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Intentionalism, defeasibility, and justification

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Abstract

According to intentionalism, perceptual experience is a mental state with representational content. When it comes to the epistemology of perception, it is only natural for the intentionalist to hold that the justificatory role of experience is at least in part a function of its content. In this paper, I argue that standard versions of intentionalism trying to hold on to this natural principle face what I call the “defeasibility problem”. This problem arises from the combination of standard intentionalism with further plausible principles governing the epistemology of perception: that experience provides defeasible justification for empirical belief, and that such justification is best construed as probabilification. After exploring some ways in which the standard intentionalist could deal with the defeasibility problem, I argue that the best option is to replace standard intentionalism by what I call “phenomenal intentionalism”. Where standard intentionalism construes experiences as of p as having the content p, phenomenal intentionalism construes (visual) experiences as of p as having “phenomenal” or “looks contents”: contents of the form Lp (it looks as if p).

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Notes

  1. Notable exceptions are McDowell (1982, 1994), Brewer (1999), and Burge (2003). Recently, Brewer has given up intentionalism completely (cf. Brewer 2006, 2011), and McDowell has joined Burge in holding that the content of experience is not “propositional” (cf. McDowell 2008). I strongly suspect, though, that the sense(s) in which experiential contents are “non-propositional” according to McDowell and Burge would not disqualify them from being “propositional” in the sense in which I shall use the term.

  2. This view has been argued for by quite a number of people in a variety of ways recently, for instance Byrne (2009), Pautz (2009), Siegel (2010, 2011), Schellenberg (2011), and Glüer (2014). It has been argued against, too, for instance by Martin (2002), Travis (2004), Brewer (2006).

  3. It is, of course, a substantive and extremely interesting question what it precisely takes for a mental state to be a state having propositional content. But that experience qualifies is assumed, not argued for, in this paper. (For my own Davidsonico–Lewisian take on the general question and its answer in the case of experience, see Glüer (2014)).

    Regarding the way the terminology of propositional contents and attitudes is used in this paper, I would like to note that I take it to be basic, widespread, and well-established. As far as I can tell, this is the way in which these terms have mostly been used in the analytic tradition in the philosophy of mind and language. Anyone who thinks that ascribing contents with, for instance, “accuracy conditions” to experiences does not commit them to experiences having propositional contents should tell us what precisely they mean by “proposition”—such that experiential contents are not propositions. Analogously, anyone thinking that construing experiences as having propositional contents does not commit them to their being propositional attitudes owes us an explanation of what, precisely, a propositional attitude is—such that experience isn’t one.

  4. Again, this is following Pryor (2005). Pryor, however, uses “justifier” and “justification maker” interchangeably. I shall also make use of “justification maker” later, but I shall use it to designate a subspecies of justifier. I’ll explain below.

  5. Again, all I am doing is spelling out a natural train of thought. Epistemic disjunctivists (such as McDowell) would deny that these two perceptual states are epistemically equipowerful. But that is, of course, compatible with its being natural or intuitive to think that they are. And, prima facie at least, intentionalists seem in a good position to develop an account that allows us to think of the epistemic role of experience along the lines just described as natural or intuitive. Schellenberg acknowledges this but nevertheless thinks that subjectively indistinguishable veridical and illusory experiences do not share all their epistemic powers; according to her, illusions provide “phenomenal evidence”, but veridical experiences provide both “phenomenal” and “factive evidence” (Schellenberg 2013).

  6. Not everyone agrees. Comesaña urges us not to “confuse” defeasibility with non-entailment. According to him, the basic notion of defeasible justification is that of “justification which can be lost given improvements in one’s epistemic position” (Comesaña 2014, 232, paraphrasing Pryor 2000, 517). He provides the following example to show that what he calls “entailing justification” is defeasible: “Suppose (...) you have a proof of some complicated theorem. You then show it to a very competent mathematician and (mistakenly) he assures you that there is a fallacy in the proof. You then cease to be justified in believing the theorem, even though you did have (and perhaps still have) evidence which entails it” (Comesaña 2014, 232).

    I am not sure in what sense this example involves any “improvements in one’s epistemic situation”, and I am not sure that, intuitively, justification is lost in this case. But in any case, the notion of defeat exemplified here would seem rather different from the “fallibilist” notion I am using. As illustrated in the example, Comesaña’s notion of defeat does not seem to restrict defeat to being defeated by good reasons or defeaters. Of course, a subject can lose a belief for all sorts of reasons (or none), but not all of these cases are cases in which the justification for that belief is actually defeated (in the fallibilist sense). Moreover, the example involves complicated entailment by logical (or mathematical) truth, and such cases are special, and vexed, in a variety of ways that make generalizing from them less than safe. More on entailment and the defeasibility of experiential justification in Sect. 3.

