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Credal pragmatism

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Abstract

According to doxastic pragmatism, certain perceived practical factors, such as high stakes and urgency, have systematic effects on normal subjects’ outright beliefs. Upholders of doxastic pragmatism have so far endorsed a particular version of this view, which we may call threshold pragmatism. This view holds that the sensitivity of belief to the relevant practical factors is due to a corresponding sensitivity of the threshold on the degree of credence necessary for outright belief. According to an alternative but yet unrecognised version of doxastic pragmatism, practical factors affect credence rather than the threshold on credence. Let’s call this alternative view credal pragmatism. In this paper, I argue that credal pragmatism is more plausible than threshold pragmatism. I show that the former view better accommodates a cluster of intuitive and empirical data. I conclude by considering the issue of whether our doxastic attitudes’ sensitivity to practical factors can be considered rational, and if yes, in what sense.

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Notes

  1. This example is from Ross and Schroeder (2014). Other similar cases can be found in Cohen (1999), DeRose (1992), Fantl and McGrath (2009), Gerken (2017) and Stanley (2005).

  2. For discussions on these practical factors, see Gerken (2011, 2017) and Nagel (2008). I will discuss these practical factors in more detail in Sects. 1 and 2.

  3. To my knowledge, the only philosopher who has contemplated this idea is Jon Kvanvig, as recognised in Stanley (2005: 6). Rubin (2015) considers and criticises a corresponding normative view about rational credence, which will become relevant for discussions in Sect. 3.

  4. For example, I will not be concerned with doxastic pragmatist explanations of shifting knowledge ascriptions in cases like LOW and HIGH. I will also not be concerned with the issue that doxastic pragmatism seems to deliver counterintuitive knowledge ascriptions to specific variants of LOW–HIGH pairs of cases. In one type of case, the subject is unreasonably insensitive to the perceived practical factors (e.g., she isn’t psychologically affected by practical factors typical of high stakes cases as one would expect from a normal subject); in another type of case, one is in fact in a high stakes predicament without knowing that she is. For discussions on these issues see Fantl and McGrath (2009, 43–45), Nagel (2008, 292–293; 2010, 427–428) and Sripada and Stanley (2012, 18–23). Alternative accounts of the shifting pattern of knowledge ascriptions include epistemic contextualism, relativism, subjective-sensitive invariantism, pragmatics accounts, etc.

  5. The standard of rationality I have in mind is not ideal or unbounded rationality. The latter kind of rationality (e.g., conformity to Bayesian standards) encompasses decision-making strategies that have little or no regard for the constraints of time, knowledge, and computational capacities that real humans face. It is widely acknowledged that real humans often go astray from exhibiting ideal rationality given their heavy reliance on fast-and-frugal heuristics in decision makings. Following Simon (1956) and Gigerenzer et al. (1999), I take that the type of rationality that applies to real humans is bounded rationality. In Sect. 3 I will draw a more detailed distinction between these two types of rationality.

  6. This distinction was first introduced by James (1956). See Ganson (2008), Kelly (2014) and Wedgwood (2012: 325) for recent endorsements.

  7. Under one interpretation, Fantl and McGrath (2009: Ch. 5)’s view of belief is another functionalist variant of doxastic pragmatism.

  8. Or at least the threshold is not affected in the way prescribed by threshold pragmatism. Nonetheless, it’s worth noting that credal pragmatism is compatible with some moderate flexibility of the threshold generated by other mechanisms, as some of the data considered in Sect. 2.2 seem to suggest.

  9. An anonymous referee suggests that a rewording of the dialogue would not necessarily favor credal pragmatism over threshold pragmatism. In particular, the referee observes that if we replace ‘confident’ with ‘likely for you/me’, the dialogue would not sound particularly odd. The referee also observes that it would sound odd for Sarah to say: “Even though my evidence hasn’t changed, given how much is at stake r’ is less likely for me now”. I think that the referee’s considerations touch an important point about the relation between confidence and likelihood. An explanation of why one may not find counterintuitive the modified dialogue is that we tend to attribute different meanings to expressions such as ‘being likely for someone’. This expression may sometimes refer to subjective confidence, but more frequently it is used to refer to epistemic probability (probability of a proposition given one’s evidence). The notion of probability relevant for epistemic chance and epistemic modals is almost universally considered to be epistemic—not subjective—probability. With an epistemic reading in place, it is clear that if in the above case Sarah’s evidence remains the same across the contexts, also the likelihood of r’ on her evidence remains the same (by definition). With such a reading, it is not surprising that the modified dialogue doesn’t sound odd and Sarah’s claim sounds inconsistent. However, if one moves to alternative readings of likelihood not indicative of subjective confidence, the intuitive judgments are not relevant to test credal and threshold pragmatism.

  10. In his words, closure is “the juncture at which a belief crystallizes and turns from hesitant conjecture to a subjectively firm ‘fact’” (Kruglanski and Webster 1996: 266). Given this definition, closure implies the self-transparency of one’s belief; hence closure entails belief. The opposite is not always true: there can be non-transparent beliefs, and in such cases belief doesn’t involve closure.

  11. In the studies of Mayseless and Kruglanski (1987), the data on subjective confidence comes from participants’ self-evaluation. What is measured, more precisely, is a higher-order evaluation about one’s own confidence. If we accept Williamson’s claim about the non-luminosity of mental states, the subjective confidence might not be always transparent to the subject herself. However, since paradigmatic examples of non-luminosity concern only marginal cases, this should not create a substantial problem for taking the empirical data at face value. That said, it might be good to take these empirical data with some reservation.

