Abstract
According to John McDowell’s version of disjunctivism, a (non-illusory) perceptual experience has both a property that it shares with a subjectively indistinguishable illusory experience (the property of being an appearance that p) as well as a property that it does not share with a subjectively indistinguishable illusory experience (the property of being a fact that p making itself manifest to a subject). McDowell is also an infallibilist about justification; accordingly, he holds that a perceptual experience justifies a belief in virtue of the latter property. In this paper, I defend McDowell against an argument that purports to show that perceptual experiences justify beliefs only in virtue of the former property, the property that they share with illusory experiences. The argument is a version of Michael Huemer’s self-defeat argument for phenomenal conservatism; in Sect. 2 I show how the argument seemingly applies to show that McDowell’s infallibilism is false. I respond on behalf of McDowell to Huemer’s argument by developing McDowell’s idea of knowledge as cognitive purchase on a fact: I explain both why this idea requires infallibilism about justification (Sect. 3) and how this idea allows a response to Huemer’s argument (Sect. 4).
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Notes
Although disjunctivists have begun to offer differing treatments of illusions and hallucinations (see e.g., Fish 2009), I need not address these differences here, given my purposes in this paper.
See e.g., Pryor (2000, p. 518): “We can at best have defeasible justification for believing what our senses tell us; so anyone who thinks we have perceptual knowledge about our environment has to embrace fallibilism”.
According to McDowell, “justification adequate to reveal a state as one of knowing must be incompatible with falsehood” (2002, p. 98). See also McDowell (1995, 2011). So when I say that McDowell has an infallibilist view of justification, what I mean is that he has an infallibilist view of the justification that is required for knowledge. McDowell’s internalist infallibilism is generally taken to be one example of a group of internalist infallibilist views known collectively as epistemological disjunctivism. The leading exponent of epistemological disjunctivism is Pritchard (2012). My focus in this paper is limited to McDowell’s version of epistemological disjunctivism; I will not defend the general version of the view at this time.
McDowell develops his (metaphysical) disjunctivism most extensively in his (1986); see also his (1982, 2013). Other metaphysical disjunctivists include Campbell (2002), Fish (2009), and Martin (2002, 2004). Some deny that McDowell is a metaphysical disjunctivist (see e.g., Snowdon 2005), but I agree with Haddock and Macpherson (2008, pp. 11–12) that McDowell clearly adopts metaphysical disjunctivism in his (1986). Pritchard argues that “epistemological disjunctivism does not in itself entail metaphysical disjunctivism,” although he acknowledges that “the disjunctivist view of the metaphysics of perceptual experience seems to offer the most natural way of explaining why there is this radical epistemic difference in these pairs of cases” (2012, p. 24), pairs in which one case involves a subject with a perceptual experience and the other involves a subject with a subjectively indistinguishable illusory experience. I argue below that McDowell does employ metaphysical disjunctivism to defend his epistemological disjunctivism; see footnote 18.
See also McDowell (2008a, p. 382, fn. 7): “This difference in epistemic significance [between a perceptual experience and an indistinguishable illusory experience] is of course consistent with all sorts of commonalities between the disjuncts. For instance, on both sides of the disjunction it appears to one that, say, there is a red cube in front of one”.
McDowell seems to be appealing to this kind of intuitive view when he equates fallibilism with “giving in to skepticism” (2011, p. 54).
McDowell no longer holds that experiences have propositional content; he now holds that experiences have what he calls “intuitional” content (2008b, p. 4). But for ease of exposition, I shall continue to write as if McDowell holds that experiences have propositional content; for our purposes here, nothing substantive depends on how we characterize McDowell’s view of content.
McDowell of course acknowledges that we do not have such a mechanism; he acknowledges that “appearances do not give me the resources to ensure that I take things to be thus and so on the basis of appearances only when things are indeed thus and so” (1995, p. 878). But given that he accepts the disjunctive nature of appearances, McDowell needs to provide an explanation of why appearances do not provide us with these resources, and he fails to do so.
See McDowell (2010, p. 249): “The common state types that figure in my disjunctive conception—states of having it appear to one that things are thus and so—are relevant to understanding how we can accommodate fallibility in an epistemology according to which experience at its best reveals aspects of objective reality to subjects”.
Here McDowell would be in disagreement with Martin (2004, pp. 68–70), who holds that a perceptual experience has its power to produce beliefs in virtue of a property that it does not share with illusory experiences. But note that Martin can hold this view only because he also holds the view that illusory experiences do not share any categorical properties with perceptual experiences (2004, pp. 70–74), a view with which McDowell disagrees, as I noted earlier in Sect. 1.
See also Huemer’s own arguments in favor of his first premise (2009, pp. 230–231).
See Korcz (1997), who notes that “the standard view of the correct analysis of the basing relation will be some sort of causal analysis” (p. 171). A notable dissenter to this standard view is Lehrer (1974, pp. 122–126). For present purposes, I shall simply note my agreement with Goldman’s insistence that Lehrer’s counterexample to the standard view is unconvincing (1979, p. 22, n. 8).
