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Permissivism and the Truth-Connection

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Abstract

Permissivism is the view that, sometimes, there is more than one doxastic attitude that is perfectly rationalised by the evidence. Impermissivism is the denial of Permissivism. Several philosophers, with the aim to defend either Impermissivism or Permissivism, have recently discussed the value of (im)permissive rationality. This paper focuses on one kind of value-conferring considerations, stemming from the so-called “truth-connection” enjoyed by rational doxastic attitudes. The paper vindicates the truth-connected value of permissive rationality by pursuing a novel strategy which rests on two main planks: first, there is a distinction between a fine-grained and a coarse-grained type-individuation of belief-forming methods. Secondly, different kinds of decision-theoretic reasoning, i.e. expected-accuracy reasoning and accuracy-domination reasoning, must be paired with a fine-grained and a coarse-grained type-individuation of methods, respectively. I argue that while the first pair is wholly irrelevant to the question of the truth-connection, the second affords the means to a permissivist explanation of the truth-connected value of rationality.

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Notes

  1. See Kopec and Titelbaum (2016) for an overview of the philosophical significance of the Permissivism vs. Impermissivism debate.

  2. I’ll briefly touch on how Impermissivism accounts for the truth-connection below.

  3. See, for instance, Daoust’s (2017) and Thorstad’s (2019) replies to Greco and Hedden’s (2016) idea that rationality ascriptions can be used to identify reliable informants and to plan what to believe in certain circumstances.

  4. Thorstad (2019) proposes two versions of a permissive metepistemology that purport to explain the value of having rational beliefs without appealing to the truth-connection. By contrast, I want here to concede that there is such a thing as the truth-connected value of rationality to then show that Permissivism can vindicate it.

  5. Let me also mention that Kopec and Titelbaum (2019) link permissivism to truth-conduciveness in a different way than the Horowitz-Schoenfield debate, i.e. by focusing on the question of the reliability of one’s methods. I won’t be concerned here with that approach.

  6. For any proposition p, credence C, and possible world w, a scoring rule assigns a real number ≥ 0 which measures the inaccuracy of holding C on the basis of its proximity to the ideal credence function at w. If p is true at w the ideal credence is the 1; if p is false, then the ideal credence is 0. The best score achievable is 0, which means the distance from the ideal credence is minimised to 0. There are various scoring rules one can avail oneself of, but it is not my aim here to compare their respective pros and cons. See Pettigrew (2013) for a brief introduction to epistemic decision theory and Pettigrew (2016) for a book-length treatment of a decision-theoretic-based approach to epistemic rationality.

  7. In line with a large body of work on Permissivism and Impermissivism (see Horowitz 2014, 2019, Kopec and Titelbaum 2019, Meacham 2014, Schoenfield 2014, 2019, White 2005), I will be focusing on credences, as opposed to outright belief. I will also follow a recent strand of research in formal epistemology, championed by Jim Joyce (1998) and Richard Pettigrew (2016) and also employed by Horowitz and Schoenfield, which uses the tools of epistemic decision theory to explain what it is for credences to be related to truth. Let us therefore take the relevant “acts” to be the (non-voluntary) adoption of credence functions, and interpret utility functions as functions that take a state of the world and a possible credence and return a measure of the epistemic utility that S attaches to that credence given that state of the world. By identifying epistemic utility with gradational accuracy, it follows that a credence has greater epistemic utility at a world if it has greater accuracy at that world. The gradational accuracy of a credence is measured by a suitable scoring rule. See Pettigrew (2013) for a brief introduction to epistemic decision theory and Pettigrew (2016) for a book-length treatment of a decision-theoretic-based approach to epistemic rationality.

  8. I formulate the Endorsement Argument differently from Horowitz’s. To my mind, the premise-conclusion formulation I adopt here scores higher in perspicuity than Horowitz’s.

  9. Another assumption of the Horowitz-Schoenfield debate is the focus on Interpersonal, as opposed to Intrapersonal, Permissivism. According to the former, while rationality does mandate a specific response to any given total body of evidence for each agent, it does not mandate the same response across agents. According to the latter, Permissivism holds for a particular agent S, that is, rationality does not mandate a specific response to any given total body of evidence for each agent. This paper also focuses on Interpersonal Permissivism only. For a defence of Intrapersonal Permissivism see Jackson (2019).

  10. See Talbot (2008) for a primer on Bayesian epistemology.

  11. Probabilism tells us that S’s C should cohere with the following axioms: all probabilities are between zero an one; logical truths have probability one; when two propositions p and q are mutually exclusive, the probability of their disjunction is the sum of their individual probabilities.

  12. Conditionalization tells us that S’s C in p at t1 is required to be equal to her initial conditional credence p|e at t0, where e is the total evidence S acquires between t0 and t1.

