Abstract
Early moderns such as Locke and Descartes thought we could guarantee the justification of our beliefs, even in worlds most hostile to their truth, if only we form those beliefs with sufficient care. That is, they thought it possible for us to be impeccable with respect to justification. This principle has traditionally been used to argue for internalism. By placing all of the normatively relevant conditions in our minds, we ensure reflective access to what those norms require of us and so sustain the possibility of impeccability (unlike externalism). However, recent challenges to transparency leave this reasoning vulnerable. In response, I show how impeccability can be sustained without requiring transparency. The account only works if we define internal states as those directly accessible to our rational belief forming systems. I argue that this sort of causal internalism, while somewhat revisionary, preserves traditional motivations for internalism while avoiding problems faced by other varieties. The result is a renewed argument for internalism that simultaneously moves us away from access internalism and towards a species of mentalism.
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Notes
Plantinga (1993, 15).
See McAllister forthcoming for a defense of this account of epistemic blame and its connection to justification as originally conceived.
See, e.g., Littlejohn (forthcoming), Srinivasan (2015), Williamson (forthcoming).
Williamson (2000, Ch. 4).
Kvanvig (2014, Ch. 2, § 5).
Smithies (2019).
Srinivasan (2015, 273).
See Schoenfield (2015) for a related attempt to motivate internalism despite threats to luminosity. There are significant differences in how we go about formulating and defending our ideas, nevertheless there is, I think, a common insight motivating both of our responses.
Pollock (1987, 66).
If you think that perceptual beliefs are inferred from how things appear to us, then consider how it is we came to believe that things appear thus-and-so. At some point, our beliefs must be caused apart from higher-order beliefs, or else we would be faced with forming an infinite regress of beliefs prior to forming any belief and belief formation would be impossible.
This does not yet commit us to the position that those appearances are good reasons for belief, or ones adequate to justify belief in the absence of defeaters.
Pollock (1987, 68).
With respect to the norms of justification, a belief that conforms to those norms is said to have propositional justification for its content, whereas a belief that complies with those norms is said to be doxastically justified.
Pollock (1987, 69).
Wedgwood (2002, 357).
Ibid.
The fact that the man heard the dryer go off on a Wednesday could make a difference to what he believes if, for instance, he knows that the dryer goes off sporadically (even when the laundry isn’t finished) on days other than Wednesday. However, the man would have to be reflectively aware of the fact that he heard the dryer on a Wednesday in order for it factor into belief-formation, in which case its being Wednesday doesn’t make any difference to whether the sound of the dryer immediately brings about belief or not. Another way to put this is that the state hearing the dryer go off on a Wednesday is, in that particular case, not the most proximate cause of belief, but only causes belief by virtue of intermediary states such as believing that it is Wednesday.
Wedgwood (2002, 363).
Conee and Feldman (2004, Ch. 3).
Bergmann (2006, 55–56).
If we define “externalism” as “not-causal internalism”, then it follows by definition that externalist norms appeal to conditions that are not directly accessible to our automatic processing systems. That being said, I should showcase that the sorts of theories usually thought of as exemplars of externalism are still “externalist” in this particular sense.
See, e.g., Goldman (1979).
It is of course possible to gerrymander an external state of affairs that necessarily correlates with some internal state (e.g., the state of affairs S has internal state M and God exists is an external state of affairs that, if God necessarily exists, will perfectly track the internal state M), but these are trivial. The crucial thing is that none of the external conditions proposed by externalist theories of justification, nor anything in their vicinity, are of this sort.
Pollock (1987, 74).
See, e.g., Goldman (1986).
One of these might feature in a folk-psychological explanation of belief if, say, S1 believes that trusting in the testimony of S2 is a reliable process, and so infers the belief that p from the fact that S2 testified that p. But clearly the reliability of that process is not the most proximate cause of belief in that situation.
If the content of their beliefs is externally determined, then perhaps the subjects do not form the exact same beliefs. Nevertheless, it is clear that one subject will form the same kind of belief if and only if the other does. The only difference is that the content of the one belief will be “filled in” differently than the content of the other. Thus, I will set this complication aside.
Huemer (2007, 40).
Schoenfield (2015, 257–258). I’ve amended the example to better fit our purposes.
Williamson (2000, 180).
Langsam (2021, 9792).
Langsam (2021, 9799).
Furthermore, nothing said above about the causes of our beliefs implies that we can have the same token state in a case of perception as we do in a case of illusion or hallucination. Say that, in the case of perception, S has a perceptual state P and, in the case of hallucination, S has an entirely different token state H. There is no token state common to both of them. The argument made above is simply that P would be the most proximate cause of a belief in S if and only if H would be as well (were S to have that state instead), and this proves that P only brings about belief by virtue of properties that H also possesses. Now, if we wish, we could define “appearances” as a type of mental state characterized exclusively by how it feels to be in a state like P or H, in which case we could say that S has an appearance in both the perceptual case and the hallucinatory case; and those appearances would be the proximate causes of S’s belief in both. But it would not be the same appearance in both cases, only the same type of appearance. And it is only the former claim that disjunctivists should be concerned to deny. Thus, once again, we see that even disjunctivists should accept the causal claims at issue here.
Schoenfield (2015, 254).
Being the proximate cause of a belief is not sufficient for being the base of that belief, but the additional conditions (whatever they are) are ones that will be ordinarily satisfied when a directly accessible mental state triggers our rational belief forming dispositions.
Bergmann (2006, 70).
Something like this is perhaps by Bergmann does not see internalism and externalism as exhaustive, with mentalism (including what we are calling “causal internalism”) residing somewhere in between the two.
The claim under consideration here adds to Wedgwood (2002) that the internal facts about our mental states that determine belief formation always have to do with their phenomenal properties.
Bonjour and Sosa (2003, 4.2–4.3).
Bergmann (2006, 67).
Wedgwood (2002, 359–360).
Once again, issues of content externalism aside.
Smithies (2019).
This cuts against Smithies claim that phenomenalism and a phenomenal conception of evidence is best motivated by accessibilism—the position that justification is reflectively transparent to us. This claim features centrally in the argument of Smithies (2019), and especially in his critique of phenomenal conservatism in Ch. 12. Essentially, Smithies proposes that internalists double-down on reflective transparency, whereas I am trying to show how internalism can be motivated apart from reflective transparency.
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McAllister, B. Rescuing a traditional argument for internalism. Synthese 201, 144 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04119-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04119-0