Reasons, Justification, and Defeat 2021931162, 9780198847205, 9780192586490

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Reasons, Justification, and Defeat

Reasons, Justification, and Defeat, edited by Jessica Brown, and Mona Simion, Oxford University Press USA - OSO, 2021.

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Reasons, Justification, and Defeat, edited by Jessica Brown, and Mona Simion, Oxford University Press USA - OSO, 2021.

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Reasons, Justification, and Defeat

Copyright © 2021. Oxford University Press USA - OSO. All rights reserved.

Edited by JESSICA BROWN AND MONA SIMION

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © the several contributors 2021 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2021 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2021931162 Copyright © 2021. Oxford University Press USA - OSO. All rights reserved.

ISBN 978–0–19–884720–5 Printed and bound in the UK by TJ Books Limited Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Contents List of Contributors

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1. Introduction

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Jessica Brown and Mona Simion

2. The Normativity of Knowledge and the Scope and Sources of Defeat

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Sanford C. Goldberg

3. The Structure of Defeat: Pollock’s Evidentialism, Lackey’s Framework, and Prospects for Reliabilism

39

Peter J. Graham and Jack C. Lyons

4. Losing Knowledge by Thinking about Thinking

69

Jennifer Nagel

5. Dispositional Evaluations and Defeat

93

Maria Lasonen-Aarnio

6. Suspension, Higher-Order Evidence, and Defeat

116

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Errol Lord and Kurt Sylvan

7. Reasons for Reliabilism

146

Bob Beddor

8. Knowledge, Action, and Defeasibility

177

Carlotta Pavese

9. Undercutting Defeat: When it Happens and Some Implications for Epistemology

201

Matthew McGrath

10. Defeaters as Indicators of Ignorance

223

Julien Dutant and Clayton Littlejohn

11. Competing Reasons

247

Justin Snedegar

12. Perceptual Reasons and Defeat

269

Mark Schroeder

Index

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List of Contributors

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Bob Beddor, National University of Singapore Jessica Brown, University of St Andrews Julien Dutant, King’s College London Sanford C. Goldberg, Northwestern University Peter Graham, University of California Riverside Maria Lasonen-Aarnio, University of Helsinki Clayton Littlejohn, King’s College London Errol Lord, University of Pennsylvania Jack Lyons, University of Glasgow Matthew McGrath, Rutgers University Jennifer Nagel, University of Toronto Carlotta Pavese, Cornell University Mark Schroeder, University of Southern California Mona Simion, University of Glasgow Justin Snedegar, University of St Andrews Kurt Sylvan, University of Southampton

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1 Introduction Jessica Brown and Mona Simion

1.1. Introduction

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The notion of defeat has been central to epistemology, practical reasoning, and ethics. Within epistemology, it is standardly assumed that a subject who knows that p, or justifiably believes that p can lose this knowledge or justified belief by acquiring a so-called ‘defeater’, whether evidence that not-p, evidence that the process which produced her belief is unreliable, or evidence that she has likely misevaluated her evidence. Within ethics and practical reasoning, it is widely accepted that a subject may initially have a reason to do something, although this reason is later defeated by her acquisition of further information. The notion of defeat has been central to a wide range of different philosophical debates, including, but not limited to: (1) The nature of justification and knowledge: since knowledge and justification are taken by many to be defeasible, the extent to which one account or another of the nature of knowledge/justification is able to account for/accommodate defeat constitutes an important ground for assessing its theoretical credentials (see e.g. Sudduth 2018). (2) Internalism versus externalism: several epistemologists worry that epistemic externalism has a hard time accommodating psychological defeat; at the same time, conversely, if justification supervenes on mental states alone, as per internalism, it seems mysterious that it could be defeated by normative defeaters lying outside of the cognizer’s ken (see e.g. Pappas 2017). (3) Epistemic norms and reasons: for accommodating the phenomenon of defeat, debates on epistemic norms and epistemic reasons owe us, at a minimum, an account of epistemic normative overriding, as well as an account of reasons against belief (see e.g. Simion 2020) (4) Evolutionary debunking arguments: the nature of defeat has repercussions for the debate about the metaethical implications of

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evolutionary explanations of morality. It is argued that some, if not all, human moral beliefs are the product of evolutionary forces: we were selected for having useful rather than true moral beliefs. Learning about the evolutionary origin of our moral beliefs undercuts their prima facie justification, or so the challenge goes (see e.g. Silva 2016). Evidence and higher-order evidence: since evidence is widely taken to be defeasible, a plausible account of evidence should come with a corresponding plausible account of defeat. For instance, one important desideratum for any such account is that it explains the defeating power of higher-order evidence, namely of evidence that one’s first-order beliefs are the output of a flawed process (see e.g. Brown 2018). Closure and transmission: one popular solution to alleged failures of closure principles for knowledge and transmission principles for warrant is known as ‘the defeat solution’: roughly, the thought goes, closure and transmission hold prima facie, and the intuitions of failure are to be explained in terms of psychological defeat. This solution, of course, hangs on the assumption that there is such a thing to begin with: i.e. that psychological defeat is a genuine epistemic category (see e.g. Pryor 2004). Disagreement: one way to characterize the debate between conciliatory and steadfast views of disagreement is as centred around the question: can the testimony of one’s peer carry defeating power? Steadfast-ism answers ‘no’, conciliationism answers ‘yes’. The correct account of the nature of defeat can help settle the issue (see e.g. Frances and Matheson 2019). Reductionism versus anti-reductionism about testimony: say that a suspect for murder S tells you that she did not do it. According to both of the main views in the epistemology of testimony, you are not justified to believe S. According to reductionism, that’s because you always need positive, non-testimonial reasons to believe what you are being told. In contrast, according to anti-reductionism, you are prima facie justified to believe S, but your justification is defeated. The correct nature of the nature of defeat will likely go a long way in the direction of settling the issue (see e.g. Green 2008).

It is useful to categorize contributions to the defeat literature as falling under one of the following two broad categories: (i) the nature and extent of defeat and (ii) kinds of defeaters. In what follows, we will first briefly run through the state of the art thus categorized (Sections 1.2 and 1.3). Last, we give an

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overview of the volume’s chapters and explain how they build on the state of the art (Section 1.4).

1.2. The Nature and Extent of Defeat

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1.2.1 Defeaters as Reasons The first and now considered the classic view on the nature of defeat in epistemology is due to Pollock (1986). According to this view, D is a defeater of E’s support for p for S if and only if (i) E is a reason to believe p for S, and (ii) E&D is not a reason to believe p for S (henceforth Pollock’s view). The account has a lot going for it; first, it promises to cut across normative domains, in virtue of being framed in terms of reasons; after all, epistemologists hardly enjoy exclusivity on reasons. With Pollock’s view in play, it is easy to see how we could generalize it to cover different targets (e.g. actions) and types (e.g. moral, prudential) of normativity. Second, Pollock’s view makes good on the intuitive thought that defeaters are actualizers of the possibility of a positive normative status to be overridden or undercut; what the view says, in a nutshell, is that defeaters are the kind of things that render a permissible belief impermissible. More recently, though, Pollock’s view has come under heavy attack. First, as Chandler (2013) points out, Pollock’s view is problematic in that it cannot accommodate what can be called justifying defeaters. As the name suggests, a justifying defeater JD of E’s support for p for S does double duty: it prevents E from being a reason to believe p for S but, at the same time, it gives S a new reason to believe p. So, JD is a defeater for S, but it does not fulfil clause (ii) of Pollock’s view, as E&JD still is a reason for S to believe p. Second, the view has been found wanting on prior plausibility in virtue of the very fact that it’s stated in terms of reasons. Pollock’s view fits snugly with evidentialism about justification: the epistemic status of a belief is determined by the reasons for and against believing. As such, on Pollock’s view, there is no defeat without reasons. With the increased popularity of externalist, processbased accounts of justification, however, conceiving of defeat in terms of reasons is not very helpful. One reason for this is that, on standard forms of reliabilism (process reliabilism, virtue reliabilism, proper functionalism), reasons are neither necessary nor sufficient for justification. If reasons don’t have any justificatory power, however, it is mysterious why they might have defeating powers. Furthermore, notable defenders of

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reliabilism deny that reasons are substantive epistemic normative categories to being with (e.g. Lyons 2009; Kornblith 2015).

1.2.2 Defeaters as Reliable Processes Reliabilist theories of justification have been extremely popular in the last three decades and come in a variety of forms, the gist of the view is that a belief is justified if and only if formed via a (normally) reliable procedure, or ability. Reliabilism is a theory of prima facie justification. As such, in line with normative theories in general, it needs a theory of defeat in order to hold water. The standard reliabilist account of defeat comes from Alvin Goldman:

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The alternative reliable process account (ARP): S’s belief is defeated if there are reliable (or conditionally reliable) belief-forming processes available to S such that, if S had used those processes in addition to the process actually used, S wouldn’t have held the belief in question (Goldman 1979). One can see how ARP is an elegant reliabilist translation of the Pollockian thought that defeat is the kind of normative entity that, when taken in conjunction with the extant epistemic support for the relevant belief, fails to render it justified. Bob Beddor (2015) is the locus classicus for criticism of ARP; if Beddor is right, ARP is both too weak and too strong. Against ARP’s sufficiency direction, Beddor offers the following case: Thinking about Unger: Harry sees a tree in front of him at t. Consequently, he comes to believe the proposition TREE: 〈There is a tree in front of me〉 at t. Now, Harry happens to be very good at forming beliefs about what Peter Unger’s 1975 time-slice would advise one to believe in any situation. Call this cognitive process his Unger Predictor [ . . . ]. What’s more, [ . . . ] whenever it occurs to Harry that Unger would advise him (Harry) to suspend judgement about p, this causes Harry to [ . . . ] suspend judgement about p. So, if Harry had used his Unger Predictor, he would have come to [ . . . ] suspend judgement regarding TREE. What this cases shows is that ARP is too weak: contra ARP, for my belief that p to be defeated, it is not enough that I would change my mind about p in a counterfactual world due to employing some reliable process. What this objection identifies is that ARP is normatively too weak: just because I would change my mind in world W, it does not follow that I should change my mind in world W: defeat is a normative notion.

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Here’s Beddor’s case against ARP’s necessity direction: Job opening: Masha tells Clarence that her department will have a job opening in the fall. Clarence believes Masha; assuming that Masha is usually reliable, Clarence’s belief counts as prima facie justified. Sometime later, Clarence speaks with the head of Masha’s department, Victor, who informs him that the job search was cancelled due to budget constraints. Now suppose that Clarence harbours a deep-seated hatred of Victor that causes him to disbelieve everything that Victor says, what’s more, no amount of rational reflection would rid Clarence of this inveterate distrust. Consequently, he continues to believe that there will be a job opening in the fall. This case shows that ARP is also too strong: just because, in all counterfactual worlds, I would irrationally and stubbornly hold on to my belief, it does not follow that I should do so. Once again, ARP is not normative enough to do the job it is supposed to do.

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1.2.3 Defeat Scepticism We have seen that, within epistemology, it is standardly assumed that a subject who knows that p, or justifiably believes that p, can lose this knowledge or justified belief by acquiring a defeater. Within ethics and practical reasoning, it is widely accepted that a subject may initially have a reason to do something although this reason is later defeated by their acquisition of further information. However, the traditional conception of defeat has recently come under attack. Some have argued that the notion of defeat is problematically motivated (Lasonen-Aarnio 2010, 2012, 2014; Hawthorne and Srinivasan 2013). According to a second strand of attack, the notion of revisionary defeat is inconsistent with important desiderata on an account of knowledge or justification such as naturalism, externalism, evidentialism, or a rule-based account (Greco 2010; Lasonen-Aarnio 2010, 2012, forthcoming, Beddor 2015; BakerHytch and Benton 2015; Weatherson, 2019). A further worry concerns how the defeat of a proposition’s status as evidence is compatible with a Bayesian framework (e.g. Weisberg 2009; Pryor 2013; Greco 2017). Furthermore, those who adopt a steadfast view on peer disagreement can be understood as denying the defeating effect of evidence that a peer disagrees with one (e.g. Kelly 2005). In the light of these attacks, some have suggested that we should diagnose the intuition that there is something wrong with someone who continues to

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believe that p in the face of defeating evidence not by the suggestion that the relevant belief loses its status as justified or as constituting knowledge but instead in some other way, e.g. by some variety of error theory. According to Williamson (2009: 315), for instance, when we intuit that one’s knowledge gets defeated, we are, in fact, confusing between whether one knows and whether it’s probable on one’s evidence that one knows. Another popular suggestion is that continuing to believe that p in such circumstances is to exhibit an epistemic disposition likely to lead to trouble in the long run (Lasonen-Aarnio 2010; Hawthorne and Srinivasan 2013). According to this view, in cases of alleged defeat, our intuitions fail to distinguish between impermissibility and mere blameworthiness generated by irresponsible behaviour. Against defeat scepticism, in recent work, one of us (Brown 2018: Ch. 5) has argued that it involves an unnoticed and unacceptably high cost: once we explicitly distinguish between contributory (i.e. synchronic) and revisionary (i.e. diachronic) defeat, it is hard to argue against revisionary defeat. That is because it is deeply implausible to deny the contributory notion of defeat—i.e. roughly, evidence against p that is part of the initial body of evidence. For, to do so is effectively to deny that when evidence affects justification, it is one’s overall evidence that matters and not merely a part of it. But, once we accept the contributory notion of defeat, it is hard to deny the revisionary given the plausible epistemic symmetry between cases of contributory and revisionary defeat.

1.2.4 Higher-Order Defeat Higher-order evidence is evidence about what evidence one possesses or what conclusions one’s evidence supports. One interesting question involving higher-order evidence is: how should our beliefs respond to our beliefs about our beliefs when we do have higher-order evidence (Feldman 2005; Christensen 2010; Kelly 2005, 2010). A related issue in recent epistemology is explaining the defeating power of higher-order evidence, namely of evidence that one’s first-order beliefs are the output of a flawed process (see for instance Christensen 2007, 2010; Kelly 2010; Lasonen-Aarnio 2014). Suppose, for illustration, that you are a pilot who calculates whether you have enough fuel to reach the closest airport. Upon calculating, you reach the conclusion that you have more than enough fuel to get to an airport fifty miles further than the one in your initial plan. Suppose you then glance at the altimeter to

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see that you’re at 10,500 feet and remember that hypoxia is a risk at altitudes of 10,000 feet and higher. You now have evidence that you might have hypoxia, and thus you have evidence that you might have miscalculated. Are you now justified in believing that you can get to the more distant airport? Are you justified in believing that your evidence supports that claim? (Christensen 2010). Answering ‘yes’ to both questions is intuitively extremely problematic: it licenses an extremely form of dogmatism. Answering ‘no’ to the first question and ‘yes’ to the second doesn’t seem very promising either: even if you can’t actually bring yourself to believe F, being justified in believing your evidence supports F prima facie justifies you in believing F. Answering ‘no’ to both questions is the traditional way to go for champions of defeat, and probably the most widely spread view in the literature. For one, this is the answer that suggests itself on both the main views on the nature of defeat (the reasonsbased and the alternative reliable process-based accounts). One highly debated view in the literature combines defeat scepticism with answering ‘yes’ to the first section and ‘no’ to the second question. On this view, then, your second-order evidence fails to defeat your first-order justification: you are still justified to hold your first-order belief that you’ll reach the second airport, but you are no longer justified in believing that your evidence supports your claim. This view has become known as the ‘level-splitting view’ (Lasonen-Aarnio 2010, 2014; Wedgwood 2011; Coates 2012). Thus, on this ‘level-splitting view’, the pilot is justified to believe that they’re going to reach the second airport and that their evidence does not support this conclusion (henceforth Rational Akrasia). Feldman (2005: 110–11) argues that it is impossible for this belief to be both true and reasonable since the second conjunct undermines the reasonableness of the first conjunct (see also e.g. Elga 2007; Christensen 2007; 2010; Horovitz 2014; Titelbaum 2015). Furthermore, the level-splitting view has also been argued to licence problematic theoretical and practical reasoning (e.g. Brown 2018; Horovitz 2014). For instance, if Rational Akrasia obtains, if the pilot believes that she has enough fuel to reach the second airport, then it seems that she can exploit the claim that she has enough fuel to reach the second airport in her practical reasoning. For example, she might reason that since she has enough fuel to reach the second airport, she should not bother to land on the first airport. Nonetheless, while ignoring the first airport on the grounds that she has enough fuel to reach the second one, she ought to also admit that it’s unlikely on her evidence that she’ll reach the second airport! But acting in this way seems entirely unreasonable.

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1.3. Kinds of Defeaters

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1.3.1 By Mechanism How does defeat work? Pollock’s distinction between rebutting (also known as overriding) and undercutting (also known as undermining) remains the classic answer to this question. According to Pollock (1986), there are two ways in which defeaters act: roughly, they either speak against the content of one’s belief, or against the credentials of its formation procedure. To see how this works, say that my friend Mary tells me that TRAIN: The train leaves at eight sharp, and thereby I come to justifiably believe that TRAIN. Now, say that my other good friend, Alice, sharply disagrees: according to Alice, the train leaves at 8.30. The thought is that, after receiving Alice’s testimony, I am no longer (fully) justified in believing TRAIN, in virtue of acquiring evidence against TRAIN being the case. In this case, Alice’s testimony constitutes itself in a rebutting defeater for my believing TRAIN. In contrast, undercutting defeaters speak against the credentials of the source of my belief. Consider for instance, an alternative scenario in which Alice tells me that Mary is a compulsive liar about trains’ schedules. After receiving her testimony, I am no longer (fully) justified in believing TRAIN based on Mary’s assertion. On Pollock’s view, a rebutting defeater, then, for a belief that p of S is a reason for S for either believing non-p or for believing some proposition q, where q is incompatible with p. In that, on Pollock’s view, rebutting defeaters work by overriding the reasons in favour of believing that p. In contrast, undercutting defeaters don’t speak against p, but rather against the credentials of the belief formation procedure employed in forming the belief that p. An undercutting defeater for a belief that p of S is a reason for S attacks the connection between S’s ground for believing p and p. One worry that arises about Pollock’s distinction is whether it is plausible that it is an exclusive one, as the account seems to suggest. Pryor (2013), for instance, gives an example meant to illustrate that a rebutting defeater can, in virtue of its rebutting normative power, also constitute itself in an undercutting defeater: to see this, suppose S’s justification for believing p from evidence E is rebutted, as S acquires new evidence E* that more strongly supports q, which is incompatible with p. When this happens, Pryor argues, S is left with the question of why p is false even if E is true. Pryor’s suggestion is that the best answer available to S is that, in the present context, E is not a reliable indicator

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of the truth of P. Hence E* also acts as an undercutting defeater, since it supplies S with some evidence against the reliability of E in supporting p. In contrast, Sturgeon (2014) argues that undercutting and rebutting defeaters exemplify two essentially different kinds of defeat. According to Sturgeon, for instance, in contrast to rebutting defeat, undercutting defeat is not fully independent: it acts in tandem with the subject’s belief that the source under attack is the one that is actually responsible for generating the belief in question.

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1.3.2 By Normative Status An important question addressed in the literature on defeat concerns the normative status of defeaters. The normative status question concerns the issue of whether defeaters need to be justified themselves. Lackey’s (1999) distinction between doxastic (aka merely psychological) and normative defeaters is central to this debate. In Lackey’s view, doxastic defeaters are merely psychological defeaters: they are beliefs of S, not necessarily true or justified, that speak in favour of the claim that S’s belief that p is false or is based on an unreliable source. Normative defeaters are (good) reasons for entertaining doxastic defeaters. According to Lackey, then, the answer to the normative status question is ‘no’: defeaters need not be justified themselves. Many epistemologists agree with Lackey, and it is fair to say that Lackey’s distinction—which itself entails that defeaters need not have positive epistemic status—has become a classic in the epistemological literature of the last years. According to Alvin Plantinga (2000: 364–65), for instance, irrational and unwarranted beliefs can defeat beliefs that have impeccable epistemic status. Suppose I believe that I’m made of flesh, blood, and bone. I then come to believe, due to some cognitive disorder, that my head is made of blown glass. According to Plantinga, given that I come to hold this second belief I now have a defeater for the prior belief, even if the defeater was formed by way of cognitive malfunction. According to Plantinga, this case is one where I have a ‘rationality defeater’: given that I acquire the second belief, it is no longer rational for me to hold the first one. Contra Plantinga, Alston (2002) argues that only beliefs with positive epistemic status can defeat beliefs that have positive epistemic status, and, furthermore a belief D can defeat belief A only if D has greater warrant than A. One of us (Simion 2020) has also argued that the existence of merely psychological defeat implies the existence of merely psychological

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10      justification, i.e. it implies justification internalism. If this is so, externalists about justification should be especially worried about the category of mere psychological defeat.

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1.3.3 By Psychological Status Another important question for taxonomizing defeat concerns whether defeaters need to enjoy psychological status or not, or, more clearly put, whether only mental states (e.g. beliefs) can do defeating work, or, to the contrary, facts outside our skull can also have defeating influence over the normative status of our beliefs. It is fair to say that it is widely acknowledged that, in the case of knowledge defeaters, the answer to the psychological status question is ‘no’: facts out there in the world can act upon our knowledgeable beliefs and thereby lower their epistemic status. The classic case to illustrate this point is Gilbert Harman’s (1973: 143–44) assassination case. Suppose that a political leader has been assassinated. A reporter who is a witness to the assassination dictates details of the event to his news agency so that the story may be included in the day’s final edition of the paper. Jill picks up the paper and reads the story and believes that the political leader has been assassinated. However, before Jill picks up the newspaper and reads the story, loyalists to the political leader declare on nationwide television that the bullet actually struck and killed someone in the political leader’s entourage. Jill reads the true story in the paper but misses the false report on television. Many people believe with Harman that Jill doesn’t know that the political leader has been assassinated. There are, however, several different views on the market as to what explains this datum. According to Swinburne (2001) and Pollock (1986), the explanation is social: the fact that Jill does not have knowledge is the consequence of there being a true proposition (suggestive of a defect in justification) that is widely believed in Jill’s society. Others think that the explanation lies with the easy availability of the relevant defeating information (Sudduth 2018). We have seen that epistemologies that incorporate doxastic defeaters typically take them to defeat justification (Alston 1989: 238–9; Bergmann 2006: 155–6) or some species of rationality (Plantinga 2000: 357–66). When it comes to non-doxastic defeaters, however, things look slightly different: while nondoxastic defeaters are widely taken to have an impact on knowledge, whether mere facts out there in the world can defeat justification is a more controversial issue. The epistemic internalist will have to answer ‘no’: after all, by

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internalism’s lights, justification supervenes exclusively on facts internal to the cognizer’s mind. Epistemic externalists, however, can afford to have mixed views about the issue. Sandy Goldberg (2016), for instance, argues that evidence one does not have, but that one should have had, can defeat one’s justification. He thinks this comes about in virtue of social facts, i.e. in virtue of the reasonable expectations of others grounded in norms internal to a social practice. According to Lackey (2008), too, mere normative (non-doxastic) defeat can defeat justification in cases where the believer has negligently ignored important counter evidence, in virtue of epistemic responsibility constituting a crucial component of epistemic justification.

