Abstract
I argue that we can achieve certainty about some empirical propositions. When someone is having a migraine and attending to it, she can be certain that she is in pain. I show that examples intended to undermine claims of certainty or to raise doubts about the reliability of introspection do not touch such cases. Traditional foundationalists have held that epistemically certain beliefs can serve as the basis for all one’s other justified beliefs. This is not so, because those beliefs that are certain are spread too thinly to serve as broad justificatory foundations. Certainty has a different role. The best explanation for the existence of epistemically certain empirical beliefs is experientialism, the view that nondoxastic sensory experiences can justify beliefs. Experientialism then offers a framework for showing how the stream of sensory experiences can provide an adequate basis for the justification of our ordinary beliefs about the external world.
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Notes
On the cognitive component of emotions, see Nussbaum (2001).
Mills (2002, 385). See also Horgan and Kriegel (2007). The latter paper is similar to one section of the present paper in offering responses to claimed counterexamples to certainty or infallibility. Horgan and Kriegel’s account of a “bracketing mode of presentation of phenomenal character” (Ibid., 128), used in their defense of a restricted infallibility thesis, seems problematic. It relies on the idea of a mode of presentation in which the truth or falsity of a subject’s background presuppositions does not affect the phenomenal content of the belief relating to that mode of presentation. But when presuppositions do affect phenomenal content, it would seem that Horgan and Kriegel’s analysis could not be applied. And there may be many such cases—cognitive penetration regarding color perception, psychological attitudes toward memories of past pain experiences, and so on. The present paper discusses a wider range of counterexamples and addresses cases such as cognitive penetration where background beliefs do affect phenomenal content.
“As to the fact that there can be nothing in the mind, in so far as it is a thinking thing, of which it is not aware, this seems to me to be self-evident” (Descartes 1988, 130). Such passages have suggested that early modern philosophers are committed to the idea that a subject has introspective certainty regarding all his mental states. But, at least in Descartes’s case, this cannot be squared with his claim that some mental states, including but not limited to emotions, are confused: “The passions are to be numbered among the perceptions which the close alliance between the soul and the body renders confused and obscure” (Ibid., 229). Passions are kinds of “thoughts” (Descartes’s broad term for mental states), but they lack clarity and distinctness in at least some of their aspects. Thus, Descartes, at least, could not have held the view that every mental state or subjective experience is certain in every respect, in spite of some ambiguous language that perhaps led to the doctrine being attributed to him.
Some defenders of certainty (for example, Klein 1981) argue that ordinary propositions about the external world can be certain. But most philosophers sympathetic to empirical certainty think that such propositions are vulnerable to skeptical evil demon scenarios. Schwarz posits absolute certainty for a special class of “imaginary” propositions (analogous to imaginary numbers in mathematics), which do not represent cognitively transparent features of occurrent sensory experiences, but which can influence an agent’s subjective probability function with respect to the status of ordinary external-world propositions (2018, 775, 779–80). Schwarz’s account is necessitated by his assumption that beliefs that do transparently represent sensory experiences cannot be certain. My argument that we can have such certainty makes it unnecessary to introduce this additional machinery.
See Section 4 below for a discussion of differing foundationalist approaches to the question whether the relevant sorts of sensory experience are conceptual or nonconceptual in content.
These principles are to be understood as needing only to be true of S, not applied by S to her occurrent experience. See Van Cleve (1979) and further discussion in the text below for details.
See Gertler (2001), Chalmers (2003), Hellie (2004), Stoljar (2016). Many expressions of demonstrative beliefs, following Nagel (1974), are in terms of what the experience is like. Following Gertler (2001, 320-21), I dispense with the term “like” in my characterization, to avoid any suggestion that a comparative judgment is being discussed.
My use of the phrase “demonstrative experiential belief” corresponds to what Chalmers calls a “direct phenomenal belief” (2003, 236). Chalmers holds that a direct phenomenal concept (identified at this stage of his argument as the concept R) “is not a demonstrative concept in the usual sense” (Ibid., 229). So he would not want to call a belief incorporating that concept a demonstrative belief. Chalmers’s reasons for wanting to avoid such terminology concern ontological matters that are not at issue here.
Following Chalmers, my treatment of rigid designators is to be understood as picking out the same object in all epistemically possible worlds, not all logically or metaphysically possible worlds. See Chalmers (2003, 228, 268–71), for details on how he would analyze the intensionality of a belief containing a direct phenomenal concept.
Reported in Hardin (1988, 39).
This is a more qualified articulation of a point made by Pappas (1975). Bailey (1979) rightly notes that Pappas’s argument in support of the incorrigibility of subjective reports of sensations makes the overly general claim that in order for a future scientific theory to count as confirmed or well-established, conflicts between observations and theory will not in fact arise. Pappas’s response to Bailey (1980) does not appear to me to engage with Bailey’s criticism. Pappas ought to have narrowed the scope of his claim so that it referred only to the sort of hypothetical (and unlikely) theoretical development I note in the text.
