Abstract
In this paper I take up the question of the nature of the doxastic attitudes we entertain while inquiring into some matter. Relying on a distinction between two stages of open inquiry, I urge to acknowledge the existence of a distinctive attitude of cognitive inclination towards a proposition qua answer to the question one is inquiring into. I call this attitude “hypothesis”. Hypothesis, I argue, is a sui generis doxastic attitude which differs, both functionally and normatively, from suspended judgement, full belief, credences, and acceptance. In closing, I point to the epistemological significance of hypothesis. More specifically, I contend that holding an attitude of hypothesis enables us to respond rationally to peer disagreement, and I suggest that such an attitude offers a suitable articulation of the view, originally put forward by Philip Kitcher, that cognitive diversity in inquiry has epistemic benefits.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Clearly, Lucy could also focus on rf or vf if doing so would enable her to rule those explanations out by employing less resources. Yet, this point is orthogonal to the inquisitive priority that pf holds in Lucy’s mind. I owe this point to an anonymous referee.
As far as I am aware, the only notable exception is a recent article by Will Fleisher (2018) with which I will engage at various points of the present investigation.
To forestall misunderstandings: The role of Lucy’s case is not to offer a faithful reconstruction of scientific practice but rather to illustrate the possibility of three-stage inquiries by giving it some concreteness.
I would like to thank Tim Schroeder for suggesting this nice example to me.
A clarification is in order here. I will keep on endorsing Friedman’s characterisation of suspended judgement for the sake of simplicity, but let emphasise that the correctness of the view I will put forward does not rely on the correctness of her account of suspended judgement. All I need in order to distinguish between the first and the second stage of open inquiry is the distinction between a stage at which the inquirer is epistemically neutral and a stage at which she no longer is. The kind of epistemic neutrality I am interested in could be equally delivered by other accounts of suspended judgement.
For more details about questions and answers, see Friedman (2013). Let me just draw the reader’s attention to an important distinction between answers and responses to a question pointed out in Friedman (2013). If we are inquiring into the question of whether Matthew made it to the party, this question has two possible answers only: either he made it, or he did not. However, one can respond to this question by saying “Who’s Matthew?”, “Which Party?”, and so on. I am here interested in answers and not in responses.
I am envisaging the possibility that Lucy utters a bare sentence expressing the proposition she is cognitively inclined towards, but the more realistic scenario is such that she utters sentence like “pf is the best shot at explaining pf”, “I conjecture pf”, and so on. To my mind, this suggests that, realistically, Lucy is not disposed to unqualifiedly assert pf.
I will come back to the issue of which doxastic attitudes are distinctively associated with the third stage of inquiry, i.e. namely the stage at which we close our inquiry, below.
This is a mere terminological choice, and the unhappy reader should feel free to replace it with any label they take to be more suitable than this one. The project I am after in this paper is not to understand how we use the term “hypothesis” in ordinary language, but to offer a characterisation of the state of mind we are in at the second stage of an inquiry such as Lucy’s.
Let me emphasise that this is but a simplification. I will indeed suggest that while we typically close our inquiries by (fully) believing a proposition, we can do so in other ways too.
The reader will have by now started to wonder whether hypothesising that p reduces to (or entails) assigning a not-so-high credence to p. I will address this issue in Sect. 4.
Friedman (2017a: p. 311) calls it “Ignorance Norm”. Throughout the paper, I will take the ‘p answers Q’ expression to refer to p being a complete answer to Q.
One might wonder whether Friedman takes RNIK to be a wide-scope, as opposed to a narrow-scope, principle. If so, the epistemic obligation not to inquire takes scope over the whole conditional and the consequent cannot be “detached”, thereby avoiding the objection to RNIK I have just stated. Two observations are in order. First, Friedman (2017a: p. 323 fn. 19) explicitly says that the principle receives a narrow-scope reading, but that a wide-scope one is also acceptable. So, I do not take myself to be begging the question against her formulation of the principle. Secondly, and more importantly, I think that we should resist formulating RNIK (and cognate principles) as wide-scope norms. Wide-scope norms are widely (although not universally) taken to express requirements of rationality, where such requirements are meant to target certain ways of structuring one’s mind by preventing certain combinations of attitudes. Friedman (2017a: pp. 311–312) seems to be thinking of RNIK in these terms. However, RNIK crucially differs from run-of-the-mill rational requirements—consider the idea rationality requires of you that if you believe p, you do not believe not-p—in that it does not merely prevent certain combinations of attitudes. Irrespective of whether RNIK is formulated in a wide- or narrow-scope way, the antecedent of RNIK is a known proposition, and not a merely believed one. This asymmetry cannot be ignored and, to my mind, suggests that principles such as RNIK are to be seen as substantive prescriptions of reason, as opposed to structural prescriptions of rationality. I thank an anonymous referee for pressing me on this matter.
