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Epistemic Reasons, Transparency, and Evolutionary Debunking

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Abstract

Recently, evidentialists have argued that only they can explain transparency--the psychological phenomena wherein the question of doxastic deliberation of whether to believe p immediately gives way to the question of whether p--and thus that pragmatism about epistemic reasons is false. In this paper, we provide a defense of pragmatism. We depart from previous defenses of pragmatism which argue against the evidentialist explanation of transparency or the fact of transparency itself, by instead arguing that the pragmatist can provide a sound explanation of transparency while maintaining her distinctive view of epistemic reasons. We do so by putting forth an evolutionary debunking explanation of doxastic deliberation. Since both the evidentialist and pragmatist have sound explanatory accounts of transparency, we argue that transparency should not be appealed to when trying to adjudicate the debate between evidentialists and pragmatists, but rather must be decided on other grounds.

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Notes

  1. Korsgaard and O'Neill (1996).

  2. See Foley (1993), McHugh (2013), Moran (1988), Rinard (2015), Rinard (2017), Shah (2003), Shah (2006), Shah and Velleman (2005), Sharadin (2018), and Steglich-Petersen (2006).

  3. It will be helpful to be a bit more precise about what sorts of considerations the pragmatist thinks can count as reasons for belief. The pragmatist does not think that evidential considerations are never reasons for belief; they clearly often are. The pragmatist instead thinks that evidential considerations do not exhaust all the reasons there are for belief.

  4. Moran (1988), Shah (2006), Shah and Velleman (2005).

  5. Moran (1988), Shah (2003), Shah (2006), Shah and Velleman (2005), Wald (2015).

  6. See McHugh (2013), Rinard (2017), and Sharadin (2016b). Other philosophers (Nolfi (2015), Rinard (2015), Steglich-Petersen (2006)) have argued that if transparency is true, it does not support evidentialism in the way that Shah (2006) and Shah and Velleman (2005) argue that it does.

  7. Piller (2016) argues that a certain understanding of evidentialism is compatible with the idea of non-epistemic commitments, a concept somewhat related to pragmatism.

  8. To be clear, our concern here is solely with how transparency bears on epistemic reasons. Others have taken up the issue of transparency with respect to the question of the nature of belief and what distinguishes it as a unique mental state (see, for example, teleological accounts of the nature of belief like Steglich-Petersen (2008), constitutivist accounts like Shah and Velleman (2005), and motivational accounts like Sullivan-Bissett (2018)). We do not address the topic of the nature of belief here.

  9. Strictly speaking, our view is not that the pragmatist holds that it’s wrong for agents to deliberate in this way, but rather that it would be better if agents also took pragmatic reasons into account when doxastically deliberating. We address this issue in section 4.2.

  10. Throughout the paper, we purposefully use the terms ‘humans’ and ‘people’ when speaking about the claims of transparency instead of ‘agents’, since transparency is a phenomenon that concerns actual existing agents (that is, actual human beings), and not agents as such.

  11. In this way, our strategy is similar in spirit to the evolutionary debunking arguments offered in metaethics, for example Street (2006) and Joyce (2001, 2006).

  12. This is closely related to a phenomenon that Steglich-Petersen (2009) has labelled “exclusivity”. The thesis of exclusivity holds that non-evidential considerations cannot be motivating reasons for adopting doxastic attitudes. Something is a motivating reason to believe p if it is a reason for which the deliberator believes p. So, exclusivity holds that people cannot take non-evidential considerations for believing p as reasons for which to believe p. Though transparency entails exclusivity, they are different claims because exclusivity says nothing about the phenomenology of deliberation. Transparency, on the other hand, holds that when people consider whether to believe p, this immediately gives way to the question of whether p. It is a phenomenological claim about what doxastic deliberation is like.

  13. For just a few examples, see McHugh (2013), Nayding (2011), Shah (2006), Shah and Velleman (2005), Sharadin (2016b), Steglich-Petersen (2008, 2013), and Sullivan-Bissett (2018).

