Abstract
We commonly say that some evidence supports a hypothesis or that some premise evidentially supports a conclusion. Both internalists and externalists attempt to analyze this notion of evidential support, and the primary purpose of this paper is to argue that reliabilist and proper functionalist accounts of this relation fail. Since evidential support is one component of inferential justification, the upshot of this failure is that their accounts of inferential justification also fail. In Sect. 2, I clarify the evidential support relation. In Sects. 3–5, I subject reliabilist and proper functionalist accounts of evidential support to various counterexamples. In Sect. 6, I show that the most promising ways to address these counterexamples aren’t very promising.
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Notes
When I use the term ‘justification’, I have in mind propositional rather than doxastic justification (even when I use the term ‘justified belief’). Nothing hangs on this. As will become apparent by the end of Sect. 2, the main focus of the paper is on evidential support, which is typically taken to be a component of (or at least entailed by) inferential justification—regardless of whether we are talking about propositional or doxastic justification.
The “by itself” qualifier indicates that my justified belief in J can inferentially justify me in believing S without the help of justification for any other (suppressed) premises. A similar point applies to the “solely” qualifier below.
Reliabilists usually require unconditional reliability for belief-independent processes and conditional reliability for belief-dependent ones (e.g. Goldman 1986, p. 83). Inferential processes are paradigmatically belief-dependent, and they need to be conditionally reliable in the sense that they need to be reliable given that their premises are true. For the rest of the paper, I suppress the “conditionally” qualifier.
Goldman (1979, pp. 43–44) notices and responds to the non-inferential versions of these problems. I criticize his responses in my 2014, sec. 3.3.
The Basing Requirement is generally thought to be a necessary condition only on doxastic justification, so few would impose it as a necessary condition on propositional justification. I mention the Basing Relation here just to highlight the fact that it doesn’t help address the key issue in this paper.
Williamson (2000, p. 186) uses the term speaks in favour of. Bergmann (2006, ch 5), Comesaña (2010, and Conee and Feldman (2004) use the term fit. (Strictly speaking, “fit” is not always used to cover exactly the relation I call ‘evidential support’. First, it is often used to cover both non-inferential and inferential evidential support, whereas I’m talking solely about the inferential variety in this paper. Second, some philosophers (e.g., Comesaña 2010, Sect. 6) hold that Q’s fitting E requires that S have justification for E, but I build that into a separate condition.)
Fumerton, in his early work (1985, p. 40), rejects this requirement. Yet he now seems committed to it. He seems to say that one can have inferential justification for P only if one is acquainted with the fact that one’s premise supports one’s conclusion (2006a, p. 190, nt. 7). Since one can’t have the relevant sort of acquaintance unless the premise supports the conclusion, this higher-level acquaintance requirement entails the evidential support one. In any case, see Huemer’s (2002, p. 335–338) response to Fumerton’s early view.
One might protest: couldn’t these accounts of evidential support be combined with some fancy notion of basing or some sophisticated notion of defeaters or some new requirement not yet discovered, so that the overall account of inferential justification would deliver intuitive results about which beliefs are inferentially justified? I don’t see how, but you’re welcome to try.
Many philosophers make evidential support (and probability) relative to background knowledge (e.g. Williamson 2000, pp. 186–187; Achinstein 2001). When such philosophers say that E supports P given K, I prefer to say that the conjunction of E and (the relevant parts of) K supports P. As far as I can tell, nothing significant hangs on this way of speaking. Second, I talk as though evidential support is a relation between propositions, and some proper functionalists and reliabilists also talk this way (e.g., Plantinga 1993, p. 168; Henderson et al. 2007, esp. sec. 3).
In the abstract of their 2007, Henderson et al. say that they will give a “non-reliabilist” account of evidential support. This is misleading. When they present their account of evidential support, they rely on the notion of global (and transglobal) reliability (p. 293), but they note that the account “makes no appeal to the reliability of belief-forming processes” (294, emphasis mine). What Henderson et al. meant to say, I take it, is that their account doesn’t appeal to “process reliability” (p. 283), not that it makes no appeal to reliability whatsoever.
I think non-reliabilist virtue accounts of justification will suffer from counterexamples similar to the ones which afflict the proper function account, but that’s not something that I will be arguing for in this paper.
