Abstract
Epistemology needs to account for the success of science. In True Enough (2017), Catherine Elgin argues that a veritist epistemology is inadequate to this task. She advocates shifting epistemology’s focus away from true belief and toward understanding, and further, jettisoning truth from its privileged place in epistemological theorizing. Pace Elgin, I argue that epistemology’s accommodation of science does not require rejecting truth as the central epistemic value. Instead, it requires understanding veritism in an ecumenical way that acknowledges a rich array of truth-oriented values. In place of veritism, Elgin offers a holistic epistemology that takes epistemic norms to have their genesis in our collective practice of deliberation. The acceptability of epistemic norms turns on epistemic responsibility, as opposed to reliability, and truth-conduciveness is rejected as the standard of evaluation for arguments and methods of inquiry. I argue, by way of an extended discussion of a high-profile and controversial criminal case, that this leaves epistemic practices and their products inadequately grounded. I offer an alternative, veritistic account of epistemic norms that retains a modified version of truth-conduciveness as a standard of evaluation. However, my alternative account of epistemic norms is congenial to Elgin’s holistic epistemology, and, I suggest, could be incorporated within it.
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Notes
Strevens (2012) offers an account that takes a ceteris paribus claim to be correct when its divergences from truth are not difference makers. Elgin finds this analysis plausible but uncongenial to veritism, presumably because what counts as a difference maker will reflect our judgments concerning the relevance and importance of the circumstances in which a law-like claim fails to hold.
Alston 2005, p. 33. Thus understood, a commitment to there being cognitive goals does not lend direct support to an instrumentalist characterization of epistemic rationality. On an instrumentalist conception of rationality, we would expect that what a person has reason to believe will depend on the content of his or her goals. A standard objection to epistemic instrumental rationality is that epistemic reasons typically hold categorically and independently of individual goals (Kelly 2003, Sect. 3). Alston’s understanding of the aim of cognition is compatible with the categorical character of epistemic reasons because it describes the function of a human capacity as opposed to the nature of human goals or evaluations.
I do not mean here to imply that the utility of all laws with ceteris paribus clauses can be explained by our pragmatic concerns. A meandering river will produce an oxbow lake only ceteris paribus, but it is not plausible that this law is strictly true of all the meandering rivers that we are interested in. (Thanks to an anonymous referee for this example.) A veritist might handle this kind of case by adopting Streven’s (2012) suggestion to understand ceteris paribus clauses as restricting the scope of a hypothesis to the circumstances in which the relevant causal mechanisms would hold. The truth conditions for the hypothesis would then be relativized to the restricting circumstances.
Whether understanding, if entirely factive, should be taken to be a species of knowledge will depend inter alia on one’s account of knowledge. If knowledge is understood as (de-Gettiered) justified true belief, and understanding is a species of knowledge, then understanding will require both belief and satisfaction of the J-condition. But it has been argued that justification, and even belief, may not be required for understanding (see Wilkenfeld 2016; Dellsén 2017).
Elgin explicitly contrasts her epistemic holism with externalist epistemologies that adopt a “God’s eye” point of view (pp. 67, 80 and 93).
Ryan (2002, pp. 1–2). Four of the boys were also convicted of robbery of one of the male joggers, and a fifth was convicted on riot charges in connection with a series of events that encompassed these criminal incidents. All of the boys were initially convicted of assault and riot charges, but these charges were set aside for the four boys who were under the age of sixteen (Ryan, pp. 10–11).
“‘Smart, Driven’ Woman Overcomes Reluctance.” M.A. Farber. New York Times. July 17, 1990.
New York Times. May 29, 1989. Later cited in “Central Park Revisited” by Chris Smith, New York Magazine. October 21, 2002, p. 2.
“Wolf Pack’s Prey.” Front page headline, New York Daily News. April 21, 1989.
Snyder (2015, Ch. 5). “The citywide murder rate of 7.6 per 100,000 people in the early 1960 s topped anything seen before (even during Prohibition, with a rate of 7.4), but it was just a prelude to much higher rates: 24.9 per 100,000 from 1981 to 1985 and then 25.4 per 100,000 from 1986 to 1990” (p. 182).
“Central Park Revisited” by Chris Smith, New York Magazine. October 21, 2002, pp. 1–2.
In “Racial Injustice, Social-Process Reliabilism and News-Based Inference,” Eric Bayruns-Garcia argues that racial prejudices sometimes lead otherwise reliable news sources to report unreliably on race-related topics, with the result that their audiences may form doxastically justified but false (or inaccurate) beliefs (Bayruns-Garcia ms).
Glaberson, W. “In Jogger Case, Once Viewed Starkly, Some Skeptics Side with Defendants” New York Times. Aug 8, 1990.
In 2002, the NYC Police Commissioner asked a team of three lawyers to review the case to see if the conviction reversals warranted a change in police policies or procedures. The reviewers concluded that the defendants most likely assaulted the jogger but that Reyes was also a participant in the assault (Armstrong et al. 2003). However, in her affirmation in response to the motion to vacate judgment of conviction, Assistant District Attorney Nancy E. Ryan notes that, given the timing of the attacks, it is hard to construct a scenario in which the defendants could have carried out both the attack on the female jogger and the other crimes of which they were accused (Ryan 2002, p. 49).
Sullivan, Ronald. “Jogger Trial Jury Relied on Physical Evidence, Not Tapes.” New York Times, December 13, 1990.
For example, her characterization, to a first approximation, of understanding is that of “an epistemic commitment to a comprehensive, systematically linked body of information that is grounded in fact, is duly responsive to reasons or evidence, and enables nontrivial inference, argument, and perhaps action regarding the topic the information pertains to” (2017, p. 44).
I present this account of epistemic norms in Warenski ms.
See Sylvan 2017 for discussion of derivative epistemic values as manifestations of ways of valuing truth. Sylvan’s model is inspired by that of Thomas Hurka’s (Hurka 2001). The conception of value as a creation from our attitudes of valuing has been located by some in the work of Nietzsche (e.g. 1878, Part I, 92, 1882/1887 301; 1886 203, 211, 260, 261, and 265). Because there are different ways of valuing truth, our attitudes generate additional truth-oriented values. I do not here take a position on whether fundamental values are constructions of valuing.
The veritist will want to give a veritistic account of the values of theory choice insofar as these values may be properly understood as epistemic. Although we may fall short of attaining truth in scientific inquiry, and so settle for empirical adequacy, this does not mean that truth cannot be understood as the central aim of inquiry (For discussion, see Hookway 2007.).
Elgin discusses the role of coarse-grained norms on p. 112.
Additional information about what transpired during the attack and its aftermath, including and especially the stories of the convicted men, is presented in The Central Park Five, a documentary film produced and directed by Burns (2012).
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Acknowledgements
I thank two anonymous referees from this journal for their insightful commentaries on an earlier draft of the paper. Thanks also to Hartry Field, Russell Miller and Nick Pappas for helpful conversation. I am grateful to Jessica Watson-Crosby for helpful conversations about the case of the Central Park Five.
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Warenski, L. Epistemic norms: truth conducive enough. Synthese 198, 2721–2741 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02242-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02242-5