  14. See Goleman (1987), Reed et al. (1999), Taylor et al. (2003) for evidence of this kind of effect.

  15. But: Since transparency is the claim that it is strictly impossible for people to take non-evidential considerations into account in their doxastic deliberations (rather than that they’re merely psychologically disposed to only consider truth-relevant reasons), it’s worth mentioning that we find the claim prima facie implausible.

  16. Kelly (2002); Shah (2006).

  17. Of course, this isn’t to say that evidentialists think that agents are perfect doxastic deliberators: they can of course fail to consider all of their evidence or fail to assign appropriate weights to the evidence. However, they are on the right track in one respect: they never deliberate with considerations that aren’t, according to the evidentialist, their reasons.

  18. Sharadin’s argument is presented as a counterexample to a closely related phenomenon called “exclusivity”, but, as Sharadin notes, since transparency entails exclusivity, he also argues that transparency is false.

  19. Of course, we also leave open the possibility that there is evidence (evolutionary or otherwise) that tells against the viability of transparency itself. We take the strategy of accepting the evidentialist’s assumption of the truth of transparency, because we believe that this is an unexplored option, and that this option provides a stronger argument for the pragmatist within the transparency debate by taking on the evidentialist on their own grounds.

  20. Additionally, if we think that doxastic deliberators should be sensitive to all the reasons that bear on belief, then it would seems that the pragmatist would say that we are quite poor deliberators. It seems at least plausible to us, however, that the mere fact that we are not sensitive to all of our reasons for belief does not entail that we are poor doxastic deliberators. In practical deliberations, it seems permissible (and perhaps even desirable) to leave out certain considerations. For example, if I am debating about whether or not to go to the grocery store, and I fail to consider the possibility that I will be hit by a bus on the way, it is not at all clear that this is evidence of poor deliberation. We take up the issue of whether our positive proposal entails too pessimistic of a view of epistemic agency in section 4.1.

  21. More specifically, we ignore a whole kind of reasons: namely all considerations that are non-evidential even when, according to the pragmatist, these can be reasons. Although evidentialists might also hold that we are not sensitive to all the reasons there are (see footnote 10), they do not think that we are insensitive to a whole kind of reasons.

  22. Though addressing the question of what distinguishes belief as a unique mental state, and not the topic of epistemic reasons, Sullivan-Bissett (2018) also gives an evolutionary explanation of transparency to defend her motivational account of the nature of belief.

  23. See, for example, Dennett (1971, 1987), Fodor (1983, 1985), and Millikan (1984a, 1984b, 1995).

  24. McKay and Dennett (2009) provide an extensive overview of candidates for adaptive misbeliefs (that is, for belief-forming mechanisms that systematically produce false beliefs because they are evolutionarily advantageous). They conclude that there is only one kind of false belief (positive illusions) that fits the bill, and furthermore, that the existence of this one kind of adaptive misbelief does not undermine the general claim that evolution selects for true beliefs. Frankish (2009) argues that positive illusions should not even be considered to be beliefs, thus undermining McKay and Dennett’s claim that there is at least one kind of adaptive misbelief. Flanagan (1991, 2007, 2009) and Konečni (2009) raise similar objections.

  25. For examples of other kinds of false beliefs that promote survival, see Ackerman et al. (2006, 2009), Byrne and Kurland (2001), Haselton and Buss (2000), Trivers (1985, 2000).

  26. For arguments that non-evidential beliefs can systematically promote survival, see, again, Ackerman et al. (2006, 2009), Byrne and Kurland (2001), Haselton and Buss (2000), Trivers (1985, 2000).

  27. Stich (1990, p. 62).

  28. For discussions of cognitive systems sacrificing accuracy for simplicity, see Dennett (1984), Gigerenzer and Goldstein (1996), and Gigerenzer et al. (1999).

  29. One might think that since, for the most part, people have a very strong desire to survive, then it would not be true that believing falsely that skydiving is perfectly safe would best further her ends. It is important to note, however, that the pragmatist’s evolutionary explanation is compatible with this; her claim is simply that the person’s desire to skydive provides her with a pro tanto reason to believe that it is perfectly safe. Even if it is true that the desire to survive will often override the other desires that people have, it still seems that a system that includes even a pro tanto reason to believe that skydiving is not risky would be less evolutionarily advantageous to us than a system that does not.