To see why, let us assume PNIK. By contraposition, standard definition of P as ¬O¬, and double-negation elimination, we have: Op → ¬Kp.
See e.g. Whiting (2010) for a defence. Some of the complexities I will gloss over are: First, some would contend that the best formulation of B is in terms of an obligation rather than a permission. Secondly, while I am using truth as the relevant normative property, B could be reformulated in terms of knowledge (see e.g. Williamson 2000) without affecting the main points of the present discussion. Thirdly, we can make B compatible with an evidentialist view to the effect that it is epistemically appropriate to rely on evidential considerations when engaged in doxastic deliberation (See e.g. Shah and Velleman 2005).
Being in a position to know p and knowing p differ in that the condition that one believe p in the latter is replaced by the condition that one be physically and psychologically capable of believing p in the former (see Williamson 2000). It follows that being in a position to know, just like knowing, is factive.
My considerations against the credal reductionist approach are meant to hold for both mushy and sharp options.
Goldberg’s definition of what he calls “attitudinal speculation” is an instance of such metacognitive accounts (see Goldberg 2013: p. 283).
I fully develop this view in Palmira (2019). Similar views have been defended by Goldberg (2013) and Barnett (2017) in connection to philosophical disagreement. Goldberg invokes the aforementioned notion of “attitudinal speculation” in order to make sense of the possibility that two philosophers rationally retain their incompatible philosophical views without retaining a belief in them. Barnett raises some worries about Goldberg’s metacognitive definition of attitudinal speculation and defends a view of the rational response to peer disagreement in philosophy to the effect that one is rationally permitted to have an attitude of “inclination to accept a certain view as true”. Since Barnett does not give us any detail about the functional and normative profile of this attitude, one might wonder whether what I call “hypothesis” is what he has in mind.
While Kitcher is focusing specifically on scientific inquiries, authors such as Barnett (2017) and Elgin (2010) suggest generalising Kitcher’s point by looking at the structural features of various inquisitive scenarios in which fostering cognitive diversity has better epistemic payoffs than promoting consensus amongst inquirers. Noticeably, they take philosophical inquiry to be another domain in which Kitcher’s division of cognitive labour can be fruitful.
Fleisher (2018) argues for this point extensively while talking about endorsement. I submit that given that his considerations rely on there to be extrinsic epistemic reasons for endorsement, and given that the same reasons are the ones which make hypothesising rational, his point extends to hypothesis. Furthermore, given that hypothesising p is something we do irrespective of whether we are in a scientific research context, this guarantees that the gap between collective and individual rationality in the division of cognitive labour can be closed at a general level, namely in non-scientific inquiries as well as in scientific ones.
References
Barnett, Z. (2017). Philosophy without belief. Mind. https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzw076.
Christensen, D. (2004). Putting logic in its place. Oxford: OUP.
Christensen, D. (2010). Higher-order evidence. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 81(1), 85–115.
Christensen, D., & Lackey, J. (Eds.). (2013). The epistemology of disagreement. New essays. Oxford: OUP.
Cohen, L. J. (1992). An essay on belief and acceptance. Oxford: Clarendon.
Elgin, C. (2010). Persistent disagreement. In R. Feldman & T. Warfield (Eds.), Disagreement (pp. 53–67). Oxford: OUP.
Feldman, R., & Warfield, T. (Eds.). (2010). Disagreement. Oxford: OUP.
Fleisher, W. (2018). Rational endorsement. Philosophical Studies, 175, 2649–2675.
Foley, R. (1993). Working without a net. New York: OUP.
Friedman, J. (2013). Question-directed attitudes. Philosophical Perspectives, 27, 145–174.
Friedman, J. (2017a). Why suspend judging? Noûs, 51(2), 302–326.
