses—i.e., does not actually presuppose such doxastic attitudes or their contents.

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Henderson, D., Horgan, T. Evidentially embedded epistemic entitlement. Synthese 197, 4907–4926 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-01952-6

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