  12. These data measure the confidence change score of all presentations. There is another group of data measuring confidence change of all presentations that excludes null presentations, where null presentations mean participant reports seeing nothing on the screen. Again, in this group of data, there is a significant difference in magnitude of confidence shift between the NTAC condition (18.07), the Neutral condition (32.64) and the NFC condition (42.6).

  13. Note that the number of presentations clearly demonstrates the practical sensitivity of belief—that is, people tend to collect less evidence under NFC conditions and more under NTAC conditions in order to form settled beliefs.

  14. Webster detects this result in all three experiments. Here is the result of the experiments: (i) Experiment 1—10.50 for NFC condition, 8.44 for neutral condition, 5.66 for NTAC condition; (ii) Experiment 2—10.61 for NFC condition, 8.42 for neutral condition, 5.76 for NTAC condition; (iii) Experiment 3—9.91 for NFC condition, 7.53 for neutral condition, 4.62 for NTAC condition.

  15. I would like to thank an anonymous referee for encouraging me to consider and address the various objections discussed in this sub-section.

  16. It is important to stress that these interpretations are not merely my conjectures. The authors of the studies designed them for tracking features such as significant benefits or costs of achieving accuracy in judgment, benefits or costs in forming a settled opinion, and difficulties of information processing, and they interpreted their results in this way.

  17. Weisberg (forthcoming) uses the same cluster of studies to discuss related issues about the metaphysics of doxastic attitudes.

  18. See e.g. Roet et al. (2015) for a recent review.

  19. In addition, Tetlock and Kim (1987), Kassin et al. (1991) and Lerner and Tetlock (1999) report that participants who are accountable for their judgments by expecting to have to justify them to an audience are less confident in their judgments than those who are not accountable.

  20. Thanks to an anonymous referee of this journal for drawing my attention to the possibility of this mixed view.

  21. There are a variety of different conditionalization rules. The most prominent ones are Bayesian Conditionalization (Pnew(X) = Pinitial(X|E) (provided Pinitial(E) > 0)) and Jeffrey Conditionalization (Pnew(X) = Pinitial(X|E1) · Pnew(E1) + Pinitial(X|E2) · Pnew(E2) + …+Pinitial(X|En) · Pnew(En)). Conditionalization rules are considered as the exclusively correct methods for credence change. According to standard views (e.g., orthodox Bayesian theory), it is rational to modify one’s credence on the basis of these methods, and only on their basis. This remark is important because, according to credal pragmatism, practical factors also affect credence in absence of new evidence.

  22. For overviews of discussions and relevant literaure on different types of rationality see e.g. Samuels et al. (2004) and Hertwig and Pedersen (2016).

  23. According to a famous analogy suggested by Hebert Simon, “Human rational behaviour…is shaped by a scissors whose two blades are the structure of the task environments and the computational capabilities of the actor” (Simon 1990: 7).

  24. One important line of research following this conception of bounded rationality goes under the label of ‘ecological rationality’. This captures the importance of the environment in constraining and enabling decision making. See Todd and Brighton (2016) for a recent development of the theory of ecological rationality and relevant references.

  25. I take this to be the mark of epistemic rationality as opposed to other types of rationality. However, if one conceives the difference between types of rationality in different terms, I am open to alternative ways of shaping the distinction.

  26. This notion of epistemic rationality has been discussed in recent works in epistemic utility theory. Decision theory admits an influence of practical factors in the determination of utilities, such as for example psychological effects of risk aversion (Buchak 2014). Campbell-Moore and Salow (manuscript) argue that these considerations apply also to epistemic utilities. The relevant influence of practical factors does not make rationality less epistemic, for it is still directed at maximizing accuracy (or truth) and minimizing risk of error (falsity).

  27. On the indirect ways in which practical factors influence evidential considerations and epistemic rationality in the relevant cases, see e.g., Grimm (2011) and Wedgwood (2012: 325).

  28. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing me to address this important worry.

  29. Phillips and Edwards (1966), Robinson and Hastie (1985), Zhao et al. (2012) and Douven and Schupbach (2015).

  30. I am aware that the present discussion is too sketchy and abstract. Unfortunately the limited space doesn’t allow a detailed discussion. In Gao (manuscript), I develop this non-standard Bayesian model and compare it to that discussed by Clarke (2013). In his article, Clarke shows that credence sensitivity to contextual factors is compatible with a Bayesian framework. Though I disagree with his framework, I think that it provides another illustration of how credence sensitivity to contexts can be compatible with a Bayesian framework.

  31. I would like to thank Davide Fassio, Mikkel Gerken, Jennifer Nagel, Nick Treanor, Duncan Pritchard, Roger Clarke and an anonymous referee of Philosophical Studies for their invaluable comments on earlier drafts of the paper. I would also like to thank the audiences at the following conferences: the European Epistemology Network Meeting (Paris, 2016), the XII Conference of the Italian Society for Analytic Philosophy (Pistoia, 2016), the LEG Seminar (KU Leuven, 2017), and the 91th Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society & the Mind Association (University of Edinburgh, 2017). Research on this paper was assisted by FWO (Research Foundation - Flanders) (Grant No. G047114N) and a postdoctoral fellowship from KU Leuven.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, School of Humanities, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Jie Gao

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Gao, J. Credal pragmatism. Philos Stud 176, 1595–1617 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1081-z

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