Abstract
After a period of inactivity, interest in explanationism as a thesis about the nature of epistemic justification has been renewed. Poston (Reason and explanation: a defense of explanatory coherentism, 2014) and McCain (Evidentialism and epistemic justification 2014; Erkenntnis 79:99–109, 2014) have both recently offered versions of explanationist evidentialism. In this paper, we pose two objections to explanationist evidentialism. First, explanationist evidentialism fails to state a sufficient condition for justification. Second, explanationist evidentialism implies a vicious regress.
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Notes
There are a number of externalist versions of evidentialism, depending on how liberally one understands the concept of “evidence.” See, for example, Goldman (2011) and Comesana (2010). The issue of taxonomy is further complicated because different philosophers understand ‘internalist’ and ‘externalist’ differently.
Here we formulate the explanationist requirement as a sufficient condition although we take explanationism as an analysis of justification to be stronger, as discussed below. We formulate ME as a sufficient condition because our criticisms will concentrate on sufficiency. We thank an anonymous referee for pressing us to clarify this point.
Provided that the explanationist in question is an evidentialist and takes best explanation to analyze the fit relation, the explanationist will be committed to a stronger biconditional claim (this commitment will, additionally, require that the explanationist commit to understanding entailment as a kind of best explanation relation). However, for all ME says, defenders of ME can be pluralist with respect to the fit relation. The most plausible and interesting sort of explanationist view is one that attempts to analyze the fit relation in explanatory terms.
Harman also argues that entailment is an explanatory relation (Harman 1973, pp. 162–163).
See, for example, Harman (1965).
Being justified in believing explanationism to be true is, however, inconsistent with global skepticism. McCain and Rowley argue that the open to skepticism feature of a view is what allows it to provide a non-question-begging response to skepticism (McCain and Rowley 2014).
It is not important exactly where the threshold is, although it should be at least above .5, because wherever the threshold is, it ought to at least yield a belief that is more epistemically probable than not.
One might object that explanationism is rather an alternative to talk of epistemic probability. All that we require is that the explanationist’s criteria be roughly characterizable in terms of probability. Surely at least fulfilling the conditions for justification must guarantee that the belief is more probable than not. There will be an abominable conjunction problem if it does not hold. If the explanationist justification condition doesn’t get one a belief that’s more probable than its contrary then one is stuck with the following: I’m justified in believing p, and p is not even probably true. This seems like an abominable conjunction if ever there was one.
We need not be wedded to a threshold of just above .5 in order to get this result. Diminishing probabilities will arbitrarily yield the same problem for whatever probability threshold is set for justification.
An anonymous referee suggests that perhaps explanationists could use a move familiar from Timothy Williamson’s work on evidential probability and hold that when a proposition is part of the best explanation of one’s evidence, that proposition is known, and thus probable to degree 1.0 (Williamson 2000). So, an explanatory consequence of such a proposition is not likely to fall below the 0.5 threshold for justification. While this idea seems satisfying as far as the structure of the threshold argument is concerned, it is hard to accept that Bill the bowler knows that balls going toward the pins in C knock over all the pins. Generally, it is hard to accept that propositions that best explain evidence are always knowledge.
McCain will need to allow this to fall below entailment in order to avoid other problems that arise for earlier versions of his view. See Byerly and Martin (2015).
Stoutenburg (2015) raises the concern that best explanationist epistemic principles may not be fundamental, albeit for a different reason than the one given here.
The “probabilistic threshold for justification” is just that probability which glosses what is sufficient for outright belief. In footnote 10 we gave a brief argument for why the threshold should be thought to be at least just above .5. But it might be higher if we require that a belief be highly probably true in order to be belief-worthy, such as somewhere above .7. It will be difficult to say exactly what that number it should be for a belief to be highly probably true, but this is a general problem for anyone who wishes to defend a high standard below certainty.
We can even construct cases that will be unjustified on the second clause, but that will get the same probability as in our toy case in the paragraph above. Suppose, for example, that on the first clause, the justified proposition explains so well that it gets up to .8 probability. But suppose then that the second clause proposition is not a “significantly better” explanation according to the proposed threshold. Our future proposition is only .6 probable conditional on the first clause proposition. The future proposition will get a probability of almost exactly what it would get if we had a value of .71 for both the first and second clause explanations (as in the example in the footnoted paragraph). It would be just above .5 probable. But calling one proposition unjustified by the second clause which is just as probable on one’s evidence as a proposition which the second clause calls justified in our toy example would be an overly skeptical consequence of the view.
This will work for any threshold whatever, but .5 is appropriate as the fact of something’s being the best explanation of one’s evidence can, at best, get us a conditional probability of .5.
There are some proposals which one might offer in response to this such as adding a requirement that P(p/e)\(>\) .5 or giving up on a unified general account of justification. Adding the probability requirement makes the explanation requirement superfluous. Giving up on a unified account of justification, we take it, is giving up on an explanationist analysis of justification. There may be multiple ways that explanation is relevant to justification, but this is the sort of thing that can be believed even by those who (like Richard Fumerton) argue that inference to the best explanation reduces to induction.
