In summary, if motivating norms is our model of normative guidance, then however we fill in the details dilemmism doesn’t do any better or worse than the alternatives when it comes to giving it. But maybe the motivating norms framework doesn’t capture the notion of guidance that those who press the guidance objection against dilemmism have in mind? Maybe there is a better way of thinking about guidance that really does show dilemmism to be a fatally flawed theory? Let’s look at some of the options.
Guiding dispositions
A worry one might have about motivating norms is that it overintellectualises the concept of guidance. You probably hardly ever think to yourself ‘it would be irrational for me not to believe that p, so I should believe that p’ prior to forming a belief. Nevertheless, provided that the belief-formation process is appropriately sensitive to a norm and the demands that it makes, it seems natural to say that you are guided by that norm.Footnote 34
One way to avoid this problem is to conceptualise guidance in terms of dispositions. Think about our thief again. He manifests a disposition to comply with truth when he believes that the painting in their possession is a Brueghel—in normal circumstances he would only believe that they have a Brueghel if they actually do. His error can be explained by the fact that he is in abnormal circumstances. Given this, even though he doesn’t believe in accordance with truth, isn’t it right to say that he has been guided by it when he believes what he does?
This looks promising as a way of thinking about guidance, and it doesn’t require us to have formed higher-order beliefs in order to count as having been guided. But notice that, as with the non-factive propositionalist interpretation of motivating norms, regardless of how we fill in the details, the notion of guidance in play here is not one that can be used to argue against dilemmism. The reason is the same. If this is what adequate guidance is, a person who believes that p in a conflict case may well have been guided by both truth and rationality, even though they conflict with one another.Footnote 35 The proposal is, roughly, that a person’s action has been guided by a norm when it is the manifestation of a disposition to comply with the norm. Since the thief manifests a disposition to believe only truths, and to be rational, when he believes that they have a Brueghel, he has been guided by both norms according to this notion of guidance. But in that case, dilemmism is guidance-giving in conflict cases after all.Footnote 36,Footnote 37
There is, of course, a variation on this view according to which one has been guided by a norm just in case one successfully manifests a disposition to comply with it. However, there is no good argument from this view to the claim that we should reject dilemmism, because if we adopt it guidance failures will be commonplace for any view. The situation will be the same as with the factualist interpretation of motivating norms.
Constitutive and procedural norms
It has seemed plausible to some philosophers that truth is a constitutive norm of belief.Footnote 38 That is, what makes a mental state a belief, rather than something else, is that it is governed by truth. Gluer and Wikforss () have argued against this idea on the grounds that truth does not give useful guidance. Since dilemmism is committed to truth, their argument, if it works, will torpedo dilemmism.Footnote 39
Gluer and Wikforss’s reasoning is different from the guidance-related arguments against truth we’ve looked at so far. They reason that in order to be guided by truth with respect to some proposition p, one must first form a belief as to whether the antecedent in the conditional ‘One ought: if p is false, not believe that p’ is true. For until one has formed a belief about the antecedent, one cannot apply the norm. But to form a belief about whether the antecedent is true just is to form a belief about whether p is true or false. Since what belief to form about the truth or falsity of p is precisely the question that truth was supposed to give one guidance on in the first place, Gluer and Wikforss reason, truth does not give useful guidance. And if it doesn’t give useful guidance, they argue, it is not a genuine norm of belief at all.
This is not a convincing argument. As Asbjorn Steglich-Petersen (2013) has pointed out, it relies on a narrow and demanding conception of guidance, according to which one counts as having been guided by a norm only if one forms a belief about what it requires of one. But as we are beginning to see, it is quite unclear why we should be so restrictive in our understanding of guidance.Footnote 40 Consider, for instance, the dispositionalist conception of guidance just discussed. It does not require one to form a belief about what truth requires of one in order for truth to have given guidance—it is enough that one manifests a truth-conducive disposition. Yet it certainly looks like a way of having been guided by truth. Or consider the distinction, which is sometimes made, between ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ guidance. Even if one cannot be directly guided by truth, it does not follow that one cannot be indirectly guided by it.Footnote 41 How? By following ‘procedural’ norms. As a candidate, consider, for instance, an evidentialist spin on rationality, according to which one ought to believe that p only if one’s evidence indicates that p is true. The fact that this norm requires that one believes that p only if one’s evidence indicates that it is true (rather than, say, pleasant to believe) shows that truth is playing a guiding role when one attempts to conform with the evidentialist norm, albeit indirectly.Footnote 42
Gluer and Wikforss’s objection to truth fails, then.Footnote 43Ipso facto, it fails to undermine dilemmism. However, there may be another objection in the vicinity. One might argue that since we cannot be directly guided by truth, it cannot be a full-blooded requirement. Rather, it is at most merely an ideal (aim, goal, etc.) The only real requirement, one might think, is rationality.Footnote 44
This reasoning should be rejected. It assumes that if φ-ing is an or ideal, aim, or goal, it isn’t also a requirement. But counterexamples to that assumption are easy to find. The ideal for a building contractor is (let us suppose) to finish the job on time and on budget. This ideal cannot be ‘directly’ pursued, if by that we mean that one does not need a (fallible) means to achieve the end. Yet for all that it may well be that the contractor is also required to finish the job on time and on budget. I see no guidance-related reason for thinking that the situation is any different with truth.