  13. See e.g. Christensen (2004), Smithies (2015), Talbott (2008).

  14. See e.g. Pettigrew (2020) and Skipper and Bjerring (2020) for different attempts at developing versions of Bayesianism which do not require logical omniscience. Dogramaci (2018), while explicitly rejecting Bayesianism, thinks that “something in the neighbourhood is true” (2018: 21).

  15. I think, but won’t extensively argue here, that other types of decision-theoretic reasoning would be less suitable than maximisation of expected accuracy reasoning and avoidance of accuracy domination reasoning to make sense of the notion of regarding a belief-forming method as truth-conducive. Let me just make an example and consider Maximin reasoning, which is the kind of reasoning performed by subjects who take the best of the worst, as it were. Pettigrew emphasises (2016: 165–7) two features of Maximin reasoning: first, Maximin reasoning works well when the subject is trying to settle their initial credences; secondly, to motivate Maximin reasoning in an epistemic setting it seems that agents must be extremely conservative and always shun error, as William James would put it. However, for one thing, since we regard a belief-forming method as truth-conducive throughout our epistemic lives, and Maximin reasoning is meant to be applied to the earlier stages only, Maximin reasoning would not be well-suited to capture what it is to regard a belief-forming method as truth-conducive after we have settled our initial credences. For another, given how Maximin reasoning is motivated in an epistemic setting, such a reasoning would only capture how extreme conservative subjects regard a belief-forming method as truth-conducive, thereby failing to make sense of how non-conservative subjects regard a belief-forming method as truth-conducive (A symmetrical problem would affect using Maximax reasoning to spell out the notion of regarding a belief-forming method as truth-conducive.) Expected-accuracy reasoning and dominance reasoning do not seem to be saddled with these two problems.

  16. See Pettigrew (2016) for an extended discussion of these issues.

  17. Following Lewis (1971: 55), I will always take the relativisation to evidence for granted.

  18. Horowitz ascribes the maximisation of expected accuracy conception to Schoenfield, but what really matters for my purposes is that Horowitz constructs their debate in this way.

  19. A few clarifications on Immodesty are in order. While Horowitz (2014) offers a full defence of a stronger version of Immodesty (more on this below) and Schoenfield (2014: 201) accepts it in cases where credences are sharp, Immodesty is rejected by some authors (see e.g. Christensen 2013; DiPaolo 2019). Immodesty is also threatened by a more general objection to the idea that inter-level incoherence is a form of irrationality (see e.g. Lasonen-Aarnio 2020). Given the purposes of this paper, I think that it’s dialectically better to concede Immodesty to the opponent than to engage in a sustained dispute about its truth or motivation. Two further remarks on the content of Immodesty. First, Immodesty takes a wide-scope formulation, so S can comply with it also by dropping their credence. However, the cases that I will discuss are such that S does not drop their credence, so this way of being immodest won’t be considered here. Secondly, and importantly, Immodesty should not be confused with what Mayo-Wilson and Wheeler (2016) call “Strict Immodesty”, which enjoins S to regard only their own credences as maximising expected accuracy. Now, despite the fact that Horowitz (2014: 43) has Strict Immodesty in mind, I will build my argument around Immodesty since the latter is less controversial than the former. However, my argument does carry over to Strict Immodesty. I am extremely thankful to an anonymous referee for this journal for urging me to clarify these issues.

  20. Of course, from what I’ve said above it follows that each specific set of credences has to obey Immodesty.

  21. One might claim that I’ve only argued for the existence of an all-things-considered reason in favour of such a pairing and question that we are allowed to move from such an all-things-considered reason to a “must” claim. Since the aim of this paper is to vindicate the truth-connected value of permissive rationality via the Endorsement Argument, all I need to show is that there’s a plausible version of the Endorsement Argument which doesn’t fall prey to Horowitz’s objections. So, we can replace the “must” claim with something weaker (e.g. “there’s an all things considered reason”) without affecting the conclusion of the argument. I thank an anonymous referee for asking me to clarify this point.

  22. See Joyce (2009: 267) for a remark to this effect. See Pettigrew (2016: chapter II) for a precise formulation of the argument in favour of Probabilism which respects Immodesty.

  23. While I’ll be granting this assumption for the sake of discussion, I should also emphasise that it is far from sacrosanct. See e.g. Cohen (2013) and Smith (2020) for reasons in favour of Unacknowledged Permissivism.

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Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the members of the LOGOS 2019 Epistemology Reading Group and to Hichem Naar for detailed comments on a previous draft of this paper. Special thanks go to Sven Rosenkranz. Work on this article has received funding from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades under grant agreements RTI2018-096225-J-100 and RYC2018-024624-I.

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  1. Department of Logic and Theoretical Philosophy, Complutense University of Madrid, Ciudad Universitaria, 28040, Madrid, Spain

    Michele Palmira

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Palmira, M. Permissivism and the Truth-Connection. Erkenn 88, 641–656 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-020-00373-7

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