Going forward “or disposed to become aware” is dropped for ease of expression. Nothing hinges on the omission, but see footnote 23 for further discussion.
Note that the fit relation could not be identified with a non-evidential justificationally-relevant mental state. To see this, suppose for reductio that one identifies S’s awareness of e with the fit relation that holds between a body of evidence and the proposition that body of evidence supports. But that implies that there is no mind-independent relation between a body of evidence and a proposition: rather, the relation between e and p appears only when one considers the (otherwise non-existent) relation between e and p. It is extremely difficult to even make sense of the idea that one can become aware of X when X’s very existence somehow depends upon becoming aware of X. For that reason, we think the biconditional stated in the text holds.
As a requirement on the structure of justification, the satisfaction of BonJour’s metalevel requirement is compatible with both internalism and externalism. What BonJour was eager to prove is not that externalism is false, though he thought (then and now) it was, but that foundationalism is false, in both internalist and externalist versions.
Going forward we drop the qualification ‘or S is disposed to have a seeming that p is the best explanation of e’ or ‘p is the best answer to “Why e?” ’. While seemings and dispositions to have seemings are clearly different states, the disposition to have a seeming can only contribute to justification if there are some circumstances in which actually having the seeming would contribute to justification. But the upshot of our regress argument is that there are no circumstances in which one has the seeming (and meets the other requirements) and possesses justification for believing p as a result. Put differently, if it is impossible for S to be justified in believing p as a result of it seeming to S that p is the best explanation of e, then it is impossible for S to be justified in believing that p as a result of S being disposed to have a seeming that p is the best explanation of e. We thank an anonymous referee for pressing us to comment on the importance of this distinction.
Because the regress shows that there is a problem with the proposed structure of justification, it does not matter whether the explanatory relation is knowable a priori rather than a posteriori. Our argument is that any attempt to possess epistemic justification according to the conditions implied by the three explanationist evidentialist theses necessarily fails because it is impossible to be aware of one’s total relevant evidence for a proposition when one’s awareness is itself part of that evidence.
Indeed, the regress argument presented here is structurally identical to the regress Lewis Carroll introduced in “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles” (Carroll 1895). There, the Tortoise gets Achilles to accept that one is not justified in inferring from ‘B’ from ‘If A, then B’ and ‘A’ without adding another premise: “If A, then B’ and ‘A’, then ‘B”. But, famously, if the latter premise is necessary to justifiably infer ‘B’ in the original argument, then the new argument including this new premise is not sufficient to infer ‘B’ either. As we argue below, the regress problem for explanationist evidentialists is due to the claim that awareness of the connection between a body of evidence and the proposition it justifies is a piece of evidence. If the awareness of evidential connections is evidence, and justification for a proposition requires being aware of the connection between a body of evidence and the proposition that evidence justifies, then a Carroll-style regress follows. The solution to the Carroll regress is to allow that non-propositional awareness of the connection between the premises and conclusion partly justifies the inference to the conclusion. The solution to the regress in this paper is to allow that nonpropositional awareness of the connection between one’s evidence and the proposition supported by that evidence is not itself evidence.
Indeed, perhaps it is recognition of this idea that motivates Poston (2014) to explicitly eschew non-evidential justifiers in his evidentialist theory of justification.
We thank an anonymous referee for pressing this objection and providing the proposed exception to the regress argument that we consider above.
We assumed here (along with the anonymous referee who proposed the solution) that the solution would satisfy our three theses (Evidentialism), (Mentalism), and (Awareness of Explanation). However, there is a solution in the spirit of the one discussed here that does not accept all three theses. That solution does not require that one be aware of the connection between all of one’s p-relevant evidence and p (which would necessarily generate regress), but only enough of one’s p-relevant evidence to make p probable. The idea is that one must be aware of an explanatory connection between an important part of one’s evidence and the proposition supported by that evidence. We doubt this weakened awareness condition will satisfy those who find the Norman intuition compelling. However, motivating a response along these lines may be a direction explanationist evidentialists could pursue.
We owe the terminology to (2009, p. 22), but the distinction can also be found in Alston (1986, 1988). Fumerton (2011, p. 181) gives voice to problem: “I’ve always been a bit uncomfortable with the term ‘evidentialism’ and its corresponding slogan that it is only one’s evidence that justifies one’s beliefs... [A]ny plausible version of foundationalism will still hold that there is some feature of a noninferentially justified belief that gives it that special epistemic status, but it is often a bit strained to characterize the feature in question as evidence possessed by the believer.”
See Stoutenburg (2016) for discussion of this issue.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Kevin McCain, Richard Fumerton, Ali Hasan, and two anonymous reviewers for comments on a draft of this paper. For helpful discussion, we thank Landon Elkind, Ryan Cobb, Nik Maggos, Matt Childers, and Hyungrae Noh.
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Appley, B.C., Stoutenburg, G. Two new objections to explanationism. Synthese 194, 3069–3084 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1093-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1093-1