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Notes
Recall that Siegel leads into the example with the remark, “But different etiologies for experience may pull more strongly in the direction of epistemic downgrade, even when those etiologies remain outside the subject’s ken” (emphasis added).
Huemer (2001, pp. 74–77).
In fact, something like this is much more likely to occur in real cases, except that the refrigerator would need to contain some object that was much closer in shape and color to a gun, or some object that, because of poor lighting, partial obscurity, or other poor viewing conditions, gave an appearance much closer to that of a gun, than any of the objects visible in Fig. 1. Such cases, however, raise complications whose discussion I take to be unnecessary to the present debate.
Siegel seems to invite this reading of the case when she speaks of the subject’s experience representing one of the “configurations of less complex properties that normally trigger representations of guns” (Sect. 5, reply to objection 2).
Cf. Huemer (2006), where I deploy an argument of this kind in support of epistemological internalism in general and Phenomenal Conservatism in particular.
The qualifier “in the example” should be taken as implicit throughout the argument, e.g., premise (1) states that S is justified in believing E in the example as I have elaborated it above in the text. All the normative terms in the argument, such as “ought”, “may”, and “rational”, should be read as expressing epistemic norms, though I have suppressed the qualifier “epistemically” after premise (2).
For defenses of these accounts of knowledge, see, respectively, Nozick (1981, pp. 172–211), Goldman (1992), Plantinga (1993), and Klein (1971). Note that Klein’s sense of “defeater” is different from the sense used earlier in the text. In particular, a belief may have “defeaters” in the sense of the defeasibility analysis of knowledge and yet at the same time be fully justified.
References
Goldman, A. (1992). What is justified belief? In A. Goldman, Liasons: Philosophy meets the cognitive and social sciences (pp. 105–126). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Huemer, M. (2001). Skepticism and the veil of perception. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Huemer, M. (2006). Phenomenal conservatism and the internalist intuition. American Philosophical Quarterly, 43, 147–158.
Huemer, M. (2007). Compassionate phenomenal conservatism. Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, 74, 30–55.
Klein, P. (1971). A proposed definition of propositional knowledge. Journal of Philosophy, 68, 471–482.
Nozick, R. (1981). Philosophical explanations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Plantinga, A. (1993). Warrant and proper function. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Huemer, M. Epistemological asymmetries between belief and experience. Philos Stud 162, 741–748 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0056-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0056-8