For a detailed description of experiments suggesting cognitive penetration, see Macpherson (2012). For general discussions see Ibid., Siegel (2012), Silins (2016), and Wu (2017). These discussions focus on the problem cognitive penetration presents for the justification of beliefs about the external world or scientific hypotheses. My concern by contrast is with the influence of cognitive penetration on the justification of experiential beliefs.
See Sosa (2005) for a defense of the imagination model of dreaming, according to which genuine beliefs are not formed in dreams.
See Section 3.6 for further discussion.
Similar considerations apply to putatively expert testimony that the subject has forgotten what “pain” means, or is applying the concept to the wrong sort of thing, and thus that what the subject is experiencing is not actually pain. And of course, in the case of demonstrative experiential beliefs, the concept pain is not used and questions of misapplication cannot arise.
See Van Cleve (1979) for the classic articulation of this distinction.
Speaking of the related concept of incorrigibility, Chalmers (2003, 245) argues that “intermediate accessibility requirements” may be required for incorrigible belief. The attentiveness conditions of CC and DC are intended to meet such requirements.
A matter of some debate among foundationalism-friendly epistemologists is whether sensory experiences must have conceptual content if they are to have justificational force. All foundationalists agree that these sensory justifiers are not beliefs, for if they were, regress would threaten. Foundationalists in the tradition of Price have held that sensations without conceptual content can justify (Price 1964; Moser 1989; BonJour 1999). Several contemporary foundationalists, reacting to criticisms from philosophers such as Sellars (1963), Rorty (1979), and Davidson (2006), have agreed with them that the purely nonconceptual cannot have justificational power. But they disagree with, for example, Davidson’s claim (2006, 228) that only a belief can justify another belief. Rather, the justifying sensory experiences are not beliefs but do have conceptual content. They are, for example, “the sort of experience in which it appears to one that there is an object a that is F” (Steup 2000, 79; compare Pryor 2000, 519; Huemer 2007, 30). Both the nonconceptualist and conceptualist views agree on the essential claim that sensory experiences can justify without themselves requiring justification. I believe that the nonconceptualist can adequately respond to the natural question how something nonconceptual could justify anything conceptual. But that is a topic for another occasion. In what follows, I will speak of sensory experiences as putative nonconceptual justifiers. Appropriate changes can be made in the analysis if the conceptualist alternative is required.
Huemer considers that some qualitative mental states like being in pain might be token identical to states of seeming to be in pain (2007, 46). If so, then in such cases the conceptualist and nonconceptualist approaches discussed in the previous footnote would come to the same thing.
What then counts as basic within this picture of justification? Some recent foundationalists think of external-world beliefs as basic. If such beliefs are justified by nondoxastic sensory experiences, then they can be basic provided they are justified only by sensory experiences and not by any independent beliefs. More traditional foundationalists have resisted the idea that external-world propositions can be basic items of justification because they are defeasible and are, after all, justified by something arguably more basic—the sensory experiences themselves. One might think this a terminological matter only, but there is a deeper question here connected both with the dispute about conceptualist vs. nonconceptualist accounts of sensory justifiers discussed in note 18 and with what the best developed accounts of the justification of ordinary empirical beliefs will look like. Resolution of this question thus awaits further developments.
Both the conceptualist and nonconceptualist accounts of sensory experiences can address the so-called Sellarsian dilemma, which can be represented as the problem that (1) if sensory experiences are nonconceptual, they do not need justification but are not capable of justifying, but (2) if they are conceptual they may be capable of justifying but need justification themselves (compare Sellars 1963, 132). The nonconceptualist account denies the first horn of this dilemma; the conceptualist account the second. For details on how sensory experiences understood as having conceptual content can justify without themselves requiring justification, see, for example, Steup (2000). For a detailed nonconceptualist alternative see, for example, Moser (1989, especially 97–117).
In addition to the works cited in notes for Section 4, see Chalmers (2003), Chisholm (1989), Fales (1996), Fumerton (1985), Goldman (2004), Hobson (2008), Markie (2006), McGrew (1995), and Schwarz (2018). (Since Gettier, these projects have focused on foundations for justified beliefs rather than for knowledge, given the complexities of the relation between justification and knowledge.) Siegel and Silins (2015) is a useful survey.
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Acknowledgements
For useful comments on earlier versions of this paper, my thanks are due to Paul McNamara, Jack Lyons, David Chalmers, Jennifer Lackey, Bill deVries, Ralph Kennedy, and Bob Scharff. For detailed comments on the whole of the paper, I am particularly grateful to Earl Conee, Brie Gertler, and an anonymous reviewer for this journal.
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Triplett, T. The Role of Certainty. Acta Anal 36, 171–190 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-020-00440-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-020-00440-2