Abstract
Metacognition is the monitoring and controlling of cognitive processes. I examine the role of metacognition in ‘ordinary retrieval cases’, cases in which it is intuitive that via recollection the subject has a justified belief. Drawing on psychological research on metacognition, I argue that evidentialism has a unique, accurate prediction in each ordinary retrieval case: the subject has evidence for the proposition she justifiedly believes. But, I argue, process reliabilism has no unique, accurate predictions in these cases. I conclude that ordinary retrieval cases better support evidentialism than process reliabilism. This conclusion challenges several common assumptions. One is that non-evidentialism alone allows for a naturalized epistemology, i.e., an epistemology that is fully in accordance with scientific research and methodology. Another is that process reliabilism fares much better than evidentialism in the epistemology of memory.
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See Feldman and Conee (1985).
- 2.
See Goldman (1979). For two reasons, evidentialism and reliabilism are not in fact direct rivals. First, they theorize about different things. Evidentialism states conditions that justify a subject in having a doxastic attitude (propositional justification), and reliabilism states conditions in which a subject’s doxastic attitude is justified (doxastic justification). With supplements, however, each does state conditions about both propositional and doxastic justification. Second, once supplemented, they can remain compatible (see Sect. 7.4). For simplicity, I take evidentialism and reliabilism to be direct rivals here.
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Conee and Feldman (2001). Some internalists would add that all justifiers are specially accessible by their subjects. The variety of evidentialism I defend here is compatible with, but does not entail, this addition.
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Proust’s arguments, for example, have influenced Koriat and Adiv (2012: 1611).
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Michaelian (2012: 288–90) assumes that one of these propositional attitudes is thereby formed. But it could be that the attitude was standing and just becomes occurrent.
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Apparently Plantinga assumes that a memory belief is based on evidence only if it is currently formed on the basis of conscious evidence. This overlooks the possibility that these memory beliefs were formed in the past and that currently they are just activated, and the possibility that their evidential bases are mental but non-conscious.
- 16.
Cf. Reber and Unkelbach (2010).
- 17.
For inchoate explanatory theories of memorial support, see Harman (1973: 189) and Peacocke (1986: 163–4). Jennifer Nagel (manuscript) argues that something like (c)—the interpretation of fluency as familiarity—is available to internalist accounts of the justification of “trivia beliefs”. She says (manuscript: 2) a belief is a trivia belief “if and only if (1) its origin lies in testimony from a source whose identity is now unknown to the subject, and (2) the subject lacks topically related auxiliary beliefs that would suffice to support the target belief”. My proposals go well beyond Nagel’s. I discuss justification in ordinary retrieval cases, which often involve non-trivia beliefs. Also, Nagel does not argue that (a) or (b) helps justify, and she (manuscript: 19) thinks (c) itself justifies only “weakly”. And, I state in detail why (c), on explanationist evidentialism, helps account for the relevant justification. Finally, I show that research on metacognition supports an internalist view better than a main externalist rival.
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Goldman’s (1979: 14, 2011: 278) reliabilism predicts Candidate 2. Lyons (2009: 177) however develops an untraditional reliabilism that predicts Candidate 1 instead. Unfortunately, his view robs reliabilism of the asset I mention above. Since Lyons’ (2013) reliabilism keeps with tradition, however, I draw on that work below.
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Cf. Lyons (2013: 28) and Conee and Feldman (1998: 26–7, n.13). I see no non-ad hoc reason to restrict input beliefs to those held by the subject. S1’s forming a belief that p may be causally or counterfactually dependent on S2’s belief that q (e.g., via testimony), and so it seems S2’s belief that q would count as an input to the process that formed S1’s belief that p. This has strange results.
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These beliefs concern consistency bias (whereby one reconstructs the past too similarly to one’s view of the present), change bias (whereby one views oneself in the past too differently, in order to redeem an investment), hindsight bias (whereby one attributes present knowledge to one’s past self), and egocentric memory bias (whereby one inflates one’s present self-image by distorting one’s past self-image); see Schacter (2001: Chap. 6).
- 23.
See Comesaña (2010) and Goldman (2011). Note that, even if we could confirm a unique prediction of evidentialist reliabilism, and so the Retrieval Argument failed, we would still have a significant result: generic evidentialism (rather than explanationist evidentialism) is still better supported by ordinary retrieval cases than all non-evidentialists versions of reliabilism are. Generic evidentialism states that the justified attitude for S toward p is the attitude that S’s evidence supports. It leaves open what counts as evidence, and leaves open how evidence supports.
- 24.
I thank Matthew Baddorf, Caleb Cohoe, Earl Conee, Richard Feldman, Jon Kvanvig, Kevin McCain, Kourken Michaelian, Jonathan Reibsamen, and Declan Smithies for helpful conversation and feedback on drafts of this paper.
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Frise, M. (2018). Metacognition As Evidence for Evidentialism. In: McCain, K. (eds) Believing in Accordance with the Evidence. Synthese Library, vol 398. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95993-1_7
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