Abstract
Sometimes a belief that p promotes having true beliefs, whether or not p is true. This gives reasons to believe that p, but most epistemologists would deny that it gives epistemic reasons, or that these reasons can epistemically justify the belief that p. Call these reasons to believe “truth promoting non-evidential reasons for belief.” This paper argues that three common views in epistemology, taken together, entail that reasons of this sort can epistemically justify beliefs. These three claims are: epistemic oughts are normative, epistemic oughts have a source, and the source of epistemic oughts is an end that has true belief as a necessary component. These claims would be hard for many epistemologists to deny, but accepting them, and thus accepting that truth promoting non-evidential reasons can justify beliefs, has significant consequences for epistemology. The paper considers accounts of epistemic oughts that endorse these claims but might seem to avoid the consequence that truth promoting non-evidential reasons generate real epistemic oughts, and shows that none do.
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Notes
There are also reasons against belief analogous to TPR. One has such reasons against believing p when the belief that p promotes believing what is false. I won’t discuss these, although I do think they will generate epistemic oughts in much the same way TPR do.
I’m not the first to note that certain epistemic ends would generate TPR. This comes up, for example, in papers by Richard Fumerton (2001) and Marian David (2001); Fumerton’s paper in fact is the source of one of the examples I use below (noted in a footnote). However, previous work on the topic considers a narrower range of epistemic ends than this paper, and doesn’t really engage with the questions of whether TPR can generate oughts or if these could be epistemic. Further, this previous work tends to be dismissive of the possibility that we ought to believe on our TPR, being more interested in epistemic oughts that are intuitive. This paper, on the other hand, is less concerned with intuitions about epistemic oughts and more with what oughts have normative force and why.
Some readers have indicated that they find these objections distracting, that one or another of them seems to make my argument a non-starter. If you feel similarly, I suggest skipping ahead now to the section where I respond to the relevant objection and then returning here. Most of my responses to objections don’t rely on the points I make between here and there.
This argument comes from Fumerton (2001). Interestingly, Foley, who seems to assume that synchronic epistemic ends cannot generate TPR, does say that synchronic epistemic ends can give one epistemic reasons that are not evidence. He says that one has epistemic reasons but not evidence to believe p in a situation where, were one to believe p, p would likely be true, and were one to not believe p, p would likely be false (Foley 1992, pp. 29–30). These reasons aren’t TPR because they don’t arise from p’s promoting other true beliefs, but allowing for these reasons does suggest that, if Foley had considered the possibility of dependence relations between beliefs, he would agree that synchronic epistemic ends generate TPR.
One might have a parallel view according to which beliefs aim at knowledge.
This is perhaps metaphorical. Wedgwood says that believers take themselves to be committed to this goal, so perhaps this is not an aim of belief but of believers. On the other hand, Wedgwood talks about correctness standards that are built into belief itself, which function like epistemic aims of belief. My argument works if we substitute either of these in where I talk about the aim of belief or epistemic ends.
I’ll address later in the paper the special case where TPR make it so that we ought to believe some claim that we have conclusive evidence against.
For those familiar with Wedgwood’s paper, Wedgwood might describe the e-pistemic ought as an ought that applies to a belief and arises out of the correctness standard for that belief alone.
Thank you to Julia Staffel for pointing out this objection.
See Turri (2009) for a very clear example. I could just as well cite a tedious number of other articles.
The claim about the connection between knowledge and justification is not completely uncontroversial; see, e.g. Kornblith (2008).
When an agent luckily believes a truth, what’s accidental or out of an agent’s control is not the truth of the proposition that the agent believed, but rather that the agent ended up believing a proposition that is true.
Pritchard and some others advocate an alternate view of luck. On this view, an event’s being lucky has to do with the fact that the event doesn’t occur in most nearby possible worlds (Pritchard 2004). I think this account is problematic, because I have a hard time seeing why it matters that one is lucky in this way (as long as such luck doesn’t eliminate one’s justification). That said, I suspect that, given a plausible understanding of what possible worlds are nearby, t-pistemically justified beliefs that turn out true will also be lucky in this modal sense. However, I’m uncomfortable making arguments based on a particular view of the ordering of possible worlds, and so I will refer readers who agree with Pritchard to my trump argument at the end of this section. (Note that discussions of the ordering of possible worlds also pose a problem for those defending a modal view of luck and knowledge like Pritchard’s; see e.g. Baumann 2008).
My thanks to an anonymous referee for making this worry salient for me.
One may be able to generate cases for other sorts of beings—beings with almost no beliefs, for example—where their beliefs against conclusive evidence are justified by fewer epistemic benefits. But these won’t present compelling objections to my arguments.
I’ve been asked if this doesn’t render my findings in this paper uninteresting, as TPR can generate oughts only in very rare circumstances. However, remember that TPR can also make it the case that we ought to believe propositions for which we have insufficient evidence. Cases in which such beliefs are justified by TPR may be much more common.
This is a view sometimes called “threshold deontology” or “moderate deontology” (Alexander 2000), and I’m assured that it is the majority, although not consensus, view among deontologists (White 2009). Moore (1989), Nagel (1979), and Nozick (1974) are supposed to have held such a view (Alexander 2000).
One additional worry would be that, if TPR were epistemic reasons, then it turns out that Pascal’s Wager might show that we have epistemic reasons to believe in God: perhaps we can expect that God will reward believers, but not unbelievers, with infinite true beliefs in the afterlife. (Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this issue) This would be a surprising consequence, since Pascal’s Wager is traditionally taken to be an argument for theistic belief based in practical, not epistemic, reasons. However, I don’t think anyone should find this consequence to be unacceptable. There is a large literature on Pascal’s Wager which shows that the Wager does not justify belief in God in the practical sense; for example, it is often argued that the balance of our reasons doesn’t favor belief in God over alternate deities. The arguments in this literature will generally be able to be adapted to show that the Wager does not justify belief in God in the epistemic sense as well, even if TPR can justify beliefs.
We can imagine cases in which one has practical reasons to follow one’s epistemic oughts; e.g. if one were paid to do so.
They either deny doxastic involuntarism, or think that it is irrelevant to whether or not we have reasons to believe. I won’t address involuntarism because of this.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Julia Staffel, Dom Bailey, Justin Snedegar, Chris Heathwood, Eric Chwang, Graham Oddie, Michael Tooley, and a number of conference participants whose names I don’t know for their comments on drafts or presentations of this paper. I’d also like to thank all the participants in my 2011 epistemology seminar for inspiring me to think through these issues.
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Talbot, B. Truth promoting non-evidential reasons for belief. Philos Stud 168, 599–618 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0139-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0139-1