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1.4. Summary of the Volume This volume brings together recent work to re-examine the very notion of defeat, and its place in epistemology, and in normativity theory at large. In Chapter 2, The Normativity of Knowledge and the Scope and Sources of Defeat, Sanford C. Goldberg investigates the nature and scope of defeat with an aim to argue in support of the category of normative defeat, as well as in favour of there being a social dimension to knowledge. To this effect, the chapter appeals to a prior grasp of the normativity of knowledge itself— its role in entitling a subject to confidence and in authorizing others to believe on the strength of one’s epistemic standing—to shed light on the nature and scope of defeat. Goldberg’s strategy is to focus on cases in which an otherwise epistemically well-positioned subject fails to enjoy these normative standings, and to argue that the best explanation is the presence of normative defeaters. Chapter 3, The Structure of Defeat: Pollock’s Evidentialism, Lackey’s Framework, and Prospects for Reliabilism, by Peter Graham and Jack Lyons, investigates the structure of defeat. It has two main aims; the first is mostly critical: it argues that several classical distinctions that the literature on defeat endorses are problematic. In particular, according to Graham and Lyons, the traditional categorization of defeaters as doxastic and normative is mistaken: first, unjustified beliefs can’t defeat, therefore there are no such things as merely doxastic defeaters; second, the reason why ignored evidence can defeat is different from the rationale traditionally taken to support the existence of normative defeat. The second aim of the chapter is to develop a novel, reliabilism-friendly view of the nature of defeat. On this view, having a defeater for a belief that p is a matter of either having warrant to believe

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12      not-p, or else having warrant to believe that their warrant for believing that p are inadequate (where warrant is understood in non-evidentialist terms). Chapter 4, Losing Knowledge by Thinking about Thinking, by Jennifer Nagel, puts forth a novel defense of infallibilism in epistemology against the threat coming from the phenomenon of defeat. Defeat cases are often taken to show that even the most securely based judegment can be rationally undermined by misleading evidence. Jennifer Nagel argues that defeat cases really involve not an exposure of weakness in the basis of a judgement, but a shift in that basis. For example, when threatening doubts are raised about whether conditions are favourable for perception, one shifts from a basis of unreflective perceptual judgement to a basis of conscious inference. In these cases, the basis of one’s knowledge is lost, rather than rationally undermined. Chapter 5, Dispositional Evaluations and Defeat, by Maria Lasonen-Aarnio, argues that what explains the intuition of impermissibility in putative cases of defeat resides not in the impermissibility of the target beliefs themselves, but rather in the believer’s criticizability for manifesting bad epistemic dispositions to believe. Subjects who retain their beliefs in the face of higher-order evidence that those very beliefs are outputs of flawed cognitive processes are at least very often criticizable. This, however, on Lasonen-Aarnio’s account, is not because such higher-order evidence defeats various epistemic statuses such as justification and knowledge. Instead, she argues that they manifest dispositions that are bad relative to a range of candidate epistemic successes such as true belief and knowledge. In particular, being disposed to only give up belief in response to higher-order evidence when that evidence is not misleading would require subjects to have dispositions that discriminate between cases in which their original cognitive processes is fine, and cases in which they merely seemed to be fine. But, according to Lasonen-Aarnio, such dispositions are not normally humanly feasible. In Chapter 6, Suspension, Higher-Order Evidence, and Defeat, Lord and Sylvan focus on the epistemic effect of higher-order evidence. The chapter makes two main claims: a negative one and a positive one. Their negative claim is that extreme views about the issue—claiming either that higher-order evidence has trumping effects, or that it has none whatsoever—are mistaken. The positive view in turn has two parts. The first part defends the idea that higher-order evidence provides direct reasons for suspending judgment that typically leave evidential support relations on the first order intact: instead of destroying these relations, the reasons for suspension defeat or compete with the epistemic reasons for belief generated by these relations. Secondly, the Lord and Sylvan framework purports to explain how this defeat is possible by

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showing how these distinctive reasons for suspension of judgment flow from the constitution of suspension of judgment. In Chapter 7, Reasons for Reliabilism, Bob Beddor motivates and develops a synthesis between two leading approaches to justification which are typically developed in isolation from each other; the first one comes from the reliabilist tradition, which maintains that a belief is justified provided that it is reliably formed, while the second one comes from the ‘Reasons First’ tradition, which claims that a belief is justified provided that it is based on reasons that support it. On the view proposed by Beddor, justification is understood in terms of an agent’s reasons for belief, which are in turn analysed along reliabilist lines: an agent’s reasons for belief are the states that serve as inputs to their reliable processes. Beddor argues that this synthesis allows each tradition to profit from the other’s explanatory resources. In particular, it enables reliabilists to explain epistemic defeat without abandoning their naturalistic ambitions. Chapter 8, Knowledge, Action, and Defeasibility by Carlotta Pavese, reviews some motivations for a ‘knowledge-centred psychology’—a psychology where knowledge enters centre stage in an explanation of intentional action,—it outlines a novel argument for the claim that knowledge is required for intentional action, and discusses some of its consequences, in particular for the debate on the defeasibility of know-how. As Pavese argues, a knowledgecentred psychology motivates the intellectualist view that know-how is a species of know-that. In its more extreme form, this view is committed to an epistemologically substantial claim—i.e. that the epistemic profile of knowhow is the same as that of propositional knowledge. If that is correct, one corollary of intellectualism is that the defeasibility of know-how patterns with that of knowledge. Against recent challenges, Pavese argues that this prediction is burned out, for know-how and knowledge are indeed defeated exactly when one’s ability to intentionally act is defeated. Matthew McGrath’s Chapter 9, Undercutting Defeat: When it Happens and Some Implications for Epistemology, investigates recent scepticism about the Pollockian operative commonality between rebutting and undercutting defeat. In particular, the chapter looks into the plausibility of the claim that the mechanism of undercutting defeat, in contrast to that of rebutting defeat, occurs only in conjunction with certain higher-order contributions, i.e. with beliefs about the basis on which one does or would believe. McGrath argues that, in the case of defeat of inferential justification, undercutting defeat is a genuine phenomenon and takes roughly the shape Pollock suggests, not needing help from higher-order beliefs or justifications. However, according

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14      to McGrath, for noninferential justification, the Pollockian account is in trouble. This difference, it is argued, has important implications for epistemology: for one, what seems to follow is that there is less noninferential perceptual or testimonial justification than is commonly thought. Chapter 10, Defeaters as Indicators of Ignorance, by Clayton Littlejohn and Julien Dutant develops a novel account of the nature of rationality defeat. According to their view, defeaters are indicators of ignorance, evidence that we’re not in a position to know some target proposition. When the evidence that we’re not in a position to know is sufficiently strong and the probability that we can know is too low, it is not rational to believe. Littlejohn and Dutant argue that their account retains all the virtues of the more familiar approaches that characterize defeat in terms of its connection to reasons to believe or to confirmation but provides a better approach to higher-order defeat. Furthermore, it is argued, the view provides a unified normative framework, one that gives a unifying explanation of the toxicity of different defeaters that is grounded in a framework that either recognizes knowledge as the norm of belief or identifies knowledge as the fundamental epistemic good that full belief can realize. In Chapter 11, Competing Reasons, Justin Snedegar considers different ways that reasons, bearing on our options, can compete with one another to determine the overall normative status of those options. Two key claims defended in the chapter are (i) that the theory of this competition must include a distinct role for reasons against, in addition to reasons for, and (ii) that the theory must allow for comparative verdicts about which options are more strongly supported than others, rather than simply which options are required or permitted. Snedegar rejects a simple and familiar balancing account of the competition, as well as an account that understands the competition in terms of giving and answering criticisms of the options, and he introduces a new account that incorporates a distinct role for reasons against. In Chapter 12, Perceptual Reasons and Defeat, Mark Schroeder focuses on the defeasibility of perceptual evidence. If something looks red to you, it is reasonable to believe that it is red, but if you realize you are wearing rosetinted glasses, it may not be reasonable at all to believe this, unless you have some independent source of evidence. Schroeder compares several models for how to understand this phenomenon. These models differ in their answers to two questions: what evidence we get about the external world through perception, and what our having that evidence consists in. According to Schroeder, some models have the advantage of fitting seamlessly into general accounts of non-monotonic inference but carry with them a commitment to a

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restricted space of possible options in general epistemology. Their challenge is to extract an adequate treatment of objective defeat from their elegant treatment of subjective defeat. Other models lead to commitments about the differences in what explains reasonable belief in good and bad cases. Their challenge is to extract an adequate treatment of subjective defeat from their elegant treatment of objective defeat. According to Schroeder, his favourite, non-factive content model shares neither of these problems, and it offers parallel elegant treatments of both objective and subjective defeat.

References Alston, W. (1989). Epistemic Justification. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Alston, W. (2002). Plantinga, naturalism, and defeat. In: James Beilby (ed.) Naturalism Defeated? Essays on Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press: 176–203. Baker-Hytch, M. and Benton, M. (2015). Defeatism defeated. Philosophical Perspectives, 29(1): 40–66. Beddor, B. (2015). Process reliabilism’s troubles with defeat. The Philosophical Quarterly, 65(259): 145–59.

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Bergmann, M. (2006). Justification without Awareness. New York: Oxford University Press. Brown, J. (2018). Fallibilism: Evidence and Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chandler, J. (2013). Defeat reconsidered. Analysis, 73(1): 49–51. Christensen, D. (2007). Epistemology of disagreement: The good news. Philosophical Review, 116(2): 187–217. Christensen, D. (2010). Higher-order evidence. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 81(1): 185–215. Coates, A. (2012). Rational epistemic akrasia. American Philosophical Quarterly, 1(2): 113–24. Elga, A. (2007). Reflection and disagreement. Noûs, 41(3): 478–502. Feldman, R. (2005). Respecting the evidence. Philosophical Perspectives, 19: 95–119. Frances, B. and Matheson, J. (2019). Disagreement. In: Edward N. Zalta (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2019 Edition). Stanford: Stanford University Press. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2019/entries/disagree ment/.

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16      Goldberg, S. (2016). On the epistemic significance of evidence you should have had. Episteme, 13(4): 449–70. Goldman, A. (1979). What is justified belief? In: G. S. Pappas (ed.) Justification and Knowledge. Dordrecht: Reidel: 1–25; reprinted in A. I. Goldman (2012). Reliabilism and Contemporary Epistemology. New York: Oxford University Press: 29–49. Greco, D. (2017). Cognitive mobile homes. Mind, 126(501): 93–121. Greco, J. (2010). Knowledge as an Achievement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Green, C. R. (2008). The Epistemology of Testimony. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://www.iep.utm.edu/ep-testi/. Harman, G. (1973). Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hawthorne, J. and Srinivasan, A. (2013). Disagreement without transparency: Some bleak thoughts. In: D. Christensen and J. Lackey (eds.) The Epistemology of Disagreement: New Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 9–30. Horowitz, S. (2014). Epistemic Akrasia. Nous, 48(4): 718–44. Kelly, T. (2005). The epistemic significance of disagreement. In: J. Hawthorne and T. S. Gendler (eds.) Oxford Studies in Epistemology. Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 167–96.

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Kelly, T. (2010). Peer disagreement and higher-order evidence. In: R. Feldman and T. A. Warfield (eds.) Disagreement. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 111–74. Kornblith, H. (2015). The role of reasons in epistemology. Episteme, 12(2): 225–39. Lackey, J. (1999). Testimonial knowledge and transmission. The Philosophical Quarterly, 49: 471–90. Lackey, J. (2008). Learning from Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lasonen-Aarnio, M. (2010). Unreasonable knowledge. Philosophical Perspectives, 24: 1–21. Lasonen-Aarnio, M. (2012). Higher-order evidence and the limits of defeat. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LXXXVIII: 314–45. Lasonen-Aarnio, M. (2014). The dogmatism puzzle. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 92(3): 417–32. Lasonen-Aarnio, M. (2020). Enkrasia or evidentialism. Philosophical Studies, 177: 597–632. Lyons, J. (2009). Perception and Basic Beliefs: Zombies, Modules, and the Problem of the External World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Pappas, G. (2017). Internalist vs. externalist conceptions of epistemic justification. In: Edward N. Zalta (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 edn). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/justep-intext/. Plantinga, A. (2000). Warranted Christian Belief. New York: Oxford University Press. Pollock, J. (1986). Contemporary Theories of Knowledge. Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Pryor, J. (2004). What’s wrong with Moore’s argument. Philosophical Issues, 14: 349–78. Pryor, J. (2013). Problems for credulism. In: C. Tucker (ed.) Seemings and Justification. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 89–131. Simion, M. (2020). Epistemic Norms and Epistemic Functions. Unpublished Book Manuscript. Sturgeon, S. (2014). Pollock on defeasible reasons. Philosophical Studies, 169(1): 105–18. Sudduth, M. (2018). Defeaters in Epistemology. Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. https://www.iep.utm.edu/ep-defea/#SH1b. Swinburne, R. (2001). Epistemic Justification. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Titelbaum, M. (2015). Rationality’s fixed point (or: in defence of right reason). In: S.T. Gendler and J. Hawthorne (eds.), Oxford Studies in Epistemology. Vol. 5. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 253–94.

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Weatherson, B. (2019). Normative Externalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wedgwood, R. (2011). Justified inference. Synthese, 189(2): 1–23. Weisberg, J. (2009). Commutativity or holism? A dilemma for conditionalizers. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 60: 793–812. Williamson, T. (2009). Replies. In: P. Greenough and D. Pritchard (eds.), Williamson on Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 279–384.

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2 The Normativity of Knowledge and the Scope and Sources of Defeat Sanford C. Goldberg

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2.1. Knowledge is a normative standing. Perhaps this much is uncontroversial. What this amounts to, however, is not. Minimally, to say that knowledge is a normative standing is to say that there are evaluative standards that must be satisfied if one is to count as having knowledge. Those standards include truth as well as the epistemic standards governing doxastic states. However, widespread agreement on this much does not preclude disagreement over the normativity of knowledge itself. A good deal of the disagreement over the normativity of knowledge concerns the terms of the debate. More specifically, there is controversy over which term(s), if any, to treat as basic. Should we treat the normativity of knowledge as basic, and understand normativity of all other epistemic notions (justification; rationality; evidence) in terms of it? Such is part and parcel of the knowledge-first programme in epistemology.¹ Opposing this are those who deny the priority of knowledge in an account of epistemic normativity. Other notions which are candidates for foundational status in such an account are justification, rationality, accuracy, and coherence.² Alternatively, there will be those who deny that there is any foundational notion; all we have are a variety of “epistemic desiderata.”³ However, even after we settle the matter of the terms of the debate, there remains another source of disagreement: the nature of the evaluative standards of epistemology themselves. To take a particularly clear example, consider justification. Suppose that we propose to account for the normativity of ¹ Williamson (2000), to whom we owe this approach, appears to deny that there is much illumination to be had regarding standards other than knowledge. ² For a discussion, see Goldberg (2018). ³ The term and the claim are Alston’s; see Alston (1993, 2005).

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knowledge at least partly in terms of the normativity of justification, and so we embrace the project of providing an illuminating account of the evaluative standards for justified belief. Even so, we can still disagree over what those standards are. Do they require reliability in the processes through which one formed and sustained one’s belief? Good reasons or adequate evidence? Coherence with one’s standing corpus of belief? Responsibility in beliefformation and belief-maintenance? In this paper, I want to side-step these difficult questions, and instead identify two claims that we should want as part of our account of the normativity of knowledge. I formulate the claims as follows:

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CONFIDENCE If S knows that p, then S is entitled to be confident that p.⁴ AUTHORIZATION If S knows that p, then S is in an epistemic position from which to authorize others to believe that p. As I say, I regard the truth of both CONFIDENCE and AUTHORIZATION as desiderata for accounts of the normativity of knowledge: if your favored account fails to be consistent with either of these, so much the worse for your account. (Although I won’t insist on it here, I am tempted to think that an adequate account must not only cohere with these claims but be able to explain why they are true as well.) I should note both CONFIDENCE and AUTHORIZATION are relatively weak claims. For one thing, they state sufficient conditions, not necessary conditions, on their consequences. CONFIDENCE tells us that knowledge of p is sufficient for being entitled to confidence that p, not that it is necessary. (For all that CONFIDENCE tells us, there are epistemic standings that are less demanding than knowledge, but which are consistent with being entitled to confidence.) AUTHORIZATION tells us that knowledge of p is sufficient for being in a position to authorize others to believe that p, not that it is necessary. For all that AUTHORIZATION tells us, there are epistemic standings that are less demanding than knowledge which are consistent with being in a position from which to authorize others to believe that p. I should add, too, that ⁴ Can’t one know that p, despite having misleading evidence as to one’s epistemic position with respect to p? Such a view appears to be endorsed by several authors in the higher-order evidence debate: Williamson (2014); Larsonen-Aarnio (2010, 2014); Baker-Hytch and Benton (2015), and others. I will reply to this thought in the next section.

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20  .  AUTHORIZATION is a claim about S qua speaker; it is silent on what conditions there are if an audience is to acquire this authorization from S (when S testifies in a way that expresses her knowledge). The fact that AUTHORIZATION is silent on the conditions on an audience’s acquiring an authorization from a speaker is important for two further reasons, both of which point to its relative weakness as a claim. First, this silence renders AUTHORIZATION neutral on the flash-point in the epistemology of testimony: AUTHORIZATION has no implications that favor either reductionism (according to which an audience requires positive reasons to regard a testimony as credible prior to being entitled to form a belief through accepting the testimony) or anti-reductionism (which holds that it suffices that the audience lack reasons for doubting the credibility of the testimony). But second, AUTHORIZATION’s silence on the conditions on an audience’s acquiring an authorization from a speaker enables proponents of AUTHORIZATION to allow for cases in which, while the speaker was in a position to authorize (because she had knowledge-sufficient evidence for her claim), the audience was not in a position to acquire that authorization from her—he was not in a position to acquire the knowledge that her testimony expresses—e.g., because he had a defeater that the speaker herself lacked.⁵ There is one final way in which both CONFIDENCE and AUTHORIZATION are relatively weak claims: they are silent on the source of the entitlement and the authorization. All that they say is that if one knows, then one is entitled to confidence and one is in an epistemic position from which to authorize others to believe. Neither claim weighs in on whether it is knowledge itself that grounds the entitlement and the authorization, or whether instead it is the satisfaction of evaluative epistemic standards which grounds the entitlement and the authorization (and which serves as a condition on knowledge). I will not be offering any detailed defense of the claim that CONFIDENCE and AUTHORIZATION are desiderata for an account of the normativity of knowledge. But I can say a few brief things. First, both of these claims are in keeping with various views in the literature about the normativity of other related phenomena: assertion and action,⁶ for example. Take the recent discussion of the norm of assertion. Many people hold that knowledge warrants assertion;⁷ they will not bat an eye at endorsing AUTHORIZATION. ⁵ I thank Jessica Brown for indicating the need to make this point. ⁶ Not everyone is agreed that knowledge is sufficient to warrant action: see e.g., Brown (2008a, 2008b) and Reed (2010). In at least some of these cases we might come to doubt whether knowledge is sufficient to warrant assertion as well (for which see also the references in fn 9). ⁷ For an overview of the various positions, see Goldberg (2015a, 2015b).

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I note, too, that since AUTHORIZATION states a sufficient condition (not a necessary condition) on being in a position to authorize others to believe, anyone who thinks that assertion is warranted by something which itself is entailed by knowledge—justification, say—will not bat an eye at endorsing AUTHORIZATION.⁸ Others hold that knowledge warrants belief.⁹ Anyone who does should not bat an eye at endorsing CONFIDENCE. But so too anyone who thinks that what warrants belief is some status that is entailed by knowledge—justification, say—should endorse CONFIDENCE. Again, I would guess that this is most of the field of those who think about the norm of (or epistemic standards on) belief. In what follows, I want to use both CONFIDENCE and AUTHORIZATION to reflect on the nature and scope of epistemic defeat.

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2.2. How might CONFIDENCE and AUTHORIZATION be used so as to cast light on the nature and scope of defeat? While neither of these principles mention defeat, they can be connected to the phenomenon of defeat through their connection with knowledge. To see this, note that they can be used to draw conclusions asserting a failure or lack of knowledge. Here it will be helpful to deal, not with CONFIDENCE and AUTHORIZATION themselves, but with their inverse, which I will call the defeat corollaries:¹⁰ DEFEATCONF If S is not entitled to be confident that p, then S does not know that p. DEFEATAUTH If S is not in a position to authorize others to believe (with confidence) that p, then S does not know that p. My reason for calling these the ‘defeat corollaries,’ despite the fact that they nowhere mention defeat, is straightforward: the presence of defeaters is ⁸ This covers most of the field of those who endorse some norm of assertion. Most, but not all: some endorse a truth norm of assertion (Weiner (2005); Whiting (2013)); others endorse a variable-standard norm of assertion and allow that there are cases in which the standard can be satisfied even though the speaker is not justified in believing what she asserts (McKinnon (2013, 2016) and Gerken (2014)). And I should acknowledge, too, the arguments supporting the idea that there are cases in which knowledge itself is not sufficient to warrant assertion (see Lackey (2011)). ⁹ See e.g., Williamson (2002). ¹⁰ The following discussion has been greatly improved by comments from Jessica Brown.

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22  .  typically what offers the best explanation for the truth of the antecedents of DEFEATCONF and DEFEATAUTH. In particular, given a subject who otherwise has a good deal of evidence that p but who nevertheless fails to be entitled to be confident that p (or to be in a position to authorize others to believe that p), the best explanation for our subject’s failure to satisfy these antecedents is that there are relevant defeaters in play. In these cases, the subject’s failure to occupy the normative standing that knowledge brings in its wake—and, by extension, the subject’s failure to know—indicate the presence of a relevant defeater. In this way these corollaries are useful when our interest turns to the presence of defeaters. Before proceeding to use the corollaries in this way, it is important to highlight the two distinct types of case in which the corollaries might be applied. As noted, both DEFEATCONF and DEFEATAUTH can be used to address whether a subject S knows that p: if S fails to be entitled to be confident that p, or alternatively if S fails to be in a position from which to authorize others to believe that p, then (by the lights of these corollaries) S fails to know. There are two distinct types of case to which these might be applied, corresponding to the two types of scenario in which we might be interested in the question whether S knows that p. The first type of scenario—what I will call the knowledge-prevention scenario—involves a context in which S has relevant evidence but has yet to acquire the belief that p in the first place. Here the question of whether S knows that p is tantamount to the question whether her newly acquired belief that p amounts to knowledge; and when the corollaries deliver a negative verdict, the result, in effect, is that defeaters prevented the acquisition of knowledge. The second type of scenario—what I will call the knowledge-defeating scenario—arises for a subject who currently knows that p, but who gets misleading evidence at some point down the road. Here the question is whether S’s belief that p retains its status as knowledge even after the acquisition of misleading counter-evidence; and when the corollaries deliver a negative verdict, the result, in effect, is that defeaters undermined or defeated the knowledge itself. It would seem that we can apply DEFEATCONF and/or DEFEATAUTH to either sort of scenario. Take a scenario of the first (knowledge-prevention) type. Suppose that, prior to forming the belief that p, one’s total evidence, including whatever misleading evidence one has, is such that (i) one isn’t entitled to be confident that p and (ii) one isn’t in a position to authorize others to believe that p. For example suppose that, before Lilly enters a room, she is told by an apparently reliable informant that the room’s walls are cleverly illuminated by colored

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      

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lighting, and then she walks in and encounters what appears to be a red wall. It is plausible that if under these conditions (and without further ado) she were to come to believe that the wall is red, her belief would not constitute knowledge that the wall is red. In this way the defeat corollaries can be used to bring out that (misleading) evidence can prevent one from acquiring knowledge in the first place—even in cases in which, bracketing the misleading evidence, one has what would otherwise be knowledge-sufficient evidence. But what of scenarios of the second (knowledge-defeating) type, in which one already has the knowledge that p but then encounters further relevant counterevidence (albeit of a misleading variety)? For example, suppose that Sally saw (what appeared to be) the red wall before getting the (apparently trustworthy) testimony that she was in a room whose walls were cleverly illuminated by colored lights. And suppose that the wall really is red (no lighting is involved). It is plausible to think that in this case, while she originally acquired knowledge of the wall’s being red (prior to getting the testimony), she loses her knowledge on getting the testimony. The hypothesis of lost knowledge can be further supported on the assumption that scenarios of the first (knowledge-preventing) type are possible. Given this assumption, one can deny the possibility of scenarios of the second (knowledge-defeating) type only at the cost of having to insist that the order in which one acquires evidence matters to whether one knows. The proof of this is that for any case of the second (knowledge-defeating) type, we can construct a corresponding case of the first (knowledge-preventing) type in which the misleading evidence came prior to the other evidence bearing on the proposition that p, thereby preventing the acquisition of knowledge that p in the first place. So, if we deny the possibility of knowledge-defeating cases while allowing for the possibility of knowledge-preventing cases, then in effect we are committed to thinking that the order of evidence acquisition is epistemically significant in this way. But this is implausible. Consequently, anyone who grants the possibility of scenarios of the first (knowledge-preventing) type ought to grant the possibility of scenarios of the second (knowledge-defeating) type.¹¹ Even so, I acknowledge that the claim in the second (knowledge-defeating) type of scenario, to the effect that knowledge itself is defeasible, is controversial¹²—more controversial, anyway, than is the claim in the first (knowledge-preventing) type ¹¹ Compare Brown (2018: Ch. 5), where she presents a slightly different argument for the same conclusion—namely, that if defeaters can prevent one from knowing then defeaters can undermine one’s prior knowledge as well. ¹² See e.g., Lasonen-Aarnio (2010, 2014); Williamson (2014); Schoenfield (2015); Baker-Hytch and Benton (2015).

