Abstract
A number of philosophers have recently claimed that unjustified beliefs can be defeaters. However these claims have been made in passing, occurring in the context of defenses of other theses. As a result, the claim that unjustified beliefs can be defeaters has been neither vigorously defended nor thoroughly explained. This paper fills that gap. It begins by identifying problems with the two most in-depth accounts of the possibility of unjustified defeaters due to Bergmann (Justification without awareness. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006) and Pryor (Philos Issues 14:349–378, 2004). It then offers a revised version of Pryor’s account. On this proposal, an unjustified belief can be a defeater if it is rational, all things considered. If a belief is rational, all things considered, it can require one to abandon other beliefs with which it conflicts—even if it is unjustified. Finally, this paper shows that the proposed account of unjustified defeaters is one that can and should be embraced by leading accounts of justified belief as diverse as reliabilism and evidentialism.
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Notes
A number of other works by Bergmann touch on this topic. Bergmann (1997, 2000) discuss a slightly different condition on warrant which he calls the “No-Defeater Condition” (NDC). According to NDC, a belief is warranted only if one does not believe that it is defeated, which amounts to not believing that it is epistemically irrational (2000, p. 89). Neither paper argues for NDC, but both put it to use. Bergmann (1997) uses NDC in order to sharpen the disagreement between internalists and externalists. Bergmann (2000) uses NDC in order to argue that deontological conditions on warrant do not support internalism. Another paper, Bergmann (2004), relies on the possibility of unjustified defeaters in order to defend epistemic circularity. Bergmann argues that while one can acquire a justified belief by way of epistemic circularity, the unjustified beliefs and doubts in “questioned source contexts” (2004, p. 717) can defeat that justification. Finally, in his (2005) Bergmann provides an explicit discussion and defense of NBDC that is incorporated and further developed in his (2006).
For example: “What are defeaters? The basic idea is that they are mental states of a person, S, that cause a justified belief of S to become unjustified,” (2006, p. 155). “It is obvious… that I’m thinking of defeatees as beliefs… it is a belief that gets defeated. And what that amounts to is that the belief in question ceases to be justified,” (2006, pp. 159–160).
Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this issue.
This is not to say that evidence is the only thing that can influence whether a belief is justified. Bergmann’s proper function account of justification rejects that stronger evidentialist thesis.
The label is Bergmann’s (2006, p. 166).
More specifically, Pryor later describes his (2004) paper as a defense of Moorean Dogmatism (2012, p. 276). There he describes dogmatism about perception as the view that our simplest perceptual beliefs are immediately warranted or justified– that is, their warrant or justification is not constituted by warrant or justification to believe other claims (2012, p. 276). So for example, the dogmatist about perception holds that one is justified in believing claims like, “here are two hands,” but not in virtue of one’s having justification to believe other claims such as “my senses are reliable,” or “I am not dreaming”. The Moorean dogmatist holds that this immediate justification can be transmitted through the following reasoning, which strikes many as unsatisfying:
“(1) Here are two hands.
(2) If hands exist, then there is an external world.
(3) So there is an external world.” (2004, p. 349).
Whether or not the dogmatist about perception is committed to Moorean dogmatism Pryor notes is a substantive claim that needs to be argued for (2013, p. 96). Nevertheless, in his (2004) Pryor attempts to defend Moorean dogmatism by explaining our “squeamishness” about such reasoning (2004, p. 351). Unjustified defeaters play a crucial role in that explanation: although Moorean reasoning can be used to acquire justification, such justification is vulnerable to being defeated by unjustified doubts and beliefs. For further discussion of dogmatism see Pryor (2012, section 3) and Pryor (2013, section 3).
Note that while Pryor spells out these relations in terms of what the epistemic effects of a belief would be were it justified, or what Pryor later calls “hypothetical” support or undermining (2012, p. 285), the relations are nonetheless non-hypothetical relations of rational commitment. After all, as Pryor notes, if you believe that Johnny can fly and refrain from believing that someone can fly then you are exhibiting a categorical rational failing even if your belief that Johnny can fly is not justified (2004, p. 364). As Pryor later emphasizes, “Hypothetical support is partly a matter of what categorical support you would have, if you had that warrant for P. But it’s also more than that: when your belief in P hypothetically supports believing Q, and you nonetheless resist believing Q, you will thereby be exhibiting some kind of (categorical) epistemic defect,” (2012, p. 285). Thanks to an anonymous referee for bringing this issue to my attention.
“Like me, Bergmann… also thinks that having doubts about Moore’s conclusion will take away your doxastic justification for believing Moore’s premise,” (2004, p. 375, footnote 39).
“You may in fact have justification to believe its premises, and just have unjustified doubts about them. The proof would then still give you justification to believe its conclusion. Your doubts would prevent you from rationally accepting that conclusion, until you gave them up. But this is no fault of the proof’s. The fault lies with you, for having doubts you have no good reason to believe,” (2004, p. 365).
For example, in his influential defense of reliabilism, “What is Justified Belief?”, Goldman held that a belief resulting from a reliable process is not ultima facie justified if one is justified in believing that the process is unreliable (1979, p. 18).
