Abstract
To many, judgment has seemed a locus of cognitive agency, a kind of cognitive mental act. In one minimal sense, judgment is something one does. I consider whether judgment is more robustly agential: is it a kind of action done with an aim? The most attractive version of this sort of position takes judging that p to affirming that p with an alethic aim, an aim such as affirming truly. I argue that such views have unacceptable consequences. Acts done with aims, in general, can be based only indirectly on evidence that one would attain the aim in so acting. It follows that if alethic aims theories of judgment were correct, a judgment that p could be based only indirectly on evidence for p. This itself would be problematic. But the problems extend further. Given the connection between judgment and belief-formation, it would follow, further, that the beliefs we form through judgment could at best be only indirectly based on evidence for p. On these theories, the direct bases for a judgment that p would have to be either a belief that p or a belief that it’s likely that p. The former cannot support belief-formation and the latter supports at best epistemically inappropriate belief-formation. I conclude that there is a hard limit on how robustly agential judgment can be.
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Notes
There are weaker aim-involving conceptions of judgment, ones that back off from the robust agency associated with acts agents do with aims but which take judgment to be more robustly agential than mere doings. For instance, one approach is to think of judgment as an act that itself has a certain sort of aim, regardless of any aim on the part of the agent. The aim would be functional rather than a matter of intention, desire, or the like. Another approach relaxes the requirement that the aim directing the action be the agent’s; it allows the aim instead to be attributable to a subpersonal system or state. I am not arguing against either approach here. Both views, I think, take a clear notion—persons performing acts in pursuit of (their) aims—and gesture at extending it in two different ways. We are left with metaphors that need spelling out. Before or at least in addition to exploring such metaphors, it is worthwhile seeing whether the clearer view is defensible.
To give just one example of a proposed explanation: perhaps judgment is an act or event that “embodies its subject’s answering a question in Hieronymi’s (2008) sense.
According to Sosa (2015, p. 66), you can affirm a proposition for any number of ends, e.g., “instilling confidence, reducing dissonance, etc.” Shah and Velleman (2005, p. 504) maintain that you can affirm a proposition as part of a story you tell yourself, knowing it to be fictional, or in making an assumption you know to be false, or in making a conjecture, and so on. The exact contours of affirmation are not easy to describe, but the same is true of assertion.
This definition of alethic aims theories is narrow in certain ways. For one thing, the definition refers only to aims concerning whether questions. Surely, a theory that explains judgment in terms of aims directed on other sorts of questions should qualify as an alethic aim theory. Another limitation is in the exact content of the aim. For instance, suppose I affirm that p with the aim thereby to affirm that p if p (or iff p) but don’t care much about affirming that not-p if not-p. I am presumably not, then, affirming with the aim to affirm truly on whether p, for that aim is satisfied equally well if I affirm that not-p if not-p is the case. Inspired by William James, for instance, I might want to affirm that God exists if God exists but not care much about affirming that God doesn’t exist if God doesn’t exist. With complications, I could make adjustments to broaden my definition to capture such theories. But insofar as the problems I will present for alethic aim theories do not depend on these subtle matters, I will stick with the simpler, narrower definition.
The aptness-aim theory resembles a theory invoking knowledge: to judge that p is to affirm that p with the aim of affirming what one is positioned to know on the question of whether p.
But see note 13.
Some might prefer to say that non-evidential reasons, such as monetary rewards, can’t epistemically justify judgments. This leaves room for the possibility that they can justify judgments in some other sense. Still, it seems that even if the practical benefits of judgment are reasons to judge, they are reasons of the “wrong kind”.
For endorsements of the claim that we can come to believe through judgment, see Friedman (2019, p. 681), McHugh (2011, p. 246), Peacocke (1998, p. 88), Shah and Velleman (2005, p. 503), Toribio (2011, p. 346), to list only a few. Philosophers who agree that judgment is a way of coming to believe may still disagree about the metaphysical relationship between the judgment and the belief formed. According to Jenkins (2018, p. 13), following Ryle, when you come to believe through judgment, your judgment is token identical with your coming to believe. Given a plausible account of the relation between coming to and -ing, he concludes that at the time at which you judge (and thereby come to believe), you also believe. Others regard the relationship as causal, e.g., Cassam (2010) and Shah and Velleman (2005). See Boyle (2009) and Jenkins (2018) for critiques of the causal view. It might appear that the causal theorist must claim that when we form a belief through judgment, we form the belief based on the judgment, and thus the causal theorist must deny basis identity (insofar as judgments aren’t self-based). But I think this isn’t mandatory: they can take a judgment to cause but not serve as a basis for one’s belief-formation.
This attractive account of how evidence for p provides justification for judging that p is unavailable on the less agential views of judgment mentioned in note 2. If the alethic aim is not the person’s own aim, it is not clear how it, together with the person’s having evidence that affirming p (or generally doing A toward p), could provide the person justification to do A.
One possible exception here is the evidential aims theory of judgment, on which to judge that p is to affirm p in an am to affirm what’s evidentially supported on whether p. I consider this view in Sect. 5.
