Abstract
Conceptual limitations restrict our epistemic options. One cannot believe, disbelieve, or doubt what one cannot grasp. I show how, even granting an epistemic ought-implies-can principle, such restrictions might lead to epistemic dilemmas: situations where each of one’s options violates some epistemic requirement. An alternative reaction would be to take epistemic norms to be sensitive to one’s options in ways that ensure dilemmas never arise. I propose, on behalf of the dilemmist, that we treat puzzlement as a kind of epistemic residue, roughly analogous with guilt, appropriate only when one has violated an epistemic requirement. Sometimes, in bumping up against the limits of one’s concepts, it is appropriate to be puzzled no matter what one believes. Puzzlement can thus play the same role in an epistemic dilemmist’s theory that guilt plays in the theories of many moral dilemmists.
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Notes
This principle, in various formulations, has been the topic of much controversy. It has been claimed to be subject to counterexamples (Stocker, 1971; King, 2014; Graham, 2011) undermined by folk judgements Turri and Buckwalter (2015), and have only self-undermining theoretical motivation (Talbot, 2016). For defenses of it, see Howard-Snyder (2006), Streumer (2007), Vranas (2007, 2018), Littlejohn (2012), Wedgwood (2013), Leben (2018).
The most prominent discussion of epistemic ought-implies-can principles stems from Alston (1988), who argued that since we cannot believe at will, our beliefs cannot be subject to an epistemic ‘ought’. Many have denied this kind of ought-implies-can principle in favor of some weaker variant (see, e.g., Hieronymi (2008) and McHugh (2012)). For present purposes we do not need any principle that would require our belief be under our voluntary control, or indeed under any kind of control.
Nor do we need a principle that rules out epistemic ‘ought’s in cases of compulsive belief of the kind taken by Mizrahi (2012), Côté-Bouchard (2019), Buckwalter and Turri (2020) to be problematic for epistemic ought-implies-can principles.
For uses of various thinner epistemic ought-implies-can principles more in the spirit of the one I will be appealing to, see, for instance, Bykvist and Hattiangadi (2007), Chuard and Southwood (2009), Greco (2012), Helton (2020), Forrai (2021).
For an entry point into that literature, see Margolis and Laurence (2014).
I find it natural and helpful to put this in terms of concepts, but note that we can cut out the middleman: we can just say that certain doxastic attitudes cannot be had without certain cognitive capacities. So the arguments could be restated in terms acceptable to those who, like Machery (2009), prefer to eliminate the term ‘concept’.
Putting aside the views of certain Platonists and Fodorians, anyways.
One interesting intermediary between eliminable and deep conceptual limitations: grasping one concept requires, given the capacities of the agent, the giving up of another concept. Then we could get cases where it’s true of each doxastic attitude that the agent could (at least under possible conceptual revision) have that attitude, but certain combinations of these attitudes would be impossible for this agent. Depending on how we individuate and combine concepts, we could think of this as a deep limitation on a compound concept.
Also interesting are concepts that can normally only be acquired with heavy reliance on culture that is not present to the agent. Would the average human living in 500 B.C. lack the concept of an internet search engine in an eliminable or deep way? That depends on what we wish to include in their capacities. Similarly for concepts that may require some other external cognitive aid to grasp.
To be able to explicitly model what we have said about conceptual limitations above, this specification of belief will need revision, since some truth I am unable to grasp may be true at all the worlds in my belief state. For one natural way to revise the model in this direction, see Yalcin (2018). For another, see economists’ models of unawareness (Schipper 2015; Steele and Orri Steffánsson 2021).
This dynamic way of describing the consistency norm in terms of updates corresponds to non-prioritized models of rational belief update (Hansson, 1999) It is a natural fit with the synchronic non-emptiness norm (which is equivalent to the consistency condition of Stalnaker (1984), at least assuming worlds themselves are consistent), but it is not required.
For discussion, see Barlassina and Gordon (2017, §6.3), Ravenscroft (2016, §2.2), and sources cited therein. We need not be concerned with whether the traditional understanding of these experiments is the right one; I am skeptical that it is. All we need is a possible case of a dilemma, so this should suffice. And once we have presented a possible case, it shouldn’t be too difficult to carry over the basic structure to genuine cases of conceptual limitations, whatever those turn out to be.
I say ‘at most’ because it is not clear to me that we should take option 4 to be a genuine option. Removing it would not weaken the example; it would just mean we would not need to appeal to the consistency norm requirement R3.
See Hodges (1998) for a statement of Cantor’s proof and an entertaining review of some common errors made in attempts to refute it. For ease of exposition, I won’t focus on the issues that motivated Cantor, nor what surprised him about his results (for that, see Dauben (1992)), but instead something simpler.
