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Basic factive perceptual reasons

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Abstract

Many epistemologists have recently defended views on which all evidence is true or perceptual reasons are facts (including McDowell, Pritchard, Williamson, and Littlejohn). On such views a common account of basic perceptual reasons is that the fact that one sees that p is one’s reason for believing that p (McDowell, Pritchard, Millar, Haddock). I argue that that account is wrong; rather, in the basic case the fact that p itself is one’s reason for believing that p. I show that my proposal is better motivated, solves a fundamental objection that the received view faces, and illuminates the nature of reasons for belief.

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Notes

  1. My use of “basic” is roughly that of Comesaña and McGrath (2015): one’s basic perceptual reasons don’t derive by inference from other perceptual reasons. I elaborate on this notion in Sect. 2.

  2. Burge (2003) reserves the term “justification” for epistemic credentials that depend on reasons.

  3. I am taking the belief that an object is red fruit to be perceptually fundamental, but readers can substitute alternate examples. As I discuss below, I use the term “fundamental belief” distinctly from the term “basic belief”, in order to remain neutral on the question of whether beliefs formed in perception depend on background beliefs, such as the belief that one’s senses are reliable. Basic beliefs, on one common understanding, do not epistemically depend on any other beliefs that one holds. Whether there are any such beliefs is not my concern here. Fundamental beliefs, as I understand them, are minimally inferential, such as when one “directly” forms a belief in perception; they are those beliefs closest to the periphery in one’s “web of belief” (if one is a friend of that image), leaving open whether they are genuinely basic or not.

  4. One could attempt to pragmatically explain this point away, but I don’t find that plausible.

  5. The worry that this view is viciously circular I address in Sect. 5.

  6. McDowell’s (2008) is to some extent a revision to his previous view, made in response to worries about how perception can ground fundamental perceptual beliefs. By calling them conceptual non-propositional intuitional contents, however, McDowell does not take a Burgean view, on which basic perception gives us mere non-reasons entitlements. See McDowell’s elaboration in 2011.

  7. On nonconceptual content see, e.g., Peacocke (1998, 2001), according to which perception can have a representational content, e.g., presenting one with a object being a certain way, even though one lacks the concepts needed to specify that content.

  8. For yet another perspective on this terrain see Travis (2013).

  9. Caveat: do not take these remarks to indicate that I identify a belief’s justification with an act of justifying it.

  10. See Pryor (2014) and Comesaña (2014). A point about conceptual space: one could hold that one has a priori reason for believing that one’s senses are reliable, which is operative in all perceptual reasons, so that there are no basic perceptual beliefs; nonetheless there could be basic perceptual reasons that don’t depend on any other perceptual reasons but only on a priori reasons.

  11. Thanks especially to Duncan Pritchard here.

  12. By epistemological disjunctivism Pritchard means the view that perceptual knowledge is (paradigmatically) grounded by factive and reflectively accessible support (Pritchard 2012: 2–3).

  13. Epistemological disjunctivism and the factivity of reasons are not exactly philosophical orthodoxy, so calling my target the “received view” is a bit strained; I retain the label because the view that in the basic case one’s reason is that one sees that p is the primary view advocated in the literature in the factive reasons camp.

  14. On the reasons-for versus reasons-why distinction see Audi (1986, 1993) and Ginsborg (2006). I will assume that all reasons-for are reasons-why, but not all reasons-why are reasons-for.

  15. There are two possible explanations for why he would not reply in this way. If “because” is factive, then he would not do so because it commits him to the truth of the streets’ being wet, which he is unwilling to commit to. Or, if “because” is non-factive (see discussion in Dancy 2000), he would not reply this way because of the conversational implicature it generates.

  16. See discussion in Alvarez (2010), Dancy (2000), and Hornsby (2008). The point is not that it is impossible for her to believe that it rained for the reason that she thinks that the streets are wet, but rather that that kind of psychological fact about oneself is not typically a consideration one would take (according to factive-reasons theories) to count in favor of thinking that it rained. This point, however, does leave open a reply to Pritchard’s epistemological disjunctivist: she can eschew concern with factualism about reasons in general and retreat to the claim that in paradigmatic good cases one’s reason is the fact that one sees that p. I find such a reply unattractive both because of the plausibility of the factivist’s account of such cases (e.g., Alvarez 2010) and because of some of the motivations of epistemological disjunctivism in particular: namely, the idea that justification secures an objective connection to truth via the factivity of reasons. That is, I would contend that the motivations of the epistemological disjunctivist do not allow her to take this reply, though I acknowledge that the point requires a full treatment of its own.

  17. Cf. Williamson (2000: 187–188, 2009: 352).

  18. “When an exercise of a rational perceptual capacity puts a subject in a perceptual state that is her seeing something to be so, the perceptual state that is her seeing it to be so comes within the scope of her self-consciousness” (McDowell 2011: 33).

  19. In saying that seeing-that is doxastic, I am not claiming that fundamental perceptual experience is doxastic, because it isn’t necessary that the English locution “S sees that p” captures fundamental perceptual experience. I make no assumptions at all on the issue of whether perception is belief independent (the topic of the belief independence of perception is discussed in many places, e.g., Huemer 2001; Travis 2013).

  20. I am happy to assume basing is causal, but even if that is wrong because there are exceptions (see Korcz 1997, 2010), commonly proffered putative non-causal bases are still antecedent to the belief formed on their basis (e.g., see Lehrer’s (1990) famous gypsy lawyer case) so that is no help to the received view.

  21. For other complications with this revised proposal see Ginsborg (2006).

  22. Whether my view faces other basing problems I discuss in the next section.

  23. Chisholm thinks that it is perfectly fine to answer in this way when asked about our beliefs themselves; he concludes that such beliefs about our own psychology are “directly evident” in a way that beliefs about the world around us are not.

  24. Also see Brueckner (2005: 437), BonJour (1985: 69), BonJour and Sosa (2003: 10–21).

  25. Also see Brueckner (2009: 6–7). Cf. Turri (2009), Klein (2007: 9), Markie (2005: 348–349), Brewer (1999: 167), Fumerton (1995: 56–60), and BonJour (1985: 18–23 and 90–91), BonJour and Sosa (2003: 12).

  26. See Chisholm (1977) again.

  27. Of course, temporal and causal issues loom: I would need to acquire p as a reason and the belief that p simultaneously; I discuss these issues below.

  28. Or see Williamson (2000) for arguments that the right sort of “cognitive relation” requires knowledge.

  29. See Sosa (2009) for further discussion of circularity in epistemology.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank James Genone, Duncan Pritchard, Niko Kolodny, Barry Stroud, Mike Martin, Cass Weller and Hyungrae Noh.

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    Ian Schnee

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Schnee, I. Basic factive perceptual reasons. Philos Stud 173, 1103–1118 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0532-z

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