Other externalists have followed suit. According to Greco’s virtue-based agent reliabilism a belief resulting from a reliable cognitive faculty fails to count as knowledge unless it satisfies a “subjective justification” condition, which requires the absence of reason to believe that the belief is the result of an unreliable process (2010, p. 167). And as we have already seen, according to Bergmann’s proper function analysis, a belief that results from a properly functioning faculty is not ultima facie justified if one believes that the belief is epistemically inappropriate. Elsewhere I have argued that by acknowledging that justification is defeasible in this way externalists can offer a theory of justification that can accommodate considerations that have mistakenly been thought to support internalism. See Alexander (2012).
This is why when describing the set of considerations that can influence the justification of a belief I prefer to describe them as one’s “reasons” rather than one’s “evidence”. An unjustified belief can be a reason insofar as it rationally commits one to other attitudes. But one can accept this without holding that unjustified beliefs are evidence. This use of the term “reasons” is of course partly stipulative. There are other ways of using the term such as that found in Broome (1999) where reasons are contrasted with normative requirements.
Pryor himself seems to be aware of this problem. He calls beliefs that one recognizes to be unjustified “pathological doubts” (2004, p. 363). In an endnote he tentatively suggests that such pathological doubts cannot be defeaters: “Perhaps pathological doubts wouldn’t have that power. Suppose you have a nagging belief that you’re a brain in a vat, which you recognize to be unjustified, but which you just can’t get rid of. But you go ahead and form perceptual beliefs on the basis of your experiences, just like everyone else. Then you’d be exhibiting a kind of irrationality. But in this case it’s not clear we should attribute any irrationality to your perceptual beliefs. They might arguably count as well-founded,” (2004, p. 375). However, despite his recognition of this problem, Pryor doesn’t attempt to work out the details of his account of unjustified defeaters to accommodate it. Again, his focus is on defending dogmatism, not the possibility of unjustified defeaters.
I suspect Pryor envisaged something like the view I develop in this paper. He writes, “Because the epistemic effects we're considering are non-monotonic and matters of degree, so too will be the relations of rational obstruction, rational support, and rational opposition. To keep our discussion simpler, though, I will mostly suppress the complications that introduces.” (2004, p. 364). Since the relations are non-monotonic, the defeating power of an unjustified belief can itself be defeated. Thanks to an anonymous referee for discussion of this point.
Additional conditions on holistic rationality might be offered based on one’s view about what the set of relevant considerations include. For example, evidentialists who hold that non-doxastic mental states such as experiences and rational insights are part of one’s evidence will hold that such states can influence what is rational, all things considered. In contrast, coherentists may reject this. My modified version of Pryor’s account holds that the relevant considerations includes at least one’s beliefs but is open to the possibility that other considerations are also relevant.
Reliabilism, of course, faces the generality problem. The process responsible for a given belief will be a token of different types, types which exhibit different degrees of reliability. For example, the process responsible for Jill’s belief in The Bunglers, but with Funny Business might be described as “belief based on testimony” or “belief based on the testimony of someone Jill hardly knows” or “belief based on the testimony of a compulsive liar”. Which description of the process is the relevant one that determines the justification of Jill’s belief? If reliabilism is correct there must be some solution to this difficult problem. And if there is a solution to this problem then there will be the kinds of cases I have described: beliefs based on processes that are, unbeknownst to the believer, unreliably produced. For an introduction to the generality problem, see Conee and Feldman (1985c).
Another more exotic example of an unjustified but rational belief is provided by the famous “new evil demon problem” for reliabilism. Imagine a counterpart of yours who believes just as you do on the basis of experiences that, despite being subjectively indistinguishable from yours, are the result of an all-powerful deceiving demon. Because your counterpart’s beliefs are the result of an unreliable process they are unjustified. And yet the beliefs seem just as rational as yours. This is simply an extreme version of what is going on in The Bunglers, but with Funny Business. In both cases the lack of justification is inaccessible to the believer, making belief rationally permissible. For the new evil demon problem see Cohen (1984, p. 281).
Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this worry.
For example, Conee and Feldman suggest that one’s ultimate evidence consists of one’s experiences and that they support belief in P insofar as P figures into the best available explanation of one’s experiences. See Conee and Feldman (2008).
See Conee and Feldman’s discussion of the problem of forgotten evidence (1985a, p. 70).
For simplicity in what follows when discussing minimally rational beliefs I will drop the “minimally” qualifier unless emphasizing their lack of rational support is appropriate.
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Acknowledgements
Versions of this paper were given at the central meeting of the American Philosophical Association, the Midsouth Philosophy Conference, and the metaphysics and epistemology reading group at Iowa State University. I would like to thank participants at those events for their feedback. For detailed feedback on earlier versions of this paper I would like to thank Michael Bergmann, Sommer Hodson, Stephen Biggs, and two anonymous reviewers of Erkenntnis.
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Alexander, D. Unjustified Defeaters. Erkenn 82, 891–912 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-016-9849-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-016-9849-z