Abstract
Some of the most well-known arguments against epistemic externalism come in the form of thought experiments involving subjects who acquire beliefs through anomolous means such as clairvoyance. These thought experiments purport to provide counterexamples to the reliabilist conception of justification: their subjects are intuitively epistemically unjustified, yet meet reliabilist externalist criteria for justification. In this article, I address a recent defence of externalism due to Daniel Breyer, who argues that externalists need not consider such subjects justified, since they fail to own those beliefs in a way required for epistemic evaluability. I argue that the concept of belief ownership Breyer adopts leaves his account open to related counterexamples, and suggest a modification, drawing on analogies between these cases and cases of delusions, such as thought insertion. I will argue that a concept of authorship developed in the literature on delusions better grounds the sense of attribution required for epistemic evaluability.
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Notes
It may be noted that while Norman was described as having a belief about the location of the President, Lehrer describes Truetemp as having a thought about the temperature. While this might sound weaker, in fact for Lehrer accepting a thought requires, in general, a greater level of commitment than merely having a belief. For present purposes this distinction will not be of great significance, since Lehrer, like BonJour, presents his subject as having the kind of mental state that goes along with justification and truth to constitute knowledge (Lehrer 2000, p. 13–14; 188), however that state is characterised, so the challenge they present is similar. The significance of Truetemp’s tempucomp-induced acceptance of the temperature thoughts will be considered further below (6.1).
It is, of course, possible to stipulate that one is to be held responsible for beliefs issuing from belief-forming mechanisms for which one is responsible, but this is a legalistic sense of responsibility analogous to the responsibility a Minister in a Westminster-system government has for actions within the ministry. If we are looking for a strong sense of responsibility appropriate to ground epistemic praise and blame, this is not the sense we are looking for.
Although there is disagreement in the psychological literature about whether inserted thoughts should be thought of as owned (Mullins and Spence 2003), it seems that for the purposes of defining a concept of ownership relevant to epistemic accountability, we will want to exclude such cases, since it would not be appropriate to hold the thought insertion sufferer responsible for having those thoughts.
It should be noted that Bortolotti and Broome do not themselves think that authorship is necessary for ownership (2009, p. 212), but treat them both as conditions holding in normal cases of belief and failing in cases of thought insertion. I am presenting authorship here as a necessary condition for genuine ownership, and am therefore invoking a stronger sense of ownership than Bortolotti and Broome. It would, however, also be consistent with my view to argue simply that authorship is necessary for epistemic attributability, keeping the concept of ownership distinct. I take authorship, rather than ownership, to be the more important concept here but cast the argument in terms of ownership as well for consistency with Breyer’s argument.
He may still be negatively evaluable for holding in the sense of being held guilty of some kind of epistemic vice for holding a belief without reasons, but that does not affect the argument here, since what we need to show is that the reliabilist does not need to say he has a positively evaluated belief about the President’s location.
Internalists may still judge him unjustified, but to include the requirement that he be fully internally justified would just beg the question here.
References
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Duke-Yonge, J. Ownership, Authorship and External Justification. Acta Anal 28, 237–252 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-012-0170-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-012-0170-4