Abstract
Theories of epistemic rationality that take disagreement (or other higher-order evidence) seriously tend to be “modest” in a certain sense: they say that there are circumstances in which it is rational to doubt their correctness. Modest views have been criticized on the grounds that they undermine themselves—they’re self-defeating. The standard Self-Defeat Objections depend on principles forbidding epistemically akratic beliefs; but there are good reasons to doubt these principles—even New Rational Reflection, which was designed to allow for certain special cases that are intuitively akratic. On the other hand, if we construct a Self-Defeat Objection without relying on anti-akratic principles, modest principles turn out not to undermine themselves. In the end, modesty should not be seen as a defect in a theory of rational belief.
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Notes
The notion of rationality I’m interested in here is a distinctively epistemic one. If there are principles governing which beliefs it’s pragmatically rational to have (or, perhaps more plausibly, to try to get oneself to have), they are a separate matter. On the notion under discussion, it may be rational for a father to believe his daughter committed an awful crime, even if he realizes that having that belief will destroy him emotionally.
This is one use of ‘modest’; there are other uses in the literature.
Positions along these lines are offered by Kelly (2005), Lasonen-Aarnio (2014), and Titelbaum (2015); a related view is put forth in Smithies (2019). The intuitive costs of this sort of position have been brought out in many papers in the literature on disagreement and higher-order evidence. For a representative example, consider a pilot who consults her flight instruments, whose readings in fact rationally support, in a complex way, the claim that she has enough fuel to reach an airport more distant than her original destination. She reaches this conclusion, but then is told that she’s likely hypoxic (hypoxia often causes people to reach irrational conclusions in complex reasoning, even while feeling clear-headed). Is the pilot rational to maintain her extremely high confidence that she has enough fuel? The views in question seem committed to saying that she is.
This formulation of the problem draws on Elga (2010) and Christensen (2013). Note that this version of the problem is not dependent on any contingent facts about the present distribution of opinion on Conciliationism. The objection is that if an account of rationality would, in some epistemic situation, require incompatible or irrational belief-states, it must be defective.
I have presented the Self-Defeat Objection in the standard way, as a challenge based on doubts about whether modest principles give correct accounts of rational belief. There is, of course, the question of whether a similar Self-Defeat Objection might be based directly on doubts about whether following modest principles yields accurate beliefs. I will discuss this issue in detail in Sects. 5 and 6 below.
Here and below, I’ll use “the world” as shorthand for whatever is the subject-matter of the first-order beliefs in question. Of course, one might dispute about whether beliefs about a priori matters are about “the world,” or one might argue that beliefs about rationality are beliefs about “the world”. I hope I can use this shorthand without expressing commitment to any particular answers to these questions.
See, for example, Adler (2002), Bergmann (2005, p. 423), Gibbons (2006, p. 32), Smithies (2012), or Littlejohn (2018). Even Arpaly (2000), which argues that when an agent has false beliefs about what’s rational, the most rational option is often the akratic one, takes akrasia as violating a rational coherence condition.
One might think that this issue would be moot. Some have thought that Conciliationism would be completely unmotivated without some sort of enkratic principle. Weatherson (2013) argues this explicitly, and the line is implicit in the popular thought that Conciliationism is motivated only if disagreement is evidence that one’s original belief is irrational. And the same thought would apply equally to other modest accounts of rational belief.
But this would, I think, be too quick. Treatments of disagreement have been divided, and sometimes ambiguous, between seeing disagreement as evidence that one’s initial thinking was irrational, and seeing it as evidence that one’s initial thinking was inaccurate. Elga’s (2007) early defense of Conciliationism, for example, was clearly formulated in terms of accuracy, not rationality. See Christensen (2014) for extended discussion, and argument that the conciliatory force of disagreement primarily flows from concerns about accuracy, not rationality. I will discuss accuracy-based versions of the Self-Defeat Objection below.
The exact numerical details are not required for the example, which also works even with non-uniform distribution of credence among the points were the dart (for all you can tell) may have landed. The main assumption is that you cannot be certain which evidential situation you are in.
Elga’s principle is modeled on the New Principal Principle, which is designed to capture the sense in which objective chance should be taken as an expert.
More precisely, NRR requires rational agents to have the credences that match the ideal function’s conditional credences, where the condition is that it is the ideal function. For the reasons behind this subtlety, see Elga (2013). I should also note that Elga’s principle, being defined in terms of conditional probability, incorporates the assumption that rational credences, and the credences an agent might think are rational, are probabilistically coherent. I think that this assumption should in the end be rejected. But I think that the main points to follow do not turn on this issue.