Guiding ideals
A more pressing concern for dilemmic views is that, in virtue of making logically impossible demands, they cannot even serve as guiding ideals or aims. Greco (2012) and Rinard (2018) deny the existence of epistemic dilemmas on these grounds. They argue like this. Let ‘epistemic flawlessness’ be the state of satisfying all of the epistemic requirements that bind one. Now consider:
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1.
Epistemic flawlessness is an ideal which can guide our doxastic attitude formation by being something we can strive towards.
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2.
If epistemic flawlessness is sometimes logically impossible, then it is not an ideal which can guide our doxastic attitude formation by being something we can strive towards.
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3.
Therefore, epistemic flawlessness is never logically impossible.
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4.
If there are epistemic dilemmas, then epistemic flawlessness is sometimes logically impossible.
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5.
Therefore, there are no epistemic dilemmas.
The crucial thought is that whilst satisfying certain demands might be beyond our reach, due to physical, psychological, epistemic, or computational limitations, they can nevertheless guide our behaviour by serving as ideals. But when they are logically or metaphysically impossible to satisfy, they cannot guide us in this way. Greco gives an example. You cannot match Eliud Kipchoge’s record Marathon time. But you can nevertheless treat it as an ideal to strive towards, and, if you do, it can guide your training. But what could you do to get on your way to running faster than yourself? Similarly, what could you do that would be a step in the direction of both believing that p and not believing that p? Nothing you could do would ever get you any closer to reaching these ‘ideals’. So they are not ideals. And if they are not ideals, then they are not requirements either. Or so the argument goes.
This argument is also unpersuasive. Premise (1) is ambiguous. Once it is disambiguated, we can see that premise (2) is false on one reading and that the argument overgenerates on the other. Either way, it is not sound.
Unpacked, (1) says that ‘satisfying all of the epistemic requirements that bind one is an ideal which can guide one’s doxastic attitude formation by being something one can strive towards’. The ‘all’ here is ambiguous between a collective reading and a distributive reading. On the collective reading, the idea is that we take the epistemic requirements as a whole, and the ideal of epistemic flawlessness is to satisfy all of them. One will inevitably fall short, of course, but one can strive to do better by satisfying more of them. On the distributive reading we don’t bundle up the requirements. Rather, we keep them separate, and for each requirement the ideal is that you satisfy it. On this reading, there are many ideals, not one. For each requirement, there is an ideal: satisfying that requirement.
Let’s look at the collective reading of the argument first. On it, premise (2) is false. Even if it is logically impossible to satisfy all of the epistemic requirements that bind you, because some of them conflict with one another, it is possible to get closer to satisfying all of them. You will certainly fall short, but you can strive to do better and get closer by satisfying more of them. Let me explain.
The dilemmic view says that you should believe only truths and that you should be rational. Most of the time these requirements are jointly satisfiable. Just because there are cases in which, through sheer bad luck, you find yourself in a situation in which the demands of truth and rationality conflict with one another, that doesn’t mean you’re always in that position. Now, in those cases in which they conflict, it is not logically possible to do what is required of you. So, if you ever find yourself in a dilemma situation, you will not achieve epistemic flawlessness. But you get closer to it the more of the requirements you do satisfy. In that case, epistemic flawlessness is an ideal that can guide your practice of doxastic attitude formation by being something you aspire to. Hence, premise (2) of the argument is false. Moreover, you can strive to avoid such conflict cases altogether by being judicious in your choice of epistemic sources. You’ll almost certainly fail to live up to the ideal on some occasions, but that doesn’t show that it is not an ideal towards which you can strive, and by which you can be guided.
