Abstract
A prominent argument for internalism appeals to the requirement that justified beliefs not be accidentally true from the subject’s perspective. Bergmann’s dilemma remains the most troublesome obstacle to those who defend internalism in this way. In a word, what is required for a belief to be non-accidental? If we require the subject to justifiably believe that one is aware of something counting in its favor, then a vicious regress results and one is never justified in believing anything. But we cannot require less since beliefs can satisfy any lesser requirements and still be accidental. I argue here that phenomenal conservatism, which appeals to “seemings,” shows a way out of this dilemma. The key is that seemings, via their unique phenomenal character, make their content non-accidental for us simply by our being conscious of them and without our having to reflect on their significance. This is an important step in the larger project of re-envisioning traditional arguments for access internalism as supporting mentalism instead.
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Notes
As another example, I argue in McAllister 2023 that the idea of justification being up to us—that it is always within our control to ensure that our beliefs are justified no matter what environment we find ourselves in—can be freed from access internalist assumptions and reclaimed as an argument for mentalism (of a very specific sort).
Bergmann also considers the requirement that S be aware of the justifier in a way that is conceptual but non-doxastic. He concludes that the application of a concept must itself be justified in a way that sets off the same sort of vicious regress (Bergmann, 2006, 17−18).
See McAllister 2024, 210−212, on historical and contemporary support for phenomenal conservatism.
See McAllister 2018 and, especially, 2024, Ch. 4, for a full description and defense of this view against alternatives.
Classical foundationalists like Richard Fumerton (1995) will speak of direct acquaintance with (i) a thought, (ii) a fact, and (iii) the correspondence between them—something which has come to be called “triple acquaintance.” My position is that forcefulness is the feeling associated with the satisfaction of this third condition, though I must add two qualifications. First, one can feel acquainted with the correspondence between one’s thought and the world in a general way without feeling directly aware of any specific truth-maker for that thought. Some seemings do involve this (those called “presentational seemings”), but not all do. Second, one can feel as though one is acquainted with the correspondence between one’s thought and the world without actually being acquainted with it, and it is the former that should be identified with forcefulness. Hence, seemings are something like the non-factive versions of triple acquaintance states. A nice result is that this puts phenomenal conservatives in a position to answer Bergmann’s dilemma in a way similar to classical foundationalists (see especially DePoe, 2012). Thus, those sympathetic to those proposed classical foundationalist solutions should find the phenomenal conservative solution defended herein similarly plausible.
See McAllister 2024, Ch. 2, for a more complete account of phenomenal conservatism.
To be more precise, all that is required is that S feels as though S is aware of the connection between X and B. Whether S is in the factive state of awareness or some non-factive state that is phenomenally indistinguishable from awareness makes no difference since it is solely the subject’s perspective that matters and, from that first-person point of view, whether S is in the factive or non-factive state is inconsequential. S cannot tell the difference. For the sake of convenience, however, I will generally use the terminology of “S’s being aware of the relevance of X to B” rather than “S feeling as though S is aware of the relevance of X,” though it is really the latter that I mean.
I am not the first to point out this mistake, of course. See, for instance, DePoe (2012, 421).
It is legitimate to ask whether one’s felt awareness of p’s truth is to be trusted, but the central idea behind PC is that it is to be credited even absent verification of its veridicality. Regress only looms if we deny this, but to deny it is simply to deny PC itself. Hence, this does not cast any doubt on whether PC offers the resources to resolve Bergmann’s dilemma for those who find PC independently plausible.
Let us also not get overly attached to the name “SPO.” If someone insists that this term refers to BonJour’s particular way of leveraging the case of Norman, then I will happily relinquish it. The fact would still remain that there is a different and equally legitimate way of using the case of Norman within an argument for internalism that does not fall prey to the concerns raised by Bergmann.
See also Reiland (2015, 524–525).
I have argued for a similar position at greater length in McAllister forthcoming.
Consistent with the approach in McAllister 2024, 56-57, I am treating low priors as a kind of defeater. If someone objects to this, then we can accommodate it by adding another condition to the sufficiency of seemings principle that the priors not be too low.
Otherwise, the principle of indifference would lead him to assign a prior probability to the President’s being in New York of less than .5 (much less than .5 if the number of places where the President might be without New York far exceeds the number of places where the President might be within it).
Consider the distinction between propositional and doxastic justification. All that is required to have propositional justification for believing p is evidence which indicates the truth of p to a sufficient degree. We signal the possession of propositional justification by saying “S has justification for believing that p.” In contrast, to have doxastic justification one must not only have propositional justification for believing p but also rationally base one’s belief on the evidence that propositionally justifies it. We signal the possession of doxastic justification by saying “S has a justified belief that p.” Phenomenal conservatives only take beliefs to be doxastically justified by seemings when those beliefs are properly based on seemings that propositionally justify their contents.
See the description of belief formation in McAllister 2023, §2.
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McAllister, B. How Seemings Resolve Bergmann’s Dilemma for Internalism. Acta Anal (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-023-00579-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-023-00579-8