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24  .  of scenario (that misleading evidence can prevent one from acquiring knowledge in the first place). In order to minimize the degree to which I antagonize those who reject the possibility of the knowledge-defeating type of scenario, in what follows, for the most part I will be restricting my attention to scenarios of the knowledge-prevention type.¹³ This will enable me to make the points I wish to make without having to take a stand on the somewhat controversial question whether knowledge itself is defeasible.

2.3.

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Before proceeding to use the defeat corollaries to discern the nature and scope of the phenomenon of defeat, we would do well first to acquire some confidence that both of the defeat corollaries themselves are acceptable. So, let us apply them to cases that everyone should agree are cases of a lack of knowledge owing to defeat, in the hope that they deliver this verdict. PERCEPTION Percy has been told (by a speaker he has good reason to trust) that he is about to enter a room in which many of the walls are expertly illuminated by colored lights to give the impression of being painted. Percy himself has no further basis for questioning this testimony. Percy then goes into the room and perceives what appears to be a red wall. (He has no basis for confirming whether this is the effect of red lighting.) Verdict: he is not in a position to know (through perception) that the wall is (painted) red. DISCERNMENT Dalia is looking at what she initially takes to be deer tracks in the mud. However, she soon recalls that she is in a part of the state in which there are several different animals that make very similar tracks, and she has observed previously that she is not particularly good at discerning between these different types of track. Verdict: she is not in a position to know (through perceptual discernment) that the tracks are those of a deer. MEMORY Malia seems to remember that she was twelve the first time she got on a plane. However, she knows that she is currently on a medication one of whose known ¹³ This said, I will occasionally present cases of the second (knowledge-defeating) type as well. Sometimes I will do so because I am describing cases others have presented in these terms (as a threat to previously existing knowledge); on other occasions I will do so for reasons of ease of exposition.

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      

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side effects is to create false memory impressions. Malia has no basis for ruling out the possibility that her present memory impression is false. Verdict: she is not in a position to know (through memory) that she was twelve the first time she got on a plane. I take it that a ‘no knowledge’ verdict is obvious in these cases, and that this verdict reflects the presence of the defeater. Happily, the defeat corollaries deliver this result. In none of these cases is the subject entitled to be confident, and in none of them is the subject in a position to authorize others to believe (with confidence). Thus: Percy is not entitled to be confident that he is looking at a red wall, nor is he in a position to authorize others to believe that the wall is red; Dalia is not entitled to be confident that she is looking at deer tracks, nor is she in a position to authorize others to believe that the tracks are of deer; Malia is not entitled to be confident that she was twelve the first time she got on a plane, nor is she in a position to authorize others to believe that she was twelve the first time she got on a plane. These facts, together with DEFEATCONF and DEFEATAUTH, can be used to derive the ‘no knowledge’ verdicts. And, if we ask why the antecedents of these corollaries hold, the best explanation is that the subject has a relevant defeater. These are cases, then, in which the presence of a defeater undermines the subject’s occupying the normative standing associated with knowledge, and so (we can conclude) fails to know. Of course, it is not particularly interesting or noteworthy to learn that the corollaries deliver the desired results in these cases. But that, after all, is precisely the point: my aim in these examples is to confirm the validity of the corollaries, not to use them to get interesting results. Now, having been given some reason to trust their validity, we can go on to employ the defeat corollaries in cases in which the presence (or absence) of defeaters is not so obvious. To this end, I will focus on cases in which an otherwise epistemically well-positioned subject fails to be entitled to confidence—alternatively, in which such a subject fails to be in a position to authorize others to believe (with confidence). The upshot will be that in such cases we have good reasons to postulate the presence of relevant defeaters, as the best explanation for the subject’s diminished epistemic standing (despite her otherwise strong epistemic position). That we can get this result in cases in which the result itself is not obvious is proof positive of the utility of the corollaries in helping us discern the nature and scope of defeat. Let us now move on to some of these cases.

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26  . 

2.4. There has been a good deal of discussion of certain cases of would-be higherorder defeat.¹⁴ These are cases in which a given subject has what in fact is conclusive first-order evidence that p, but also has evidence—unbeknownst to her, misleading evidence—that she is not in a position to reliably assess her first-order evidence. One example, based on a case due to David Christensen, is the following:

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LOGIC Lonny is highly competent at logic. Prior to taking a logic exam, she is told by a person she regards as sincere and competent that there is a good chance that, unbeknownst to her, she was recently administered a drug whose side effect is that it renders one highly unreliable in discerning which would-be proofs are actual proofs, even in very simple cases. (One effect of the drug is to make even simple invalid inferences seem perfectly and straightforwardly valid.) While under these conditions, she examines what in fact is (and what strikes her as) a fairly straightforward proof of the proposition that p. Does Lonny know that p, or does the testimony she received serve as a (higherorder) defeater? While many people who have addressed this matter agree with Christensen that Sally does not know that p,¹⁵ others do not.¹⁶ My own sympathies are with Christensen. I come at the issue by way of two alternative questions. They are: After reviewing the would-be proof (having previously gotten the testimony), is Lonny entitled to be confident that p? After reviewing the would-be proof (having previously gotten the testimony), is she in a position from which to authorize others to believe that p?

It seems clear to me that the verdict for both of these is “no.” And either of these verdicts, together with the relevant defeat corollary, can be used to draw the conclusion that Lonny doesn’t know that p.

¹⁴ Christensen (2010); Lasonen-Aarnio (2010, 2014); Horowitz (2014); Horowitz and Sliwa (2015); Schoenfield (2015, 2018); Brown (2018); Skipper (2018); Ye (2018). ¹⁵ See e.g., Horowitz (2014); Brown (2018); Ye (2018); Goldberg and Matheson (forthcoming). (For his part, Christensen is less interested in the question whether Sally knows that p, than he is in modeling how the higher-order evidence affects Sally’s warranted credence in p.) ¹⁶ See e.g., Lasonen-Aarnio (2010, 2014); Schoenfield (2015); Baker-Hytch and Benton (2015).

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It is perhaps no surprise that the defeat corollaries can be brought to bear on the sort of higher-order defeat illuminated by Christensen’s work. (While Christensen himself does not formulate the corollaries themselves, he does appear to use considerations in this vicinity in defense of his analysis.) But, I believe that the corollaries can be used in contexts in which the hypothesis that defeaters are present will be much more controversial. More specifically, the corollaries provide some support for the claim that when others have legitimate social expectations concerning one’s epistemic condition and one fails to live up to these expectations, this can generate defeaters—even in cases in which one lacks the defeating evidence itself. This claim is a conclusion I draw in Goldberg (2018); in what follows I use the defeat corollaries to bring this conclusion out. To this end, I offer several sorts of case in which others have legitimate expectations of a subject, where the subject fails to fulfill these expectations, and where this fact (among others) bears on the question of knowledge. I begin with two cases that have been previously discussed by others (albeit not in precisely these terms). UNOPENED LETTER (from Pollock) Elodie believes on good evidence that Clancy is currently in San Francisco. However, Clancy wants to get Elodie to believe that she (Clancy) is in Providence, Rhode Island, and so she arranges to provide Elodie with evidence to this effect. So, Clancy writes a letter to that effect and has the letter mailed to Elodie from a friend in Providence (to get the date and postmark right). One day, as Elodie reflects on Clancy’s being in San Francisco, the letter from Clancy is sitting in a pile of mail that is right in front of her, unopened, on the desk. In fact, Clancy is in San Francisco. NEWSPAPER (from Harman) Ying Yue reads the morning paper to learn that the president has been assassinated, and that there has been a coup. In fact, this is precisely what happened. But later in the day the generals now in power want to fool everyone into thinking that no such thing happened. So, they order the afternoon edition of the newspaper to issue a retraction. The afternoon edition goes out across the community and is read by virtually everyone else. However, Ying Yue never sees the afternoon edition (and never overhears others speaking of its contents). As a result, she continues to believe that the president has been assassinated and that there has been a coup. Both Pollock (explicitly) and Harman (implicitly) rely on the idea that there is a social expectation of the subject in the case in question to avail herself of the

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28  .  relevant evidence: in Elodie’s case, there is a legitimate “social expectation” that we read the letters that we receive, whereas in Ying Yue’s case, there is a legitimate social expectation that we stay abreast of the very significant breaking news in our community when it is prevalent. The failure to satisfy this expectation, together with the fact that had they done so they would no longer have been justified in believing as they do, defeats the subjects’ knowledge in both cases. We can reinforce this result through application of the defeat corollaries: applying them to the cases at hand, we get the result that there is no knowledge in either case. To bring this out, we address two questions raised by these corollaries regarding the subjects of these cases: In a situation in which a subject (Elodie; Ying Yue) violates a legitimate social expectation in connection with her belief that p, where this expectation involves getting further evidence that would have defeated her justification to believe, is the subject herself entitled to be confident that p?

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In a situation in which a subject (Elodie; Ying Yue) violates a legitimate social expectation in connection with her belief that p, where this expectation involves getting further evidence that would have defeated her justification to believe, is the subject in a position from which to authorize others to believe that p?

I submit that in each case (UNOPENED LETTER and NEWSPAPER) the answer to both questions is negative. This is diagnostic of the defeat of the would-be knowledge that the two subjects would otherwise have had. Here, as previously, the hypothesis alleging the presence of defeaters is the best explanation of the fact that a subject who otherwise is well-positioned epistemically fails to be entitled to confidence, and fails to be in a position from which to authorize others to believe with confidence. This diagnostic enables us to address an otherwise perplexing aspect of these cases. In effect, the claim on the table is that evidence one doesn’t have— the contents of a letter (or of a prevalent afternoon edition of the newspaper) that one didn’t read—can nevertheless defeat one’s knowledge, even when one is oblivious to the very existence of that evidence. But how can this be? How can evidence that a subject herself lacks play any epistemic role, let alone a defeating role, at all? It won’t do to respond to this question by insisting that the defeat works only when the subject herself is aware that there is further evidence out there (which she fails to have); for, while the

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      

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evidence-of-evidence-is-evidence view might account for some cases, it does not account for the cases as Pollock and Harman described them. Happily, the defeat corollaries give us another way to address this seemingly perplexing element of these cases: when the evidence one doesn’t have is evidence that one should have had, where this reflects others’ legitimate expectations of one, then one’s failure to have that evidence affects—or, at any rate, can affect (more on which in a moment)—one’s right to be confident, as well as whether one is in a position from which to authorize others to believe. Insofar as knowledge is a status that underwrites the right to confidence and the position from which to authorize others, it should come as no surprise, then, that in these sorts of cases evidence one doesn’t have can prevent one from knowing: such evidence bears against one’s entitlement to be confident and against one’s being in a position to authorize others to believe. We can develop this analysis, and illustrate its plausibility, in both of these cases. Starting with UNOPENED LETTER, the key claim (made by Pollock himself) is that there is a “social expectation” that one reads the letters addressed to one (Pollock 1986). We might think of this expectation as spelling out our sense of when and where and under what circumstances one is expected to do so—though there may be some indeterminacy on these matters. Even so, there are clear cases, and UNOPENED LETTER was meant by Pollock to be such a case. When this expectation is unmet, and the result is that one fails to have some crucial evidence which one would have had if one had met the expectation, we are in a position in which knowledge is at risk. On my analysis, Elodie’s knowledge that Clancy is in San Francisco would be defeated just in case the result of expanding Elodie’s current belief set so as to include the information contained in the letter would be a belief set in which Elodie isn’t justified in believing that Clancy is in San Francisco. The hypothesis of defeat is the best explanation for why Elodie fails to be entitled to confidence of Clancy’s whereabouts (or to authorize others to believe with confidence), despite the fact that Elodie has good evidence for thinking that Clancy is in San Francisco. A similar analysis is plausible in connection with NEWSPAPER. (Here I am going a bit beyond what Harman himself said, but I think this analysis is in keeping with the spirit of his example.) There is a social expectation that citizens keep abreast of the significant breaking news in their communities (especially when its dissemination is prevalent). Again, we might think of this expectation as spelling out our sense of when, where, how, and under what circumstances one is expected to do so—though there may be some indeterminacy on these matters.

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30  .  Even so, there are clear cases, and NEWSPAPER was meant by Harman to be such a case. When this expectation is unmet, and the result is that one fails to have some crucial evidence which one would have had if one had met the expectation, we are in a position in which knowledge is at risk. On my analysis, Ying Yue’s knowledge that there has been a coup would be defeated just in case the result of expanding Ying Yue’s current belief set so as to include the information in question—that there has been an afternoon edition of the newspaper publishing a retraction—would be a belief set in which Ying Yue isn’t justified in believing that there has been a coup. The hypothesis of defeat is the best explanation for why Ying Yue, despite being in an otherwise strong epistemic position with respect to the existence of the coup from having read the morning paper, nevertheless fails to be entitled to confidence regarding the coup (or to authorize others to believe with confidence). If these analyses are correct, then the defeat corollaries have a significance that may not be obvious at first glance. They can be used to make clear that the normativity of knowledge includes a social dimension, and that this social dimension can render evidence one doesn’t have epistemically significant with respect to one’s epistemic standing on some proposition.¹⁷ As noted previously, such an idea might initially seem curious: how can evidence one doesn’t possess have any epistemic significance whatsoever, let alone prevent one from acquiring knowledge (or defeat knowledge one already has)? The answer that is suggested, in part, by the defeat corollaries is that this prospect merely reflects the social dimension of knowledge’s normativity: to know that p requires a justified belief that p held in circumstances in which there is no evidence one should have—that is, no evidence which it is (legitimately) socially expected that one would have—which, if one had it, would undermine one’s entitlement to confidence and would prevent one from authorizing others to believe. When one’s justified belief that p meets this condition, I will call it socially robust.

2.5. I just argued that the defeat corollaries can be used to support the idea that there is a kind of normative (social) defeat. These are cases in which the acquisition of knowledge is prevented (or existing knowledge is defeated) owing to the subject’s failure to satisfy legitimate social expectations as to her epistemic conduct or condition, in contexts in which there is adequate ¹⁷ This point has been emphasized in the ethics literature by Moody-Adams (1994).

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      

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counterevidence that she would have acquired had she satisfied those expectations. Both UNOPENED LETTER and NEWSPAPER were cases of this sort; and the application of the defeat corollaries enabled us to discern this sort of “normative (social) defeat.” However, my analysis may strike some as unconvincing. It might be wondered, for example, whether, far from establishing a kind of normative (social) defeat, these cases are better regarded as undermining the defeat corollaries themselves. In this section, I argue that this reaction is wrongheaded. What might prompt one to jettison the defeat corollaries themselves, rather than having to countenance the possibility of a kind of normative (social) defeat that is supported by those corollaries? The obvious way to try to motivate this reaction would be to insist on the idea (i) that unpossessed evidence can never have any epistemic significance for the subject who lacks the evidence in question. For this idea is incompatible with the combination of two further views, (ii) that both of the defeat corollaries are true, and (iii) that the subjects in UNOPENED LETTER and NEWSPAPER are such that, given the facts of the case, neither one is entitled to be confident or to authorize others to believe with confidence. Since the combination of (i)–(iii) form an inconsistent triad, (at least) one of these must be jettisoned. So those who insist on (i) will need to reject either (ii) or (iii). Before considering the move to reject (ii)—the defeat corollaries themselves— let us first consider the proposal to reject (iii). According to this proposal, the subjects in UNOPENED LETTER and NEWSPAPER are entitled to confidence in their beliefs, and they are in a position to authorize others to believe with confidence—despite whatever impression to the contrary that is generated by our reflection on the evidence not in their possession. Indeed, it is easy to see how one might think to combine a rejection of (iii) with a commitment to (i). According to (i), unpossessed evidence is epistemically insignificant. If we combine this with a rejection of (iii), we reach the conclusion that the only evidence that is relevant to the question whether the subject is entitled to confidence—and the only evidence relevant to whether the subject is in a position to authorize others to be confident—is evidence in the subject’s possession. Those who endorse this approach will argue that if we restrict ourselves to the evidence in the subject’s possession in the previously mentioned cases (UNOPENED LETTER and NEWSPAPER), the subject is entitled to be confident, and is in a position to authorize others to be confident.¹⁸

¹⁸ See e.g. Feldman (2000) for a defense of a view in this spirit.

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32  .  Such a view inherits the burden of explaining away any intuitions to the contrary. I can think of two ways to do so. One would be to trace such intuitions to a conflation of the subjects’ epistemic position before and after they learn of the facts. After the subjects learn of the facts—after Elodie reads the letter; after Ying Yue acquires and reads a copy of the afternoon paper containing the retraction—they are not entitled to confidence in their original beliefs, nor are they in a position to authorize others to be confident. But this is consistent with the claim that prior to learning of these facts both are entitled to confidence and in a position to authorize others to be confident. The other way to try to explain away the intuition that (iii) holds is to argue that the intuition rests on conflating the knowledgeable third-person perspective with the subjects’ own perspectives. It is true that anyone who is aware of the relevant facts¹⁹—of the contents of the unopened letter, of the existence of the afternoon news retraction—is not entitled to confidence, and is not in a position to authorize others to be confident, on the matter at hand. But this is consistent with saying that nevertheless both Elodie and Ying Yue are so entitled and so positioned (prior to being apprized of those facts). I find both of these defensive maneuvers implausible. However, to explain why, I will be appealing to (ii)—the defeat corollaries themselves. This suggests that those who want to insist on (i)—i.e., that unpossessed evidence is epistemically insignificant—would do best to reject both (ii) and (iii). Conversely, if (ii) is plausible, so is (iii), in which case we ought to jettison (i). (That is, we ought to allow that unpossessed evidence can have epistemic significance for the person who lacks it.) My contention is that an insistence of the doctrine asserting the epistemic insignificance of unpossessed evidence has untoward implications. While I will appeal to the defeat corollaries themselves to bring these implications out, my hope is that the status of the corollaries, far from being undermined, is further confirmed in the case that follows. PEDIATRICIAN Patricia is a pediatrician whose practice is more than two decades old. One day a patient of hers, Luis, comes in with a relatively rare form of asthma. Patricia remembers reading about this condition when she was in medical school (more than two decades ago), and she distinctly remembers the then-prescribed treatment protocol. At the same time, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends that pediatricians stay on top of ¹⁹ And who lacks a defeater-defeater.

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the developments for treatment protocol of all rare conditions; accordingly, it recommends that pediatricians do a thorough literature review every 18 months to confirm that their views regarding such conditions are consistent with currently prescribed best practices. Through no fault of her own, Patricia never became apprized of the AAP’s recommendation. Happily, on most matters she does literature reviews on a regular basis anyway, and so (without explicitly aiming to do so) she keeps her practice in line with the AAP recommendation. Still, she failed to do one on this occasion, and so does not check to confirm that the old protocol is still being recommended. Unfortunately for her, a series of studies in recent years support the hypothesis that a different treatment protocol for the relevant sort of asthma is more reliable, and on this basis the AAP changed its recommendation to the new treatment. However, unbeknownst to the AAP community a large, the studies that support this recommendation failed to address an obscure confounding factor (one which the community was not in a position to appreciate at the time). The result is that, in fact, the most reliable treatment remains the one Patricia had learned about in medical school. In what follows, I want to argue for two things. First, despite the fact that her belief as to the best treatment protocol is true, Patricia is not entitled to be confident, nor is it the case that she is in a position in which to authorize others to believe with confidence. As a result, Patricia does not know that the best way to treat Luis is X (where ‘X’ designates what she learned in medical school), where—and this is my second point—her failure to know reflects Patricia’s failure to live up to the data-collecting responsibilities that were properly expected of her as a pediatrician. First, it is not the case that Patricia is entitled to be confident in what she regards as the best way to treat Luis’s asthma, nor is it the case that she is in a position in which to authorize others to be confident in the claim that her proposed treatment is best. It is common knowledge that as a pediatrician, Patricia is someone on whom others rely for matters of the health of children. What is more, as a pediatrician, Patricia has professional responsibilities, among which are to conform in her practice to the recommendations of the AAP. When others rely on her in matters of their children’s health, they rely on her to live up to her professional responsibilities (even if they themselves are in no position to articulate those responsibilities). On this score, it does not matter that Patricia is non-culpably ignorant of (one of) her professional responsibilities, and so is non-culpably ignorant of the AAP’s current treatment recommendation. Even so, it is still her responsibility as a pediatrician to

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34  .  live up to the standards set forth by the AAP (the relevant regulatory entity), as it is the legitimate expectation of those who rely on pediatricians that they do so.²⁰ But then it would seem that her failure to do so, when the failure pertains to evidence she should have had, affects her normative standing—it affects her entitlement to confidence, her being in a position from which to authorize others to believe. In short, because she is normatively deficient in matters of her profession, and because this deficiency highlights a flaw—her lacking evidence that, given her professional duties, she ought to have had, and which bear against her belief—she is thereby normatively downgraded in the ways noted previously: she lacks entitlement to confidence, and is not in a position from which to authorize others to believe. Both antecedents of the defeat corollaries hold. Some might think to question this by insisting that Patricia’s failure to possess the relevant evidence is merely a professional failure—a matter of medical negligence, as it were—which as such does not constitute the basis for any epistemic downgrade of her attitudes. But this reaction would be wrongheaded. It is here, of course, that the defeat corollaries earn their keep: these make clear that what many might try to explain away as a merely professional shortcoming is in fact an epistemic shortcoming—one that deprives Patricia of knowledge. The evidence that Patricia fails to know just is that she is not entitled to be confident and that she is not in a position from which to authorize others to believe. Of course, her belief is true; and it is supported by what she learned in medical school. But given her ignorance of the evidence she ought to have had, and the fact that this evidence counters her belief as to the best treatment, she is not entitled to be confident, nor is she in a position from which to authorize others to believe with confidence. Might one agree that Patricia fails to know, but argue that this case is best seen as a Gettier case?²¹ Like Gettier cases, PEDIATRICIAN involves additional “nearby” evidence which, if the subject had that evidence, she would not be justified in believing as she does. But the assimilation of this case into the category of Gettier cases is troubled by what is distinctive in PEDIATRICIAN: like the subjects in UNOPENED LETTER and NEWSPAPER, Patricia is properly expected to have had the evidence in question. This is no part of standard Gettier cases: one is not standardly expected to be aware of when one’s officemates sell their Ford, to be sensitive to the prospect of entering Fake Barn County, to realize that sheepdogs look a lot like sheep from a distance, or ²⁰ See Goldberg (2017, 2018) for a discussion. ²¹ I thank Jessica Brown for suggesting that I consider this option.

