Abstract
Much of the intuitive appeal of evidentialism results from conflating two importantly different conceptions of evidence. This is most clear in the case of perceptual justification, where experience is able to provide evidence in one sense of the term, although not in the sense that the evidentialist requires. I argue this, in part, by relying on a reading of the Sellarsian dilemma that differs from the version standardly encountered in contemporary epistemology, one that is aimed initially at the epistemology of introspection but which generalizes to theories of perceptual justification as well.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Similar distinctions are made by (among others) Conee and Feldman (2008). I’m not sure that what I’m calling ‘factual evidence’ is exactly the same as what they call ‘scientific evidence’, but I won’t try to tease out the differences. Importantly, I am using ‘justifying evidence’ in the same way that they do.
I say “is, or provides” because sometimes we think about J-evidence as a relation and sometimes as a relatum. In the latter case, the P-evidence is also J-evidence, although I think the conception of J-evidence as a relation is more fundamental and more helpful. P-evidence is, I think, always understood as a relatum rather than a relation.
This is not intended to suggest that conceptual, propositional, and cognitive content are all the same; it is intended to cover different versions of the basic argument.
Although I will be explicating what I think was Sellars’s actual view, found in Part I (especially Sect. 7) of EPM (1956), I won’t try to argue for this interpretation.
Although he does use the term ‘reason’, it is not entirely clear whether BonJour endorses evidentialism: whether he means for the awareness to be J-evidence for the introspective belief or to justify it in some other manner. Either way, I think the problem for his view is substantial.
James Genone (in correspondence) suggests that this sort of objection might be avoided if we distinguish between theoretical and perceptual concepts of F. The idea, I think, is that in perceptual judgment we employ a perceptual concept of cat, and in some thoughts about cats, we employ a distinct, theoretical, concept of cat. The fact that I can think about cats without knowing what they look like (or smell like, etc.) therefore doesn’t show that the perceptual cat concept isn’t a recognitional concept. It would take me too far from the present concerns to pursue this line in any detail; for now I leave it as the beginnings of a possible response on behalf of experientialism.
This is true even if these properties are had in virtue of those contents, i.e., even if representationalism is true.
My concern here is not with modest foundationalism in general (which I take to be the view that all justified beliefs are or derive their justification from basic beliefs and that some of these basic beliefs are beliefs about external objects, rather than just our own experiences), but with an experientialist version of the view. Reliabilists, for example, are often modest foundationalists without being experientialists.
It is not obvious that this is a coherent possibility. Surely there are perceptual states of which I’m unaware, but perhaps they only count as experiences if I’m aware of them. I’m not committed to the claim that there are experiences of which the agent is unaware; I’m committed to the claim that experiences of which the agent is unaware don’t provide J-evidence. I’m happy if this turns out to be vacuously true.
It does solve one problem: modest foundationalism, unlike classical foundationalism, does not require perceivers to have the concept of experience to have justified perceptual beliefs. But the main problem remains, the problem of knowing what the experience is of.
This is true despite the fact that the requirement does not explicitly figure into their view, which holds that justification is entirely determined by how well the belief fits with the evidence one possesses. They must mean to build that requirement implicity into either the possession requirement or, more likely, their understanding of evidential fit. Fit, for Feldman and Conee, is a subjective matter, dependent in part on the subject’s appreciation of the objective relations.
The ‘prima facie’ qualification is necessary, because most of us know enough that if we found ourselves having perceptual beliefs without perceptual experiences, we would be right to think something was wrong; we would thus have potential defeaters for those perceptual beliefs.
This was suggested by Mary Salvaggio (in conversation).
The same general points will apply to process, competence, and capacity views.
I say ‘might’ because I’m not at all convinced that seemings thus construed are not token-identical to beliefs after all (Lyons 2009, 70–72). The standard argument only shows that they’re not type-identical. If the seeming isn’t distinct from the belief, of course, the view doesn’t offer a third alternative after all.
I think that all perceptual sensory experiences have a spatial character and some interoceptive sensory experiences do as well (e.g., pain, hunger). Others, like moods and emotions, might not. Hence the ‘usually’ hedge.
I say it’s a rough approximation, because cats surely have concepts, and probably some of these concepts are commensurate with our own. To the extent that conceptual overlap is rare, the approximation here is a good one; if none of their concepts were the same as any of ours, the thought experiment wouldn’t involve approximation: any state we could share with them would be nonconceptual.
I am supposing that an “ordinary” case of perception is, as modest foundationalism would have it, one that does not involve introspection. Because this is compatible with the claim that the justification of introspective beliefs metaphysically depends on experiences, an unusual case of perception, one that involved introspection as well, might have a different epistemic status were the sensory experiences to be absent.
Related worries arise for introspection, but to render them at all pressing would require spelling out detailed theories of introspection, which I can’t do here.
References
Alston, W. (1988). An internalist externalism. Synthese, 74, 265–283.
Audi, R. (1998). Epistemology: A contemporary introduction to the theory of knowledge. New York: Routledge.
BonJour, L. (1978). Can empirical knowledge have a foundation? American Philosophical Quarterly, 15, 1–13.