  7. The relations between the contents we are trying to capture here are usually called “inferential” or “evidential relations”. This is a concept of evidence that applies to propositions only. Williamson (2000, 194ff) makes a quite persuasive case for the claim that all evidence is propositional. The truth of that claim, however, is not presupposed here. What makes a propositional concept of evidence natural to turn to in our context is that we work from the assumption that the justifier we are interested in has propositional content.

  8. Among other things in order to allow for evidence to remain evidence even after having been updated upon, we should only require that the conditional probability of q on p is not lower than the prior probability of p. I shall abstract from problems like this here.

  9. Such a model is, for instance, used by at least some of the contributors to the recent discussion about the potential anti-skeptical punch of “dogmatism” about experiential justification. “The dogmatist about perceptual justification says that when it perceptually seems to you as if p is the case, you have a kind of justification for believing p that does not presuppose or rest on your justification for anything else, which could be cited in an argument (even an ampliative argument) for p. To have this justification for believing p, you need only have an experience that represents p as being the case. No further awareness or reflection or background beliefs are required. Of course, other beliefs you have might defeat or undermine this justification. But no other beliefs are required for it to be in place” (Pryor 2000, 519). Contributors to that discussion include Wright (2004), Wright (2007), Cohen (2005), White (2006), McGrath (2013). Silins (2014) investigates in more detail how to think of defeaters of experiential justification in precisely such a model. See also below, fn. 19.

  10. The point here does not depend on using an update model assigning probability 1 to incoming information. It is sometimes suggested that we could get around this problem by using Jeffrey conditionalization (I haven’t seen this suggestion spelt out anywhere, though). There would seem to be at least two problems with it. First, it is not clear how to even apply Jeffrey conditionalization in our case—Jeffrey conditionalization is designed for updating on experience on the assumption that experience does not have propositional content. The basic idea behind such suggestions might be to adapt the model by assigning a probability less than 1 to the incoming experiential proposition, but even then, and that is the second problem, we would still be stuck with updating p on p. This still is a problem because it would never result in assigning p a lower probability than the one it came in with. And it is precisely the possibility of such lowering which is required in the step from experience to belief. As long a you go from p to p, it would never seem rational to lower you credence in the process. (Thanks to Susanna Schellenberg for discussion here.)

  11. Even if you find this plausible for objective probabilities, you might think that Fregean contents should be assigned subjective probabilities instead. After all, using them would seem to be motivated by wanting to account for a subjective perspective on the world. I agree, but I am not sure how that would help here. How would “going subjective on Fregean probabilities” justify a subject in lowering their credence when going from experience to belief? Of course, a subject might (wrongly) think that the region of possibility space corresponding to a “Russellian property” is, in fact, occupied by several non-identical properties, properties the subject not only thinks of under different modes of presentation, but also takes to be non-identical. There might be nothing subjectively irrational about this, but nevertheless, it would seem as if any rational assignment of a probability lower than that of the initial Russellian proposition would require an “objective” mistake on the subject’s part. A subject not mistaken about the identity of the relevant properties cannot rationally lower their probability when making such a transition. This does not seem the right model on which to think of defeasibility. Defeasibility should not be such that it requires mistake.

  12. Should it turn out to be possible to deal with the defeasibility problem by means of construing the step from experience to belief as some kind of “Fregeanization” of the experience content, that would by itself be a very interesting result constraining plausible versions of intentionalism.

  13. The defeasibility problem is, of course, related to what I have called the “stuttering inference argument” elsewhere. This is the argument that if experience provides its subject with inferential reasons for basic perceptual belief, standard intentionalism will have to construe the relevant inference as a “stuttering inference”: an inference from p to p (cf. Glüer 2009). The argument is due to McDowell (cf. McDowell 1998, 405f). McDowell uses it as an argument against the claim that experience provides inferential reasons for basic perceptual beliefs, while I have used it as an argument against construing experience content as naive.

  14. Others have used different terminology for essentially the same idea: There is widespread agreement that experiences not only have propositional content, they also have what Searle calls “mind-to-world direction of fit” (cf. Searle 1983, 7ff) and “aim at truth” (Crane 2001, 150). They are thus “assertive” (Heck 2000, 509), “committal” (Burge 2003, 452), or “stative” (Martin 2002, 386f) states. I have argued that experiences not only are like belief in these respects, but in fact are a (special) kind of belief (Glüer 2009).