See Barnett (2020 p. 15 ff). Barnett’s example is also aimed at defending the rationality of certain instances of epistemic akrasia.
I’m putting aside one sort of view here, according to which the ideally rational, or most rational, response to any evidential situation always includes maximal certainty about what the correct rational principles are. On this sort of view, rational beliefs about the principles of rationality are immune to undermining by higher-order evidence. (Views in this neighborhood are defended in Elga (2010), Titelbaum (2015), Littlejohn (2018), Neta (2018), and Smithies (2019).) On this view, Dara would be rational to have complete certainty in the correct theory of rationality (whatever that is), no matter what all the experts said, or, e.g., whether he was presented with powerful evidence that his thinking about the correct theory of rationality had been compromised by judgment-distorting drugs. See Lasonen-Aarnio (2020) for criticism of this sort of view.
One might worry that Dara—or his professors—are not taking Humean skepticism seriously enough. After all, wouldn’t it entail not only that one is not rational to believe inductively-supported conclusions, but also that one is not rational to believe that induction is reliable—that beliefs in inductively-supported conclusions are accurate?.
Putting questions of Hume-interpretation aside, we may grant that Deductive Purism does have the implication that one is not rational to believe in the reliability of induction (it will at least have this implication if one thinks that the reliability of induction is based on inductive support). But Deductive Purism explicitly does not equate rationality with reliability. So the Deductive Purist may consistently believe that (1) my belief in the reliability of induction is not rational, and (2) induction is reliable. This is just another instance of the kind of akrasia Dara embodies in his sandwich beliefs.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this worry.
I should note that different ways of extending Deductive Purism into a full theory of rationality would have different specific results here. On the common Bayesian approach to rational credences into which NRR most naturally fits, rational doxastic attitudes are traditional sharp-valued credences, which are rooted in a priori priors, and evolve as evidence accumulates. On this kind of view, Dara’s rational credence in N on Deductive Purism would be the rational prior credence N, which would presumably be moderate. We could fill in the example to stipulate that this is the general theory which Dara has been taught. But actually, any extension of Deductive Purism on which the rational credence in N is not very high will suffice to make the point in the text.
I should note that neither Marušić nor Rinard quite claim to be theorizing about “epistemic rationality.” Marušić uses “epistemic rationality” only to apply to beliefs whose truth does not depend on our actions. But he sees the commitment-related factors as crucial to the only kind of rationality that applies to beliefs that do depend on our actions. Rinard rejects separating epistemic and pragmatic rationality, and argues that the pragmatic rationality is the only important kind of rationality that applies to belief.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this point.
One might wonder here: Why did NRR succeed in the dartboard and drug cases? They too, crucially featured foreseen gaps between rationality and accuracy. The reason is that in both of those cases, the different hypotheses about what credences were rational in the subject’s situation each encoded information about the subject-matter of the belief. In the dartboard case, the hypotheses about which credence function was rational each entailed what the position of the dart was. In the drug case, the hypotheses about which credence function was rational each entailed whether the argument was valid or not.
For some very different reasons to worry about NRR, see Lasonen-Aarnio (2015).
See Elga (2010) for a nice explanation of this point.
The point here is similar to that made in Field (2000), and shows how there is something right about Elga’s claim that any acceptable view on the epistemology of disagreement “must be dogmatic with respect to its own correctness” (2010, p. 185). EC will not recommend credences (in the sense of calling them rational) that are different from the credences EC recommends. Understood this way, the claim really amounts to the claim that EC (or any account of rationality) not call the same credence both rational and irrational. And there’s no reason to suppose that modest accounts of rationality will run afoul of this requirement. But requiring this sort of consistency is quite different from saying that that EC must be dogmatic in the sense of requiring certainty in the claim that EC is the correct account of rational credence; or in requiring that, whenever EC outputs, say, .5 as the rational credence for P, it must output 1 for the rational credence in “credence .5 is the rational credence in P.”.
Some (e.g. Decker 2014) have found this sort of contingent self-undermining highly problematic, even if it doesn’t show Conciliationism false.
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Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Nomy Arpaly, Jennifer Carr, Branden Fitelson, Sophie Horowitz, Chris Meacham, Ram Neta, Richard Pettigrew, Josh Schechter, Mattias Skipper, the participants in my seminar at Brown, participants in the Harvard Workshop on Bounded Rationality, and Julia Staffel, my commentator at the Workshop, for very helpful comments and questions. Thanks also to an anonymous referee for Philosophical Studies. And special thanks to Zach Barnett for both positive suggestions and perceptive pushback.
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Christensen, D. Akratic (epistemic) modesty. Philos Stud 178, 2191–2214 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01536-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01536-6