Graham (2012) endorses a type of proper functionalism and is committed to something like PF. He talks as though his proper functionalism is a version of reliabilism, but he’s quite clear that reliability in the subject’s (or actual) circumstances is neither necessary nor sufficient for justification (see, e.g., his introduction). So he arguably doesn’t count as a reliabilist. It should be obvious, though, that proper functionalism’s prospects for avoiding the problems in this paper are not affected by whether proper functionalism gets labelled as a reliabilism or not.
If Greco intends a non-counterfactual version of statistical reliability (e.g. the number of times in the actual world some proposition is true when another is), his view will still be subject to the below counterexamples. Also see Fumerton (2006b, p. 80).
Greco allows that S has an ability to R in conditions C even if there is a sufficiently similar world in which, perhaps because of bad luck, S never achieves R in C (2000, p. 212). Analogously, he may allow A to support B even if there is some sufficiently similar world in which, perhaps because of bad luck, B is never true when A is. SW is intended to be compatible with this result.
Alston (2005, p. 124–125) would add a restriction to situations like the ones we typically find ourselves in. Even with such a restriction, the below counterexamples, perhaps with some minor modifications, will still work.
If one rejects content essentialism, the claim that a belief has its content essentially, then it might matter whether we treat evidential support as a relation between beliefs or propositions. There may be some theoretical advantages to rejecting content essentialism (see, e.g., Weatherson 2004, pp. 378–381), but I don’t know how this rejection could help solve the below problems. I’ll simply assume content essentialism in what follows.
Two points are worth mentioning about this normal worlds account of evidential support. First, it would be parallel to Goldman’s proposal that “a rule system is right in any world W just in case it has a sufficiently high truth ratio in normal worlds” (1986, p. 107, emphasis original). Second, Smith (2010) may endorse something like this account of evidential support, but his notion of normalcy is very different than that of Goldman’s (see, e.g., Smith 2007). Even given Smith’s notion of normalcy, the normal worlds account doesn’t seem to have any special advantages when it comes to avoiding the below problems.
I’m sometimes asked whether Lyons’ (2009, pp. 171–173) views fare any better with respect to the problems discussed in this paper. Not really. To avoid going into the details of Lyons’ account, the following simplified view will approximate his account: E supports C iff E bears “the appropriate reliability connection” (which he leaves unspecified) to C and the inference from C to E is a basic inference. Simplifying again, we can say that a basic inference is one that a subject is designed to make. So this simplified approximation of his account requires reliability and proper function. By requiring proper function, he will avoid some of the counterexamples that afflict SW. Yet, since my counterexamples to proper functionalism all involve reliability, my counterexamples to the proper functionalist account are also counterexamples to his (approximated) account. I also address Lyons’ work in my 2014.
I’ve encountered this objection a few times: “If there are impossible worlds, then it won’t be true that Gödel’s theorem is true in all the most similar worlds. So, given impossible worlds, SW isn’t promiscuous with necessary truths.” Postulating the existence of impossible worlds does not, by itself, constitute progress. Suppose there are equally many close impossible worlds in which Gödel’s theorem is false as there are close possible worlds in which it is true. SW may avoid promiscuity with necessary truths, but only at the cost of monkish chastity. For now not even a sound proof will support Gödel’s theorem.
Although the promiscuity problems are perhaps more worrisome, SW is also monkishly chaste with respect to necessary falsehoods. The proposition that Gödel’s theorem is false is itself necessarily false. Given SW, the denial of the theorem would not be supported by the conjunction that there are many reliable experts in the relevant domain and they all agree that Gödel’s theorem is false. This result seems to be a false negative.
Objection Your discussion of proper functionalism is too simplistic. The proper functionalist typically requires not only proper function, but also that the relevant faculties be aimed at truth and be reliable in the environments for which they are designed. Reply: BEER trivially entails Gödel’s theorem, so the reliability comes trivially. Hence, it’s easy to imagine that the relevant faculties are aimed at truth and are reliable in the environments for which they are designed. A similar point holds for the below counterexamples to proper functionalism.