  15. Even if we think that both examples are paradigmatic examples of “immediate justification”, it is not clear to me why that would mean that we should prefer a uniform treatment of these states’ justificatory role (cf. Pryor 2005, Siegel and Silins 2015 for discussion). At least as long as we are intentionalists holding that experiences do, but mere sensations do not, have representational contents, it seems to me that this difference between the putative justifiers would be quite sufficient to expect and motivate differences in the account of precisely how they provide justification. As Pryor notes, justification can be immediate even if the justifier has content and obeys (\(\hbox {PP}_2\)) (cf. Pryor 2005, 191). See also below, note 22.

  16. Cf. Williamson (2000, 187f) on that.

  17. This should be rather clear for “underminers”, i.e. defeaters attacking the connection between premise e and conclusion p. To be underminable, this connection must be such that there are conditions under which e is true but p is not. Considered as a whole, the relevant possibility space is such that at most of its “e-points” (points where e holds), p holds, too. But there also are true subsets of the e-points for which it is not the case that at most of them p also holds. For instance, on the whole, an experience as of a red book in front of you is such that it makes it very likely that there in fact is one, but under conditions of red lighting, this is not the case.

    One might think that it does not hold for “rebutters”, i.e. defeaters that attack the conclusion directly. Thus, you might have an experience that “tells you” one thing—there is a red book in front of you—but at the same time, an expert tells you that there is no such book. But that would be a mistake. To be able to “rebut” the information from experience, the defeater even in this case needs to be able to engage with it. As long as what you have is nothing but outrightly contradictory incoming information, there is nothing you can rationally do with that. It’s simply not possible to update on both p and not-p at once. What you can update on is the conjunction of experience tells me that p and this expert tells me that not-p. But then, we have precisely switched to a premise (experience tells me that p) which is compatible with the falseness of p.

  18. In his very helpful comments on a prior version of this paper, Juan Comesaña suggests that there is a different way of denying (DPC) while holding on to all the other principles listed above. As we saw above (fn. 6), Comesaña uses a different notion of defeasibility according to which justification in general remains defeasible even if the content of the justifier entails that of the justified belief (cf. Comesaña 2014, 232). In his comments, he suggests adapting the framework suggested by Williamson (2000, 209ff) to help model the defeasibility of entailing justification. This, he suggests, does not require the Williamsonian equation of evidence with knowledge, nor even the assumption that all evidence is true. All we need is the existence of one true epistemic probability function C and the possibility of striking propositions from the evidence a subject S has at a time t. The credences it is rational for S to have in a proposition p then result from conditionalizing C on the evidence S has at t. Suppose that, at \(t_{1}\), S’s evidence contains q and p is entailed by q. At \(t_{1}\), S then has justification for believing p, and the probability of p on q is 1. Nevertheless, it is perfectly possible that at a later time \(t_{2}\), S has lost this justification for believing p—because q is no longer part of S’s evidence. Thus, justification can be lost by loss of evidence. Williamson’s paradigm example for such loss is forgetting what one once knew. Let’s call this a “defeat by loss” model. Comesaña suggests that this model can be quite straightforwardly applied to experiential justification. Suppose that at \(t_{1}\), I have an experience with the content that there is a red book in front of me, and no defeating evidence. At \(t_{1}\), the proposition that there is a red book in front of me is part of my evidence. But at \(t_{2}\), I learn that there are red lights shining on the book. At \(t_{2}\), Comesaña claims, the proposition that there is a red book in front of me is no longer part of my evidence, and my credence in it should therefore be considerably lower than at \(t_{1}\). Even if we consider the defeat by loss model as simply a model employing an alternative notion of defeat, it doesn’t seem to fit justificatory relations between experience and belief particularly well. Here are two reasons for thinking that it won’t provide a satisfactory account of such relations: First, defeat here amounts to saying that my experience does not provide me with evidence or justification at \(t_{2}\). And that just does not seem right—we must not forget that we have been talking about prima facie justification all along. At \(t_{2}\), I have lost my (all things considered) justification for believing that there is a red book in front of me, but not because my experience has stopped providing me with prima facie justification for that belief. Rather, it is because the prima facie justification it provides at both \(t_{1}\) and \(t_{2}\) has been overridden at \(t_{2}\). At \(t_{2}\), when both the experience and the belief that the lighting on the book is red have to be taken into account when determining my overall (or all things considered) justification for believing that there is a red book in front of me, the result is no longer strong enough for outright belief. Having one’s experience overridden, whether by background belief or by a newly acquired belief, is not like forgetting one’s evidence.