The argument presented in this section should be distinguished from Wright’s well-known arguments against McDowell (Wright 2002, 2008). Huemer’s argument as I adapt it in this section is an argument against infallibilism and for fallibilism. By contrast, Wright’s arguments are not arguments against McDowell’s infallibilism; rather, they are arguments against McDowell’s claim that his infallibilism (and the disjunctivism that makes it possible) enables him to respond to skeptical concerns. In Wright’s words, “the Disjunctive Conception of experience … provides us with nothing to address mainstream perceptual skepticism” (2008, p. 395), and skeptical arguments “cannot be finessed by McDowell’s simple strategem of treating sheer [infallibilist] apprehension as the ‘canonical warrant’ for perceptual claims” (2008, p. 400). Wright is not presenting an argument against infallibilism and for fallibilism, for he does not think that the fallibilist is in any better position to respond to the skeptic. Rather, his point is that the debates between fallibilists and infallibilists and between non-disjunctivists and disjunctivists have no bearing on disputes about skepticism. Since my goal in this paper is to defend McDowell’s infallibilism, I address Huemer’s argument (since it is an argument against infallibilism), but not Wright’s arguments. I respond elsewhere to Wright’s arguments against McDowell; see Langsam (2014).
McDowell explicitly connects his “standing in the space of reasons” talk to the idea of justification in his 1993: “I shall start with an idea of Wilfrid Sellars, that knowledge, at least on the part of rational animals, is a standing in the space of reasons. This idea is what underlies the aspiration to analyze knowledge in terms of justification” (p. 415).
According to Hyman (1999), “knowledge is the ability to act, to refrain from acting, to believe, desire or doubt for reasons that are facts” (p. 451). But a fact can be one’s reason only “if one is aware of” it (p. 451). I would argue that the kind of awareness at issue here is belief, since we reason with beliefs. So Hyman’s conception of knowledge requires McDowell’s conception: we cannot do things for reasons that are facts unless we have cognitive purchase on those facts.
I take it that it is because McDowell’s disjunctivism is an account of subjective character that it must be understood as a version of metaphysical disjunctivism, not mere epistemological disjunctivism. See footnote 5.
This claim that reasoning requires a connection to consciousness is paralleled by McDowell’s view that representational content requires a connection to consciousness; see his (1994b). It is because he holds that genuine contents occur in consciousness that he also holds that “the content-involving truth at the ‘sub-personal’ level” described by cognitive science “is merely metaphorical” (1994b, p. 197); the sub-personal contents of cognitive science are merely “as if” contents (1994b, p. 199).
This account only applies to cases of perceptual knowledge in which the content of the perceptual belief is identical to part of the content of the perceptual experience. But McDowell now allows for cases of noninferential perceptual knowledge in which the content of the perceptual belief goes beyond the content of the perceptual experience (2008b, pp. 3–4). I leave for another occasion a consideration of how the account can be modified to allow for such cases.
“But we cannot really understand the relations in virtue of which a judgment is warranted except as relations within the space of concepts: relations such as implication and probabilification, which hold between potential exercises of conceptual capacities” (McDowell 1994a, p. 7). For McDowell’s more recent views on why relations between experiences and beliefs can be rational, see his (2008b); see also Langsam (2014).
Insofar as a subject forms a belief in rational response to a state in which the subject stands in the kind of relation to a fact that enables cognitive purchase, the subject can be said to be “rationally constrained” by that fact in the formation of the belief. For McDowell, rational constraint by the world is required for thinking and having knowledge of the world (1994a, Lectures I and II). In effect, what I have done in this section is explain what rational constraint is, and why it’s required for knowledge.
In Sect. 3, I emphasized that the subject forms the belief in rational response to the experience, but of course if the subject forms the belief in response to the experience, then the experience is a cause of the belief. And since the subject forms the belief in rational response to the experience, the property that grounds the experience’s causal power to produce beliefs will also be the property in virtue of which the relation between the experience and belief is a rational one. Therefore, since the property that grounds the perceptual experience’s causal power to produce beliefs is a property it shares with illusory experiences, it follows that both perceptual and illusory experiences can be rationally related to beliefs. And McDowell does indeed acknowledge that even though only perceptual experiences provide beliefs with the kind of justification adequate for knowledge, both perceptual and illusory experiences can produce rational beliefs: “A knowledgeable perceptual judgment has its rational intelligibility, amounting in this case to epistemic entitlement, in the light of the subject’s experience. She judges that things are thus and so because her experience reveals to her that things are thus and so; for instance, she sees that things are thus and so. The intelligibility displayed by such an explanation belongs to a kind that is also exemplified when a subject judges that things are thus and so because her experience merely seems to reveal to her that things are thus and so. These uses of ‘because’ introduce explanations that show rationality in operation” (McDowell 2008b, p. 2; emphasis added).
See footnote 23.
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Langsam, H. McDowell’s infallibilism and the nature of knowledge. Synthese 198, 9787–9801 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02682-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02682-4