Henderson, Horgan, and Potrč defend a view they call Transglobal Evidentialism–Reliabilism. The view avoids the new evil demon problem for reliabilism, which it was designed to do, but it offers no progress on the issues discussed in this paper. They claim “Propositions A\(_{1}\), ..., A\(_{n}\) collectively provide strong evidential support for proposition B just in case B is true in a wide range of experientially relevant possible worlds in which A\(_{1}\), ..., A\(_{n}\) are all true.” (2007, p. 293). An experientially relevant possible world is, roughly, one “compatible with having the experiences of roughly the character of those agents actually have” (2007, p. 283, cf. 2007, p. 293–294, 2011, p. 109–110). This account makes no progress with respect to necessary truths, for in every world, Gödel’s theorem is true. Trivially, then, the theorem is true in experientially relevant possible worlds when BEER is true. Or, anticipating the next sub-section, consider the contingent proposition that there exist creatures that have experiences. This proposition is constitutive of experientially relevant possible worlds. So it is trivially true that this proposition is true in experientially relevant worlds when BEER is true. Henderson et al.’s account entails that BEER supports propositions it has no business supporting. (If they wish, they could build into their account of evidential support the sort of counterfactual strategy they describe in their 2007, p. 292. This would not help for familiar reasons.)
If there are no genuine miracles, then the Miracle Proposition will say as much.
As Lewis (1981) argues, if we live in a deterministic world, the closest world in which I do something differently than I actually do may involve a small miracle just prior to my action. I’m happy to assume that we don’t live in a deterministic world, but even if we do, there is an easy fix. Just let the miracle proposition concern only those miracles that occurred long ago. Then the miracle proposition will be constitutive of the most similar worlds.
I suspect that SW is monkishly chaste with some contingent truths as well. A good candidate is remote-constituting propositions, i.e. those propositions that are true only in worlds that are not among the most similar worlds.
The proponent of the Nomic Account can avoid this counterexample if she assumes that a conjunction is nomically related to a conclusion whenever one of its conjuncts is nomically related to the conclusion. Since L2 is nomically related to L3, any conjunction that contains L2 as a conjunct would likewise be nomically related to L3. The Nomic Account, therefore, would rightly allow the conjunction of L1 and L2 to support L3. Unfortunately, endorsing this assumption would merely trade the condemnation problem for the vindication problem. Consider the conjunction of L2 and the claim that if this litmus paper will not be dipped in to the solution, then it will not turn red. The above assumption entails that this conjunction is nomically related to L3 because one of its conjuncts, L2, is nomically related to L3. The Nomic Assumption, then, would hold that this conjunction supports L3, but this is just to wrongly vindicate an instance of denying the antecedent.
In this paper, I focused on denying the antecedent, but a similar problem can be raised for counterinductive reasoning (e.g. 9 out of 10 observed Fs are Gs therefore the next F won’t be a G), which plausibly counts as a non-deductive fallacy. Though, Plantinga (1993, p. 172–173) does not share my intuition that counterinduction is necessarily fallacious.
Talk of design plans and proper function is convenient, but it isn’t essential to showing that SW-RETA is shamefully promiscuous. All that is needed is some possible story according to which: there is a creature who, in all the closest possible worlds to that of the creature, never believes anything (from F) on the basis of BEER except Gödel’s theorem. We could get such a story without appealing to proper function if there is a possible race of creatures, such that Gödel’s theorem is the only proposition that they are disposed to believe on the basis of BEER.
I have been using ‘E’ to stand for an arbitrary proposition that gets used as a premise in an argument. Comesaña uses ‘e’ to refer to both inferential and non-inferential evidence, and I think he intends evidence to come in the form of beliefs or experiences.
The only attempt that I know of to solve a generality problem for fields is Sosa (1991, pp. 281–284). His “solution” is that the relevant process type needs to be usefully generalized upon by the subject and her epistemic community. Unfortunately, it’s not clear his solution fits comfortably with the rest of his view (Foley 1994), and it is doubtful that his solution yields a unique type (Conee and Feldman 1998, p. 28, nt. 37).
Thanks to the following people for providing helpful comments on this paper: Alex Arnold, Robert Audi, Andrew Bailey, Jared Bates, Michael Bergmann, Rod Bertolet, Martin Curd, Paul Draper, Patrick Girard, Shawn Graves, Nate King, Brad Rettler, anonymous referees, and the audiences at Australian National University, Central States Philosophical Association, Indiana Philosophical Association, and Northwestern University. Also thanks to Juan Comesaña for helpful discussion of his views.
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Tucker, C. On what inferentially justifies what: the vices of reliabilism and proper functionalism. Synthese 191, 3311–3328 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0446-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0446-x