    That even defeated experience continues to provide you with prima facie justification can also be seen from considerations like the following: even at \(t_{2}\), the experience as of a red book in front of me raises the probability of there being a red book in front of me (compared to the probability that proposition has all on its own). That is, even together with the (justified) belief that there are red lights shining on the book, the experience provides prima facie justification for believing that there is a red book in front of me. It’s just that now, it provides equally strong prima facie justification for believing that there is a white book in front of me. (Further knowledge about the surrounding conditions might tip the balance in one or the other direction.) A defeat by loss model on which all we can do is, so to speak, switch experience’s evidential powers either on or off won’t be able to account for this. Secondly, on Comesaña’s defeat by loss model it remains mysterious just why it would be rational for me to switch the experience off at \(t_{2}\). The model does not provide any explanation of the defeat itself; it is only concerned with what happens (or should happen) afterwards. But what we wanted to know was why the experience is “switched off” at \(t_{2}\), so to speak, not what it is rational to believe once it has been switched off. (On Williamson’s own model, we do get an externalist explanation here: Evidence gets switched off when it is no longer known, but, as I said, Comesaña does not think the plausibility of his idea depends on the Williamsonian equation of evidence with knowledge.)

  19. The “problem for dogmatism” here is just that (\(\hbox {H}_{1}\)) also raises the probability of (\(\hbox {H}_{3}\)):

    (\(\hbox {H}_{3}\)):

    This is a fake-hand.

    Thus, it does not look as if experience provides the kind of anti-skeptical punch that dogmatism advertises: Rather than boosting justification for rejecting what we might call phenomenally equivalent skeptical hypotheses, experience seems to do the opposite (cf. White 2006, 531ff). There is work in progress by Jim Pryor in reaction to this (accessible on his homepage). See also Cohen (2005), Wright (2004, 2007), Spectre (2009), McGrath (2013) for relevant discussion. The basic observation goes back to Carnap (1950). The phenomenon is also noted (but welcomed) in Glüer (2014).

  20. In order to satisfy the difference requirement in full generality, the move to appearance propositions cannot be limited to cases of illusion or hallucination, either. To use this move to diffuse the defeasibility problem, we have to apply it across the board. All justification for basic perceptual belief would come via introspection, then.

  21. But don’t “first order” mental states such as beliefs provide justification for introspective “second order” beliefs? Possibly. But if so, they do not do so by means of providing inferential support. They would be mere justification makers. And of course, experience might then be a mere justification maker for introspective beliefs, too. All I am saying right now is that that does not make experience into an inferential justifier, not even an indirect one.

  22. On the assumption that beliefs do justify beliefs about themselves, they are states “assertively representing propositions” acting as mere justification makers for (second order) empirical beliefs. One might thus think that construing experience as a mere justification maker is not as much in need of special motivation as I made it out to be above (one might draw on Pryor 2005 here). But whether the state we form an introspective belief about is a headache or a (first order) belief, the characteristic difference pointed out above remains: If a state s is a justification maker for a second order belief bel about s, bel is such that it is justified by the very object it is about. This might make good epistemological sense where the object is such that the subject has “privileged access” to it, but basic perceptual beliefs are not about experiences. They are about ordinary material objects. Thus, while it might be epistemologically fine to construe an experience as a justification maker for an introspective belief about that very experience, this does not automatically provide a model by which the experience could also be a justification maker for a (first order) basic perceptual belief. And even if we could explain how experience could have justification making powers directed simultaneously both “upwards” and “sideways”, we would still need to explain why experience is so different here from belief. For even on the assumption that belief is an “immediate” justification maker for introspective belief, we do not think that puts any pressure on us to refrain from construing (first order) belief as an inferential justifier for further (first order) belief. Why would experience, if construed as a state “assertively representing propositions”—just like belief—be any different in this respect?

  23. Silins might be prepared to accept that experience is a mere justification maker. While he writes along standard intentionalist lines and thus speaks of experiences with the content that p as justifying beliefs that p, he explicitly notes, that this is a matter of mere convenience: “For convenience I will speak of experiences as having representational contents, and as having contents that can be shared with beliefs. (...) It should be possible (although inconvenient) to adapt all formulations in the paper so as to be neutral with respect to those debates” (Silins 2014, fn. 1).

