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Notes
Externalists may cry foul. I have not mentioned actual-world reliabilism or proper-functionalism. I cannot consider here in any detail the merits of these and other externalist accounts of how subjects’ beliefs could be justified in skeptical cases. I will only say that it seems quite implausible that the reason why the demon victim’s perceptual beliefs are justified has to do with facts about our world or facts about our design or evolutionary past (think Swampman). For an externalist defense of the claim that etiology can affect an experience’s justificatory force see Goldman (2009, Sect. VI).
For a defense of mentalism, see Conee and Feldman (2001). In what follows, I use ‘internalism’ to refer to mentalism rather than to any thesis about introspective accessibility of justifiers.
Here I borrow from an example used by colleague Peter Markie.
The Downgrade Principle holds that “the justification an experience provides for its contents falls below the baseline,” i.e., cannot justify beliefs in those contents (p. 7). Siegel considers two ways to develop this principle, one which takes the principle as a principle about propositional justification (the Propositional Downgrade Thesis) and the other which takes it as a principle about doxastic justification (the Doxastic Downgrade Thesis). I will treat these as interchangeable.
If we understand justification as a sort of epistemic permission to believe, then even if we supposed withholding was permissible here, surely belief is as well—so it might be argued.
They may indicate something important about principles of justification, though, if such coherence requirements are, so to speak, shadows of principles of justification. I cannot discuss the issue further here.
For an explanation and defense of evidentialism, see Conee and Feldman (2004).
The internalist account given here of Biased Search and Fabricated Evidence is similar to that of Feldman (2000, Sect. D), with one exception: Feldman does not grant that the defects here count as epistemic. I would differ on this score. These defects alone seem to prevent the beliefs formed from being knowledge. I take this to be enough to qualify those defects as epistemic.
I think the same analysis applies to her other examples, Ouija Board and Pessimism.
The idea of quasi-inference in experience is discussed more fully in McGrath (forthcoming).
To preserve mentalism, we would need to insist that the background information needn’t be knowledge in order to play its role in making the quasi-inference a good one for the subject. But I think this is plausible. Take a “normal” BIV who is justified in her belief that there is a gun before her. She is justified because her experience as of a gun is the output of a good quasi-inference. Although she doesn’t count as knowing the appearance of guns, and perhaps doesn’t count as knowing how to identify guns, she has mentalistic surrogates of these forms of knowledge. I assume here that knowledge is not a mental state.
In personal communication, Siegel suggests that there might be cases of such selection effects in which the person is given substantial evidence of their ability to detect features in a set of racially diverse faces. If so, what exactly would be bad about the quasi-inference from the particular experiences to the “only” experience? Still, wouldn’t the “only” experience be downgraded, and downgraded because it is not evidence? However, I would still be tempted to think that in such a case the “only” experience would fail to be evidence because it is not arrived at in the right way from the subject’s fundamental experiential evidence.
References
Conee, E., & Feldman, R. (2001). Internalism defended. In H. Kornblith (Ed.), Epistemology: Internalism and externalism (pp. 231–260). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Conee, E., & Feldman, R. (2004). Evidentialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Feldman, R. (2000). The ethics of belief. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 60(3), 67–695.
Goldman, A. (2009). Internalism, externalism, and the architecture of justification. Journal of Philosophy, 106(6), 309–338.
McGrath, M. (forthcoming). Phenomenal conservatism and cognitive penetration: The ‘bad basis’ counterexamples. In C. Tucker (ed.) Seemings and justification: New essays on dogmatism and phenomenal conservatism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Siegel, S. (2011). Cognitive penetrability and perceptual justification. Noûs, 46(2), 201–222.
Siegel, S. (2012). The epistemic impact of the etiology of experience. Philosophical Studies. doi:10.1007/s11098-012-0059-5.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Richard Feldman and Susanna Siegel for helpful discussion.
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McGrath, M. Siegel and the impact for epistemological internalism. Philos Stud 162, 723–732 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0055-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0055-9