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to be sensitive to the prospect that one’s clock has stopped a short time ago. The unpossessed evidence in PEDIATRICIAN, by contrast, is evidence that others properly expect the subject to have had—it was evidence she should have had. In light of this it would be curious indeed to explain the ‘no knowledge’ verdict as a matter of (Gettierizing) epistemic luck (rather than a matter of insufficient evidence). I submit that the points I am making with PEDIATRICIAN are general. They hold not only for pediatricians, but for anyone who is a member of a professional organization whose standards capture good epistemic practice and on whose members others rely for information (in the expectation that they conform to those standards): such professionals ought to conform in their practice to the standards articulated by their professional organization. In addition, these points hold in cases involving experts as well as people who play one or another role in a social or work group, as well as in cases involving participation in other social practices, whether between partners at work, family members at home, friends, or what-have-you.²² The point is simply this: when a person who is legitimately expected to have certain evidence (or to follow a certain protocol in inquiry etc.) fails to do so, where her failing to do so results in her failing to have relevant counterevidence that she ought to have had, the person is not entitled to confidence, nor is she in a position from which to authorize others to believe (with confidence). This is seen not only in PEDIATRICIAN but also in both of the unpossessed evidence scenarios in UNOPENED LETTER and NEWSPAPER as well. In sum, the general lesson is that legitimate social expectations give rise to the prospect of a kind of (normative and social) defeat. What is interesting about this kind of defeat is that it can bear against the epistemic standing of a subject’s belief even when the subject is ignorant of the defeating consideration itself.

2.6. The time has come to draw the various pieces of the picture into a more cohesive whole. My general conclusion is that the normativity of knowledge has more far-reaching implications than is typically assumed. In this paper, I have tried to capture some of these implications in terms of the two defeater conditionals themselves; these can be applied to certain cases to help us discern a normative (social) type of defeat. Failure to recognize this type of ²² An early example of this was given in Gibbons (2006).

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36  .  defeat, I submit, is tantamount to a failure to have in one’s sight a state that has the sort of normativity we associate with knowledge. I believe that this picture of the normativity of knowledge is far-reaching. While we may well be able to characterize a condition in fully naturalistic terms, such that non-human animals can be in that condition, my strong suspicion is that such a condition would not answer to the sort of thing we expect human knowledge to be. The defeat conditionals articulate the basis for this suspicion. One lesson to be learned, if I am right is that even if (following Ernie Sosa) we designate such a naturalistic condition as a kind of (mere) ‘animal knowledge,’ there is a great chasm separating such a condition and what we ought to recognize as distinctly and paradigmatically human knowledge.²³ The chasm is greater than many appear to suppose, since it involves moving to a domain rife with the normative social expectations we have of one another as we move about the world acquiring information in our characteristically socially dependent ways.²⁴

References Alston, W. (1993). Epistemic desiderata. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 53(3): 527–51.

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Alston, W. (2005). Beyond Justification: Dimensions of Epistemic Evaluation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Baker-Hytch, M. and Benton, M. (2015). Defeatism defeated. Philosophical Perspectives, 29(1): 40–66. Brown, J. (2008a). Subject-sensitive invariantism and the knowledge norm for practical reasoning. Noûs, 42: 167–89. Brown, J. (2008b). Knowledge and practical reason. Philosophy Compass, 3(6): 1135–52. Brown, J. (2018). Fallibilism: Evidence and Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Christensen, D. (2010). Higher-order evidence. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 81(1): 185–215.

²³ See Goldberg and Matheson (Forthcoming), where we reflect on this further. ²⁴ I would like to express my gratitude to Jessica Brown for her thoughtful and incisive comments on an earlier draft of this paper; and to Mona Simion, Jennifer Lackey, and Baron Reed, with whom I have discussed these and related topics at great length. None of them are responsible for the shortcomings of this paper!

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Feldman, R. (2000). The ethics of belief. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 60(3): 667–95. Gerken, M. (2014). Same, same but different: The epistemic norms of assertion, action and practical reasoning. Philosophical Studies, 168(3): 725–44. Gibbons, J. (2006). Access externalism. Mind, 115(457): 19–39. Goldberg, S. (2015a). Assertion: On the Philosophical Significance of Assertoric Speech. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goldberg, S. (2015b). Recent work on assertion. American Philosophical Quarterly, 52(4): 365–80. Goldberg, S. (2017). Should have known. Synthese, 194(8): 2863–94. Goldberg, S. (2018). To the Best of Our Knowledge: Social Expectations and Epistemic Normativity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goldberg, S. and Matheson, J. (Forthcoming). The impossibility of mere animal knowledge for reflective subjects. Erkenntnis. Horowitz, S. (2014). Epistemic akrasia. Noûs, 48(4): 718–44. Horowitz, S. and Sliwa, P. (2015). Respecting all the evidence. Philosophical Studies, 172(11) 2835–58. Lackey, J. (1999). Testimonial knowledge and transmission. Philosophical Quarterly, 49: 471–90.

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Lackey, J. (2011). Assertion and isolated second-hand knowledge.” In: J. Brown and H. Cappelen (eds.) Assertion: New Philosophical Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 251–76. Lasonen-Aarnio, M. (2010). Unreasonable knowledge. Philosophical Perspectives, 24(1): 1–21. Lasonen-Aarnio, M.( 2014). Higher-order evidence and the limits of defeat. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 88(2): 314–45. McKinnon, R. (2013). The supportive reasons norm of assertion. American Philosophical Quarterly, 50(2): 121–35. McKinnon, R. (2016). The Norms of Assertion: Truth, Lies, and Warrant. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Moody-Adams, M. (1994). Culture, responsibility, and affected ignorance. Ethics, 104(2): 291–309. Pollock, J. (1986). Contemporary Theories of Knowledge. Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield. Reed, B. (2010). A defense of stable invariantism. Noûs, 44: 224–44. Schoenfield, M. (2015). A dilemma for calibrationism. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 91: 425–55.

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38  .  Schoenfield, M. (2018). An accuracy-based approach to higher order evidence. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 96(3): 690–715. Skipper, M. (2018). Reconciling enkrasia and higher-order defeat. Erkenntnis, 84 (6): 1369–86. Weiner, M. (2005). Must we know what we say? The Philosophical Review, 114(2): 227–51. Whiting, D. (2013). Stick to the facts: On the norms of assertion. Erkenntnis, 78 (4): 847–67. Williamson, T. (2014). Very improbable knowing. Erkenntnis, 79(5): 971–99. Williamson, T. (2000). Knowledge and Its Limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williamson, T. (2002). Knowledge and Its Limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Ye, R. (2018). Higher-order defeat and intellectual responsibility. Synthese, 1–21.

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3 The Structure of Defeat Pollock’s Evidentialism, Lackey’s Framework, and Prospects for Reliabilism

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Peter J. Graham and Jack C. Lyons

Epistemic justification is very often defeasible: the addition of new information can weaken or destroy what was a perfectly adequate justification. Normally, if an object looks red to you, then you’re justified in believing it’s red. Often such justification is good enough to yield knowledge. But if it looks red and you find out it’s illuminated with red light, then—absent further information—you’re no longer justified in believing it’s red. If you persist in believing so, you don’t know it. You might have prima facie justification, but you lack ultima facie justification: your initial justification is defeated. Most discussions of defeat occur within either an evidentialist or a responsibilist framework. This is problematic. First, it is far from obvious what the resulting theories of defeat have to do with each other and whether they can even be rendered compatible. Second, both approaches seem to fit poorly with a reliabilist epistemology—a fact that is of much concern to us, since we endorse broadly reliabilist views. In this chapter we first discuss evidentialist and responsibilist accounts of defeat before offering a reliabilist view. In Section 3.1, we discuss Pollock’s seminal evidentialist views on reasons and justification, defeat and defeaters. We then discuss Jennifer Lackey’s responsibilist-inspired account in Sections 3.2–3.4, focusing on her influential claim that all defeaters are either “doxastic” or “normative.”¹ Despite its influence, we argue her distinction is entirely unfounded. “Doxastic” and “normative” defeaters in Lackey’s sense simply do not exist. We then turn to the reliabilist treatment of defeat in Section 3.5.

¹ Green (n.d.); Grundmann (2011); Palermos (2011); Matheson (2011); Carter (2015), (2018); Carter and Navarro (2017); Goldberg (2018); Goldberg and Matheson (2020); Pritchard (2018).

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40  .    .  We think defeat fits naturally into a reliabilist epistemology, in a way that is neither responsibilist nor evidentialist.²

3.1. Pollock provided the seminal treatment of defeat and defeaters.³ Pollock first defines (epistemic) reasons (to believe) in terms of justified belief.

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A state M of a person S is a reason for S to believe P if and only if it is logically possible for S to become justified in believing P by believing it on the basis of being in state M.⁴

Justified belief is then Pollock’s explanatory primitive. Other evidentialists take the notion of evidence or reasons as basic. Evidence is their explanatory primitive. What do reasons have to do with defeat? The technical terms “epistemic defeat” and “defeater” then get their sense from the defeasibility of reasons and justification. Suppose Carol perceptually experiences an object as red and as having a particular shape. This is a reason to believe that is an apple.⁵ But then she picks it up and feels its texture and weight. It feels more like a polished rock than an apple. Perhaps it is an objêt d’art made of stone, cleverly made to look just like an apple. Carol’s new experience is a reason to believe both that is a stone and that is not an apple. Her new experience defeats her old experience as a reason to believe that is an apple. Her old experience combined with her new experience is not a reason to believe that is an apple, but instead a reason to believe it is a stone, cleverly shaped to look like an apple. Given her new experience, the rational thing for Carol is to change her mind, if she hasn’t already. Given one set of relevant reasons, you can have a good reason to believe p. Given another, more inclusive set, you might no longer have a good reason

² Please note that our topic here is justificatory defeat. The term ‘defeater’ is sometimes used in discussions of “defeasibility” responses to the Gettier problem, to refer to an unknown fact that would defeat justification if known (or justifiedly believed). These “knowledge defeaters”—also sometimes called ‘factual’ defeaters—are not our concern here. ³ Pollock (1967), (1968), (1970), (1971), (1979), (1986), (1987), (1994), (2001), (2006). ⁴ Pollock and Cruz (1999): 195. ⁵ We ignore here debates about the contents of perceptual states and perceptual beliefs, whether they involve indexicals, singular terms, or existential generalizations. Our use of the demonstrative is for convenience’s sake and isn’t intended to take a stand on this issue.

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to believe p. Some reasons to believe p are defeated by other reasons. Those other reasons are defeaters. Those defeaters, in turn, might be defeated by further reasons. Those are defeater-defeaters. A reason that can be defeated is a defeasible reason. What you are ultimately justified in believing thus depends on your total evidence, not just part of it.⁶ Pollock and Cruz (1999) formulate the notion of a defeater as follows: If M is a reason for S to believe p, a state M* is a defeater for this reason iff it is logically possible for S to be in the combined state consisting of being in both state M and state M* at the same time, and this combined state is not a reason for S to believe p.⁷

M and M* range over the kinds of mental states that can serve as reasons for beliefs. Defeaters are then just reasons functioning in a destructive rather than constructive mode.⁸ For Pollock, all defeaters are either rebutters or undercutters:

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If M is a defeasible reason for S to believe p, M* is a rebutting defeater for this reason iff M* is a defeater (for M as a reason for S to believe p) and M* is a reason for S to believe ~p.⁹ If M is a defeasible reason for S to believe p, M* is an undercutting defeater for this reason iff M* is a defeater (for M as a reason for S to believe p) and M* is a reason for S to doubt or deny that he or she would not be in state M unless p were true.¹⁰

For Pollock, beliefs—doxastic states—are not the only possible defeaters, for he denies “doxasticism” in epistemology—the view that only beliefs can serve as reasons. M and M* range over a variety of mental state types, including perceptual experiences, sensations, feelings, moods, and memories, as well as doxastic states. Pollock’s view is an evidentialist one: the justificational status of a belief is determined by the evidence—the reasons—for and against believing. Pollock’s evidentialism entails that you can’t have defeat without

⁶ Authors often describe the phenomenon of defeat in temporal terms. First you have a good reason to believe that p. Next, you acquire new information that defeats that reason. Many of our examples proceed just like this. But nothing about defeat requires this temporal ordering. ⁷ Pollock and Cruz (1999): 195. ⁸ Similar formulations occur in Chisholm (1977): 72–3, (1989): 53. ⁹ Pollock and Cruz (1999): 196. ¹⁰ Pollock and Cruz (1999): 196–7.

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42  .    .  reasons/evidence; the only things that can produce defeat are things that can produce justification. Reasons aren’t restricted to beliefs for Pollock, but they are restricted to things that you might base a belief on. Prima facie doxastic justification is limited to things that you have based your belief on. Ultima facie justification—even ultima facie doxastic justification—is importantly different, for it also depends on other reasons you possess but which haven’t positively or negatively causally influenced that belief. Pollock is surprisingly inexplicit about ultima facie justification, but it is fairly clear that he thinks that a belief is ultima facie justified just in case it is prima facie justified, and the agent doesn’t possess any ultimately undefeated defeaters for it. To possess a (for example, rebutting) defeater for the belief that p is to have a reason to believe ~p, i.e., to be prima facie propositionally justified in believing ~p. This makes ultima facie (doxastic) justification depend in part on propositional justification in a way that prima facie (doxastic) justification doesn’t. Thus, while having merely propositional justification can’t increase your doxastic justification, it can diminish it. Though rightly influential, there are a few idiosyncratic features of his formulations worth pointing out. First, in Pollock’s classic formulations (though this is rectified in Pollock (2001)), the definition of defeat doesn’t admit of degrees and thus doesn’t allow for partial defeat: cases where a reason reduces justification without eliminating it. Second, this problem is exacerbated by the oddly conjunctive framing of the definitions for rebutting and undercutting defeat: a rebutting defeater is something that’s both a defeater and a reason to believe the negation of the target proposition. If we weaken the definition of defeat to allow for partial defeat, then the first conjunct will be entailed by the second and is thus unnecessary. If we don’t allow for partial defeat, then the conjunctive definitions of undercutting and rebutting defeat are too narrow. Third, only reasons/evidence can be defeaters. This is very much a deliberate choice on Pollock’s part. Later, we will see it come under attack from two quite different quarters, responsibilist and reliabilist. It is worth highlighting for now. Fourth, somewhat surprisingly, only reasons can be defeated. Of course, this has to be true in the case of undercutting defeat, but it’s not obvious why rebutting defeat attacks reasons for the belief that p rather than the belief ’s prima facie justification. It seems more natural to think of rebutting defeaters as working foremostly on prima facie justification and only derivatively on reasons. For these reasons, it’s worthwhile to simplify and reformulate the basic Pollockian outlook. Here’s a theory that’s squarely Pollockian in spirit:

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d is a rebutting defeater for S’s belief that p iff d is a reason for S to believe not-p. d is an undercutting defeater for S’s belief that p iff d is a reason for S to believe that her reasons for believing p are inadequate.

Since we haven’t defined undercutting and rebutting defeat in terms of the more general notion, we can do it the other way around: d is a defeater for S’s belief that p iff d is a rebutting or an undercutting defeater for S’s belief that p.

Finally:

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S’s prima facie justification for believing p is defeated iff S possesses a defeater for that justification, and that defeater is not ultimately defeated.

A prima facie justified belief is ultima facie justified iff it’s not defeated. These definitions make clear the evidentialist presumption that defeat is simply a matter of having reasons/evidence, and that ultima facie justification is thereby a matter of what the balance of the evidence—what the whole of the evidence—supports. They allow defeat to come in degrees, like reasons more generally. On the evidentialist view, the basis for defeat is the same as the basis for justification: the subject’s evidence.

3.2. Jennifer Lackey has argued that Pollock’s distinction between rebutting and undercutting defeaters requires supplementation with another distinction between “doxastic” and “normative” defeaters. According to Lackey, a doxastic defeater is “ . . . a doubt or belief that is had by S that indicates that S’s belief that p is either false or unreliably formed or sustained.”¹¹ By ‘indicates’ she means ‘obviously entails.’ In particular: ¹¹ Lackey (2006b): 438. See also Lackey (1999): 483, (2003): 707, (2005a): 164, (2005b): 638, (2008): 44, 253, (2011a): 317. Lackey uses ‘psychological defeater’ and ‘doxastic defeater’ interchangeably. The former serves to emphasize that in addition to beliefs, some doubts can function the same way as doxastic defeaters, but since they are not narrowly classified as beliefs, we need a broader term. Hence ‘psychological.’ Nothing will hang on this point in our chapter. What about perceptual experiences, and other non-doxastic states? Though in two places she included experiences along with beliefs and doubts in her list of psychological defeaters (Lackey (2006a): 87, (2006c): 4), otherwise experiences do not

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• A doxastic rebutting defeater for a subject’s belief that p is a further belief of the subject that q, where that belief, given its content and the contents of other beliefs held by the subject, very obviously entails ~p. A doxastic rebutting defeater creates an incoherent set of first-order beliefs. For example: S believes {p, q, if q then ~p}. • A doxastic undercutting defeater for a subject’s belief that p is the subject’s further belief that my grounds do not make it likely that p (or something functionally equivalent, e.g., the source of my belief that p is not reliable). A doxastic undercutting defeater also creates an incoherent set of beliefs: S believes {p, my grounds do not make it likely that p}. The incoherence here does not lie solely in the contents, but in the subject’s attitudes towards those contents, like Moore-paradoxical thoughts generally. Must doxastic defeaters themselves be justified to do their defeating work? Not at all. Lackey repeatedly emphasizes that doxastic defeaters need not be true, justified, or rationally held to do their defeating work.¹² Doxastic defeaters are justified or unjustified beliefs that indicate that a subject’s belief that p is either false or unreliably formed or sustained. That’s her account of doxastic defeaters. There are also instances of defeat where the agent doesn’t have a doxastic defeater, hence the need for another category of defeaters: normative defeaters. There are two very different uses of the phrase ‘normative defeater’ in the literature, Lackey’s use and another we will explain shortly. We begin with Lackey’s use. According to Lackey, a normative defeater involves three parts. A proposition q is a normative defeater for a subject’s belief that p in Lackey’s sense iff: (1) S has evidence—in the form of experiences, beliefs, etc.—that justifies believing q for S. (2) q would be a doxastic defeater for S’s belief p if S were to believe q. (3) S ought to believe q.¹³

appear in her formulations (e.g., Lackey (1999), (2003), (2005a), (2005b), (2008): 44, 157, 204, (2011a): 317, (2014a): 292, (2014b): 75). The more common formulation states her considered view: psychological (doxastic) defeaters for Lackey are necessarily doxastic states (propositional attitudes) like beliefs or doubts, never non-doxastic experiences. Non-doxastic experiences, instead, ground normative defeaters, as we will see. That’s how experiences enter her “ontology of defeat.” ¹² Lackey (2005b): 647, cf. Lackey (2003): 707, (2005a): 164, (2006a): 87, (2008): 44–5, (2011a): 317. ¹³ Lackey (1999): 475, (2003): 707, (2005b): 638, (2005a); 164, (2006a): 87–8, (2006c): 4, (2008): 45, 157, (2011a): 317.

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Condition (1) explains why evidence grounds normative defeaters. Condition (2) explains why they defeat the subject’s belief that p; it explains why the evidence is counterevidence for it explains why normative defeaters are “counterparts” of doxastic defeaters.¹⁴ Condition (3) explains why Lackey calls them “normative” defeaters, for epistemic duty requires the subject to believe the normative defeater. (3) Can look redundant given (1), but it’s actually much stronger. To say that you’re justified in believing p is to say that you’re epistemically permitted to believe p. To say that you ought to do something, however, is to say that you’re doing something wrong if you don’t do it; you have a duty or obligation to do it. Clearly one could have epistemic permission to believe p without having an epistemic obligation to believe it. We will explain why Lackey includes (3) in Section 3.4. What is the other sense of the phrase ‘normative defeater’? On the other use, a normative defeater is:

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1. A worldly piece of evidence (like a letter hidden under the doormat). 2. That the subject is not aware of and so does not “possess” (the subject has no idea about the letter). 3. That if the subject were aware of, then the subject would possess a defeater for one of her beliefs (if she read the letter, she’d now have a defeater for a belief). 4. That the subject should be aware of, that the subject should possess (for some reason she should check under her doormat and read the letter). A normative defeater for a subject’s belief in this sense is a potential defeater that the subject does not actually possess but should.¹⁵ This is not Lackey’s sense. Lackey’s idea of normative defeat arises from beliefs the subject should have but does not, given evidence the subject already possesses.¹⁶ This other use of ‘normative defeaters’ is not what she has in mind.¹⁷ ¹⁴ Lackey (2006a): 8. ¹⁵ For this use of the phrase ‘normative defeater,’ see Lyons (2009); Grundmann (2011); Goldberg (2018); Pritchard (2018). ¹⁶ Lackey addresses evidence one does not possess but should in only two of her articles, and there she is using ‘normative defeater’ only to address issues of knowledge, not of justification. Lackey (2005b), (2014a). ¹⁷ A passage in a recent paper (Lackey (2018): 161) might lead one to think she now has this other sense in mind in addition to her sense as defined in the text. She gives an example where she says a subject’s belief is defeated, for the subject lacks evidence that she should have had. She then favorably cites (Goldberg (2018), who had this other sense in mind. But the example makes it clear that this other sense is not what she has in mind. For, in her example, the “evidence that the subject should have had” simply consists in a justified belief that the subject should have formed, given other evidence (in this case, another justified belief) that the subject already possesses. So, the evidence the subject should have had is just the proposition that the subject should believe, given her other evidence she already possesses.

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46  .    .  An example from Lackey of undercutting normative defeater should help make her use of the phrase ‘normative defeater’ clear:

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Alice is incorrectly told by an otherwise reliable optometrist that her vision is nearly completely unreliable, yet she refuses to accept his diagnosis, without having any rational basis for doing so. So, one might say, even though the optometrist’s report is false, Alice should accept his diagnosis, given all of the evidence that she has available to her, and thus she has a normative defeater for her visual beliefs.¹⁸ Nevertheless, as she is walking out of the doctor’s office, [Alice] sees a car accident on Michigan Avenue, forms the corresponding true belief that there was such an accident. She rejects the report [that she has unreliable vision] for no rational reason.¹⁹

Alice has good evidence from the doctor’s diagnosis that her vision is unreliable: she knows he told her that her vision is unreliable, and she believes he is a reliable informant on matters optometrical. Given this evidence she possesses, believing the proposition my vision is unreliable is justified for her. Given Lackey’s definition of doxastic defeaters, this proposition would be a doxastic defeater if she were to believe it. Furthermore, Lackey insists, she ought to believe it. That’s why it is a normative defeater. The proposition my vision is unreliable is then Alice’s normative defeater for her belief there was a car accident.²⁰ Lackey’s example involves a belief as the evidential basis for the normative defeater. This belief must be justified, given her definition of normative defeaters, for unjustified beliefs are not a part of one’s evidence that justifies further beliefs. Non-doxastic experiences can serve as the evidential bases for normative defeaters as well, for experiences too are a part of one’s total evidence. How does Lackey understand the basis of defeat, for both doxastic and normative defeaters? “The underlying thought” behind both kinds of defeaters, she says, . . . is that certain kinds of counterbeliefs [doxastic defeaters] and counterevidence [the grounds for normative defeaters] contribute epistemically unacceptable irrationality to doxastic systems and, accordingly, that justification and knowledge can be defeated or undermined by their presence.²¹

¹⁸ Lackey (1999): 487. ¹⁹ Lackey (2008): 63. ²⁰ Lackey (2008): 64. ²¹ Lackey (2005a): 164, (2006a): 87, (2008): 45, (2014a): 292, (2014b): 75.