  30. In support of this point, Frankish (2009) distinguishes between acceptances and beliefs, and maintains that evolution did not select for cognitive systems that allow us to doxastically deliberate in a way that systematically produces false beliefs.

  31. See McKay and Dennett (2009).

  32. Millikan (2009, p. 529).

  33. It might also be worth noting that there is a distinction between what Kahneman (2011) calls “fast thinking” and “slow thinking”: “Fast thinking” roughly corresponds to our subconscious belief-formation, whereas “slow thinking” roughly corresponds to our conscious belief-formation. The vast majority of false beliefs that might be conducive to our survival (see McKay and Dennett (2009)) occur as the result of fast thinking (e.g. cognitive biases, heuristics, etc.). Since doxastic deliberation exclusively involves slow thinking, we have even more reason to believe that it is not immune from the rest of our cognitive processes that aim at truth as a proxy for survival. Frankish (2009) argues that even though some of our cognitive systems occasionally produce false beliefs, we still lack any evidence that the cognitive system that regulates doxastic deliberation (or slow thinking) systematically produces false beliefs.

  34. McKay and Dennett (2009, p. 501) call these theoretical escape clauses “doxastic shear pins”.

  35. See, again, Dennett (1984), Gigerenzer and Goldstein (1996), and Gigerenzer et al. (1999) for arguments that evolution often selects for systems that sacrifice accuracy for speed (and thus simplicity).

  36. Dawkins (1982), Stich (1990).

  37. Fodor (2008) uses a similar example.

  38. Similarly, one might think that evolutionary pressures make us messy, such that sometimes we would form beliefs based on pragmatic considerations instead of, as we’ve claimed here, never doing so (given the truth of transparency). However, notice that transparency is a claim about explicit doxastic deliberation, and so our evolutionary explanation only concerns this context. Notice that this is compatible with people sometimes forming beliefs based on pragmatic considerations outside of the context of explicit doxastic deliberation.

  39. Strictly speaking, for the pragmatist whether we really are bad epistemic agents in deliberating in this way will depend on whether having this kind of system (wherein we’re taking into account considerations that aren’t our epistemic reasons) will achieve our interests well.

  40. On moral worth, see Arpaly (2002) and Markovits (2010).

  41. Again, it’s important to note that the pragmatist needn’t even be held to this response, as they could say that not being sensitive to some of the considerations that are an agent’s epistemic reasons might actually be a good way to achieve one’s desires or interests (see footnote 7).

  42. For helpful discussions of this kind of strategy, see Kornblith (1993, 2002), Nolfi (2015), Nozick (1993), Schroeder (2007), Sharadin (2015, 2018).

  43. Familiarly, Mill (1998), Part II makes this point.

  44. Here we’re assuming that the pragmatist would want to accept the plausible principle that one ought to believe in accord with one’s epistemic reasons (i.e. that one ought to believe that which one’s epistemic reasons most support).

  45. See Booth (2008) for a similar point.

  46. Of course, one could also argue that the explanation evidentialists have provided is not sound. However, as we stated at the beginning of the paper, we’re aiming to be as charitable as possible: our aim is not to question the explanatory account put forth by the evidentialist, but rather just their claim that there is no alternative explanatory account available to the pragmatist.

  47. Rinard (2017).

  48. We would like to thank Teresa Bruno Nino, Jeremy Fantl, Scott Looney, Hille Paakkunainen, Nathaniel Sharadin, and Preston Werner for their valuable comments and discussions on earlier drafts of this paper. We are especially indebted to Nathaniel Sharadin, who read multiple drafts of this project, and gave us extensive feedback. 

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  1. Department of Philosophy and Religion, Franklin College, Franklin, IN, USA

    Nicole Dular

  2. Department of Philosophy, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA

    Nikki Fortier

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Dular, N., Fortier, N. Epistemic Reasons, Transparency, and Evolutionary Debunking. Philosophia 49, 1455–1473 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00302-6

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