Friedman, J. (2017b). Inquiry and belief. Noûs. https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.12222.
Goldberg, S. (2013). Defending philosophy in the face of systematic disagreement. In D. E. Machuca (Ed.), Disagreement and skepticism (pp. 277–294). London: Routledge.
Greaves, H., & Wallace, D. (2006). Justifying conditionalization: Conditionalization maximizes expected epistemic utility. Mind, 115(459), 607–632.
Hanson, N. R. (1958). Patterns of discovery. Cambridge: CUP.
Horowitz, S. (2014). Immoderately rational. Philosophical Studies, 167, 41–56.
Joyce, J. (1998). A nonpragmatic vindication of probabilism. Philosophy of Science, 65(4), 575–603.
Kitcher, P. (1990). The division of cognitive labor. The Journal of Philosophy, 87(1), 5–22.
Konek, J. (2016). Probabilistic knowledge and cognitive ability. The Philosophical Review, 125(4), 509–587.
Lasonen-Aarnio, M. (2014). Higher-order evidence and the limits of defeat. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 88(2), 314–345.
Laudan, B. (1978). Progress and its problems: Towards a theory of scientific growth. Berkeley: University of California Press.
MacFarlane, J. (2011). What is assertion? In J. Brown & H. Cappelen (Eds.), Assertion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McHugh, C., & Whiting, D. (2014). The normativity of belief. Analysis, 74(4), 698–713.
McKaughan, D. (2008). From ugly duckling to swan: C.S. Peirce, abduction, and the pursuit of scientific theories. Transaction of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 44(3), 446–468.
Moss, S. (2013). Epistemology formalized. The Philosophical Review, 122, 1–43.
Moss, S. (2018). Probabilistic knowledge. Oxford: OUP.
Palmira, M. (2019). How to solve the puzzle of peer disagreement. American Philosophical Quarterly, 56(1), 83–96.
Rosenkranz, S. (2007). Agnosticism as a third stance. Mind, 116(461), 55–104.
Searle, J. R. (1976). A classification of illocutionary acts. Language in Society, 5, 1–23.
Searle, J. R., & Vanderveken, D. (1985). Foundations of illocutionary logic. Cambridge: CUP.
Shah, N., & Velleman, D. J. (2005). Doxastic deliberation. The Philosophical Review, 114(4), 497–534.
Stalnaker, R. (1984). Inquiry. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Steel, D. (2010). Epistemic values and the argument from inductive risk. Philosophy of Science, 77(1), 14–34.
Sturgeon, S. (2008). Reason and the grain of belief. Noûs, 42, 139–165.
Turri, J. (2010). Epistemic invariantism and speech act contextualism. The Philosophical Review, 119(1), 77–95.
Van Fraassen, B. (1980). The scientific image. Oxford: OUP.
Whiting, D. (2010). Should I believe the truth? Dialectica, 64, 213–224.
Whitt, L. A. (1990). Theory pursuit: Between discovery and acceptance. In PSA: Proceedings of the biennial meeting of the philosophy of science association (Vol. 1, pp. 467–483).
Williamson, T. (2000). Knowledge and its limits. Oxford: OUP.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Fernando Broncano-Berrocal, Annalisa Coliva, Bartek Czajka, Cory Davia, José Diez, Carl Hoefer, Hichem Naar, Neri Marsili, Daniel Morgan, Martina Orlandi, Lucas Rosenblatt, Sven Rosenkranz, Léa Salje, Tim Schroeder, Carlota Serrahima, Paulina Sliwa, Sarah Stroud, three anonymous reviewers for this journal, and audiences at the XII SIFA conference held in Pistoia in 2016, the LOGOS Seminar 2017 held in Barcelona, the CRÉ-GRIN workshop “Attitudes, Rationality and Concepts” held in Montreal in 2017, and the CPA 2018 conference held in Montreal for their helpful feedback on various parts of this material. Work on this article has received funding from the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme under Grant Agreement H2020-MSCA-ITN-2015-675415, the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO), under Grant Agreement: FFI2016-80588-R and the Beatriu de Pinós postdoctoral fellowship programme, under Agreement 2016BP-00132.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Palmira, M. Inquiry and the doxastic attitudes. Synthese 197, 4947–4973 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-01955-3
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-01955-3