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On Lackey’s view, irrationality—the failure to conform to the requirements of rationality—is then the source of defeat. We will elaborate on this idea as we critically engage Lackey’s framework. Both categories, we shall argue, are problematic. There is no such thing as a doxastic or a normative defeater in Lackey’s sense.²²

3.3.

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We begin with doxastic defeaters. Although Lackey’s examples of doxastic defeaters throughout her corpus involve justified doxastic defeaters, central to Lackey’s concept of doxastic defeaters is the insistence that they can be unjustified, or even irrational.²³ We will argue that that is a serious problem. To test the intuitive plausibility of this view, we should imagine cases involving unjustified doxastic defeaters. Here’s a recipe: (1) S believes that p on very strong total evidence. (2) S comes to believe q on absolutely no evidence, in a completely unreliable way. If any belief is unjustified, this one is. Let the belief occur through wishful thinking, emotional attachment, a brain tumor, mental illness, radiation, etc. (3) S’s background beliefs include if q then ~p. (4) The subject now has an incoherent set of beliefs: S believes {p, q, if q then ~p}. (5) By Lackey’s definition, S’s belief that q is then a doxastic defeater for S’s belief that p. Absent a defeater-defeater for q, then on Lackey’s view S’s belief that p is no longer justified.²⁴ For Lackey, S should stop believing p. (6) But that is counter-intuitive, given that S has very strong evidence for p, and no evidence against it. (The only consideration that speaks against believing p is q, but she has, by stipulation, no evidence for q and shouldn’t believe it.)

²² Lackey also frequently says, in addition to doxastic and normative defeaters, that there is a third category of so-called “factual” defeaters. Following Lackey, we’ve seen some philosophers to even say of defeaters that there is a “traditional” three-way taxonomy of “psychological” (doxastic), “normative,” and “factual” defeaters. Firstly, this is not the traditional view. Secondly, we deny the existence of socalled “factual” defeaters, for we reject defeasibility analyses of knowledge. ²³ Lackey (2005b): 647, cf. Lackey (2003): 707, (2005a): 164, (2006a): 87, (2008): 44–5, (2011a): 317. ²⁴ Lackey must allow the possibility of cases where such defeater-defeaters are lacking, or otherwise the possibility of unjustified defeaters is an idle wheel, as they would always be defeated by a defeaterdefeater.

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48  .    .  We think that in such cases the subject should not believe q but should continue believing p. p is based on strong evidence, formed in a reliable way. q is neither. How could a belief that is well-justified on strong evidence have the force of its evidence defeated by an unjustified belief, based on no evidence at all? A number of other authors have endorsed—sometimes offhandedly, sometimes deliberately—the idea of unjustified defeaters, i.e., the idea that an unjustified belief can nevertheless defeat the justification of a prima facie justified belief.²⁵ But Lackey’s discussion of defeat disguises this very controversial claim as an innocuous terminological point. It’s nothing of the sort. Notice first that this view of doxastic defeaters is incompatible with any roughly evidentialist view. On an evidentialist view, nothing can be relevant to justification but evidence, and unjustified beliefs aren’t evidence.²⁶ On the evidentialist view, defeat occurs when one’s partial evidence supports believing p but one’s total evidence (or even just a more inclusive body of partial evidence) does not. A defeater is then just another piece of evidence. On the Pollockian theory of defeat, nothing can provide defeat that can’t also provide justification, but unjustified beliefs can’t provide justification. Hence, an unjustified belief cannot be a defeater. Lackey needs an argument that there might be unjustified doxastic defeaters. Without such an argument, her entire category of doxastic defeaters is unmotivated, for the evidentialist already recognizes that justified beliefs can play the role of defeaters, either rebutting or undercutting. Without an argument, there’s no need for Lackey’s broader category of doxastic defeaters. Does she have an argument? She does not articulate one. But here is a suggestive passage: [It] is important to notice that what makes an undefeated doxastic defeater epistemically problematic is that it is held in conjunction with another belief. The defeater itself need not be true, justifiedly believed, or rationally believed to have the power to defeat other beliefs precisely because it need not be true, justifiedly believed, or rationally believed to render it irrational to hold certain other beliefs.²⁷

²⁵ For example, Goldman (1986) and Bergman (2006), among others. ²⁶ It is therefore surprising that an evidentialist like Matheson (2011) cites Lackey approvingly in connection with doxastic defeat. ²⁷ Lackey (2005b): 647, emphasis added. See also Lackey (2003): 707, (2005a): 164, (2006a): 87, (2008): 44–5, (2011a): 317, (2014b): 75.

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Doxastic defeaters thereby contribute “epistemically unacceptable irrationality to doxastic systems.”²⁸ That’s the idea we flagged at the end of the last section. She thus seems to be thinking something like the following:

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(1) Rationality requires coherence amongst one’s propositional attitudes (assumption). (2) When one holds a particular belief that p despite also holding a doxastic defeater for that belief—either a rebutter or undercutter, whether justified or unjustified—then one holds an incoherent set of propositional attitudes (definition of doxastic defeater). (3) Hence, if one holds a belief that p despite a doxastic defeater (justified or unjustified), then one is being epistemically irrational (from 1, 2). (4) If one is being irrational partly in virtue of holding a belief that p, then that belief that p is not justified (assumption). (5) Hence, if one holds a belief that p despite a doxastic defeater, whether justified or unjustified, then that belief that p is not justified (from 3, 4). (6) If a belief that p was justified, but is no longer justified, due to the possession of a defeater, then its justification is defeated (assumption). (7) Hence, if one holds a belief that p despite a doxastic defeater, whether justified or unjustified, then its justification is defeated (from 5, 6). This argument looks valid. And it makes plain a connection between doxastic defeaters, irrationality, and defeat, while allowing that doxastic defeaters may be unjustified. Justified or unjustified, doxastic defeaters induce incoherence; incoherence induces irrationality; irrationality induces defeat. That’s why unjustified doxastic defeaters defeat. But is the argument sound? No. (4) Is false. Notice that (3) says that if a subject holds a belief that p, then acquires a belief that q, where q is a doxastic defeater (possibly unjustified), but the subject continues to believe that p, then the subject has entered an irrational state, the state of holding an incoherent set of propositional attitudes. But (4) then condemns one of the beliefs in the set in particular as unjustified—the belief that p that the subject started with. And if rationality requires that we not believe propositions that are not justified for us, then rationality requires that the subject give up his belief that p. That’s the route the subject is required to take to exit his current state of irrationality. So, (4) says if the subject starts with a justified belief that p, then ²⁸ Lackey (2005b): 639, 647, cf. (2005a): 164, (2006c): 4, (2008): 253, (2014b): 75.

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50  .    .  acquires an unjustified belief that q, where that belief that q combined with the belief that p then puts the subject into an irrational overall state, then the subject is required to give up on the justified belief that p to exit the irrational state. This, we think, is obviously false. That is not what rationality—even coherence rationality—requires of the subject. What coherence rationality requires is that the subject give up at least one of the beliefs in the incoherent set, but not any one belief in particular. The subject could exit irrationality by giving up q, or some other auxiliary belief. Rationality requires some accommodation. It does not require giving up the original belief in particular. That’s just the lesson of the Quine–Duhem thesis. It seems perverse to require that the subject abandon her justified belief that p when she acquires an unjustified belief that q, as if two wrongs made a right. One might rather think—and this is just the point we’ve made already—that if anything, rationality would have required the subject not to form the unjustified belief that q in the first place. Now that she has, the best option is to retract it. Not only is this the intuitively obvious response, and the response that evidentialism requires, it’s the response that a coherence/responsibilist theory would endorse anyway. The coherence theory never said to get rid of every belief that’s implicated in a local incoherence; it says to get rid of (or modify) the less-well-connected beliefs to maximize coherence among the betterconnected beliefs. We want a large, comprehensive, and coherent belief set, and the way to get that isn’t to just toss out everything that’s involved in any kind of conflict, but to selectively pin the blame for the conflict on whichever beliefs are less coherent with the rest of the set, independent of the conflict in question. The proponent of unjustified defeaters would have us do the opposite of what the coherence theory recommends: they would have us abandon the well-connected beliefs to accommodate the poorly connected ones. There’s another kind of argument one sometimes sees in defense of unjustified defeaters. The proponent will say something along the lines of “given that she believes her senses are unreliable, S should stop believing that p.”²⁹ This would support a modus ponens argument for the desired conclusion (that S should stop believing p) if ‘given that’ functioned like ‘if ’: i.e., if the starting point were “if S believes her senses are unreliable, S should stop believing that p.” But that’s far from obvious; in fact, it’s the very controversy we’re trying to resolve. More likely, the plausibility of the ‘given that’ claim derives from its ²⁹ For example, see Bergmann (2006): 165–7. For some discussion of the issue, see Frances (2014): 79–84.

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introduction of a scope ambiguity between something like ‘if Bel(p) then Ought(~Bel(q))’ and ‘Ought(if Bel(p) then ~Bel(q)).’³⁰ The argument requires the former disambiguation, while it’s only the latter that’s either intuitively obvious or supported by coherence considerations. This kind of ‘given that’ talk is quite tempting. It’s natural to say that given that you believe that this tank of piranhas is a hologram, you ought to be willing to put your hand in it. It doesn’t follow that it’s rational for you to put your hand in the tank—just because you do (irrationally) believe it’s a hologram. It’s only conditionally rational, rational relative to a belief that turns out to be itself irrational. Relative to that crazy belief, that action wouldn’t be crazy. But since the belief in fact is crazy, so the action is too. The action is rational relative to the rationality of the belief, not relative to its mere existence. You don’t get to run a modus ponens-type inference in these cases. Finally, Lackey frequently makes reference to undefeated doxastic defeaters: “Millicent acquires an undefeated defeater for her visual powers via another person’s testimony, and hence fails to have the knowledge in question . . . . Millicent’s hearers [are justified] but Millicent is not, because she has the undefeated defeater.”³¹ Such repeated qualification suggests that even Lackey herself thinks that a defeated doxastic defeater doesn’t kill the prima facie justification of the belief it’s a defeater for. But why should that be? If defeaters don’t need to be justified, they shouldn’t need to be undefeated to do their defeating work. She thinks they can be irrational and still defeat, after all. Could it really matter whether a defeater is unjustified because defeated, or unjustified because the agent pulled it out of a hat? This suggests a tacit recognition on Lackey’s part that unjustified beliefs can’t serve as defeaters after all. Lackey’s right that incoherence is a problem, and also right that so-called doxastic defeaters, as she has defined them, introduce incoherence. And we agree that a subject is required to make some adjustments. But we just don’t think incoherence as such is the same as epistemic defeat. Defeaters defeat propositional justification by introducing counterevidence into the subject’s total evidence, not by merely introducing incoherence at the level of the subject’s propositional attitudes.

³⁰ See Broome (2013) for similar comments. There is a lively and expanding discussion, partly growing out of Broome’s work, on questions surrounding the so-called “enkratic” principle, and cases where a subject’s total evidence might justify the first-order belief that p and the higher-order belief that one’s total evidence does not justify the belief that p. See for example Worsnip (2018) and LasonenArnio (2020), among others. ³¹ See Lackey (1999): 485; emphases added; see also the most recent block quotation.

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52  .    .  This means that Lackey is not only wrong about unjustified doxastic defeaters, but also about why justified doxastic defeaters defeat. They don’t defeat because they introduce incoherence; they defeat because they negatively change the subject’s total evidence. Lackey’s talk about doxastic defeaters is not a harmless and neutral bit of taxonomy. The idea of unjustified defeaters is flatly incompatible with evidentialism, which holds that only reasons or evidence can provide or play the role of defeaters; unjustified beliefs cannot play that role. The idea that “doxastic” defeaters (whether justified or unjustified) defeat in virtue of incoherence simply misunderstands the nature of defeat. There is no rationale to introduce Lackey’s category of doxastic defeaters.

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3.4. We now turn to Lackey’s category of normative defeaters. Recall that for Lackey a normative defeater for a subject’s belief that p is a proposition that q where (1) S has evidence that justifies believing q for S; (2) q would be the content of a doxastic defeater for S’s belief that p if S were to believe q; and (3) S ought to believe q. Just as we see no rationale for Lackey’s category of doxastic defeaters, we also see no rationale for her category of normative defeaters, and not only because normative defeaters are understood in terms of doxastic defeaters. Before turning to criticism, there’s an important difference between her two categories. Lackey’s concept of doxastic defeaters is supposed to describe a certain phenomenon—defeat by belief, whether justified or not—that simply doesn’t exist. The phenomenon that normative defeaters are supposed to describe, on the other hand—defeat that results from ignored evidence—is certainly a real thing. It’s Lackey’s explication of this phenomenon, in terms of duties to adopt doxastic defeaters, that is flawed, as we’ll argue. There are three problems with Lackey’s theory of normative defeat. First, it involves unnecessary complications to treat the cases of defeat it is designed to cover, while simultaneously relying on dubious category of doxastic defeaters. Normative defeaters, according to Lackey, are grounded in counterevidence possessed by the subject. But they do not consist in that counterevidence. Instead, Lackey makes that counterevidence relevant only through the circuitous route of doxastic defeaters that one should have, beliefs that you would have had, had you not been flouting your epistemic duties.

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Why is this complication unnecessary? Look at things from the evidentialist’s perspective: the counterevidence alone already defeats the subject’s propositional justification. If the subject maintains the original belief in the face of such counterevidence, then the subject’s belief is not doxastically justified, for it is no longer propositionally justified. That’s all there is to it. Univocal evidence supports believing p; equivocal evidence (evidence that contains sufficient counterevidence) does not. There’s no need to postulate the obligation to believe the proposition that the counterevidence supports. Recall Alice. Alice sees a car crash. Ordinarily that is sufficient evidence to justifiably believe there was a car crash. But Alice was also told by a reliable optometrist that her vision has been significantly impaired. The evidence from the testimony of her senses and the evidence from the testimony of her optometrist combined fail to justify believing there was a car crash. The combined evidence is equivocal and thus does not provide sufficient overall reason. Thus, when she does so believe, her belief is not doxastically justified. The testimony of her senses is defeated by the testimony from her optometrist. That’s it. There is no need to introduce an obligation to believe the proposition the evidence supports to explain why the evidence defeats. Second, it’s not very plausible that defeat will typically involve obligations to believe anything at all, let alone to believe doxastic defeaters. Epistemic reasons typically produce permission, not obligation. And yet, any time an agent has permission to believe ~p, she thereby has a defeater for believing p. Lackey’s reliance on propositions you ought to believe will leave us with far too few defeaters.³² Third, there’s no chance that standard cases of defeat will even involve permissions to believe doxastic defeaters, let alone obligations. In other words, Lackey’s view makes counterintuitive predictions about standard, straightforward cases of defeat. Suppose David is indoors and Edwina calls from outside and says it is raining. David believes her and is justified in this belief. But then Fiona calls from outside and tells David that it is not raining. David has no reason to trust Edwina over Fiona or vice versa, but he ignores Fiona’s testimony and continues to believe it is raining. The evidentialist would say that David’s belief that it’s raining is no longer propositionally justified, now that his evidence is equivocal and thus isn’t doxastically justified. Edwina’s

³² Could Lackey get by with mere permissions, redefining normative defeaters as propositions you are permitted to believe (rather than ought to believe), which would be doxastic defeaters if you did? We doubt it. While there’s something plausible about the transfer of obligation (if you’re obligated to A, and doing A would obligate you to B, then you’re obligated to B) this idea loses all plausibility when one of those obligations is replaced by a permission (if you’re permitted to A and doing A would obligate you to B, you’re obligated to B).

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testimony gives him a reason to believe it’s raining, but Fiona’s testimony gives David a rebutting defeater. What would Lackey say about this case? David has a rebutting defeater, but he doesn’t believe a rebutting defeater, so on Lackey’s view he must have a normative rebutting defeater. But this means that he ought to believe a rebutting doxastic defeater for the belief that it’s raining. That is, he ought to believe that it’s not raining. But clearly this is wrong. In the face of such conflicting testimony, David shouldn’t believe anything about the weather. Not only is he not obligated to believe Fiona’s testimony, he’s not even permitted to believe it in the circumstances. This kind of case is easily and naturally handled by a Pollockian theory of defeat, while Lackey’s theory fails pretty decisively. Why, then, did Lackey ever think there had to be normative defeaters? Her idea, as we’ve already noted for doxastic defeaters, seems to be that they follow from the requirements of rationality themselves. If a subject holds a belief despite a normative defeater, the subject is being irrational and so their belief is not justified. Here’s a relevant passage: . . . a subject who holds a belief in the face of a normative defeater is being epistemically irrational and/or irresponsible. For instance, in discussing a classic case of normative defeat [the case of Samantha, who believes the President is in NYC but has massive counterevidence that she ignores that he is in Washington DC], Laurence BonJour says that such a subject is “ . . . being thoroughly irrational and irresponsible” in disregarding the evidence in question.³³

BonJour goes on to say that the subject’s “irrationality and irresponsibility prevent[s] [Samantha’s] belief from being epistemically justified.” Along with BonJour, Lackey also approvingly cites similar passages in Michael Williams (1999: 22–3). Here is a relevant passage from Williams: [We] can ask whether, in forming a certain belief, I have negligently ignored important counterevidence . . . . beliefs reached [this way] would be irresponsibly held and would not count [as justified for] epistemic responsibility is the primary sense of justification . . . an essential component of rationality.

So-called normative defeat must then occur when a subject ignores or disregards relevant counterevidence they possess, for the subject is being irrational and/or irresponsible in so doing. ³³ Lackey (2005a): 171–2. Italics in the original. Bold added for emphasis. Lackey cites BonJour (1985): 39. See also Lackey (2005a): 178 for another example.

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If the subject is being irrational, then the subject must be violating a requirement of rationality. That’s the “underlying thought,” after all, at least according to Lackey, when a subject’s belief is defeated. What then is the requirement of rationality that Lackey must have in mind? Clearly, it must be the requirement not to ignore one’s counterevidence. With this requirement in mind, here is an argument for normative defeaters, in Lackey’s sense: (1) A subject’s belief that p is doxastically justified only if it is not irrationally held. Rationality is necessary for justification (assumption). (2) A subject’s belief that p is irrationally held if the subject ignores her counterevidence; rationality requires acknowledging counterevidence (requirement of rationality). (3) A subject ignores her counterevidence unless she believes the propositions that the relevant body of counterevidence supports. (An account of what it is to acknowledge counterevidence). (4) Hence, if a subject who believes p does not believe the propositions that her body of counterevidence, relevant to p, supports, then her belief that p is irrationally held (from 2, 3). (5) Hence, if a subject who believes p does not believe the propositions that her relevant body of counterevidence supports, then her belief is not doxastically justified (from 1, 4). (6) Hence, if a subject believes p in the face of normative defeaters (as defined by Lackey), then her belief is irrationality held (from 4) and so not justified (from 5). The first three premises seem to validly entail the conclusions, and so it looks like we have an argument that makes explicit connections between rationality, justification, defeat, and so-called normative defeaters. We’ve thereby made sense of Lackey’s view that when a subject “ignores” or “disregards” counterevidence, that entails “epistemically unacceptable irrationality” that defeats the subject’s justification for her belief. So, if we are looking for an argument for why there must be normative defeaters, we have found one. The argument, however, does not work. Without taking a stand on the first or second premise, we think it should be clear to everyone that the third premise is false. One way to regard or acknowledge counterevidence is to believe what it is evidence for. That is certainly true. But it is not the only way to regard or acknowledge counterevidence. When subjects like Alice, Carol, and David have counterevidence, that evidence defeats their prima facie

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56  .    .  justification for their belief that p, so that their total evidence no longer propositionally justifies believing that p. How might they acknowledge or show due regard to their counterevidence? They might do it—and this is what the evidentialist recommends—by giving up their belief that p. And that is because their belief that p is no longer propositionally justified on their total evidence. Alice could and should acknowledge the force of her counterevidence by not believing there was a car crash. Carol could and should give due regard to her counterevidence by giving up her belief that is an apple. David could and should respect his counterevidence from Fred’s testimony by suspending judgment as to the outside weather. Insofar as our characters violate a requirement of rationality if they continue to believe despite their counterevidence, it is not that they are failing to believe the propositions that their counterevidence supports. It is rather that they are believing a proposition that their total evidence does not support. The requirement of rationality at work in all of these cases—a requirement that supports the requirement to acknowledge one’s counterevidence—it is the alltoo-familiar requirement not to believe what one’s total evidence does not support. Lackey’s view of normative defeat misunderstands the phenomenon of defeat and defeaters for it misunderstands not only how counterevidence defeats, but also what it takes to acknowledge one’s counterevidence. Defeaters qua counterevidence do not defeat by introducing obligations to believe propositions supported by the defeating evidence. Defeaters qua counterevidence defeat by changing what propositional attitudes a subject’s total evidence supports taking. The evidentialist has a handy treatment of all of these cases without introducing a requirement to believe—or even a permission to believe—what the counterevidence supports. Just as there are no doxastic defeaters, there are no normative defeaters.³⁴ Internalist epistemologists tend to be motivated by one or both of two distinct principles. The first is that your beliefs should always fit your evidence. The second is that when you believe something, that imposes on you an obligation to adjust your other beliefs accordingly if doing so is necessary to maintain coherence. We have seen the first—evidentialist—principle used to articulate a relatively promising theory of epistemic defeat. We have seen an attempt to use the second—responsibilist—principle to understand defeat, but that effort seems to us much less promising. ³⁴ It is worth noting that none of the responsibilists Lackey cites—BonJour, Chisholm, McDowell, Williams—ever suggest that the only way to acknowledge one’s counterevidence is to believe the propositions one’s counterevidence justifies believing. As far as we can tell, these philosophers do not acknowledge her category of normative defeaters.

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In particular, the doxastic/normative defeat framework should be avoided. Talk about doxastic defeaters gives a free pass to the implausible view that unjustified beliefs can defeat beliefs that have otherwise very strong prima facie justification. Normative defeat is closer to what the rest of us would recognize as defeat—defeat by counterevidence. But if we’re going to understand defeat in terms of reasons/evidence, it should be in terms of reasons permitting or failing to permit the belief whose justification is at issue (as Pollock does), not in terms of reasons producing duties to believe competing propositions.

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3.5. So far, we’ve been looking at attempts to understand defeat in evidentialist and responsibilist frameworks. But these are not the only frameworks for understanding defeat. We think that the work we’ve done points the way toward a distinctively reliabilist account. This is important. Reliabilism is primarily a theory of prima facie justification and as such, it needs a theory of defeat. If the only way to understand defeat is in evidentialist or responsibilist terms, this seems to present a problem, with the reliabilist invoking reliability in her treatment of prima facie justification, but then pivoting to the quite alien concepts of evidence or responsibility in her treatment of defeat and thus ultima facie justification. Although extant versions of reliabilism have perhaps failed so far to offer adequate theories of defeat, we think this is not a problem intrinsic to reliabilism. The various forms of reliabilism do have sufficient resources for illuminating the nature of epistemic defeat, without deviating from the basic spirit of reliabilism. We argued above that Pollock’s evidentialist framework is much more promising than Lackey’s responsibilist one. This is good news for reliabilism, for although neither framework sits comfortably with reliabilism without modification, Lackey’s framework is much more deeply inhospitable to reliabilism. For example, it’s hard to see a rationale in terms of reliability for demanding that an agent ignore her highly reliable visual processes, simply because she has the false and irrational belief that those processes are unreliable.³⁵ In contrast to this deep and probably constitutional ³⁵ One could, of course, try to claim that there’s a reliable process of responding to higher order defeaters, or something similar. We don’t think this is at all promising, in part because this is a poor candidate for a cognitive process in the needed sense (see Lyons (2019)) but also because even if it were, it would seem to be the kind of belief-dependent process that can only transmit or preserve justification, not generate or create it (see Goldman (1979)).