  24. Thus his verdict that “nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief” (Davidson 1983, 141). Consequently, there is no defeasibility problem for Davidson, either. For more on Davidson and McDowell on perception, see Glüer (2012b).

  25. “Entitlement”, Burge explains

    is epistemically externalist inasmuch as it is warrant that that need not be fully conceptually accessible, even on reflection, to the warranted individual. The individual need not have the concepts necessary to think the propositional content that formulates the warrant. Entitlements that I shall discuss are epistemically externalist in the further sense that the warranting features include relations between the individual and an environment (Burge 2003, 504f).

  26. According to Burge himself, perceptual states have representational contents that are truth-conditional, but not propositional. The belief that you are (prima facie) entitled to form on the basis of an experience with such a content is what he calls “an appropriately conceptualized perceptual belief” (ibid.). Ignoring this difference, I am using ‘p’ for both the “conceptualized” belief content and the “unconceptualized” experience content here.

  27. For further discussion of Burge’s suggestion, see Silins (2012).

  28. The epistemic disjunctivist might not have much epistemological use for the indicator-idea, construing entitlement along McDowellian lines, for instance, as conferred by states of seeing (or veridical experience in other modalities) only. But states of seeing are, of course, supremely reliable indicators.

  29. Schellenberg (2013) argues along lines somewhat similar to Burge’s for the claim that experience provides what she calls “phenomenal evidence” for belief. According to Schellenberg, the function of experience is to single out particulars and property instances in one’s environment, and having perceptual experiences is exercising perceptual capacities to do so. From this, she derives a claim according to which “good cases”, i.e. cases in which the subject succeeds in experientially singling out particulars and property instances, have metaphysical (and explanatory) priority over “bad cases”, i.e. cases of illusion or hallucination. This, she argues, is why an experience as of p provides “phenomenal” evidence for believing that p—regardless of whether the experience is illusory or not, and regardless of its reliability (cf. Schellenberg 2013, 700ff; 720). Again, epistemological consequences are drawn from metaphysical claims about essential relations between experience (content) and the environment. (For Schellenberg, this involves content externalism insofar as she thinks of concepts in “capacity terms”, i.e. of concept possession as consisting in the possession of certain kinds of cognitive capacities.) But here, there is no connection with reliability at all. So, how do we derive any epistemic characteristics for experience, then?

    According to Schellenberg, it is rational for a subject to rely on their experiences precisely because these are the results of exercising capacities to single out particulars and property instances. And having such capacities entails that if a subject exercises these in the presence of a suitable F under suitable conditions, she will in fact succeed in perceptually singling out this F and its instance of F-ness. Thus, the metaphysics of experience is supposed to explain its epistemology—but explicitly without invoking the notion of reliability:

    The notion of systematic linkage in play is understood in terms of a metaphysical and explanatory primacy notion, which is not a reliabilist notion. If perceptual capacities are employed in perception, then they happen to be reliable. However, even in this case it is the primacy of the good over the bad case that gives experience its epistemic force. On the account presented, the epistemic force of perceptual experience does not depend on whatever reliability (if any) perceptual experience might have (Schellenberg 2013, 720).

    Even if we grant the highly controvertible functional metaphysics, there is the very same lacuna here as in Burge’s account, it seems to me. The question, simply put, is: How do we get the epistemology out of the metaphysics? And given its explicit divorce from what might well seem to be the most relevant epistemic characteristic in the vicinity—the reliability of experience—the epistemological significance of the metaphysics remains even more of a mystery here. Moreover, it is hard to see how the link could be established in a way that preserves the claimed independence from reliability. On the assumption that reliability is a mere accident and has nothing to do with the epistemic force of experience, it should remain rational to rely on experience even in the absence of reliability. This requires that it is possible to have the capacities characterised by Schellenberg without their exercises being reliable indicators of what they function to single out. And indeed, given the way Schellenberg characterises the relevant capacities, having them does not guarantee reliability. It only guarantees that there won’t be many “false negatives”, so to speak—false positives might nevertheless abound. As an illustration, think of Burge’s example of a rabbit’s representation of danger (Burge 2003, 517). Its tokenings are very unreliable as indicators of danger in precisely that way. But even though it makes a lot of sense for the rabbit to panic in reaction to each and every one of them, it would hardly be rational for creatures like us to form danger-beliefs on the basis of a rabbity-capacity to single out instances of danger. It thus looks as if there needs to be more to having perceptual capacities than Schellenberg requires if these capacities are to explain the epistemic force of experience. Moreover, it again looks likely that reliability will be highly relevant to this explanation.

