Abstract
Suppose we learn that we have a poor track record in forming beliefs rationally, or that a brilliant colleague thinks that we believe P irrationally. Does such input require us to revise those beliefs whose rationality is in question? When we gain information suggesting that our beliefs are irrational, we are in one of two general cases. In the first case we made no error, and our beliefs are rational. In that case the input to the contrary is misleading. In the second case we indeed believe irrationally, and our original evidence already requires us to fix our mistake. In that case the input to that effect is normatively superfluous. Thus, we know that information suggesting that our beliefs are irrational is either misleading or superfluous. This, I submit, renders the input incapable of justifying belief revision, despite our not knowing which of the two kinds it is.
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Notes
Some HOE brings with it more than just information about the rationality of our beliefs. For example, if someone who we know has more evidence than we do tells us that our evidence E misleadingly supports P, we learn both that she thinks that E supports P and also that she thinks that P is false. But by implying that she thinks P is false, such HOE carries with it some run-of-the-mill evidence against P, perhaps via an Evidence of Evidence is Evidence principle as Feldman (2014) suggests. I will focus on cases where the HOE does not bring with it such evidence.
I return to this assumption in Sect. 4, where it is called into question.
I use talk of what we should believe interchangeably with talk of what rationality permits, and with what is rationally justified.
Even friends of pragmatic encroachment like Fantl and McGrath (2011) would grant that the credences we should form are independent of prudential considerations.
Little rides on there being absolutely no exceptions to this claim. It is true of, at least, the vast majority of HOE. If the arguments to come only apply to the vast majority of HOE, that would be enough for my purposes.
We can gain negative HOE even in cases where we have no view about some matter. In those cases, any information suggesting that our evidence requires a particular credence c would imply that we did not do a good job in forming a rational credence.
So defined, the HOE would be right even in cases where it points to a doxastic attitude that is not supported by the evidence, as long as we indeed failed to form the rational attitude. For example, the HOE is right when we believe a proposition that we should disbelieve, and the HOE suggests that we should suspend judgment.
Christensen (2010b) introduces this distinction.
We should not deny that with suitably arranged background knowledge, almost anything can be evidence for almost anything else. On some backgrounds, testimony that P is evidence against P, and a memory seeming as of Q is evidence against Q. But the existence of such backgrounds does not touch the interesting issues of the epistemic significance of testimony and memory.
Abstaining from having a view may not be psychologically possible. But assuming it is possible, it may still seem irrational to not have a view on a matter that we have considered and have evidence about. Refusing to have any doxastic attitude whatsoever about what is right in front of our eyes cretainly seems irrational. See Nelson (2010) and Alexander (2013) for views on which abstinence from having a doxastic attitude can be rationally permitted. See Friedman (2017) for a view of suspension as closely tied to inquiry.
Cases in which we know that we are guaranteed to believe irrationally may look like ones in which rationality requires that we have no view. This appearance is arguably mistaken. If such cases are possible, they could at most show that we are sometimes doomed to fail to believe as we should.
Some unique HOE-like inputs might resist the misleading/superfluous charge. For example, we may learn that our total evidence including this very input supports so and so (thanks to Antonia Peacocke for this point). If such HOE is possible, it could change what we should believe by changing our total evidence, while avoiding misleading claims about whether we assessed our original evidence rationally. However, one concern is that it is difficult to conceive of such inputs. Since this kind of HOE does not question our ratioanlity given our original evidence, it is unclear what new evidence it brings with it so as to change what our total evidence supports. Another concern is that such HOE marks a departure from the kind of input that the literature in the area has been concerned with—like peer disagreement, evidence of bias, or reasoning-distorting drugs. So in the event that such unique HOE is both possible and evades the misleading/superfluous charge, it leaves most other cases of HOE vulnerable.
Thanks to Alex Worsnip for an exchange leading to this line.
One move that is available to my opposition (and coheres with standard Evidentialism) is to take our evidence to depend on our epistemic abilities. If our ability to tell what the raw data make probable affects what evidence we have, then our evidence may change in light of input about what the data make probable. This suggestion deserves more attention than I have room to offer, but one concern is that it would no longer be taking HOE to be the kind of input that challenges our rationality given our own evidence.
Schechter (2013) takes irresponsibility to undermine rationality.
This is especially clear in the case where Watson’s hunch is misleading. Suppose that Watson is a detective, and despite the evidence clearly supporting Suspect’s innocence, he follows his hunch that Suspect is guilty. When we correctly assess the evidence, we may ask Watson why he is charging Suspect with the crime. If he responds by saying that he does not go by the evidence, but by his hunch, we should want him to retire.
The idea here is similar to Berker’s (2013) point against epistemic consequentionalism, which is that the view’s central problem is in “its focusing on the promoting or conducing relation.”.
See Boult (2017), Littlejohn (forthcoming) for discussions of epistemic excuses.
On Horowitz’s (2014) view, “an epistemically akratic agent believes something that she believes is unsupported by her evidence.” On Titelbaum’s (2015) view “no situation rationally permits any overall state containing both an attitude A and the belief that A is rationally forbidden in one’s current situation.”.
Following Worsnip (2018), we might consider Enkrateia to be a coherence requirement, and consider Steadfast and Higher-Level Influence to be evidential requirements. Yet as long as rationality requires both coherence and responsiveness to evidence, the tension between the three theses remains.
See Hazlett (2012) for the opposing view.
Kelly (2010) offers some Enkrateia-independent reason to think that a level-connection principle obtains. He argues that recognition of the import of our evidence is the reason we form the paradigmatically rational beliefs that we do. It is not a major leap from this observation to thinking that a necessary requirement on rational belief is that agents recognize what their evidence supports. Moreover, as Kelly argues, recognition that such-and-such entails justification to believe that such-and-such.
Kiesewetter (2016) briefly notes this.
I express a similar thought in Tal (2018).
To avoid falling prey to the Dogmatism paradox, it must be that we do not lose knowledge that our justification supports the truth upon gaining HOE. If we lost that knowledge, we would no longer be justified in using our preexisting justification alone. Fortunately, given Level-Connection, whatever justification we have at the higher level must be for the truth. No HOE could undermine our knowledge of this fact. Relatedly, it must also be that we do not lose knowledge of what our evidence is upon receiving HOE (thanks to Ram Neta for this point). However, we should bracket issues concerning doubts about what our evidence is for present purposes. The main reason for doing so is that many paradigm instance of HOE do not undermine our knowledge of what the evidence is. For example, a disagreeing peer may well agree that the evidence is indeed what we take it to be, but disagree about its upshot. The question of what to believe when we are uncertain about what our evidence is seems separate from the question of what to believe when we are uncertain about whether we believe rationally.
It is also possible to reject my presupposition of a thesis like Optimism, and thus block the inference from Enkrateia to Level-Connection. It would be an interesting result of the argument here if we had to give up Optimism to resist it. That said, notice two considerations against such a move. First, the kind of Optimism that the inference relies on is quite modest. Our evidence need not justify some doxastic attitude relative to every possible proposition, but only relative to propositions of the form attitude a is rational. Second, rejecting Optimism would not be in the spirit of Enkrateia. Just as it seems inconsistent to assert P but believing P is irrational, it seems inconsistent to assert P but despite considering the matter I have no view about whether believing P is rational.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the participants of the 2019 Chapel Hill Normativity Workshop, as well as to anonymous Philosophical Studies referees, for offering insightful feedback. Special thanks goes to Stewart Cohen and Juan Comesaña for their help with developing the ideas in this paper.
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Tal, E. Is higher-order evidence evidence?. Philos Stud 178, 3157–3175 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01574-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01574-0