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58  .    .  incompatibility between responsibilism and reliabilism, the conflict between evidentialism and reliabilism might be relatively superficial—at least in the present context. We can get a reliabilist-friendly account of defeat— admittedly a sketchy and preliminary one—by taking the Pollockian structure articulated above and purging it of any reliance on reasons or evidence. Let’s address the why of this before the how. Although several authors have developed evidentialist versions of reliabilism,³⁶ reliabilism is typically taken to be a competitor to evidentialism. One reason for this is that standard forms of reliabilism state sufficient conditions for justification (e.g., process reliability) that don’t entail that the agent has any reasons, or evidence. Additionally, some reliabilists think reasons by their very nature are too internalistic and will deny that any justification is a matter of reasons. More modestly, some beliefs, especially so-called “IIPM beliefs” (introspection, intuition, perception and/or memory beliefs) might be justified in a way that doesn’t have anything to do with being based on reasons. Recall that reasons and evidence, on the broadly Pollockian view, are things on which a belief is based; on the nonevidentialist view, however, we “just know” the deliverances of perception, memory, and so on, without basing them on anything. We won’t argue against evidentialism here, but we do want to show how a reliabilist theory of defeat can avoid evidentialism. Suppose you have it on good authority—and justifiedly believe—that the previous tenants left no furniture in the apartment. Later, when you open the door, you see furniture. This gives you a defeater for your belief that there’s no furniture in the apartment. If we’re assuming a nonevidentialist reliabilism where perception gives justification without the involvement of reasons, we’ll need a way to describe the situation without invoking reasons. We’ll say instead that perception gives you a warrant for believing that there’s furniture in the room: it gives you prima facie propositional justification for that belief, whether you end up believing that or not. Warrants are like reasons, but without any assumption that there’s some other mental state, introspectible or otherwise, on which the belief is based. Having a warrant for believing p is thus compatible with having reasons for p, but if there is justification that doesn’t derive from reasons, it’s also compatible with lacking any reasons for p. Thus, the concept of having a warrant is a more general and inclusive concept than that of having a reason. Any time you have a reason you have a warrant, but you might have a warrant without having a reason.

³⁶ See for example Alston (1988); Comesaña (2010); Tang (2016); and Miller (2019).

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This allows us to articulate a general view about defeat that is very much in the Pollockian spirit. We can use Pollock’s view about the structure of defeat and simply drop the assumption that all warrants involve reasons. We simply take what Pollock says in terms of reasons and say it instead in terms of warrants:

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• S has a rebutting defeater for her belief that p iff she has a warrant to believe not-p. • S has an undercutting defeater for her belief that p iff she has a warrant to believe that her warrants for believing p are inadequate. • S has a defeater for her belief that p iff she has a rebutting or an undercutting defeater for her belief that p.³⁷ Having a warrant to believe p, we take it, is nothing more than having prima facie propositional justification to believe p. Thus, all the reliabilist needs to do to have a theory of defeat is to develop a theory of propositional justification. This is non-trivial, since reliabilism is first of all a theory of doxastic justification, but it’s far from hopeless.³⁸ Pollock himself offers what’s clearly a theory of propositional justification, where propositional justification is derived from doxastic justification: a reason, for Pollock, is something that could give you doxastic justification. Representing a more pessimistic view, Bob Beddor argues in a recent paper that the standard reliabilist accounts of defeat fail, and suggests that reliabilists appeal to reasons to correct this deficiency.³⁹ While we want to concede that his argument is effective against a standard extant reliabilist theory of defeat, we will insist that it poses no insuperable problem for reliabilism more generally. And it does nothing to show that defeat needs to be understood in terms of reasons. A (perhaps the) standard reliabilist theory of defeat is Goldman’s Alternate Reliable Process theory (ARP), according to which S’s prima facie justified belief that p at t is defeated just in case S has another reliable process available

³⁷ For the purposes of this paper, we are assuming that all defeaters are rebutting or undercutting, which means that you only get defeat where you have warrants, thus that there are no “normative defeaters” in that other, not-Lackey, sense mentioned above. ³⁸ We’re arguing here that reliabilism needs a theory of propositional justification because it needs it for a theory of defeat. This stands in contrast both with the views of Kornblith (2017), who thinks that doxastic justification is the only one of the two that matters, and of Feldman and Conee (1985), who claim to base their theory of doxastic justification on their theory of propositional justification. ³⁹ See Beddor (2015), and also his Chapter 7 in this volume, which is similar in important ways to what we’re offering here.

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60  .    .  to her at t, which if used in addition to or instead of the one actually used, would have resulted in S’s not believing that p.⁴⁰ ARP formulates defeat in terms of counterfactual non-belief rather than counterfactual disbelief, largely because, as we saw previously, the proper response to defeaters is often agnosticism, rather than doxastic reversal. Against ARP, Beddor offers the following cases: S sees a tree but has a reliable skeptic’s-advice-predicting mechanism, which S normally trusts when she uses it. The skeptic would have advised not believing there’s a tree, and in this case, had S used this mechanism, S wouldn’t have believed there was a tree. Nevertheless, S’s visual prima facie justification is, intuitively, undefeated by the availability of this mechanism.⁴¹

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This case aims to show that, contrary to ARP, the agent’s having an available reliable process that would have led to non-belief, is insufficient for defeat. Here’s Beddor’s other case: S hears a defeater for her belief that p, from a reliable source, but one for whom S holds an inveterate and irrational distrust. S would never take this person’s testimony to heart, so she persists in believing p. Intuitively S’s belief is defeated, even though her distrust means that the process of taking the testimony on board is not available to her.⁴²

This case aims to show that, contrary to ARP, the agent’s having an available reliable process that would have led to non-belief is unnecessary for defeat. There are serious objections one could level against the kind of thing Beddor counts as a process and what he takes availability to be. We won’t pursue these objections, for we think that Beddor’s cases reveal a genuine flaw with ARP, whether or not they refute ARP as they’re currently stated. Beddor thinks that the problem with ARP is that it omits consideration of reasons. We think the problem with ARP is that it is formulated in terms of what the agent would have believed, or not believed, had she used another process. Roughly, an adequate theory of defeat needs to be formulated in terms of what the agent should have believed or not believed had she used another

⁴⁰ Goldman (1979); Lyons (2009). To be at all plausible, this needs to be interpreted as claiming that the belief is prima facie defeated, not that it is ultimately defeated. ⁴¹ Beddor (2015): 150–1. ⁴² Beddor (2015): 155.

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process. More precisely, since we’ve seen how badly that fared for Lackey’s normative defeaters, what the agent would or would not have had (prima facie) warrant to believe, had she used another process. Counterfactual nonbelief only entails defeat if all the relevant components of the counterfactual situation go normatively correctly, but this isn’t guaranteed merely by stipulating that the process is reliable. This is because the counterfactual situation will typically involve all kinds of factors beyond the immediate consequences of the use of the alternate process. That alternate reliable process might feed into an unreliable one, so that the agent forms a justified belief and then concludes something unjustified from it. Or the justified belief might be one to which the agent would respond in an irrational way that’s in no way sanctioned by reliabilism. Beddor’s cases trade on just these kinds of possibilities, on the gap between what the agent would have believed (/not believed), and what the agent should have believed (/not believed), or is licensed in believing (/not believing). ARP is flawed because it focuses on the way alternative available processes yield counterfactual non-belief, when it ought instead to be focused on the way alternative available processes yield warrants. Does this appeal to warrants, and to what the agent does or doesn’t rightly believe in the counterfactual situation, amount to a significant concession to Beddor, or to the evidentialist, or to the opponent of reliabilism? Not at all! Reliabilism is a normative epistemological theory, after all. Its raison d’être is to give an account of warrants, of what beliefs are prima facie normatively appropriate. If it can’t do that, then defeat is the least of reliabilism’s problems. Here, then, is the sort of thing a reliabilist can and should say about possession of warrants and thus about propositional justification: S has (prima facie) warrant for believing p at t iff a cognitive process that satisfies the general theoretical requirements for prima facie (doxastic) justification (a) is available to S, and (b) if used at t, taking as inputs only states that S is already in, does or would likely produce p as output.

Again, this is a sketch and is intended primarily for the purpose of illustrating that reliabilism has promising resources for accommodating defeat. Nevertheless, several comments about the proposal are in order. Notice that the formulation is very general, leaving open what the requirements are for prima facie justification. This is for two reasons. First, it allows the present theory of warrant possession (and consequently of defeat) to be easily imported into reliabilist theories that differ in other respects. Second, it makes quite explicit the fact that the present theory of defeat is making use of

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62  .    .  old theoretical apparatus, not importing new machinery that might not fit the general reliabilist ethos. It will therefore inherit the virtues (and vices) of that apparatus. Plug in a naturalistic and reductive and nonevidentialist theory of prima facie doxastic justification, and you’ll get a naturalistic and reductive and nonevidentialist theory of propositional justification, and thus of defeat, and thus of ultima facie doxastic justification. Clause (b) restricts the relevant outputs of the available processes to those that would result from the system’s taking as inputs only states S is already in. This is perhaps already entailed by a reasonable individuation of cognitive processes (see Lyons (2019)), but it’s worth making it explicit. We don’t want the fact that S has an unopened encyclopedia nearby to give S warrant for everything written in the encyclopedia. Next, the formulation mentions the process producing “p as output,” rather than producing the “belief that p.” We trust that it is intelligible to say that a belief-forming process might be producing an output, even when that output isn’t a belief. A visual process might output the proposition that the lines are of unequal length, even though the viewer is convinced that it’s an illusion and thus does not believe they’re of unequal length. More generally, we want to say that having a process available can give you warrant (/propositional justification) for some proposition, even though you don’t believe that proposition, and perhaps never would.⁴³ Finally, the formulation is vague in some crucial respects. In particular, it relies on the availability of a process that does or would likely produce p. Some might object that the vagueness connected to availability and likelihood here are unacceptable. On the contrary, these might just be unavoidable features of propositional justification, on any reasonable theory. If I justifiedly believe p and that p implies q, then I’m propositionally justified in believing q; and all this gives me a defeater for my belief that ~q. But not merely because my justified beliefs entail q—they entail every necessary truth, many of which I’m not propositionally justified in believing and which don’t provide defeaters. Why? Because these consequences aren’t obvious to me, where obviousness is cashed out by the reliabilist in terms of process availability. Since obviousness comes in degrees, availability will have to as well, if this move is to have any hope of working. For similar reasons, we can’t demand of an available process ⁴³ Could a belief-forming process produce as outputs states that aren’t at all belief-like? If an alternate reliable process produced the desire that p, it doesn’t seem like this would be a defeater for the belief that ~p (thanks to Beddor, personal communication). Maybe we need to restrict the outputs to states with assertoric force or which are in some other way sufficiently belief-like. We won’t try to sort out the details here.

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that it would lead to an output that p. For those logical consequences that are not screamingly obvious but yet obvious enough to count as propositionally justified, it’s plausible that the use of the relevant process wouldn’t guarantee the output of that consequence but would only make it quite likely. Suppose Chuck believes that he’s never owned a weapon, although if he thought about it for a while, he’d remember that his parents bought him some Chinese throwing stars for a birthday back in the 1980s. Is Chuck’s belief that he’s never owned a weapon defeated? It depends, we think, on how hard it would be for Chuck to recall this: how long and hard Chuck would have to probe memory, how robust or fragile the cueing conditions would need to be in order to retrieve the memory, how likely a memory search would be to trigger recall, etc. Given that defeat comes in degrees, we might even claim— with some plausibility—that Chuck’s degree of ultima facie justification is affected by these considerations: if three seconds of thinking about it, under pretty much any conditions, would fetch the relevant memory, then Chuck’s prima facie justification for believing he’s never owned a weapon is significantly reduced; if only a great deal of focused concentration, when primed with ninja movies, would result in retrieval of this memory, then Chuck’s initial justification is only slightly reduced. In this way, what Goldman (1986) calls power (a ratio of truth to queries, where reliability is a ratio of truths to falsehoods) might be directly relevant to propositional justification and defeat, even if it’s not directly relevant to positive, prima facie justification.⁴⁴ Some people don’t like the idea that possession of reasons, or warrants, or evidence, might come in degrees. In order to avoid this result, Feldman (1988) goes so far as to claim that the evidence a person possesses at a given time is restricted to those conscious mental states she’s in at that time. The worry for this proposal is that it would seriously diminish the body of evidence anyone possesses at a given time. How many items can be in consciousness at once? Serious estimates range from one (Dehaene 2014) to 7 +/-2 (Miller 1956), with most people thinking it’s about 4. Not enough, it seems. We saw above that Pollock largely elides this important issue; although he articulates a very detailed theory of ultimate defeat, none of it applies directly to questions of ⁴⁴ These thoughts seriously complicate the treatment of defeater-defeaters, the full treatment of which we reserve for another occasion. If a regular defeater is a “first-level” defeater, and a defeaterdefeater is a “second-level” defeater, and so on, then higher-level defeaters will tend to be less available than lower-level defeaters, due to the cognitive difficulty involved in thinking of them and appreciating their significance, with the result that higher-level defeaters will tend, roughly, to asymptote to irrelevance. This contrasts with the Pollockian view (see Beddor, Ch. 7, this volume), according to which higher-level defeaters destroy justification just in case there is an odd, rather than even, number of levels.

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64  .    .  an agent’s actual epistemic status, unless we add the claim that an agent’s belief is (prima facie) defeated iff she is in possession of a reason that serves as a defeater for that belief. Propositional justification was going to come in degrees anyway, because reasons and warrants vary in their strength. But strength, availability, and likeliness of output are orthogonal dimensions of variation: a piece of evidence, for example, can be weakly supportive but fully obvious/available, strongly supportive but far from obvious/available, etc. The fact that the current proposed reliabilist theory of defeat reveals and highlights some of the vagaries surrounding propositional justification is no criticism of that proposal, not if these vagaries were really already a part of propositional justification. This proposal is surely in need of further refinement, and different reliabilists may want to tweak it in different ways. A full treatment of this issue demands a paper of its own. The point we wanted to make with it here was this: a roughly Pollockian view about defeat can be smoothly accommodated in a reliabilist epistemology, without the reliabilist having to embrace any evidentialist or responsibilist elements that are in any way foreign to the naturalistic spirit of reliabilism. A belief is prima facie defeated, roughly, when the agent has available to her a “good” cognitive process (the kind that would yield prima facie doxastic justification) that would output the content that that belief is false or unwarranted. The proposal bears some obvious similarities to the well-known ARP (which we take to be a selling point), although it fixes some serious problems by trading warrants talk for talk of counterfactual non-belief. At the same time, this shift from reasons to warrants serves to highlight what was right about Pollock’s seminal work on defeat. Although Pollock himself focused on reasons, rather than warrants more generally, there’s nothing stopping the nonevidentialist from taking on board the vast majority of the Pollockian view. Having defeaters is having prima facie propositional justification and having prima facie propositional justification is having warrants. Having warrants is something that can be understood in whatever general epistemological framework—evidentialist, reliabilist, perhaps even responsibilist—you like. The recent literature has been dominated by two influential discussions of defeat. One of these has been healthy and productive; the other has clouded some relevant issues and taken as uncontroversially true something that we think no one should even believe, but certainly no one should simply assume: namely, that unjustified beliefs can defeat justified beliefs. The good strand of the standard view of defeat is the evidentialist strand, but it’s not good because

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it’s evidentialist. It’s good because it sees defeat as proceeding (only) from warrants, which is true. Evidentialists make the further claim that only evidence provides warrants. Those of us who deny that can still find a great deal of common ground with the evidentialist theory of defeat.⁴⁵

References Alston, William. (1988). An internalist externalism. Synthese, 74: 265–83. Beddor, Bob. (2015). Process reliabilism’s troubles with defeat. The Philosophical Quarterly, 65: 145–59. Beddor, Bob. (Ch. 7, this volume) Reasons for reliabilism. Bergmann, Michael. (2006). Justification without Awareness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. BonJour, Laurence. (1985). The Structure of Empirical Knowledge. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Broome, John. (2013). Rationality Through Reasoning. Hoboken, NJ: WileyBlackwell. Carter, J. Adam. (2015). Group knowledge and epistemic defeat. Ergo, 2: 711–35. Carter, J. Adam. (2018). Meta-epistemic defeat. Synthese, 195: 2877–96.

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Carter, J. Adam and Jesus Navarro. (2017). The defeasibility of knowledge-how. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 95: 662–85. Chisholm, Roderick. (1977). Theory of Knowledge. 2nd Ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Chisholm, Roderick. (1989). Theory of Knowledge. 3rd Ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Comesaña, Juan. (2010). Evidentialist reliabilism. Nous, 44: 571–600. Dehaene, Stanislas. (2014). Consciousness and the Brain. New York: Penguin. Feldman, Richard. (1988). Having evidence. In: Philosophical Analysis. D. Austin (ed.) Dordrecht: Kluwer: 83–104. Feldman, Richard and Earl Conee. (1985). Evidentialism. Philosophical Studies, 48: 15–34.

⁴⁵ Thanks to Bob Beddor, Adam Carter, Paul Silva, Mona Simion, and especially Jessica Brown for comments on an earlier draft that led to improvements. Thanks also to Jonathan Kvanvig and Duncan Pritchard for helpful conversations on these topics. We also thank audiences at the 2019 Bled Philosophical Conference and at the 2019 Social Epistemology Network Event at Underwood International College in South Korea for beneficial comments and questions. In particular, we recall especially helpful comments from Lizzie Fricker, Chris Kelp, Mark Kaplan, Hilary Kornblith, and Brent Madison.

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66  .    .  Frances, Bryan. (2014). Disagreement. Cambridge: Polity Press. Goldberg, Sanford. (2018). To the Best of Our Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goldberg, Sanford and Jon Matheson. (2020). The impossibility of mere animal knowledge for reflective subjects. Erkenntnis, 85: 829–40. Goldman, Alvin. (1979). What is Justified Belief? In: G. S. Pappas (ed.) Justification and Knowledge. Dordrecht: Springer: 1–23. Goldman, Alvin. (1986). Epistemology and Cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Green, Christopher. (n.d.). Epistemology of Testimony Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://iep.utm.edu/ep-testi/. Grundmann, Thomas. (2011). Defeasibility theory. In: The Routledge Companion to Epistemology. S. Bernecker and D. Pritchard (eds.) New York: Routledge: 156–66. Kornblith, Hilary. (2017). Doxastic justification is fundamental. Philosophical Topics, 45: 63–80. Lackey, Jennifer. (1999). Testimonial knowledge and transmission. The Philosophical Quarterly, 49: 471–90. Lackey, Jennifer. (2003). A minimal expression of non-reductionism in the epistemology of testimony. Nous, 37: 706–23.

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Lackey, Jennifer. (2005a). Testimony and the infant/child objection. Philosophical Studies, 126: 163–90. Lackey, Jennifer. (2005b). Memory as a generative epistemic source. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 70: 636–58. Lackey, Jennifer. (2006a). Learning from words. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 73: 77–101. Lackey, Jennifer. (2006b). Knowing from testimony. Philosophy Compass, 1/5: 432–48. Lackey, Jennifer. (2006c). Introduction. The Epistemology of Testimony. J. Lackey and E. Sosa (eds.) Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1–21. Lackey, Jennifer. (2008). Learning from Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lackey, Jennifer. (2011a). Testimonial knowledge. In: The Routledge Companion to Epistemology. S. Bernecker and D. Pritchard (eds.) New York: Routledge: 316–25. Lackey, Jennifer. (2011b). Testimony: Acquiring knowledge from others. In: Social Epistemology: Essential Readings. A. Goldman and D. Whitcomb (eds.) Oxford: Oxford University Press: 71–91. Lackey, Jennifer. (2014a). Socially extended knowledge. Philosophical Issues, 24: 282–98.

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Lackey, Jennifer. (2014b). A deflationary account of group testimony. In: Essays in Collective Epistemology. J. Lackey (ed.) Oxford: Oxford University Press: 64–96. Lackey, Jennifer. (2018). Credibility and the distribution of epistemic goods. In: Believing in Accord with the Evidence: New Essays on Evidentialism, Synthese Library 398. K. McCain (ed.) Cham, Switzerland: Springer: 145–68. Lasonen-Arnio, Maria. (2020) Enkrasia or evidentialism? Philosophical Studies 177: 597–632. Lyons, Jack. (2009). Perception and Basic Beliefs: Zombies, Modules, and the Problem of the External World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lyons, Jack. (2019). Algorithm and parameters: Solving the generality problem for reliabilism. The Philosophical Review 128: 463–509. Matheson, Jonathan. (2011). Epistemological problems concerning skeptical theism. Faith & Philosophy, 28: 323–31. Miller, Emelia. (2019). Liars, tigers, and the bearers of bad news, oh my! Towards a reasons account of defeat. The Philosophical Quarterly, 69: 82–99. Miller, George. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63: 81–97. Palermos, Spyridon Orestis. (2011). Dualism in the epistemology of testimony and the ability intuition. Philosophia, 39: 597–613. Pollock, John. (1967). Criteria and our knowledge of the material world. The Philosophical Review, 76: 28–60.

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Pollock, John. (1968). What is an epistemological problem? American Philosophical Quarterly, 5: 183–90. Pollock, John. (1970). The structure of epistemic justification. Studies in the Theory of Knowledge, 4: 62–78. Pollock, John. (1971). Perceptual knowledge. Philosophical Review, 80: 287–319. Pollock, John. (1974). Knowledge and Justification. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pollock, John. (1979). A plethora of epistemological theories. In: Justification and Knowledge. G. S. Pappas (ed.) Dordrecht: Springer: 93–115. Pollock, John. (1986). Contemporary Theories of Knowledge. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Pollock, John. (1987). Defeasible reasoning. Cognitive Science, 11: 481–518. Pollock, John. (1994). Justification and defeat. Artificial Intelligence, 67: 377–407. Pollock, John. (2001). Defeasible reasoning with variable degrees of justification. Artificial Intelligence, 133: 233–82. Pollock, John. (2006). John Pollock. In: Epistemology: 5 Questions. V. F. Hendricks and D. Pritchard (eds.) Copenhagen: Automatic Press/VIP.

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68  .    .  Pollock John and Joseph Cruz. (1999). Contemporary Theories of Knowledge. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Tang, Weng Hong. (2016). Reliability theories of justified credence. Mind, 497: 63–94. Michael Williams. (1999). Problems of Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Worsnip, Alex. (2018). The conflict of evidence and coherence. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 96: 3–44.

