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Truthy psychologism about evidence

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Abstract

What sorts of things can be evidence for belief? Five answers have been defended in the recent literature on the ontology of evidence: propositions, facts, psychological states, factive psychological states, all of the above. Each of the first three views privileges a single role that the evidence plays in our doxastic lives, at the cost of occluding other important roles. The fifth view, pluralism, is a natural response to such dubious favouritism. If we want to be monists about evidence and accommodate all roles for the concept, we need to think of evidence as propositional, psychological and factive. Our only present option along these lines is the fourth view, which holds that evidence consists of all and only known propositions. But the view comes with some fairly radical commitments. This paper proposes a more modest view—‘truthy psychologism’. According to this view, evidence is also propositional, psychological and factive; but we don’t need the stronger claim that only knowledge can fill this role; true beliefs are enough. I first argue for truthy psychologism by appeal to some standard metaethical considerations. I then show that the view can accommodate all of the roles epistemologists have envisaged for the concept of evidence. Truthy psychologism thus gives us everything we want from the evidence, without forcing us to go either pluralist or radical.

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Notes

  1. The only label which is mine here is 'factive-state psychologism'. Thanks to an anonymous referee for making me take seriously pluralism as a theoretical option.

  2. Arguably, Littlejohn (2012) is another—and equally radical—factive-state psychologist. According to him, one’s evidence consists of one’s justified beliefs, where justification entails truth.

  3. ‘Truthy’ comes from Littlejohn’s ‘truthers’ who think that only true propositions are evidence (Littlejohn 2013).

  4. But see Littlejohn (2012, p. 95) and Williamson (2000, p. 43), who assume that facts are (true) propositions.

  5. Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising the regress problem. As a quick demonstration that it would take us too far afield, let me mention two solutions that are available to the truthy psychologist. One is to insist that all evidence is doxastic and that the truth of a certain class of beliefs stops the regress. Another option is to argue that there are non-doxastic forms of basic evidence which are nonetheless propositional (e.g., Huemer’s (2007) ‘appearances’). Each of these strategies faces challenges. The first needs to explain how we non-arbitrarily isolate the relevant class of beliefs without construing experiences as more justificatorily basic. The second needs to defend direct realism about perception. Such realism may threaten the Beast of Two Burdens Thesis, unless we block the move from realism to metaphysical disjunctivism (e.g., McDowell 1986). Thanks to John Gibbons and Ram Neta for convincing me that disjunctivism is a threat to the Beast of Two Burdens thesis.

  6. Hence, the distinction is sometimes drawn in terms of ‘justifying‘ and ‘explanatory‘ reasons (Dancy 2002, pp. 20–25).

  7. For a justification of this way of reading Williams, see fn. 17.

  8. He takes beliefs to be the most eligible psychological candidates, since he has already argued desires out (2002, Chap. 2). Whatever one might think about that argument, certainly for our purposes of getting at evidence, it is plausible to assume that if evidence is psychological, it must be cognitive.

  9. With some charity. Strictly, what is believed are propositions, but Dancy means facts here (2002, p. 104) and rejects propositionalism (2002, pp. 115–118).

  10. Dancy argues against two further versions of psychologism (2002, pp. 112–126). One of them breaches BTB, so no need to go into it. I argue that the other is a misconstrual of psychologism in §6.

  11. I use this drastic example because it dramatises the strangeness of the view. Dancy’s own examples downplay the strangeness, because they don’t involve the non-existence of the explanans.

  12. Why not retain the factivity of explanation by saying that the motivating reason is the fact that the agent (falsely) believed such and such? Dancy thinks of this view as a version of psychologism and rejects it (2002, p. 124). See fn. 19 below.

  13. I borrow this way of speaking from Velleman (2000, Chap. 6).

  14. I say ‘motivation-relevant fact’ here and throughout this section because for me to be moved to do anything at all, all sorts of facts need to obtain—I have to have a head, for starters. But we don’t think of these as my motives.

  15. To suppose that they are not facts here would beg the question, since that is what the argument for EXTREME aims to establish.

  16. The argument will work equally for desire. I use belief here because I am ultimately after the notion of a reason for belief.

  17. This argument also justifies my reading of Williams as claiming that a reason, R, must itself be able to motivate. The two standard readings are that what must be capable of motivating is:

    (1) my belief that R (Finlay 2009, p. 12), or 

    (2) my belief that R is a reason to ϕ (Shah 2006, pp. 485–486).

    Clearly, (1) falls against Horn 1, and (2) falls against Horn 2 of the present dilemma. More generally, the dilemma faces anyone who thinks that the motivation requirement is a requirement on having reasons rather than on something’s being a reason (e.g., Comesaña and McGrath 2014).

  18. This is one of the reasons that epistemic normative requirements are understood to take wide scope (e.g., Broome 2000).

  19. Dancy (2002), for example, thinks that this is the most promising version of psychologism. But, he argues, it is vulnerable to a major objection (2002, p. 124). Suppose I believe that there are pink rats in my shoes. The fact that I have this belief seems to be a good reason to see a doctor. But (a) we only have such reasons in weird cases, so reasons aren’t typically facts about our mental states; and (b) such reasons are good reasons regardless of whether the state is veridical or not. Truthy psychologism is not vulnerable to this objection, since it does not concern facts about mental states.

  20. In arguing for truthy psychologism by showing how it can accommodate all of these roles, I take my cue from Rysiew (2011). This is dialectically fitting, since he is the most explicit current pluralist, and he defends the view precisely by appeal to these roles.

  21. The claim that only propositions can enter in such relations is rejected by opponents of propositionalism (e.g., Conee and Feldman 2008, 2011) as well as by some of its friends (e.g., Neta 2008). This doesn’t matter in the current context, as long as it is allowed that propositions can enter in such relations.

  22. See, e.g., Dougherty and Rysiew (2014), Littlejohn (2012, §3.1), and Rysiew (2011).

  23. Kelly argues that one concept—‘normative evidence’—drives the first two roles, and another —‘indicator evidence’—the third and fourth (Kelly 2008, §3). Rysiew (2011) argues for the unity of the concept by showing, with Thomas Reid, that what makes many different things evidence is that they all make the believed proposition ‘evident’. But the unity of the concept notwithstanding, he thinks that we should be pluralists about its extension.

  24. This is the so-called ‘mentalist’ conception of internalism. Truthy psychologism will also be at a disadvantage on the ‘accessibilist’ view. (See Conee and Feldman 2004, Chap. 3.)

  25. This example also speaks strongly against a popular anti-psychologism argument (e.g., Collins 1997): We deliberate in light of what we take to be good reasons; We do not deliberate in light of our psychological states; So, good reasons are not psychological states. But here is Sherlock deliberating in light of both. So, the deliberation-argument is inconclusive. (Thanks to an anonymous referee for making me see this.) For the stronger claim that the argument is unsound, see Turri (2009).

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Alexandra Couto, Christoph Hanisch, Katherina Kinzel, Sebastian Kletzl, Martin Kusch, Dejan Makovec, Herlinde Pauer-Studer, Martha Rössler, and an anonymous referee for Philosophical Studies, for really helpful comments on earlier drafts. Thanks also to Santiago Echeverri and Pascal Engel for inviting me to the Ontology of Evidence Workshop (Geneva, 2013), and to Florian Steinberger for asking me to give a talk on truthy psychologism at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (LMU, 2013). The audiences at these events helped a lot with this paper.

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Mitova, V. Truthy psychologism about evidence. Philos Stud 172, 1105–1126 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0339-3

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