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Reconciling Enkrasia and Higher-Order Defeat

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Abstract

Titelbaum (in: Gendler T, Hawthorne J (eds) Oxford studies in epistemology, 2015) has recently argued that the Enkratic Principle is incompatible with the view that rational belief is sensitive to higher-order defeat. That is to say, if it cannot be rational to have akratic beliefs of the form “p, but I shouldn’t believe that p,” then rational beliefs cannot be defeated by higher-order evidence, which indicates that they are irrational. In this paper, I distinguish two ways of understanding Titelbaum’s argument, and argue that neither version is sound. The first version can be shown to rest on a subtle, but crucial, misconstrual of the Enkratic Principle. The second version can be resisted through careful consideration of cases of higher-order defeat. The upshot is that proponents of the Enkratic Principle are free to maintain that rational belief is sensitive to higher-order defeat.

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Notes

  1. This picture of epistemic rationality bears clear resemblance to model-theoretic developments in deontic logic; see McNamara (2014) for background. Titelbaum (2015, p. 263) introduces a very similar model to frame his discussion.

  2. For discussions of the Uniqueness Thesis, see Levinstein (2015), Schoenfield (2014), Titelbaum and Kopec (2016), White (2005), among others. For discussions of epistemic dilemmas, see Christensen (2007b, 2010, 2014), Lasonen-Aarnio (2014), and Worsnip (2015).

  3. Discussions of practical akrasia go back as far as to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Book VII, Chs. 1–10). For early modern discussions of practical akrasia, see Davidson (1970) and Hare (1952).

  4. Although see Arpaly (2000), Audi (1990), and McIntyre (1990) for authors who doubt that practical akrasia need always be irrational.

  5. See Horowitz (2013) for a detailed discussion of the intuitive oddness of epistemic akrasia. For related discussions of Moore’s paradox, see Green and Williams (2007) and Smithies (2012).

  6. See, e.g., Coates (2012), Weatherson (ms.), Wedgwood (2012), and Williamson (2000).

  7. See, e.g., Christensen (2010, 2016), Horowitz and Sliwa (2015), Schoenfield (2016), and Worsnip (2015).

  8. For further discussion of self-misleading evidence, see Worsnip (2015, forthcoming), Lasonen-Aarnio (forthcoming), and Skipper (forthcoming).

  9. As also pointed out by Christensen (2010, pp. 196–97), it is not obvious how, exactly, Mary begs the question if she disregards the study on the parental bias. But that she, in one way or another, begs the question seems intuitively clear. The situation is similar to the traditional Dogmatism Puzzle: as Harman (1973, pp. 148–49) notes, it is not obvious why it is irrational to disregard a body of evidence on the grounds that it speaks against one’s knowledge; but that it is irrational seems intuitively clear.

  10. Of course, Elga’s position in the disagreement debate is far from uncontroversial. For criticism, see Kelly (2010) and Lackey (2008a, b).

  11. See, e.g., Kelly (2005, 2010), Christensen (2010), and Rasmussen et al. (2018).

  12. These include not only proponents of various forms of “conciliationism” such as Elga (2007), Christensen (2007a, b), and Feldman (2006), but also proponents of moderately “steadfast” views of disagreement such as Kelly (2010), Lackey (2008a, b), and Worsnip (2014). To my knowledge, Titelbaum (2015) is the only current proponent of the view that disagreement cannot have defeating force.

  13. Strictly speaking, this step of the argument relies on a (relatively weak) evidentialist thesis, since an inference is drawn from what Mary’s evidence supports to what she is rationally permitted to believe. However, since anyone who accepts the Possibility of Higher-Order Defeat is committed to this evidentialist thesis, Titelbaum gets the relevant version of evidentialism for free. For further discussion of evidentialism, see Conee and Feldman (1985, 2004) and Shah (2006).

  14. An anonymous reviewer has rightly pointed out that this line of reasoning presupposes a relatively fine-grained individuation of epistemic situations. More specifically, it is assumed that epistemic situations are sufficiently fine-grained to make it the case that Mary indeed transitions to a new epistemic situation when she learns about the parental bias. For present purposes, I shall simply grant a fine-grained individuation of epistemic situations, since my qualms about Titelbaum’s argument lie elsewhere.

  15. Of course, one might try to give a principled reason to think that rational mistakes are possible only for a certain subset of Pmath. For example, one might think that it can only be rational to be mistaken about sufficiently complex arithmetic statements. But in the absence of such a principled reason, the thought goes, it seems ad hoc to claim that rational mistakes are possible for certain propositions in Pmath, but impossible for others.

  16. I am grateful to Maria Lasonen-Aarnio for bringing the latter interpretation to my attention.

  17. There are, of course, those who argue that epistemic justification is factive—see, e.g., Littlejohn (2012), Steglich-Petersen (2013), Sutton (2007), and Williamson (2000, forthcoming). However, such philosophers must in any case deny the Possibility of Higher-Order Defeat, since the No Fixed Point Thesis (which is implied by the Possibility of Higher-Order Defeat) says that a particular kind of justified false belief is possible, in which case epistemic justification cannot in general be factive.

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Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 8th Annual Edinburgh Graduate Epistemology Conference and in the Research Unit for Theoretical Philosophy at Aarhus University. Thanks to the audience on both occasions for valuable feedback. Special thanks to Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen, Jens Christian Bjerring, Maria Lasonen-Aarnio, Ram Neta, Mike Titelbaum, and two anonymous referees for Erkenntnis for helpful comments and criticism.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Aarhus, Jens Chr. Skous Vej 7, 800, Aarhus C, Denmark

    Mattias Skipper

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Skipper, M. Reconciling Enkrasia and Higher-Order Defeat. Erkenn 84, 1369–1386 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-0012-x

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