  30. Sympathies with putting subjective appearance properties into the contents of experience are expressed by, among others, Egan (2006), who suggests understanding them as “centering features”, Antony (2011), and myself (2009, 2012a).

  31. Philosophers thinking that experience represents objective, but situation-dependent properties include Harman (1990), Tye (1995), Noë (2004), Schellenberg (2007, 2008), and Brogaard (2010). Brogaard thinks of these properties as “centered properties”. Except for Noë, who identifies what he calls “perspectival” or “P-properties” with looks, these philosophers do not usually link them to appearances, however. Relationalists such as Brewer (2011) and Genone (2014) do identify looks or appearances with certain kinds of objective, situation-dependent properties, but they do not think that experiences represent them. Rather, they join Martin (2010) in thinking that experiences do not have representational contents at all. Martin himself goes further and argues that looks aren’t relational at all. According to him, looks are identical to the basic sensible properties (for some critical discussion, see Glüer (2013).

  32. There are two main kinds of motivation for adopting such a “dual representationalism”. Shoemaker suggests that experience represents both colors and “appearance colors” in order to allow for spectrum inversion without misrepresentation while holding on to strong representationalism, i.e. the claim that experiential content determines (experiential) phenomenal character and vice versa. Most others adopt the dual representation idea in order to explain perceptual constancies in terms of experiential content. For an argument to the effect that no such dual representationalism actually can account for the full phenomenology of perceptual constancy, see Glüer (2015).

  33. Of course, other properties may play a role in the analysis of appearance properties, but that is a different story.

  34. Antony, too, argues that the only properties “present” in our experience are appearance properties. But she thinks that their experiential presence amounts to “representation” only in “an attenuated sense” (35f). This is because she thinks of the relation between appearance properties and experiences in such a way that it is impossible for an experience to misrepresent these properties, and of representation as requiring the possibility of misrepresentation. I think that on phenomenal intentionalism, it remains possible for experience to have false contents. This will be unusual, since it requires misclassification of one’s own sensations, but it strikes me as clearly possible. But even if the appearance content of an experience never were to be false, I do not see why it would be any less representational for that. Appearance contents do have (empirical) truth conditions, and they do not lose them by being the contents of “infallible” states.

  35. Shoemakerian appearance properties are a good start, but where he has phenomenal kinds, I think we need what could be called “functional phenomenal kinds” (I am drawing on Pagin (2000) here). The idea has been developed in more detail for color experience in Glüer (2012a).

  36. One of my main motivations for developing phenomenal intentionalism is accommodating both the intuitive reason providing role as well as the justificatory role of experience (Glüer 2009, 2012b, 2014). (McGrath (forthcoming) agrees that looks provide reasons (and justification) for perceptual beliefs, but thinks of looks in “fully objective” terms.)

    Moreover, adopting a phenomenal semantics allows us to construe experience as a (special) kind of belief. Most importantly, it allows us to construe experience as an attitude of holding true—such an attitude is arguably required to be what I have here called an inferential justifier. Nothing short of a proposition held true provides a subject with (inferential) reasons or justification for believing another proposition. Cf. Glüer (2009, 2012b).

  37. As Comesaña notes, externalism about the relation of evidential support is rather widespread these days (cf. Comesaña 2005). Pollock himself, however, construed the relation between experience and basic perceptual belief as a conceptual matter. While I think that goes too far, I do think that the ability to draw the right inferences from (undefeated) experience, inferences from looks red to is red, for instance, is sufficiently basic to content determination to set experience apart from, say, brute clairvoyance cases. For more on that, see Glüer (2014).

  38. This position of course is similar to dogmatism (cf. above, note 9) in embracing Pollockian prima facie justification as the model for experiential justification. As Pryor develops it, dogmatism construes experience as what I have called a mere “justification maker”, not an inferential justifier, however. Given that the experiential input proposition is a looks-proposition, there is no particular anti-skeptical punch to the account of experiential justification suggested here. After all, as noted above (fn. 19), an input proposition Lp not only provides evidential support for p, but indeed for any phenomenally equivalent skeptical hypothesis as well, even though presumably much less of it.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Juan Comesaña, James Genone, Susanna Schellenberg, and Peter Pagin for very helpful comments and discussion.

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Glüer, K. Intentionalism, defeasibility, and justification. Philos Stud 173, 1007–1030 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0538-6

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