Abstract
In the following I discuss the debate between epistemological internalists and externalists from an unfamiliar meta-epistemological perspective. In doing so, I focus on the question of whether rationality is best captured in externalist or internalist terms. Using a conception of epistemic judgments as “doxastic plans,” I characterize one important subspecies of judgments about epistemic rationality—focusing on the distinctive rational/functional role these judgments play in regulating how we form beliefs. Then I show why any judgment that plays this role should be expected to behave the manner internalists predict. In this way, I argue, we can explain why our basic toolbox for epistemic evaluation includes an internalist conception of rationality.
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Notes
Unfortunately, “rationality” is ambiguous in at least one important respect. One might take “rationality” to be a function of the sort of warrant that is capable of making a true belief into an instance of knowledge. On the one hand, like many externalists, I believe that this sort of warrant or “rationality”—like knowledge itself—is best thought of in externalist terms. But if the arguments below are correct, there is also a second fundamental sense in which someone’s beliefs may evaluated epistemically—one which is associated with the sort of justification that is capable of making one’s beliefs subjectively rational. In what follows, I reserve the term “rationality” for the second of these concepts—a concept which I take to be the source of the internalist intuitions discussed below. (Unfortunately, the same ambiguities exist for terms like “justification”, so that there seems to me to be no way to avoid them here.) But it is important to stress that this is fully compatible with the existence of both internalist and externalist notions of “rationality” as just described.
For more on the relationship between knowledge and such external facts, see Schafer (forthcoming).
Or, perhaps better, systematically context-sensitive in ways that span the gap between the two readings noted above.
For a different way of framing these debates, which makes externalism seem like the more modest position, see Greco (2005).
A crucial question for any internalist is how this notion of “access” is to be spelt out. For instance, if to have access to some fact is just to know it, then this constraint is compatible with most forms of externalism. Unfortunately, this way of understanding access does not seem to me to capture the intuitions I discuss below. Thus, if it is these intuitions that our talk of “access” is meant to do justice to, access to the fact that P will have to involve something other than knowing that P. Shortly I will have more to say about this, but for now I will rest content with our intuitive grasp of this idea.
Once again, it is important to stress that this is only one of many possible ways of drawing this distinction. For a taxonomy of some of these, see Pryor (2001).
Cases of this sort are, of course, traditionally associated with Descartes. For the application of such examples to externalism see Cohen and Lehrer (1983).
See BonJour (1985). Of course, the debate about the force of examples of this sort is ongoing. But there is no doubt that they have provided one of the main impetuses for contemporary discussions of internalism. And this alone makes them worthy of discussion here.
It is important to stress again that we may have several notions of rationality—some of which may have a more externalist character. If so, these cases can be taken to focus our attention on the notion of rationality that has a prima facie internalist character.
For a traditional externalist view that appears to run afoul of these examples, see Goldman (1979).
A common response in the contemporary literature to this phenomenon has been to postulate a distinction between two forms of knowledge or justification. For example, Sosa (2007) suggests that in order make sense of these intuitions, we must draw a basic distinction between what he calls “animal” and “reflective” knowledge. And Burge (2010) argues that it is crucial in this regard to distinguish two quite different notions of epistemic justification or support—what he calls “entitlement” and “justification”. I am in broad sympathy with this style of approach to these issues, at least insofar as they concede that epistemic evaluation involves both internalist and externalist dimensions. But I differ from them on how exactly we should understand these phenomena. In particular, while I am generally sympathetic to the distinctions these authors draw, the roots of our tendency to engage in epistemic evaluation of both a broadly internalist and a broadly externalist sort seem to me to lie in an even more basic distinction between the sort of evaluation we engage in when we attribute knowledge to someone and the sort that is involved when we treat someone’s belief as a rational response to their situation.
In response to these cases, others have suggested that an individual’s epistemic status depends on whether their belief-forming methods are reliable, not in their possible world, but rather in the actual one. (For a recent example of this sort of approach, see Comesana (2002).) But while this modification captures the intuitions noted above when we consider the Evil Demon world as a counter-factual possibility, it does not capture them when we consider it as a counter-actual possibility. And if we limit ourselves to considering counter-factual as opposed to counter-actual possibilities, then this view will satisfy the definition of internalism provided above. Thus, such views represent the sort of convergence between sophisticated forms of internalism and externalism that I noted above—although, for the reason just noted, they do not appear to me to do full justice to the intuitions that fuel internalism.
A further issue in making this idea precise is the sort of supervenience involved in it. For example, here are two ways of reading this principle:
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(i)
The state of being rational in possessing some belief supervenes only on facts that are cognitively accessible to the believer, across the space of all metaphysically possible worlds.
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(ii)
The state of being rational in possessing some belief supervenes only on facts that are cognitively accessible to the believer, across the space of all epistemically possible worlds.
The difference between these two readings will not matter much if we focus on the case of perceptual epistemology, which will be my focus here. (Although it may matter with respect to views like Comesena’s.) But it has the potential to matter a great deal when we turn to the implications of internalism for the epistemology of necessary truths. For reasons I discuss in more detail elsewhere, it seems to me that it is the second of these claims that captures the full scope of the internalist’s Central Idea. But I will not argue for this here.