Given that we are talking about mathematical truths which are presumably true in all metaphysically possible worlds, we must here be appealing to a different kind of possibility. See Chalmers (2011) and Berto and Jago (2019) for a couple ways of doing this. This is a controversial issue, and there are other ways of handling this coming from a worlds-based model, most notably by appeal to fragmentation (Stalnaker, 1984; Pérez Carballo, 2016; Yalcin, 2018; Elga and Rayo, 2020) I don’t see reason for doubting that the example would carry over when translated to other frameworks, but I will not work through how to do so here.
See Lasonen-Aarnio (2014) and Worsnip (2018) for proposals along these lines for dealing with puzzles of higher-order evidence. There remain various details to work out concerning just what it takes for norms to conflict, what exactly happens when they do, and whether we need to worry about cases where conflicting requirements are generated by the same norm. But I don’t have reason to believe such details cannot be worked out in a satisfactory way.
For different approaches to epistemic blame, see Brown (2020), Boult (2020, 2021). An interesting project would be to work out whether all accounts of epistemic blame lead to similar results to Greco’s withdrawal of trust, or whether there are some understandings of it more useful to the dilemmist, but as far as I know this has yet to be pursued.
For that, see Hughes (n.d).
Though I will only discuss puzzlement, my proposal is not incompatible with taking there to be other instances of epistemic residue, perhaps also analogous with guilt, perhaps analogous with blame, or perhaps something that has no clear parallel on the moral side.
Note that I’m not suggesting the dilemmist hold that puzzlement is appropriate for all cases of failure to meet an epistemic requirement. The proposal is that failure to meet an epistemic requirement is necessary for appropriate puzzlement, not vice versa. Perhaps violations of only some kinds of requirements are appropriately puzzlement inducing. And perhaps some violations are equivalent to blameless violations of moral requirements.
In Deigan (n.d.) I posit and defend a norm requiring that for any question one wonders, one must be able to think at least some possible answers that one has not yet ruled out. Such a norm would be violated in such a case, as well as some helpful cases suggested to me by anonymous reviewers, such as the puzzlement felt by a scientist whose experiments yield surprising results that they cannot see how to make sense of, or cases of being baffled by some bizarre nocturnal behavior of one’s neighbor. By no means do I think the dilemmist should take it to be intuitively obvious that there is some epistemic requirement violation in such cases, just that it’s not obvious that there isn’t.
Though it is not necessary for the residue-based case for dilemmas, it is worth noting that in cases like these, it also seems that besides puzzlement being appropriate, lacking puzzlement is inappropriate. If one were simply to take one of the bad options available without any puzzlement, one would apparently be missing something. And if it’s brought to one’s attention but one still feels nothing like puzzlement, then something is more seriously off. This is similar to guilt. A moral wrongdoer can lack guilt through inattention or self-deception, in which case they’re missing something, but the wrongdoer can also recognize wrongdoing but feel no guilt, which seems a more serious problem.
The option of withholding or suspending judgement has been important to the discussion of epistemic dilemmas, since it seems to offer a way out to agents facing putative epistemic dilemmas for which there is no clear analogue for agents facing putative moral dilemmas. For anti-dilemmic takes on this, see Flowerree (n.d.), Lord and Sylvan (n.d.), Simion (n.d.); for pro-dilemmic takes, see Odegard (1993), Turri (2012), Hughes (2019).
Thanks to Daniel Greco (p.c.) for this case.
I have used the terms ‘justified’ and ‘appropriate’, but what matters here isn’t the terminology—we could mark the distinction with ‘objective’ as opposed to ‘subjective appropriateness’, ‘fitting’ as opposed to ‘warranted’, or ‘correct’ as opposed to ‘rational’. The point is just that there is some status that puzzlement doesn’t have in Henrietta’s case that it does have in the cases we’ve considered involving failures to meet some epistemic requirement. The dilemmist should say that it is that status that indicates failure to meet an epistemic requirement, and that is the status that Francine’s and George’s puzzlement would have, no matter which of their options they take.
For a recent articulation of a view along these lines, see Scharp (2020).
See Wittgenstein (1953–2009, §§121–129).
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Acknowledgements
For helpful discussions and comments, thanks to Daniel Ferguson, Daniel Greco, Juan S. Piñeros Glasscock, Zoltán Gendler Szabó, participants of the 2017 Yale Philosophy WIP seminar, and two anonymous reviewers for this journal.
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Deigan, M. Conceptual limitations, puzzlement, and epistemic dilemmas. Philos Stud 180, 2771–2796 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-01961-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-01961-3