Abstract
Two major arguments have been advanced for the claim that there is a transmission failure in G. E. Moore’s famous proof of an external world. The first argument, due to Crispin Wright, is based on an epistemological doctrine now known as “conservatism.” Proponents of the second argument, like Nicholas Silins, invoke probabilistic considerations, most important among them Bayes’ theorem. The aim of this essay is to defend Moore’s proof against these two arguments. It is shown, first, that Wright’s argument founders because one of its premises, viz, conservatism, invites skepticism and must therefore be rejected. Then the probabilistic argument is challenged, yet not because its formal part is dubious, but rather on the grounds that it incorporates as an implicit premise an unconvincing philosophical claim. Finally, the most promising objection to dogmatism – understood here as the negation of conservatism – is repudiated.
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Notes
Warrant (or justification) is here understood as propositional, not doxastic, warrant. A person P has a propositional warrant for a proposition q if it would be epistemically appropriate for P to believe that q; irrespective of whether P actually believes that q or not. P has a doxastic warrant for q if P believes that q in virtue of her propositional warrant for q.
Nicholas Silins argues that the notion of warrant employed in the transmission principle must be the notion of doxastic warrant since otherwise this principle would fail in many legitimate pieces of reasoning, such as the following: “Moby Dick is a whale. Therefore, Moby Dick is a mammal” (see Silins, 2005, 74–76). I nonetheless stick to my interpretation of Wright’s principle, for two reasons. First, I do not see why a piece of reasoning cannot be “legitimate” even if warrant is not transmitted from its premises to its conclusion. For the second reason, see fn. 2.
The last step of this argument can be formulated more precisely as follows: From the claim that one has a warrant for the premise (II) among other things in virtue of the fact that one has a propositional warrant for the conclusion (III) it follows that one acquires a propositional warrant for this conclusion if one acquires a warrant for the premise (II). Thus, one does not acquire for the first time a propositional warrant for the conclusion (III) by acquiring a warrant for the premise (II) and, recognizing the validity of Moore’s proof, deducing from the premise (II) the conclusion (III).
But from the above-mentioned claim it cannot be inferred that doxastic warrant fails to be transmitted. For the following could be the case: The claim mentioned above is true, and by deducing the conclusion (III), a certain person bases, for the first time, her belief that this conclusion is true on her propositional warrant for this conclusion, which she already had before this deduction; more exactly: she acquires for the first time a doxastic warrant for the conclusion (III) by acquiring a warrant for the premise (II) and deducing from it the conclusion in question.
The upshot of these considerations is that the following biconditional is true: The notion of warrant employed in the principle of warrant transmission is the notion of propositional, not doxastic, warrant if and only if it can be concluded from the claim mentioned above that this principle founders. Assuming charity, this militates against Silins’s, and for my, interpretation of this principle (see also fn. 1).
My explanation of these two terms differs from Silins’s explanation of them at the beginning of his essay, but is in line with the way he uses them in the rest of his paper (see, e.g., Silins, 2007, 121f.).
In fact, two different accounts of the justification of perceptual judgements are to be found in Wright’s 2002 paper: one in the first additional premise of the original I-II-III argument, another in the reformulated skeptical argument. Wright’s original conception of justification is much more convincing than the one contained in the reformulated I-II-III argument. Moreover, the latter is not supported by Wright. If it could thereforebe shown that the reliabilist account ofjustification is wrong, one would also have established that Wright’s original conception of justification is correct and one would not for the time being have a reason to repudiate the original I-II-III argument. (The preferability of the original I-II-III argument plays into my hands in that conservatism’s inviting skepticism can only be shown, if at all, with this argument, but not with the reformulated I-II-III argument.)
Wright points out that until recently nobody has explicitly claimed that the principle of equivalence closure is wrong (see Wright, 2014, 232). Among the extremely rare critics of this principle are Brett Sherman, Gilbert Harman and Stephen Yablo (see Sherman and Harman, 2011, esp. 137, and Yablo, 2014, chap. 7, esp. 119–121).
For another criticism of Silins’s explanation, see Neta, 2010, 698–701.
Proponents of an explanation drawing on default entitlements (like Silins) as well as opponents of such an explanation (like Kotzen and Neta) seem to take it for granted wrongly that there is in addition to Silins’s explanation only one serious explanation, viz, the one based on Wright’s conservatism.
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Dierig, S. Moore’s Proof, Warrant Transmission and Skepticism. Philosophia 50, 487–502 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00402-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00402-x