Abstract
Here I present and defend an etiological theory of objective, doxastic justification, and related theories of defeat and evidence. The theory is intended to solve a problem for reliabilist epistemologies—the problem of identifying relevant environments for assessing a process’s reliability. It is also intended to go some way to accommodating, neutralizing, or explaining away many internalist-friendly elements in our epistemic thinking.
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Notes
Alston (1995) suggests that typical environments are relevant for assessing epistemic reliability: “The requirement for reliability is that the process would yield a high proportion of truths over a wide range of situations of the sort we typically encounter” (Alston 1995, p. 10). But what is typical? The man on the street would not find our FBC typical, yet Barnette is justified there. In addition, whatever typical environments are we can construct cases where one fortuitously comes to have processes reliable relative to them. I doubt we would consider the resulting processes justification-conferring.
Clearly, the theory owes much to not only Goldman, but also etiological theories of knowledge defended by Kornblith, Millikan and others. Indeed, DPR can be seen as the justificatory cousin of such etiological theories of knowledge (though I remain neutral on an relation between justification and knowledge), with some important differences. The latter typically make exclusive use of biologically evolutionary explanations. Hillary Kornblith, for instance, argues that explanations involving knowledge will advert to capacities that were selected because they contribute to the fitness of a species by delivering reliably produced true beliefs (Kornblith 2004, p. 57; see also Millikan 1993, p. 244). DPR, on the other hand, allows any developmentally reliable process to confer justification, whether that development was cultural, genetic, ontogenic, phylogenic, evolutionary or otherwise. Further, as we shall see, the present account will be extended to cover defeat and evidence in a fairly rigorous way.
No doubt there will be some processes that develop for some reason other than reliability, and so aim at something other than truth. It is well documented, for example, that those with a rosy view of themselves enjoy better psychological health overall than those with more accurate self-views, who are by comparison more likely to experience psychological distress (See, e.g., Taylor and Brown 1988). But if a process is fairly reliable it is likely that developmental reliability will play some role in explaining its persistence. Pragmatics probably won’t offer the full explanation in most cases because even pragmatically beneficial belief-forming processes can be too costly overall if they produce too high a proportion of false beliefs. On the relevance of reliability when it plays some small role in the development of a process, see Sect. 3.1.
For present purposes, externalism is simply the denial of internalism, where internalism is understood in the way suggested by Conee and Feldman: “The justificatory status of a person’s doxastic attitudes strongly supervenes on the person’s occurrent and dispositional mental states, events, and conditions” (2001, p. 2). Though internalism can be refined in various ways, e.g., by limiting the subvenient base to mental states that are accessible (Cf. Bergman 2006, Ch. 3), the above seems to be the weakest position that merits the appellation ‘internalism’.
Two comments are in order. First, P2-type processes take various forms. In one form, P2 takes into account information that is inconsistent with the belief, B, produced by process P1 (perhaps the information favors some alternative belief B*), and functions to prevent or eliminate B. In another form, P2 takes into account information that undermines the belief, B, (perhaps without supporting some other belief) to prevent it or eliminate it. Second, though this version of reliabilism can incorporate a special clause for conditionally reliable processes, I think such a clause is unnecessary.
Pollock and Cruz (1999) argue that a belief is justified when the believer has followed the correct procedural norms. On this view, procedural norms that govern belief formation are not unlike norms that govern grammatical sentence formation. Unfortunately, we do not get from them an account of what makes a norm of belief formation correct (i.e., part of the competence theory of belief formation), though we do get the view that it is not fixed by external facts (p. 25). One can see how it might be difficult for such internalists to count Sally’s norm incorrect. After all, it is a norm governing belief formation that she can competently follow. To the extent that DPR is better able to distinguish correct norms from incorrect norms, it is the preferable theory.
For an example of the former, Conee and Feldman offer this: One’s ultimate evidence (which they take to be experiential), or propositions about one’s ultimate evidence, is that which is explained by propositions that are the best available explanation of one’s experience (2008, pp. 97–98). See also Neta (2008), who explicates evidence in terms of propositions that require confidence distributions in hypotheses, and rationally regulate attitudes. For an example of the latter, Williamson offers this: One’s evidence is one’s knowledge (2000, p. 185).
It is important to distinguish this sense of evidence from other senses. Consider what we can call a courtroom sense of evidence. Under courtroom standards, objects can be evidence, and investigators can go looking for evidence. Further, an object can be evidence even if never discovered by anyone, e.g., a gun at the bottom of a river. In the sense we are concerned with, however, nothing can be evidence unless internalized in some way by an agent, for evidence that p just is a reason to believe that p, and one cannot have reason to believe p unless one is internally related to something that helps support p. The undiscovered gun at the bottom of the river, for instance, is no reason for anyone to believe anything.
I should speak of increasing commitments to propositions, rather than beliefs, but to avoid cumbersome phrases I shall speak of commitments to beliefs. I shall have more to say about these commitments shortly.
Alternatively, one could defend a modified version of DPR so that justification-conferring processes are processes that take contentful mental states as input.
Some additional points are worth mentioning. First, there are cases where mental contents lose their status as evidence. This happens when one initially has evidence that a wall is red, viz., it’s looking red, but later learns that the wall is bathed in red light (see Pollock and Cruz 1999, p. 86). Second, I include developmentally reliable processes in the account of Evidence Against to capture cases where evidence for p seems to count as evidence against not p. Third, the principles do not yield the result that “evidence for p” entails “evidence against not p”, nor the result that “evidence against p” entails “evidence for not p”. Though I think these are the right results, it is beyond the purview of the paper to discuss these entailments.
What makes the principles externalist is that the evidentiary status of a mental content does not strongly supervene on occurrent and dispositional mental states, events, and conditions.
One thing seems fairly clear. A belief cannot become justified because the process that produced it became reliable some time after the belief was produced. If it is to be relevant to the justification of a belief, the question of why a process developed needs to be asked as of the time the relevant belief was produced.
For a classical statement of such a case, see Stewart Cohen (1984, p. 283).
This is similar to Goldman’s (1992) explanation of new evil demon intuitions. There, Goldman argues that new evil demon judgments regarding justification will eventually track classical reliabilism (via slow, conservative change). By contrast, I argue that our judgments follow DPR when the developmental information is supplied.
Take a case where beings much like ourselves evolved in an environment with odd background radiation, such that blue objects actually appear to them the way that red objects appear to us. Those other beings actually take red appearances to count as evidence for the existence of the color blue, including the reflectance properties and dispositional tendencies we normally associate with blue objects. If their visual processes evolved because they were wildly successful in this odd environment I see no reason to count their beliefs so produced unjustified. For them, redly appearances really do count as evidence for blue (functional-dispositional) color properties.
Here, I have to confess that my intuitions about the justification of SwampCog’s beliefs are not very strong and they are accompanied by a high degree of doubt and uncertainty about the case, particularly when I attend to his bizarre history.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Terry Horgan for feedback on a previous version of this paper and for his constant guidance. I also thank the audience at a Pacific APA presentation (2006) where I proposed early incarnations of the present views. Last, I thank three anonymous referees for Erkenntnis for their helpful feedback and criticism.
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Bedke, M.S. Developmental Process Reliabilism: on Justification, Defeat, and Evidence. Erkenn 73, 1–17 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-010-9221-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-010-9221-7