Abstract
I consider the ‘inferentialist’ thesis that whenever a mental state rationally justifies a belief it is in virtue of inferential relations holding between the contents of the two states. I suggest that no good argument has yet been given for the thesis. I focus in particular on Williamson (Knowledge and its limits, 2000) and Ginsborg (Reasons for belief, 2011) and show that neither provides us with a reason to deny the plausible idea that experience can provide non-inferential justification for belief. I finish by pointing out some theoretical costs and tensions associated with endorsing inferentialism.
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Notes
Compare Popper (1959 [1935]): ‘If we demand justification by reasoned argument, in the logical sense, then we are committed to the view that statements can be justified only by statements’ (p75, italics in the original). Popper approvingly cites the work of the \(19^{\mathrm{th}}\)-century German philosopher J. F. Fries (1828–31) in connection with this claim.
Of course, an experience might also confer externalist, non-evidential justification in virtue of being a reliable mechanism, as well as being a reason for belief.
Though see Gluer-Pagin (2014), who holds that experiences are a kind of belief.
Both Bonjour and Brewer have since changed their minds on this issue—see Bonjour (2000) and Brewer (2011) respectively. McDowell’s more recent work might also be seen as retreating from inferentialism—e.g., his (2013). And in Sect. 3, below, I will argue that Williamson is in fact sympathetic to experience providing something like non-inferential rational justification.
Clarification: to say that justification is ‘in virtue of’ the inferential connection between contents of m1 and m2, is not the same as saying that the subject gains justification via performing an inference. It may be that the subject forms a justified belief in response to the experience without performing any kind of mental action we would want to call a personal-level inference (conscious or unconscious), but the experience counts as a (good) reason for belief for the subject in virtue of the content of the experience entailing or making likely the content of the belief.
I am very grateful to an anonymous referee for pressing me to distinguish between these different senses of ‘representational’.
Clarification: not all versions of foundationalism need be committed to the existence of non-inferential justification. One possible kind of foundationalism holds that basic beliefs are self-justifying; and this justificatory relation that a basic belief allegedly bears to itself then perhaps could be held to be inferential.
I consider the options/costs for resisting some of these sorts of apparent counter-examples to inferentialism in Sect. 5, below.
Hopp (2011) makes this point forcefully:
‘There is no need to explain how non-conceptual states can stand in inferential or logical relations with beliefs. They don’t and can’t. This does not mean we are in the presence of a mystery, however. What, in the theory of knowledge, could be less mysterious than that my belief can become epistemically justified when I manage to perceive, to come into the direct presence of, its truth-maker?... Provided perceptual experiences actually manage to ‘get at’ a certain class of objects, they can provide warrant for belief about those objects. The fact that they can, moreover, is more obvious, by a long shot, than any theory according to which all reason-giving relations are inferential.” (Hopp 2011, p. 191).
William Alston attributed this sort of mistake to Sellars:
‘It is tempting to suppose that Sellars has fallen victim to the pervasive confusion between the activity of justifying a belief—showing the belief to be reasonable, credible or justified—and a belief’s being justified, where this is some kind of epistemic state or condition of the believer vis-a-vis the belief, rather than something he is or might be doing.
... if still in the coils of this confusion, he is likely to take it as obvious that at least S must be capable of justifying B in order to be justified in accepting B.’ (Alston, Epistemic justification 1989, pp. 70–71).
I am not suggesting that Sosa himself is making the sort of mistaken ‘slide’ in question—I mention him only to illustrate the respectable argument from which such sliding might begin.
I am grateful to an anonymous referee for some very helpful suggestions as to how best to structure this section.
Ginsborg first draws this distinction in her (Ginsborg 2006).
I further discuss this possibility in Sect. 5, below.
I think this sort of position, allowing non-propositional reasons1, but insisting that reasons2 are always propositional, can be thought of as opposite to the view Williamson seems to endorse, which effectively holds that reasons1 are always propositions, but allows that some reasons2, e.g., sensory experiences, are non-propositional. See the discussion of Williamson in the previous Sect. 3, above.
Indeed you might think that having the ability to immediately recognize F-ness when you see it, in some range of circumstances, just is the ability to reliably form beliefs about F-ness on the basis of experiencing F-ness in those circumstances. I.e., the recognitional ability is not something distinct from the ability to form justified beliefs.
For simplicity I assume here, as is generally the case, that relational theories of experience are non-representational theories. However, there are some ‘hybrid’ views in the literature, e.g., Langsam (2011), Logue (forthcoming), which hold that experience is both relational and representational.
See footnote 26, below, for examples of theorists who hold such a view.
E.g., One familiar kind of theory about mental content holds that a mental state has whatever content it has in virtue of the role of the relevant sub-personal mechanisms in promoting the historical evolutionary success of the species etc. And so you might think that the representational content is a property of the physical/neural structures/mechanisms that instantiate the mental state, structures/mechanisms which also happen to ground or give rise to the phenomenology, but that this content is not manifested in or embodied by the phenomenology itself. Such a position will perhaps seem more plausible for some mental states than others—e.g., whatever phenomenology an episode of consciously trying/willing to do X has is perhaps plausibly not such as to display whatever specific content this trying/willing state is held to possess. Whereas, I take it, most representational theorists of perception would want to hold that the phenomenology of a perceptual experience does display or embody the content of that mental state. And of course this need not be an all or nothing distinction. It might be that some aspects of a state’s phenomenology are content embodying/displaying whilst others are not (i.e., they are representationally idle).
Some philosophers, e.g., Dennett (1991), will want to deny that conscious experience can really have such a richly determinate nature that can outstrip the subject’s ability to make judgements about it in this way—it merely introspectively seems (an introspective illusion) to be richly determinate and detailed in this way.
Once more, I am indebted to an anonymous referee for suggesting this way of framing the issues here.
Notice (to repeat): the issue here is whether experience itself can provide even a measure of non-inferential justification, not whether it can, all by itself, provide complete/outright justification for belief.
An intermediate position, somewhere in between the second and third approaches, might be a version of recent ‘disunified’ theories of experience, which hold that a perceptual experience consists of both a sensory and a cognitive component—see Bengson et al. (2011), Reiland (2014). If the cognitive component possessed content not only about the environment but also about the sensory component then, depending on the precise relation between these two components, this might be thought of either as a version of the second approach or the third.
Or to put it in terms of our recognitional abilities: this third approach could be understood as holding that our ability to recognise these various further aspects of our conscious experience—both that it has the content it does and also any non-representational features/aspects it might have—is mediated by a further representational state or component whose content concerns these aspects of the original experience.
The term ‘seeming’ is a philosophical term of art that has been understood in a variety of ways. For example: as Huemer (2001, 2007, 2013) uses the term, perception, introspection, memory, rational intuitions can all count as different kinds of ‘seemings’ that can provide non-inferential justification, whilst Brogaard (2013) holds that ‘epistemic seemings’ just are beliefs. For present purposes I am using ‘seeming’ to mean some kind of putative representational state that is neither a perceptual experience nor a belief.
Versions of this paper were presented at the conferences: ‘Perspectives on Intentionality’, Fefor (Norway), ‘Epistemic Justification’, University of Groningen and at King’s College London. I am very grateful to the audiences on all three occasions for their helpful questions. Thanks in particular to Clayton Littlejohn and to Anders Nes for helpful discussions. And many thanks also to two anonymous referees whose comments and criticisms very substantially improved this paper.
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Raleigh, T. Against an inferentialist dogma. Synthese 194, 1397–1421 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-1002-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-1002-z