BonJour, L. (1985). The structure of empirical knowledge. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
BonJour, L. (2003). A version of internalist foundationalism. In L. BonJour & E. Sosa (Eds.), Epistemic justification: Internalism vs. externalism, foundations vs. virtues (pp. 3–96). Malden, MA: Blackwell.
BonJour, L. (2010). Epistemology: Classic problems and contemporary responses (2nd ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Byrne, A. (2014). Perception and evidence. Philosophical Studies, 170, 101–113.
Byrne, A. (2015). The epistemic significance of experience. Philosophical Studies. doi:10.1007/s11098-015-0537-7.
Chalmers, D. (2003). The content and epistemology of phenomenal belief. In Q. Smith & A. Jokic (Eds.), Consciousness: New philosophical perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Comesaña, J. (2010). Evidentialist reliabilism. Nous, 44, 571–600.
Conee, E., & Feldman, R. (2004). Evidentialism: Essays in epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Conee, E., & Feldman, R. (2008). Evidence. In Q. Smith (Ed.), Epistemology: New essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Davidson, D. (1986). A coherence theory of truth and knowledge. In E. Lepore (Ed.), Truth and interpretation: Perspectives on the philosophy of Donald Davidson. New York: Blackwell.
Feldman, R., & Conee, E. (1985). Evidentialism. Philosophical Studies, 48, 15–34. Reprinted in Conee and Feldman 2004.
Fodor, J. (1998). There are no recognitional concepts; not even red. Philosophical Issues, 9, 1–14.
Goldman, A. I. (1979). What is justified belief? In G. Pappas (Ed.), Justification and knowledge. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Goldman, A. I. (2011). Toward a synthesis of reliabilism and evidentialism? Or: Evidentialism’s problems, reliabilism’s rescue package. In T. Dougherty (Ed.), Evidentialism and its discontents. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Graham, P. (2012). Epistemic entitlement. Nous, 46, 449–482.
Gupta, A. (2006). Empiricism and experience. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Huemer, M. (2007). Compassionate phenomenal conservatism. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 74, 30–55.
Kelly, T. (2006). Evidence. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition). http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/evidence/.
Kim, J. (1988). What is ‘naturalized epistemology’? Philosophical Perspectives, 2, 381–405.
Korcz, K. A. (1997). Recent work on the basing relation. American Philosophical Quarterly, 34, 171–191.
Korcz, K. A. (2010). The epistemic basing relation. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Spring 2010 Edition). http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2010/entries/basing-epistemic/.
Kvanvig, J. L. (2012). Coherentism. In A. Cullison (Ed.), A companion to epistemology (pp. 57–72). New York: Continuum Press.
Lyons, J. C. (2008). Evidence, experience, and externalism. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 86, 461–479.
Lyons, J. C. (2009). Perception and basic beliefs: Zombies, modules, and the problem of the external world. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lyons, J. C. (forthcoming a). Goldman on evidence and reliability. In H. Kornblith, & B. McLaughlin (Eds.), Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Lyons, J. C. (forthcoming b). Perception and intuition of evaluative properties. In A. Bergquist, & R. Cowan (Eds.), Evaluative perception. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McDowell, J. (1982). Criteria, defeasibility and knowledge. Proceedings of the British Academy, 68, 455–479.
McDowell, J. (1994). Mind and world. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Plantinga, A. (1993). Warrant and proper function. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pollock, J. (1986). Contemporary theories of knowledge. Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Pollock, J. L., & Cruz, J. L. (1999). Contemporary theories of knowledge (2nd ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Pryor, J. (2000). The skeptic and the dogmatist. Noûs, 34, 517–549.
Schellenberg, S. (2013). Experience and evidence. Mind, 122, 699–747.
Schellenberg, S. (2015). Phenomenal evidence and factive evidence. Philosophical Studies. doi:10.1007/s11098-015-0528-8.
Sellars, W. (1956). Empiricism and the philosophy of mind. Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 1, 253–329.
Silins, N. (2005). Deception and evidence. Philosophical Perspectives, 19, 375–404.
Sosa, E. (2007). A virtue epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tucker, C. (2010). Why open-minded people should endorse dogmatism. Philosophical Perspectives, 24, 529–545.
Tucker, C. (Ed.). (2013). Seemings and justification: New essays on dogmatism and phenomenal conservatism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Williamson, T. (2000). Knowledge and its limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Acknowledgments
Earlier drafts of this paper were presented at the Workshop on Perceptual Evidence at Rutgers University, Camden and Workshop on Perceptual Epistemology at Southern Methodist University in 2014. Thanks to Peter Baumann, Alex Byrne, Philippe Chuard, Juan Comesaña, Kevin Connolly, Justin Fisher, James Genone, Dan Greco, Robert Howell, Michael Huemer, Alex Jackson, Peter Klein, Matthew Lockard, Adrienne Prettyman, Mary Salvaggio, Susanna Schellenberg, and Brad Thompson for comments.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Lyons, J. Experiential evidence?. Philos Stud 173, 1053–1079 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0540-z
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0540-z