On the collective reading of the argument, then, it is simply not true to say that a normative epistemology which allows for dilemmas does not provide us with a guiding ideal toward which we can strive. That leaves us with the distributive reading of the argument. Here the thought is that there cannot be conflicting requirements because, in virtue of it being logically impossible to satisfy each of them, you cannot even begin to get closer to doing what is required of you. On this reading, the argument might be thought to cause a problem for dilemmism, since there really is nothing you can do to get closer to satisfying the requirement ‘believe that p and don’t believe that p’.
However, read this way the argument overgenerates. Suppose that you’re either required to φ or required to not-φ but have no way of knowing which and no chance of finding out. Can you use the ideal ‘do what you’re required to do’ as a guide when making your decision about whether to φ or not-φ in this context? No. The most you can do is guess and hope you get it right. The requirement (whatever it happens to be) cannot be used by you as a guide to make your decision in any way whatsoever; you might as well flip a coin. But we already know from anti-luminosity considerations that this situation—one where you are either required to φ or required to not-φ but have no way of knowing which—is possible.Footnote 45 What’s the difference between this situation and a conflict case? It’s logically and metaphysically possible for you to do what’s required of you, of course—that’s a difference. But it isn’t a relevant difference. What’s important is that in this situation you cannot use the requirement that binds you as a guide to help you make you decision. As we might put it: an invisible ideal is not one that you can strive to satisfy. You might satisfy it by accident, of course—a case of fortuitous luck. But it can’t play the role of guiding your behaviour. The upshot is that we should reject the argument on its distributive reading. However we interpret it, then, the flawlessness argument does not undermine dilemmism.
Guiding reasons
We still don’t have a good guidance objection to dilemmism. Perhaps the problem is that we have focused on guidance by norms and the requirements on doxastic attitude formation that they generate. A different approach maintains that what should guide us is not doxastic requirements themselves, but rather the things that make it the case that we are required to adopt doxastic attitudes. The most popular way of developing this idea is within a factualist ‘reasons-first’ ideology.Footnote 46 It is this approach that I will focus on here. According to this view, what you ought to do is determined by the balance of your reasons, and for a fact to be a reason for you to φ it must be able to guide you. Specifically, you must be able to φ for the reasons that make it the case that you ought to φ:
reasons-determine-oughts: What you ought to do is determined by the balance of your reasons.
reasons guide: You are able to φ for the reasons that make it the case that you ought to φ.
The conjunction of reasons-determine-oughts and reasons guide appears to motivate accepting rationality and rejecting truth and (a fortiori) dilemmism. Why? Well, suppose for reductio that truth is a genuine norm. If so, then given reasons-determine-oughts the fact that p is false is a reason for you not to believe that p even when you don’t know that p is false. But this contravenes reasons guide. This is because, given hyman’s thesis, reasons guide entails:
filter: The fact that p is a reason for you to φ only if you know that p.
Since you cannot refrain from believing that p for the reason that p is false when you’re not in a position to know that p is false, we must reject truth, and hence dilemmism. Instead, we should accept rationality—being rational, the thought goes, is just a matter of correctly responding to your reasons.
Here’s the interesting thing. The reasoning here appears to be invulnerable to the arguments I have given so far, which trade on the observation that we often have poor epistemic access to facts about what’s required of us. This is because filter isn’t a luminosity principle. The claim isn’t (1), it’s (2):
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1.
P is a reason for you to φ only if you know that p is a reason for you to φ.
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2.
P is a reason for you to φ only if you know that p.
(1) is a luminosity principle, but (2) isn’t. The fact by which you are guided is that p, not that p is a reason to φ. As a result, it is unaffected by anti-luminosity arguments. This approach bypasses worries about our poor epistemic access to the facts about what we should do by putting an epistemic filter in place according to which only the facts that we have access to make a difference to what we should do in the first place.
But why think that for p to be a reason of you to φ, you must be able to φ for the reason that p? The answer given by fans of reasons guide is that unless we accept it, we will not be able to rule out cases in which the only way you can do what you ought to do is by acting irrationally and getting lucky. Call this idea no flukes:
no flukes: It is always possible to do what you ought to do without having to act irrationally and getting lucky.
Think again about our thief. According to truth he ought not to believe that they have a painting by Brueghel. But the only way he can conform with truth is by brazenly and irrationally disregarding his evidence. This, the thought goes, is unacceptable. So, we should accept no flukes, and no flukes motivates reasons guide.Footnote 47
Does this shift of focus to guidance-by-reasons help us to decide between the fundamental norms? I don’t think it does. The problem is that even if we accept filter and reasons-determine-oughts there will still be cases in which you can only do what you ought to by acting irrationally and getting lucky. no flukes is false. But in that case, we have no motivation for reasons guide, and so no motivation for filter. And without filter, we have no argument for rejecting truth and dilemmism.