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4 Losing Knowledge by Thinking about Thinking

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Jennifer Nagel

Knowledge can be real without being armor-plated. We gain and lose knowledge in many ways in the normal course of life. We learn and then naturally forget, within minutes or hours, many details of what we have perceived for ourselves and heard from others. We can also lose knowledge without losing belief; for example, when the world changes in unseen and unexpected ways behind our backs. In addition to passive processes of forgetting and becoming outdated, we can actively switch to suspension of judgment on points where we once had knowledge. This last type of switching is often routine and unremarkable; for example, when one decides to suspend belief upon recognizing that one’s grounds or basis for judgment on a given point may well have weakened over time. Upon reflection, I have doubts about the accuracy of my mental map of the city where I used to live two decades ago, a city I used to know quite well. The quality of my judgments about Albuquerque has suffered from erosion on two fronts: the city’s businesses, streets, and bus routes have doubtless changed over time, and my memories have been shifting and fading. Given this natural deterioration of my basis, it is entirely reasonable—and epistemologically uncontroversial—for me to suspend judgment on any finer points of that city’s layout. My current state of suspension casts no shade on the epistemic status of the judgments I routinely made in this area twenty years ago. Other cases of switching into suspension seem potentially more troubling. To some, these cases suggest a certain tension between rationality and knowledge, or some rational fragility in the bases of the judgments which constitute knowledge. Known in the literature as “defeat cases,” these scenarios are sometimes taken to show that it is possible to have knowledge of a proposition on a certain basis, and then find oneself rationally required to switch to suspension of judgment, despite continuing to have exactly one’s original basis for judgment. Others have argued that even if these cases show that it

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70   is in some sense unreasonable to cling to the originally knowledge-sustaining basis of one’s judgment, one can nonetheless retain knowledge by doing so. This chapter argues that defeat cases have been misinterpreted by both sides. Knowledge is indeed lost in defeat cases, but it is not lost while one’s original justifying basis is retained: a deep feature of these cases is that they inevitably involve epistemically significant—although sometimes hard-tospot—shifts in the basis of one’s judgment of the original first-order question. These shifts are produced in various ways, including the production of selfconscious worries about how one is thinking. The new basis that arises after the shift will not sustain knowledge of the key proposition, but it is not the same as the basis one had before the self-conscious worries or other defeating conditions arose. Close examination of these cases can help us gain a sharper sense of what actually constitutes the basis of a judgment, and why exactly the bases that underpin knowledgeable judgments are strictly immune to rational undermining, while nevertheless being vulnerable to loss through what I will call basis displacement. The fact that knowledge of a given proposition can be lost does not show any weakness in its original basis: just as you might come to forget ever having felt the pain of some particular toothache, where this forgetting casts no shadows over the epistemic credentials of your originally vivid knowledge of the pain, so also you can lose knowledge through the displacement of your original basis for judgment, notwithstanding the optimal epistemic quality of that original basis. Section 4.1 outlines my infallibilist approach to justification and the more popular fallibilist alternative. Section 4.2 aims to explain the appeal of fallibilism, and Section 4.3 examines defeat cases in the light of my theory of justification.

4.1. Justification and the Basis of a Judgment Despite immense debate over just what is meant by ‘justification’ in epistemology, there is widespread agreement that it denotes a positive normative status, and that this status applies at least to all states of knowledge. My approach here will be to start with the justification of what is known, before moving outward to more controversial cases. What is the justifying basis of a person’s knowledge of a fact? We might start by observing that facts (or true propositions) can be known in a variety of ways. It is possible to know a fact—say, where some object is currently located—through several distinct sensory modalities, through appropriate

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testimony from a trusted knower, through sound inference from premises themselves known through observation or testimony, or through some combination of these. In addition to the outer-world channels of perception, inference, and testimony, we also have interoceptive awareness of facts about inner phenomenal states such as thirst and dizziness. The range of ways in which propositions may be believed includes all these ways of knowing—given that knowing entails believing—plus a wide variety of epistemically worse ways of coming to make a judgment. One might come to believe a proposition on the basis of an illusion, deceptive testimony, or unsound inference, or in some other way, perhaps even as a result of a novel medical intervention. One might wonder what unites the more restricted set of ways in which propositions can be known, as opposed to just believed. If we take knowing to be distinguished from believing by its special relationship with the truth—it is an essential feature of knowing that only what is true can be known—then ways of knowing are likewise most naturally distinguished from the broader class of ways of believing in virtue of their relationship to the truth. In my view, a way of judging that p is a way of knowing only if the truth of p is essential to this way of judging.¹ On this way of individuating “ways of knowing,” inference is not a way of knowing, but sound inference from known premises is. Likewise, perception counts as a way of knowing only if it is understood in success terms, as involving sensory systems that have an appropriate causal sensitivity to a range of facts, where some fact within this range causes a corresponding judgment through the normal operation of these systems. Although “perception” is sometimes used in a broader sense that encompasses any kind of sensory activation, I will use it in the more restricted success sense here. Similarly, testimony will denote acceptance of an honest knower’s word, rather than the absorption of any report. With this restricted understanding of ways of knowing in hand, my proposal here is that the justifying basis of a person’s knowledge of a fact—what makes that attitude epistemically right, indeed optimal—is nothing other than the way it is known. While my initial focus is on the justifying bases of knowledge, I do not mean to imply that judgments falling short of knowledge can have no justifying bases whatsoever; their weaker, derivative level of justification is a function of how closely the ways in which they were formed resemble ways of knowing (further details will emerge in due course).

¹ Note that this is a necessary, and not a sufficient condition; it may be essential to guessingcorrectly-on-a-Tuesday that the relevant proposition is true, but this will not be enough to qualify it as a way of knowing.

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72  

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This basic approach to the relationship between knowledge and justification has old roots in the history of philosophy, most vividly in the Classical Indian Nyāya tradition. In the Nyāya Sutra (c. 200 CE), Gautama characterizes perception as “inerrant” (1.1.4), and stipulates that it must involve a causal connection between the perceived object and the sensory faculty (Dasti and Phillips 2017). Other ways of knowing (pramānas, in Sanskrit) such : as testimony and inference, are likewise described in the tradition as “faultless,” “unfailing,” and “non-deviating” (Matilal 1986: 135). Less-than-sound inference is labelled “pseudo-inference,” hallucination and the like are “pseudo-perception,” and misinformation is not testimony but “pseudotestimony” (Dasti and Phillips 2010; Dasti 2012). Contemporary non-skeptical epistemologists will readily agree that the good cases here have some justifying basis; what is more controversial is to identify the justifying basis of a known fact with the way it is known. This understanding of the justifying basis of what is known is frankly incompatible with the currently popular fallibilist approach to knowledge, according to which there is typically a significant gap between one’s knowledge of a proposition and one’s justifying basis, so that what is known can have the same justifying basis as what is merely believed, or even falsely believed. Here is Baron Reed’s gloss on the core idea of fallibilism: Roughly stated, the basic idea is that the subject can know something even though it could have been false. This is not the same as saying that the subject can know something that is false – it is very widely accepted by philosophers that, if a belief counts as knowledge, it is true. Rather, the claim is that a belief held with a particular epistemic grounding can be knowledge even though the subject could have held that belief with the same grounding in circumstances where the belief is false (and, of course, in those circumstances the belief would not count as knowledge). (Reed 2012: 585)

According to fallibilists, false beliefs can have precisely the same epistemic grounding as instances of knowledge, so epistemic grounding in cases where p is known cannot be understood in a way which makes the truth of p essential to one’s epistemic grounding for p. Not all formulations of fallibilism are given in terms of epistemic grounding; some speak of evidence or justification. Another standard formulation of fallibilism is rendered by Reed as follows: “A person S knows that p in a fallibilist way just in case S knows that p on the basis of some justification j and yet S’s belief that p on the basis of j could have been false (or mistaken or

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in error).”² (Reed 2012: 586) The example he offers to bolster his point will bring out the difference between our views of justifying bases:

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For example, I know that the Cubs beat the Dodgers the last time they played; I know it because my brother told me what happened, and he is usually reliable about this sort of thing. But, if he had misread the box score in the newspaper, I still would have believed him. In that case, my belief would have been held with the same justification, but the belief would have been false. Because this case is possible, the knowledge I actually have (when my brother did not misread the box score) is fallible. (Reed 2012: 586)

For simplicity, I will understand the subject of these cases as hearing from his brother just that the Cubs won, without any further elaboration about his having read the paper as opposed to having watched the game live or on television. I will also understand the subject to be taking his brother’s word for it, in both cases, as opposed to forming his belief on the basis of explicit reasoning from the premises, “My brother said that the Cubs won,” and “My brother is usually reliable about this sort of thing.” We generally accept trusted testimony without such calculated reasoning about its likelihood of being correct, and if we were to restrict ourselves to such explicit reasoning, it is not clear that we would gain as much as we do from the reports of others. If explicit reasoning from exactly the premises just given yields knowledge, it seems only to yield knowledge of a weaker conclusion like, “It is highly likely that the Cubs beat the Dodgers,” as opposed to knowledge of the stronger conclusion that the Cubs won. I take Reed’s use of the stronger conclusion in this example to indicate that he also accepts trusted testimony as a path to knowledge that is interestingly different from the explicitly reasoned calculation that could deliver knowledge of the weaker claim. Indeed, the weaker claim (that it was likely the Cubs had won, given the report of a typically reliable person), could be true, and arguably even known, even in the case of the misread loss, so, if the contrast between the cases is to illustrate that the very proposition known might have been false, we should not weaken it. I agree with fallibilists like Reed that knowledge can be transmitted through testimony, even third-hand, as from a brother’s report of a newspaper story. However, the view I will defend distinguishes different justifying bases for the ² In the face of concerns about knowledge of necessary truths, this provisional formulation is later amended to “S knows that p in a fallible way just in case S knows that p on the basis of some justification j and yet S’s belief that p on the basis of j could have failed to be knowledge” (Reed 2012: 587). This amended formulation remains incompatible with my account.

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74   good case and the bad: in the good case, I take the justifying basis to consist in the entire conduit from the Cubs’ actual victory to the subject’s awareness of that victory, incorporating the successful perceptual and inferential processes giving rise to knowledge on the part of the reporter, and the safe transmission of this knowledge to the brother, who reports what he came to know by reading the paper to the appropriately trusting subject. It is because the subject has learned in such a way from a knowledgeable source that his judgement is epistemically in the clear, normatively appropriate, and fully justified. In the bad case, there is no such chain of transmission between the outcome of the game (presumably a loss) and the subject’s formation of a belief in a victory. Misreading a report is not a way of knowing, nor is trusting someone who is mistaken. There are some commonalities between the good and bad cases: for example, in both, the subject trusts someone who is usually reliable. Thanks to the partial similarities between the knower and the subject of the bad case, even the bad case subject has some measure of justification (on which more later), but the justifying bases of the good and the bad cases are not the same. On the common fallibilist understanding of these cases, by contrast, the subjects of the good and bad cases can have precisely the same justification.³ One way to make sense of this would be by identifying justification with what is available to the subject to report as the basis of his judgment that p, if asked how he knows that p. What matters here is not the actual history of the subject’s judgment, but only those aspects of the apparent history which are readily available to the subject for report. This subjective impression of one’s basis will be called the subjective basis, for short, although we should be careful to note that the subjective basis is not a basis for the judgment in the causal

³ I say “can have” rather than “always have,” to admit a greater variety of types of fallibilism. For some forms of internalist fallibilism, the subjects of good and bad cases like the ones just given will always have exactly the same justification; there is no gap between what one’s justifying basis is and what it seems to be (e.g., Smithies 2019). But even for externalist fallibilists like Goldman (1979), who would assign sharply different levels of justification to the perceiver and the hallucinator, running distinct cognitive processes with different levels of reliability, there are at least some phenomenally indistinguishable pairs of good and bad cases where the same process is at work across the divide. For example, if the same retinal stimulation is produced by a convex object lit form above and a concave object lit from below, generally resulting in a perceptual impression of convexity, given our learned background expectations of light from overhead, then the same reliable but not infallible process is at work in the person who sees the normally lit convex object as convex, and the person who sees the concave object as convex in the presence of subtle lighting from below. These good and bad cases are equally justified, in Goldman’s later fallibilist reliabilism (although not in his earlier infallibilist causal view), given his restriction on the individuation of belief-forming processes to what happens “within the organism’s nervous system” (Goldman 1979: 12). Although for simplicity I focus largely on internalist forms of fallibilism here, I believe there are ways of extending the arguments of this chapter to positions like this kind of reliabilism.

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sense of that word, even if it represents some elements in the causal basis. Between this subjective fallibilism and my objective infallibilism lie a spectrum of views, including externalist forms of fallibilism such as process reliabilism; for simplicity, I will focus mainly on the extreme ends of the spectrum in what follows. We have a limited view of the causal processes behind our judgments, even in cases where we gain knowledge. The subject who comes to know about the victory can trust his brother without being able to report on the exact track record supporting his sense that his brother is reliable about “this sort of thing” (and indeed without being able to explain the exact scope of “this sort of thing”), although there may well be some intelligent appreciation of the brother’s track record underlying this trust. Consciousness presents products of cognition, rather than the underlying processes, let alone the distal features of the processes that secure our grip on external truths. It is because what is available to consciousness is so restricted that the bad case (pseudo-testimony) can be mistaken for the good (testimony): from the subject’s first-person perspective, I can equally respond to a challenge in either case by saying something like, “my brother said that the Cubs won, and he is usually reliable about this sort of thing.” In my view, the similarity of reports produced in the good and bad cases is evidence of the disparity between subjective and objective bases: one might reasonably say the same thing about one’s basis in a case of error and in a case of knowledge, and in either case, one has limited first-person access to what actually makes one’s judgment normatively appropriate. The fact that one’s judgment is normatively appropriate in the good case means that one does have suitable first-person access to the key first-order fact (for example, that the Cubs won), but it is possible to know that the Cubs won without knowing the full story behind how it is that you know this fact, down to the relevant characteristics of the reporter who saw the game, and so forth. Despite failing to capture the full story of how we are normatively in the clear, subjective impressions of our ways of thinking nevertheless play an interesting role in our cognitive economy, and are not simply epiphenomenal to the course of our thinking about first-order issues over time. In particular, conscious representations of the bases of our judgments play a vital role in our cognitive flexibility, our capacity to change how we are thinking about first-order issues, whether such changes are prompted by anomalies we encounter as individuals, or by challenges we receive from others.

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4.2. The Function of Subjective Representations of Basis The appeal of fallibilism can be better understood if we undertake a deeper investigation of the character and function of conscious representations of the bases of our judgments. One intriguing feature of these conscious representations is their pervasive availability. While our attention is ordinarily directed at first-order questions in the world—one feels elation at the Cubs’ victory, one notices a large object in the room—these first-order questions are for selfconscious creatures like us always settled with some accompanying representation of how they are settled (through testimony, through visual or haptic perception, and so on). There are consciously available differences between seeing or touching an object, and between judging that the Cubs won on the basis of having seen them play, having inferred that they must have won, or having heard about it via testimony. It is a good question why we have this kind of metacognitive awareness, and what relation it ultimately bears to the normative status of our judgments. To answer these questions, we can begin by reviewing some evidence bearing on the general availability of subjective representations of basis. In roughly a quarter of the world’s languages, ordinary declarative judgments bear obligatory markings of the distinctions between major ways of knowing such as first-hand perception, testimony, and inference (Aikhenvald 2004), but the source monitoring functions that underpin those grammatical markings are taken to operate in typical adult speakers of all languages (Johnson, Hashtroudi et al. 1993; Papafragou, Li et al. 2007). In earlier work, I emphasized the social function of source monitoring: if we have some indication of where our judgments are coming from, we can do a better job of sharing our knowledge with others, and where needed, selectively telling them what they don’t already know (Nagel 2015). Source monitoring also enables us to share our perceptual knowledge of features of our current context by directing others’ perceptual attention appropriately (“look over there!”), sparking their own independent way of knowing the fact in question. Another function of source monitoring is connected to our individual cognitive flexibility: consciously available representations of the bases of our judgments guide us in our active epistemic exploration of the world (stepping closer, turning the lights on, moving our hands, or gaze over the object), and in rethinking matters when something we have judged to be the case turns out to be problematic. Realizing I have taken someone else’s word for a disputed claim, I can try to verify it with my own eyes; if what I seem to see strikes me as implausible I can ask others if they also see it. These tasks of sharing and

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rethinking can be combined: in epistemically cooperative communities, the work of sorting testimony from pseudo-testimony (and so on) is socially distributed. Others are often better positioned to tell whether you are seeing or hallucinating, or whether your source is trustworthy. So, even in languages such as English, where source marking is lexical and optional, we frequently communicate source, marking what is inferred with a construction like “I gather that . . . ” or what is derived from testimony with “I hear that . . . .” These constructions can be used to invite those who may be better positioned epistemically to corroborate or correct our judgments (Pomerantz 1980). The social role of subjective bases does something to explain the natural appeal of fallibilist views of justification. Even if there is something normatively undesirable about cases of pseudo-perception or pseudo-testimony (other things being equal, surely these are not the conditions we hope to inhabit), the subjects who find themselves in these conditions will behave just like their good case counterparts when their epistemic status is challenged. They will tell similar (partial) stories about how they arrived at their judgments, including to themselves, if they become worried about their own epistemic standing and attempt to introspect. As far as their active control of their epistemic agency is concerned, subjects are guided by their subjective bases, so theories that take justification to be a matter of the proper exercise of epistemic agency will place considerable weight on subjective bases. Explicitly inferential reasoning deserves special attention in this account. Reasoning might seem to be an exception to my contention that the subjective impression of one’s basis is only a partial representation of what makes the judgment normatively appropriate. In particular, when one is conscious of the premises of a deductively sound argument, and then derives the conclusion, one might think that the subjective and objective bases of the judgment coincide, and that in this type of case, the subjective basis fully captures what causes the judgment and makes it normatively appropriate. However, even here, there are many normatively relevant features of the inferential judgment that are not presented to consciousness. If one is to attain knowledge of the conclusion, it matters not only which premises manifest themselves in consciousness (say, by being rehearsed in inner speech), but also the epistemic standing of these premises (which will typically depend on factors not present in consciousness), and the soundness of the rules of inference sparked by the recitation of those premises to produce the conclusion. Explicit reasoning, like all reflective cognition, consists in operations performed on consciously available material, but most of the workings of reflective cognition are themselves unconscious (Evans 2009). We can fail to notice this because typical humans

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78   share common capacities to deploy common rules of inference, including for example simple rules of syllogistic reasoning (Mercier 2011, Mercier and Sperber 2011), so, in cases where the epistemic standing of one’s premises is not in question, one can share inferential knowledge of a conclusion by reciting one’s premises in a way that will equally trigger the subconscious operation of the same relevant rules of inference in oneself and one’s audience, to secure the transition to one’s conclusion. Thanks to the typical commonalities in our rational capacities, explicit reasoning is a powerful device for the sharing of knowledge: if my epistemic standing on a given point is in initially in doubt, but I can produce a sound demonstration of that point from premises known to my audience, reliant on rules of inference they also deploy, then what I transmit to the audience is not only knowledge of the conclusion, but also the activation of a way of knowing it. They do not need to trust me, or see me as knowing, to gain knowledge of the conclusion we arrive at together. This is one reason why we are so naturally inclined towards explicit argumentation when we encounter resistance from an audience or doubts about our epistemic standing. In the face of doubts about our epistemic standing on a given point, we can engage in explicit reasoning, even if our original judgment on this point was not made on the basis of reasoning. If I have seen a highly unusual event outside the deictic sphere of our current conversation, I cannot share my knowledge of the event by directing my audience’s perceptual attention to it. If I attempt to transmit my knowledge of the unusual event through simple testimony, I face the risk of being dismissed as failing to know, given that what I am reporting will sound unlikely. A better strategy will be to present whatever evidence I can share to support my claim that the event occurred, pointing out its causal traces, and so forth, even though my own awareness of the event was secured through first-hand perception and not inference. Where a truth is itself known through explicit reasoning, there is little difference between the strength of one’s dialectical position and the strength of one’s epistemic position; in other cases, dialectical strength is used as a test for the presence of knowledge, and there may well be a gap between whether one can pass this social test for knowledge and whether one actually knows. There are internalists who make inference essential to justification, seeing even perception as essentially involving inference from prior evidence. For example, Stephen Schiffer describes the formation of a perceptual belief (say, that there is a red cube before him, abbreviated ‘Cube’) in a favorable case (‘Good’) as follows: ‘in Good I come to be justified in believing Cube by inferring it from the fact that I am having such-and-such sensory experiences

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as of Cube, and I cannot become justified in believing Cube in Good other than by inferring it from that evidence’ (Schiffer 2009: 198). This position is problematic in several ways. One might worry that such an inference would not actually be a very good one: from the fact that I am having sensory experiences “as of ” the presence of a cube, it does not actually follow that there is a cube in front of me. Such experiences might be caused by hallucinations or holograms as well as cubes. One might worry about one’s entitlement to the “as of ” locution, which seems to presuppose some prior acquaintance of the experiences that correlate with the real presence of cube, where knowledge of this correlation will be hard to secure. And lastly, one might worry about the reality of such inferences: if we take it to be a condition on “evidence” that it is evident in the sense of being present to consciousness, ruling out accounts in which the relevant inference is subpersonal, then it seems that perceptual beliefs on Schiffer’s account will only very rarely count as epistemically justified. How often are we first conscious of having a certain type of “as-if” seeming, and then only subsequently aware of the outer object, through inference? By contrast, externalists like Timothy Williamson do not insist that justified belief is ultimately inferential in character, and do not see basing as necessarily an explicitly inferential relation. Alongside the well-recognized category of explicitly evidence-based belief, Williamson introduces a category of implicitly evidence-based belief, where a belief in p is in this category “if it is appropriately causally sensitive to the evidence for p” (Williamson 2000: 191). Evidence itself, meanwhile, is not a precursor to knowledge but knowledge itself, and knowledge does not in general need to be based on prior evidence (or knowledge). Like many other externalists, he emphasizes the naturally unreflective, and non-inferential character of perception: “When we acquire new evidence in perception, we do not first acquire unknown evidence and then somehow base knowledge on it later. Rather, acquiring new evidence is acquiring new knowledge. That knowledge need not itself be based on further evidence, nor is it evidence for itself in some non-trivial way. But it is evidence for or against potential answers to questions to which we do not yet know the answer” (Williamson 2014: 4).⁴ On this approach, which fits and indeed ⁴ One might wonder whether this more recent formulation of Williamson’s view is a strengthening of the earlier view, according to which a perceptual belief that p could be implicitly evidence-based by being appropriately causally sensitive to the perceptual evidence for p. On the old position, one could have perceptual evidence for p without knowing that p, for example if one had misleading evidence about the source of light. However, even in the new position, which highlights situations in which we just gain the perceptual evidence that p, thereby coming to know that p, we can still distinguish a separate notion of “perceptual evidence for p,” where the knowledge we gain speaks in favour of p without entailing knowledge of p. This kind of knowledge might be especially important in cases where

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80   inspires the view I am defending in this chapter, we are not initially aware of visual appearances as of the cube, from which some belief about the cube is then inferred; in the good case, what we are initially conscious of is the cube. Our first moment of evidence is that there is a cube before us, in the good case. If we turn introspective, directing attention inward, we are aware that we have specifically visual experience “as of a cube,” but this is a metacognitive byproduct of the original unreflective judgment, and not a prior condition of it. It is true that hallucination would generate a similar metacognitive byproduct, but false that hallucination would make us equally justified. In the bad case, all we are conscious of is that there is something which appears to be a cube, but it is part of the badness of the bad case that we will typically judge that there is a cube present. If we wish to make a judgment which will be legitimate in both cases, we can restrain ourselves to the more cautious judgment that a cube seems to be present, but a general strategy of restricting oneself to such judgments would entirely undermine the value of our worldsensitive perceptual mechanisms. It is a feature of unreflective cognition that it does not involve reflection on how we ought to be thinking: in unreflective cognition such as ordinary perceptual judgment we are focused on the world, and not on the question of how we should now be making judgments. Because metacognitive impressions of our judgments play a key role in defending our epistemic status under challenge, it is not easy to give up the idea that instances of knowledge always require the backing of prior evidence. In her defense of fallibilism, Jessica Brown observes that there is something quite counter-intuitive about positions like the one I am defending here. She defines both fallibilism and infallibilism in terms of a relation obtaining between evidence and judgment: what infallibilists hold and fallibilists deny is that, “knowing that p requires evidence which entails that p” (Brown 2018: 4). She observes that Williamson’s equation of knowledge with evidence (in Williamson 2000) gives rise to an unusual form of non-skeptical infallibilism: because any known proposition is automatically included in one’s evidence set, the fact that every proposition entails itself will ensure that no proposition is held without entailing evidence (Brown 2018: 32). She then argues that it is inappropriate to cite a proposition as evidence for itself (Brown 2018: Ch. 3). Where the function of evidence is to lend support to a contested proposition, citing that very proposition will beg the question at issue, whether the

we have misleading evidence speaking against p which makes us think inferentially about the question of whether p, rather than forming a naïve perceptual belief. Thanks to Carlotta Pavese for valuable discussion on this point.