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(i)
248. The idea that attributions of knowledge are connected with something like deference is not unique to Gibbard. For an early statement of a similar idea, see Austin’s comment that “I know that P” functions (at least in part) as a performative with roughly the significance of “I guarantee that P” in Austin (1946).
Note that such doxastic plans are quite similar to what Alvin Goldman calls “doxastic decision procedures.” Of course, Goldman introduces this notion to criticize a form of internalism, but he does not consider the form of Internalism to be defended below. And he seems to have no objection to the idea of a doxastic decision procedure as such.
See Schafer (forthcoming), and compare Weiner (2009).
In addition to the work cited above, in his under-appreciated Craig (1990), Edward Craig argues that to assert that Smith knows that Q is to approve of Smith as an informant about Q. And it has become increasingly common in recent years to suggest that a central feature of knowledge attribution is a sort of “knowledge-action link” such that P is admissible as a premise in practical reasoning just in case one knows that P. For two recent proposals in this area see Fantl and McGrath (2002) and Hawthorne and Stanley (2008).
This principle could and perhaps should be rephrased in degree-theoretic terms. For the sake of simplicity, I restrict myself to the “all-out judgment” version of it here.
See again Schafer (forthcoming).
Ultimately, we will sometimes want to evaluate their response taking this aspect of their state of mind into account—while other times, we will want to set it aside. Thus, there will be a degree of contextual variability with respect to these sorts of questions built into our concept of rationality. Not surprisingly, this fits very naturally with the idea, noted above, that the difference between externalistic and internalistic forms of rationality is a matter of contextual variation as opposed to genuine ambiguity.
By contrast, whether we use the term “rationality” to capture this form of epistemic evaluation is relatively unimportant to me here. As noted above, I am happy to allow that “rationality” has both an internalist and an externalist reading.
Or, perhaps, under certain counteractual conditions.
See, for example, Goldman (1988).
Thanks to an anonymous referee for pushing me on this case and these issues more broadly.
Of course, this is just a rough first pass at stating a principle of this sort. For much more detailed discussion, see Gibbard’s discussion of attributions of moral praise and blame.
Williamson (2002).
Of course, when taken in this way, I can happily accept this idea.
Something that comes out especially in his discussion of failures of “luminosity”. Obviously, there are a number of connections between the present discussion and such debates, but there is no space here to give them the discussion they deserve—although I will touch on some related issues below.
McDowell (1995).
Goldman (2001).
Although see Williamson (2002) for some worries about these claims.
It might be thought that what is relevant here is not whether being in C1 and being in C2 are actually indistinguishable from one another, but rather what one rationally believes about this matter. I’m agnostic about this question. So it is fortunate that either claim is sufficient to explain why the concept of rationality obeys the internalist’s constraint. For in the cases that matter most to this discussion, it is both the case that the situations in question are indistinguishable from one another and that we rationally believe that they are indistinguishable. Thus, for the sake of simplicity I will proceed as if the connection between indistinguishability and rational planning is the simpler one stated above—although it may well be the case that the best account of these issues runs through our rational beliefs about indistinguishability in the manner just noted.
For the same reason, the account of rationality I defend here does not entail that someone can be rational in believing that P only when they are capable of distinguishing worlds in which P is true from worlds in which it is false—a condition that is sometimes referred to as sensitivity. Rather, it only requires that if someone is rational in believing that P in one world, they must be rational in believing that P in all indistinguishable worlds, be they worlds in which P is true or worlds in which P is false.
These comments are also relevant, of course, to the connections between these ideas and Williamson’s discussion of “luminosity”.
Or, again, insofar as we rationally believe we could do so.
This argument has similarities to some more familiar arguments for internalism. The most similar version I know of is the argument offered in Pollock and Cruz (1999). I discuss the relationship between my argument and Pollock and Cruz’s below.
Here I have been assuming that the reader rejects skepticism about our current state of epistemic rationality. But the same basic points may be made from a skeptical direction.
As noted above, the state that supervenes here will be the state of believing a proposition within a certain proposition-type. Once again, I leave these complications to the side for ease of exposition, since they do not effect the essential argument.
Here is an area where the precise sort of supervenience involved the internalist’s Central Idea may matter. But, in fact, since the most important basic logical and probabilistic truths hold, not just in all metaphysically possible worlds, but also in all epistemically possible worlds, the difference between the two readings I noted above should not matter here.
Wedgwood (2002) makes this point nicely.
For a nice discussion of this, see Goldman (2001). There are, of course, many possible responses to these problems, and I do not want to suggest that any of them are in the end decisive, only that it may be best to explore these issues from a perspective that deemphasizes the role of conscious access.
See Block (1995).
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Acknowledgments
This paper has benefited from the help of more people than I will be able to remember. Among the most important are Yuval Avnur, Sinan Dogramaci, David Enoch, Hartry Field, Don Garrett, Anna-Sara Malmgren, John Morrison, Bernard Nickel, Jim Pryor, Declan Smithies, Nico Silins, David Velleman, and several anonymous referees.
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Schafer, K. Doxastic planning and epistemic internalism. Synthese 191, 2571–2591 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0412-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0412-7