Abstract
According to the received view, externalist grounds or reasons need not be introspectively accessible. Roughly speaking, from an externalist point of view, a belief will be epistemically justified, iff it is based upon facts that make its truth objectively highly likely. This condition can be satisfied, even if the epistemic agent does not have actual or potential awareness of the justifying facts. No inner perspective on the belief-forming mechanism and its truth-ratio is needed for a belief to be justified. In my view, this is not the whole story. While I agree that introspective access to our reasons is a defining feature of justification for the access internalist, not the externalist, I will argue that even for the latter, some kind of introspective access is an epistemic desideratum. Yet, even given that I am right, the desirable might not be achievable for us. Recent psychological research suggests that we do not dispose of reliable introspection into the sources of our own beliefs. This seems to undermine the claim that we can introspectively know about the reasons upon which our beliefs are based. In this paper I will therefore additionally show why these results do not threaten the kind of introspective access desirable from an externalist point of view.
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Notes
I use the term “reason” synonymous with “ground”, rather than with “evidence”. Externalists grounds need not be psychological, contentful states, but can also be psychological processes or even non-mental facts. See e.g. Kim (1993, p. 308).
Alston (1989b) claims that reasons always have to be contentful mental states („indicators“ or „evidence“). One might call this position “evidential reliabilism.” Goldman (1979) assumes that justifying reasons are psychological processes which need not include any evidential states. This is “process reliabilism.” Williamson (2000) claims that all justifying reasons are known external facts. One might call this kind of position “reason objectivism.” This view is challenged in Grundmann (2009).
I take ‘introspection’ here as a technical term that refers to a non-perceptual way of knowing. I do not have the model of inner sense in mind. For a compelling criticism of the inner sense model of introspection see Shoemaker (1996).
Interestingly, this objection is put forward by Foley (1993, p. 133), one of the major proponents of supervenience internalism.
Alston (2005) calls all features which are desirable from an epistemic point of view “epistemic desiderata”, no matter whether or not they are constitutive of being justified.
Alston (1989a, p. 214), claims that accessible is “what the subject can come to know just on reflection”. Hence Alston is committed to the view that accessible reasons must be such that we can gain knowledge about them by introspection alone.
In exactly this sense Block (1995) distinguishes between ‘metacognitive monitoring consciousness’ and ‘access consciousness’ where the latter simply means that the content of a representation is poised to be processed as a premise within thinking, rational control of action and language control.
One anonymous referee has objected to my view that the epistemic subject must surely know the reasons his conclusion is based upon in order to be able to articulate those reasons. But here knowledge does not require more than first-order availability of the contents of those reasons. It certainly does not imply that one is able to say what source of justification one is relying on, i.e. whether it is vision, hearsay or memory.
On Burge’s view the self-knowledge in question has epistemic privilege (infallibility or at least immunity from brute error) and rests on a peculiar source (it is direct and non-perceptual). It therefore can be called “introspective” in my sense (which requires only peculiarity of its source).
One anonymous referee was still puzzled about how one can avoid contradiction without knowing what one believes. Think of it this way: why cannot my first-order thinking about the world be rationally sensitive without presupposing second-order awareness of occurring contradictions?
See for this line of criticism Peacocke (1996, p. 129): “much critical reasoning involves thought about the world, rather than about attitudes. I think there is a more primitive kind of reasoning which still involves assessment of relations of support, consequence, and evidence, and can be used by a thinker in revising his beliefs, without the thinker actually exercising or possessing concepts of propositional attitudes”.
Compare Weinberg (2007) for similar considerations. Weinberg claims that being a hopeful source, i.e. a source whose errors we can detect and correct, is of crucial epistemological significance. For Weinberg being a hopeful is the mark of trustworthy epistemic sources (p. 327).
This explanation and the following one were suggested by two anonymous referees.
This model was suggested to me by Hilary Kornblith (in personal conversation).
“Unrestricted access” here means access without in principle blind spots or cognitive closure to certain domains. It does not imply that all relevant facts are transparent to the epistemic agent.
This is due to the previously mentioned confirmation bias.
Consciousness must here of course be understood as phenomenal or first-order access consciousness, not as introspective knowledge. Otherwise, the claim would be trivial.
This point is stressed by Wilson (2002, p. 106): “to the extent that people’s responses are caused by the adaptive unconsciousness, they do not have privileged access to the causes and must infer them (…). But to the extent that people’s responses are caused by the conscious self, they have privileged access to the actual causes of these responses (…)”.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Quassim Cassam, Frank Hofmann, Joachim Horvath, Hilary Kornblith, Thomas Spitzley, Tobias Starzak, Ralf Stöcker, Karsten Stüber, Woldai Wagner and Christina Zuber for helpful comments and critical discussions.
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Grundmann, T. Introspective Self-Knowledge and Reasoning: An Externalist Guide. Erkenn 71, 89–105 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-009-9169-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-009-9169-7