For discussion, see Comesaña and McGrath (2014).
When I discuss evidential mental states in what follows, I will sometimes omit mention of the proposition with respect to which they are evidential when the relevant proposition is clear from context.
Two clarifications here. First, there is some subtlety about exactly what your probabilistic belief is. Depending on the case, you might believe that x is very likely the F, believe that x is more likely than not to be the F, or believe only that x is more likely to be the F than the other candidates. The reader is invited to read my use of ‘likely’ loosely enough to cover all such possibilities. Second, in appealing to probabilistic beliefs, I run the danger of entering into a thicket of issues about their nature. When one has such a belief, should this be understood as believing a proposition about some sort of probability, e.g., epistemic probability? Or should it instead be understood as a matter of having a graded state of confidence, a “credence” in the proposition that x is the F? I cannot completely sidestep this debate. I will assume that when you believe that it’s likely that p you do have the appropriate state of confidence. I leave open whether the belief that it’s likely that p is a state of confidence or is instead a belief in a proposition which grounds such a state of confidence. Part of my thinking here is that, although believing that p is a further “plunge” on the question whether p beyond believing it’s likely that p, the latter is itself some sort of plunge, and we should understand this plunge to involve confidence. If believing something likely had no implications for confidence concerning it, there are reasons to worry whether could play its role in rationalizing action.
I should address a terminological issue at this point. Is p evidence for p? Is likely p evidence for p? If so, then what I’m calling target beliefs could also count as evidential mental states. Rather than dipping into this debate, I stipulate that ‘evidential mental states’ is to apply to mere evidential mental states, and so to exclude target beliefs. My focus is on ordinary garden-variety evidence, not fringe cases involving the very proposition itself or a probabilistic qualification of it. The motivational profile of judgment needs no revision in light of this clarification of my usage.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for this objection and the next one.
There are states one can be in with or for aims: one can live in a McMansion with an aim to impress one’s friends.
Given that the aim is to affirm the truth on whether p, the corresponding target beliefs, to be precise, would be the belief that p is the truth on whether p and that p is likely the truth on whether p. These are trivially equivalent to beliefs that p and that likely p, and so I take the latter to count as target beliefs. No such trivial equivalence exists when the relevant aim is aptness.
Thanks to Andrew Chignell for raising this question.
If we make full use of the unrestricted indirectness thesis, the consequence would be even more astounding: whenever a belief is formed through judgment based on any evidential mental state it is also target-based. For, we do sometimes form beliefs through judgment solely based on nondoxastic evidential mental states—perceptual experiences, intuitions, episodic memories—and not based on any beliefs at all and so not based on any target beliefs. It is debatable just where doxastic bases give out, but it is plausible that they do give out at some point, at which point the relevant “basic beliefs” have nondoxastic bases. At the very least, it would be surprising, and not in a desirable way, if our theory of judgment required us to deny this.
Suppose I judge that the Yankees will lose the game based on my belief that they are behind by 10 runs in the 8th inning. And suppose I believe the latter based on a belief that ESPN reports it. Suppose I form the belief that Yankees will lose through my judgment. Could it be that I’m forming this belief directly based on a belief that ESPN reported that the Yankees are 10 runs behind in the 8th and only indirectly on the basis of a belief that they are 10 runs behind in the 8th inning? Could the structure for the basing of my judgment fail to match that of my belief in this way? This seems absurd.
The evidential aims theory has similar implausible consequences. On this view, in forming a belief that p through judgment based on evidence for p, one’s belief would have to be based on a belief to the effect that p is what’s evidentially supported on whether p.
Silins (2012, p. 308) argues that judgment plays a key role as a guide to belief, insofar as judging that p can give one immediate justification to believe that one believes that p. For a similar view, see Peacocke (1999). I do not deny that judgment plays such an epistemic role. I am claiming only that when we are inquiring, the primary reason we care about judgment is not its power to justify second-order beliefs about our beliefs but its being a way we can arrive at justified and knowledgeable first-order beliefs.
My conclusion contrasts with those of Sosa (2015) who views judgments as acts with intentions (66) and claims that when a judgment is apt, the judgment “is an intentional action of affirming aptly” (166).
See Koziolek (2020) for an account along these lines, Koziolek’s account is knowledge first: it understands judgment as in the first instance the acquisition of knowledge.
If one wanted to allow for the possibility of judgment without either belief or knowledge (and so without the acquiring or retaining belief or knowledge), one might entertain the view that judgment is an act of the sort that normally constitutes the acquisition or retention of belief or knowledge.
I dedicate this paper to Ernest Sosa. I am grateful to two referees for Synthese for valuable comments. For illuminating discussion of the ideas of the paper, I thank Andrew Chignell, Jeremy Fantl, Nicholas Koziolek, Chris Willard-Kyle, Dave Liebesman, Ernest Sosa, and the participants of the Spring 2021 Rutgers graduate epistemology seminar I co-taught with Sosa.
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McGrath, M. A limitation on agency in judgment. Synthese 200, 88 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03616-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03616-y