To see why there will still be cases in which one ought to φ yet cannot φ without acting irrationally and getting lucky even if we accept filter and reasons-determine-oughts, consider the following two cases:
red table: Grace is in room one. She sees a red table in front of her in normal lighting conditions and forms the belief that there is a red table in room one.
white table: Bella is in room two. She sees what appears to be a red table in front of her but is in fact a white table made to look red by a hidden light source. She forms the belief that there is a red table in room two.
Both beliefs are surely rational. Are they the beliefs Grace and Bella ought to have according to fans of the reasons-first approach? Given that they accept rationality and reject truth one would expect the answer to be ‘yes’. But in fact it seems to be ‘no’: Grace should believe that there is a red table in room one, but Bella should not believe that there is a red table in room two. Why? Remember that according to the view we are considering, what one ought to believe is determined by the balance of one’s reasons (reasons-determine-oughts), and only known facts are reasons (filter). Grace knows that there is a red table in front of her and knows that she is in room one. So she has excellent reasons to believe that there’s a red table in room one. Bella isn’t so fortunate. She knows that she’s in room two, but she doesn’t know that there’s a red table in front of her, since there isn’t—the table is white. So it doesn’t look like she has good reasons to believe that there is a red table in room two. And since what she should believe is determined by her reasons, it looks like she shouldn’t believe that there is a table in room two.
Now, ask yourself: is it possible for Bella to do what she ought to without being irrational and getting lucky? Pretty clearly not. She’d be completely irrational to suspend on or disbelieve the proposition that there is a red table in room two. But in that case white table is a counterexample to no flukes. And since reasons guide depends on no flukes, we have no reason to accept reasons guide.
Proponents of reasons guide are aware of this problem. In response, they point out that it appears to Bella that the table is red, and that this is something that she presumably knows (or at least, is in a position to know).Footnote 48 They then argue that this fact—the fact that it appears to Bella that there is a red table in front of her—is a reason for her to believe that there is a red table in room two. Moreover, this reason carries substantial weight. Enough to make it the case that on the balance of reasons she ought to believe that there is a red table in room two. So in fact Bella ought to believe what it would be rational for her to believe. Moreover, she need not act irrationally and hope to get lucky in order to believe what she ought to. So, white table isn’t a counterexample to no flukes after all.
However, this reply doesn’t work. In order for it to work, the fact that it appears to one that p must always be as weighty a reason for one to believe that p as is the fact that p. For if it is not, then it will be possible to construct good-case/bad-case pairs analogous to red table & white table in which the subject in the bad case has less reason to believe that p than does the subject in the good case. In some of these cases, this difference in the weight of reasons will be enough to make it the case that the subject in the bad case ought not to believe that p, whilst the subject in the good case ought to believe that p. In these bad cases, the subject will be in the same position as Bella: the only way to do what she ought to do will be to act irrationally and get lucky. These cases would be counterexamples to no flukes.
The problem is that there is no reason to think that the fact that it appears that p is always as weighty a reason for one to believe that p as is the fact that p.Footnote 49 Lasonen-Aarnio (2019) makes the point especially clearly. If one knows that p and one knows that p entails q, then one has as strong a reason as there could be to believe that q: a reason that entails that q. By contrast, Lasonen-Aarnio notes, if one knows that p and one knows merely that p appears to entail q, then one does not have as strong a reason as there could be to believe that q (i.e. an entailing reason) unless one can rule out the possibility that the appearance is misleading. Since appearances can be misleading, one cannot always rule out the possibility that an appearance that p is misleading. Thus, there are possible cases in which the fact that it appears that p is not as weighty a reason for one to believe that p as is the fact that p—white table is just such a case.Footnote 50
So, no flukes is false. Where does this leave us? Without an argument for reasons guide, and so without a reason to accept filter, and so without a guidance-related objection to truth or dilemmism. Conceptualising guidance in terms of reasons rather than norms and requirements doesn’t help those who would level the guidance objection against dilemmism.Footnote 51
Of course, the focus here has only been on a factualist implementation of the reasons-first programme. Not all adherents to the programme accept factualism. Some go in for propositionalism or psychologism.Footnote 52 Could one of these approaches appeal to guidance considerations to rule out a view dilemmism in favour of a rationality-centric view? I am sceptical—I suspect that they will be unable to account for the irrationality of biased beliefs. However, there isn’t space to discuss the issue here, so instead I will leave the ball in their court. If a workable argument can be constructed, it is up to them to construct it.