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contest arises from some audience who could have doubts about whether the speaker knows that p, or whether it arises from the speaker’s own doubts about her epistemic status with respect to p. So, Brown is right that one’s knowledge that p is generally not self-supporting in a way which will satisfy those who have raised doubts about one’s knowledge that p. However, if we can separate the task of proving one’s epistemic status from the conditions of initially entering that status, we do not need to insist that every item of knowledge be backed by prior evidence. If our sensory systems give us appropriate causal sensitivity to some features of reality, for example, then when these systems make us aware of those features, we can gain knowledge without prior supporting evidence. Brown advances two independent lines of argument against the kind of strategy I advance at the outset of this chapter, in which ways of knowing constitute our sources of justification. If I insist that a way of judging that p only yields full justification when the truth of p is essential to one’s judgment that p, Brown objects both that our natural ways of individuating beliefforming processes do not involve this kind of factivity, and also that an insistence on it will rule out some plausible instances of knowledge, most notably knowledge gained through inductive inference (Brown 2018: Ch. 2). On the first point, she grants that English-speakers do use the factive locution “see that” for successful cases of visual perception, and even that we have some extended use of it for the detection of mental states (e.g., seeing that another person is in pain), but she correctly observes that there is no directly parallel construction for testimony in English, and it is generally strained to apply “see that” here.⁵ Brown notes that one might say something like “I saw she was telling me the truth” on some special occasion, but this is not our ordinary practice in reporting second-hand knowledge, and it would be outright peculiar to say “I saw that Wikipedia was telling me the truth” on having consulted that source on some minor point of trivia (Brown 2018: 33). If we take our task to be one of individuating belief-forming processes, where it is understood from the outset that a belief is an attitude which can attach to either true or false contents, and where the aim is to predict or explain the subject’s behavior or claims independently of their environment, then it is not surprising that the processes we come up with will be of types that make no essential reference to the relation between the subject and the environment. It is certainly possible to individuate belief-forming processes on ⁵ However, it is worth noting that constructions of the form “S was told + interrogative” are factive; as are constructions like “S learned from X that p.” Thanks to Carlotta Pavese for this observation.

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82   the basis of the metacognitive byproducts they produce in us, and we may be particularly tempted to do this if we approach epistemological questions from the first-person perspective: from the inside, there is a conspicuous commonality between states of seeing and states of hallucinating. Still, anyone impressed by Jessica Brown’s concerns about what is reflected in natural languages might worry that similar concerns also arise when we individuate belief-forming mechanisms from the inside. Do English-speakers commonly refer to a way of forming beliefs that is neutral between seeing and seeming to see? The question only becomes more pressing when we look across languages: for example, the most comprehensive survey of grammaticalized evidentials (Aikhenvald 2004) reports no language which has an evidential marking that is neutral between seeing and visually hallucinating. However, we do not have to frame the problem from the outset as one of individuating ways of forming beliefs. Another route in to the problem would start by distinguishing ways of learning about the world; this path can make it seem more natural to focus on the distinctions between first-hand perception, second-hand learning through testimony, and sound inference. Even if similar problems arise on the side of belief-forming mechanisms individuated from the first-person perspective, it remains a good question why these factive modes of learning are not all conveniently and transparently lexicalized across languages, especially given our reasons to believe that speakers of all languages are generally monitoring the relevant distinctions. One reason may be that our conversational contributions do not typically assert their epistemic character; even in languages where assertions must be evidentially marked, the evidential marking is not part of the at-issue content of the assertion (Simons 2007; Murray 2017). When we do make epistemic standing explicit, some ways of learning carry more weight in common dialectical contexts than others: I can reasonably expect others to defer to me on commonplace events of which I have firsthand experience (how do you know that Bill broke the window?—I saw him do it), but it is less persuasive to respond to challenges by citing sources whose epistemic credentials are more complex, and are equally open to the challenger (such as Wikipedia). Still, there is some evidence that we naturally think of testimony in a way which recognizes the distinction between it and pseudotestimony: for example, note that in his initial description of the baseball game case, Baron Reed describes himself as knowing the outcome, “because my brother told me what happened.” This way of capturing the basis of the judgment is not in fact neutral between the good case and the bad: “he told me what happened” is factive, where “he told me that the Cubs won” is not. In

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the case where the Cubs lost, it is not true that my brother who said otherwise told me what happened. But Reed is not wrong to reach for the stronger construction in the context of a discussion of the testimonial transmission of knowledge: the tell-wh construction has a good claim to be our more natural way of thinking of what is happening when we speak with those we trust.⁶ Likewise, when we use an epistemic modal like “must” to indicate inference, we are not necessarily indicating any diminished commitment to the main claim we are making, or admitting the possibility of error in our inference (Von Fintel and Gillies 2010).⁷ In conditions where the epistemic credentials of our claims are under challenge, it may be dialectically appropriate for us to retreat to more neutral formulations concerning what we have been told, or what we gather may well be the case, but this does not mean that our initial way of thinking about the origins of our judgments is similarly cautious. Brown’s concern about inductive inference is harder to address. It may seem odd to suggest that the progression from observing any finite subset of ravens to concluding that all ravens are black could be a process which securely locks us onto the truth, so that the truth of this conclusion is essential to the process. I will have to insist upon individuating processes so that a different process is carried out when one samples ravens in a possible world containing a few unsampled albino specimens, versus a world in which all ravens are black, and one is subject to no risk. These processes might look the same to the ravencounter, but one of them involves epistemically important luck in avoiding the white ravens, where the other was relevantly safe. In my view, the justifying basis of a judgment is not strictly a function of the choices for which one may be responsible, or even those together with the subpersonal processes involved in cognition; the basis includes environmental conditions as well. In this larger process, the evidence afforded by individual observations plays a crucial role in legitimizing the ultimate judgment, but it does not exhaust the normative conditions responsible for what one comes to learn through induction. Proper treatment of this issue lies beyond the scope of the present work, but I hope to have given some sense of the limited role I am assigning to consciously available evidence in my overall account of justification. Defeat cases pose an especially interesting challenge to my account, exactly because they seem to leave the basis of a judgment fixed, while toying with the

⁶ I am grateful to Patrick Shirreff and Carlotta Pavese for discussion on this point. ⁷ This point is controversial, as Carlotta Pavese has reminded me. For a contrary view of ‘must,’ see Daniel Lassiter (2017).

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84   subject’s representation of that basis. The next section takes a fresh look at these cases.

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4.3. Defeat Cases, and Shifts of Basis Roger White has a sharp statement of the problem that defeat cases pose the type of view I am defending in this chapter. White is concerned to defend a ‘Cartesian’ conception of evidence, in which ‘the evidence I gain from visual experience consists in information about how things visually appear to me’ (White 2014: 301). On this conception, one has precisely the same evidence in seeing or hallucinating. White contrasts his preferred view with ‘Evidence Externalism.’ according to which ‘the evidence I gain from visual experience goes beyond information about how things visually appear to me and may include facts about how things are in my environment’ (White 2014: 301). The evidence externalist denies that the subject enjoys the same evidence in the Good case of seeing one’s hand and the Bad Case of hallucinating a hand: the Good case includes ‘a kind of direct epistemic access to the presence of a hand before me.’ White then lays out a case in which a person (we will call him “Hank”) who is actually looking at his hand and is given highly persuasive but misleading evidence that he is merely hallucinating. The Cartesian view of evidence has an easy explanation of why Hank seems to lose his justification to believe that he is looking at his hand, under the pressure of the misleading evidence. The ordinarily strong relationship between the visual appearance of a hand and the presence of a hand is screened off by the apparently plausible misleading testimony about the drug. If the evidence externalist agrees that the misleading testimony renders Hank unable to have a justified belief that there is a hand before him, then she will need to explain how the subject’s ‘direct epistemic access’ to outer world facts has disappeared. White argues that there is nothing available from the externalist’s depiction of the scenario to explain this shift: First, why is it that misleading evidence that I’m hallucinating robs me of this extra evidence? Nothing appears to have changed about my perceptual state and connection to the world. Suppose I even go on dogmatically thinking here’s a hand despite the mounting evidence that I’m hallucinating. I am at least still seeing my hand. My eyes are still receiving accurate information from the world and my belief forming mechanisms are operating as usual in forming a true belief. Isn’t that enough to have direct perceptual access to the

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layout of my environment? I also happen to have some misleading evidence that this is not so which I am blithely ignoring. But it is hard to see how my possession of such evidence changes my perceptual state in such a way to rob me of my direct perceptual access to the world. (White 2014: 314–5)

White is right to observe that nothing in Hank’s eyes or environment need change as the misleading reports about drugging are taken on board. What is controversial here is his claim that Hank’s ‘belief forming mechanisms are operating as usual in forming a true belief ’ as he dogmatically affirms here is a hand, notwithstanding the apparent evidence that he is not in a good position to judge this question. By the description of the case, Hank is not engaging just the same belief-forming mechanisms on the question of his hand’s presence before and after he registers the misleading evidence. In the original and naïve perceptual judgment, Hank is immediately conscious of his hand. The infallibilist account of the basis of this belief can cite such factors as the proper functioning of Hank’s visual capacities and their safely true production of a noninferential judgment. To generate the impression that Hank’s belief is defeated, note that it is important that he has a properly first-personal present-tense recognition of the bearing of his misleading reports about his situation on the judgment he is asked to make. Because Hank’s new evidence opens the question of how he should think about whether his hand is really before him or not, he is switched from naïve to reflective cognition on that embedded question at the same time.⁸ To understand the misleading reports, Hank must consciously entertain the possibility that he himself has ingested a drug which produces illusions as of hands; to make matters worse, he has also been given a persuasive argument that this possibility is actual. If we imagine him as ‘blithely ignoring’ this possibility and dogmatically judging here’s a hand, this deliberate evasion of evidence is part of the complete belief-forming process now sustaining his belief (for another version of this argument, see Van Wietmarschen (2013: 413–15). If this process now involves thinking dogmatically and disregarding evidence, Hank is no longer making a judgment in a manner which generally leads safely to the truth: sound naïve thinking has been replaced by questionable reflective cognition. ⁸ Against this kind of move, Ru Ye urges that “how one’s belief is based is a purely psychological process, a process about how the belief is formed or maintained, and gaining a piece of evidence needs not change this psychological process” Ye (2018: 7). I would urge that gaining evidence is also a psychological process, and one which forces changes in the related psychological process of answering a suitably related question. Ye maintains that defeat is ultimately best understood as a matter of intellectual responsibility; this may be right, but one could have an account of responsibility which includes the specification of responsible processes.

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86   Maria Lasonen-Aarnio offers a rival analysis of these cases. She distinguishes between the basis and the method of a judgment, where one’s basis is the belief-forming process responsible for a belief, and one’s method is the epistemic rule that one follows. An example illustrates the distinction:

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Assume, for instance, that Suzy comes to believe that Tuesday is a rainy day based on looking outside in the morning. She then immerses herself in a book, ceasing to consciously entertain the belief, and forgetting all about the rain. At noon she takes a look outside again and undergoes a new mental process producing a belief that Tuesday is a rainy day. In this case, she may well believe that Tuesday is a rainy day by using the same method as before, but not on the same basis as before. (Lasonen-Aarnio 2010: 5)

In Lasonen-Aarnio’s view, the stubborn subject who retains his belief in the face of misleading evidence is being unreasonable: the disposition that he is showing in insisting upon this method of belief-formation does not generally lead safely to truth, if we consider its application across a wide variety of cases. However, Lasonen-Aarnio argues, in this particular case the belief is still wellbased and safely true: by stipulation our subject is exercising perception in favorable conditions, and his method of believing on the basis of perception is at no risk of delivering error in these conditions. The method is a good one, given the circumstances, although the subject’s adoption of it shows a disposition which would in most circumstances be problematic (crime does not generally pay, but in this case the subject gets away with something). The subject’s dogmatic belief actually constitutes knowledge, on Lasonen-Aarnio’s account, and any intuitions to the contrary are to be explained by appeal to a general heuristic of taking unreasonable beliefs to fall short of knowledge, as they typically do. Lasonen-Aarnio describes the stubborn subject as adopting the method of believing ‘on the basis of perception.’ If the basis of a belief is the whole beliefforming process responsible for its production, then arguably this moment of ‘adoption’ should itself constitute part of the basis of the stubborn subject’s belief, a part which distinguishes this basis from that of the naïve subject. Taking a more restricted view of the basis as naïve perception, the problem is rather that this basis is no longer an option for the subject, given the stipulations of the case. It is certainly possible for the dogmatic subject to believe the same proposition that he initially believed on the basis of perception, to re-endorse the verdict delivered to him by sight, after this verdict has been brought into question. However, if perceptual judgment is by its nature

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noninferential and unreflective, the stipulated presence of conscious contents that offer rival answers to the first-order question—what is before you is perhaps not a hand, but a mere hallucination—is enough to ensure that our subject is not judging unreflectively anymore: he now has to step through the minefield of these contents to make up his mind. Whether he likes it or not, the basis of his judgment now includes factors other than the straightforward causal sensitivity to features of the environment that constitutes ordinary visual perception. We could perhaps imagine a subject with exceptional powers of mental self-control, able to induce a selective temporary amnesia in himself to banish all the misleading evidence from his consciousness. But the agent who has somehow managed to forget all his defeaters and now looks innocently at his hand is undefeated; at the moment of judgment he is not unreasonable but naïve, and once again able to know. Accepting a proposition unreflectively is not the same psychological process as accepting it in the face of recognized defeaters. Becoming reflective on a question ordinarily settled unreflectively does not automatically trigger epistemic self-sabotage. It is sometimes possible to wonder whether the lighting is tricky, for example, and collect more evidence to reassure oneself rationally that it is not. In such a case, one is no longer simply ‘believing on the basis of perception’; one is believing on the basis of conscious reflection which takes a succession of inputs, including perceptual inputs. As long as conscious reflection consists in sound reasoning, however, it can still support knowledgeable judgment. However, when reflection is coupled with scrutiny of the background assumptions of unreflective thought, in conditions where that scrutiny cannot be rationally addressed with the materials available to reflection, we are in trouble. One advantage of understanding defeat cases this way, rather than Lasonen-Aarnio’s, is that we can accept the common intuition that defeated subjects lack knowledge; we do not need to concoct an error theory. Bob Beddor poses an interesting case, in which a subject (Consuela) sees a red vase, but is told by a “usually reliable informant” that it is a white vase illuminated by red light; however, Beddor stipulates, “Consuela (unjustifiably) regards her interlocutor as completely unreliable; hence, his testimony doesn’t causally affect her credence [in the proposition that there is a red vase before her]” (Beddor 2014: 147–8). Beddor argues that this type of case will block efforts like mine that aim to deal with defeat through the individuation of cognitive processes. This case is somewhat more pared-down than White’s: Hank was given highly persuasive testimony, so it would be harder for him to come across as rational in discounting the odd possibility of a hallucinogenic

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88   drug out-of-hand. Consuela is simply told, falsely as it turns out, that there is a red light shining on the vase. If she understands this report, even if she does not accept it, then it is a good question whether Beddor can simply stipulate that the report has no causal impact on Consuela’s credal state. To understand the report is to contemplate an explanation of one’s current percepts at odds with the judgment delivered by naïve perception, at which point one would be already engaged in reflective cognition; in my view, understanding the interlocutor will already suffice for basis displacement. The interlocutor does not need Consuela to accept that the lighting is abnormal in order to raise the question of whether the lighting is abnormal, a question that cannot be settled by naïve perception, but one which bears on the legitimacy of trusting her initial impression of the color of the vase. If Consuela closes the question about the lighting with some unjustified reasoning about the interlocutor’s unreliability, then again, her belief formation is compromised. Perhaps there is a way of understanding Consuela’s attitude to the interlocutor as so dismissive that she does not even consider the question of whether there actually is something wrong with the lighting; on this way of reading the case, I would venture, her unreasonable attitude to this misleading interlocutor could insulate her from defeat.⁹ So far, I have considered cases involving a switch from unreflective to reflective cognition. Even within the realm of reflective cognition, we can generate similar problems by shifting to higher-order reflection. Reflective cognition itself involves sequentially presented contents, where the global broadcast of these contents in consciousness enables them to trigger a variety of modular subpersonal processes, including processes responsible for explicit reasoning (for a review, see Carruthers 2015). In higher-order reflection, it is possible to raise the worry that these underlying operations are going awry, so that one’s ordinary capacity to reason well has been hijacked. David Christensen (2010) details a case in which one has just solved a simple logic puzzle, but then is given what seems like excellent evidence that one is under the influence of a drug which makes one generate inaccurate answers to logic puzzles of this kind, while leaving one with ordinary feelings of logical competence, and an intact capacity to understand the puzzles’ initial

⁹ The insulation can only happen under rather special circumstances: perhaps the interlocutor is Consuela’s little brother who teases her with suggestions she finds too irritating to consider seriously. Other ways of being dismissive do not leave the epistemic standing of her belief unscathed: if she is weirdly dogmatic about the color of the vase, for example, then Consuela’s grip on the relevant firstorder truths about the world is no longer safe. Thanks to Mona Simion for helpful criticism on this point.

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parameters. Rethinking the puzzle, Christensen observes, it seems the rational thing is to lower one’s confidence that the apparently correct response is right. If the evidence about the drug is misleading, one does still have entailing grounds for one’s conclusion in the well-understood initial parameters of the puzzle. However, the misled subject will be compromised in her ability to exploit those grounds. Ordinarily, rational reflection on the parameters of a logical puzzle enables the judgment that a certain answer is correct, where this answer comes to mind in a manner that seems compelling, thanks to underlying cognitive processes that execute a valid rule of inference such as modus ponens. These rules are executed in us by processes which are themselves unconscious, like the processes supporting syntactic judgments, although realized in different brain regions (Monti and Osherson 2012). For the subject who is conscious of the misleading evidence about the effect of the drug—an effect that produces false but apparently compelling solutions to logical puzzles—the question of the correct answer to the puzzle has been re-opened, and the fact that her initial answer to the puzzle seems compelling is now a warning sign against it. Where she could initially accept the answer on the basis of logical capacities which safely deliver the truth, where those capacities were simply exercised on the parameters of the puzzle, she is now challenged to reflectively endorse that answer while taking on board not only the parameters, but also her new apparent evidence against the hypothesis that the answer which seems compelling is right. The basis of her judgment has a new level of psychological complexity, and working in this complex manner with materials available to her, it is no longer possible for our subject to naively endorse the initial and correct answer to the puzzle, and it is no longer rational for her to reflectively endorse this answer either. Because her original reasoning was sound, the basis of her original judgment has not been rationally undermined: one could not rationally demonstrate that this flawless basis was at fault. There is a certain elegance in understanding defeat as involving a shift in the basis of one’s judgment: this strategy saves externalists from needing to add a special internalist patch to their theory of knowledge. The addition of special patches to cover defeat cases is a longstanding practice in broadly externalist analyses of knowledge, and a practice which has long been seen as problematic for these approaches. In the classical Indian Nyāya tradition, for example, knowledge was analyzed as a ‘truth-hitting cognitive episode,’ born of a faultless causal or justificatory source, qualified with the extra condition that the resulting judgment must be ‘non-dubious in the sense that no reasonable ground for doubting its truth has appeared’ (Matilal 1986: 135). Bimal Matilal

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90   notes that the 11th-century skeptic Śrīharśa was already concerned that the ‘no-defeater’ clause seem oddly redundant, given the condition on the quality of one’s source (ibid). Contemporary Anglo-American externalists still add similar ‘no defeater’ clauses to their basic externalism, analyzing knowledge as something like reliably produced true belief in the absence of defeaters (e.g., Goldman 1986). Because the other conditions on his analysis of knowledge are often weaker, they are not always open to Śrīharśa’s worry about redundancy, but the motivations of this type of hybrid position remain difficult to explain. Laurence BonJour raises the worry that any theory of this sort will be an ‘untenable halfway house’ between internalism and externalism (BonJour and Sosa 2003: 32). When externalists consider what makes a belief normatively appropriate, the defining feature of their position is that they do not insist that the subject should always have conscious access to positive justifying grounds. It is curious, then, for externalists to add a requirement excluding the conscious availability of negative evidence. Why should conscious access matter on one side of the ledger and not the other? If the misleading apparent evidence in defeat cases has a direct impact on our need for conscious materials, then there is an explanation of the asymmetry: by raising concerns about the assumptions of less reflective forms of judgment, defeat cases shift us upwards into more reflective ways of thinking, in which we will need consciously available materials to proceed rationally and make safely true judgments. Psychologically realistic externalists do not have to see the conscious recruitment of reasons as epiphenomenal in our beliefforming processes: operations on conscious contents are distinctive causal processes too. Not only in defeat cases, but across the board, externalists can insist that subjects need to have appropriate consciously available input for reflective cognition, given that this type of thinking consists in sequential operations on what is consciously available. The externalist can consistently maintain that consciously available input is not needed for our unreflective forms of judgment such as perception. Maintaining psychological realism, these forms of judgment do not consist in operations on consciously available material; they simply generate consciously available results. Knowledge is generated both reflectively and unreflectively following uniform epistemic principles: no special criteria are needed to explain when we need reflectively accessible evidence, or to manage defeat cases.¹⁰ ¹⁰ For very helpful written comments on this chapter, I am grateful to Carlotta Pavese and to Mona Simion. For discussion, I am grateful to David Barnett, Maria Lasonen-Aarnio, Sergio Tenenbaum, and Jonathan Weisberg. I would also like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding my research.

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References Aikhenvald, A. Y. (2004). Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beddor, B. (2014). Process reliabilism’s troubles with defeat. The Philosophical Quarterly, 65(259): 145–59. BonJour, L. and E. Sosa. (2003). Epistemic Justification: Internalism vs. Externalism, Foundations vs. Virtues. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Brown, J. A. (2018). Fallibilism: Evidence and Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carruthers, P. (2015). The Centered Mind: What the Science of Working Memory Shows us about the Nature of Human Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Christensen, D. (2010). Higher order evidence. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 81(1): 185–215. Dasti, M. and S. Phillips. (2017). The Nyaya-sutra: Selections with Early Commentaries. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing. Dasti, M. and S. Phillips. (2010). Pramana are factive: A response to Jonardon Ganeri. Philosophy East and West, 60(4): 535–40. Dasti, M. (2012). Parasitism and disjunctivism in Nyāya epistemology. Philosophy East and West, 62(1): 1–15.

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Evans, J. (2009). Introspection, confabulation, and dual-process theory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32(02): 142–3. Goldman, A. (1979). What is justified belief? In: Justification and Knowledge. G. S. Pappas (ed.) Dordrecht, Holland: D. Riedel: 1–23. Goldman, A. (1986). Epistemology and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Johnson, M. K., S. Hashtroudi, and D. S. Lindsay. (1993). Source monitoring. Psychological Bulletin, 114(1): 3–28. Lasonen-Aarnio, M. L. (2010). Unreasonable knowledge. Philosophical Perspectives, 24(1): 1–21. Lassiter, D. (2017). Graded Modality: Qualitative and Quantitative Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Matilal, B. K. (1986). Perception: An Essay on Classical Indian Theories of Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mercier, H. (2011). On the universality of argumentative reasoning. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 11(1–2): 85–113. Mercier, H. and D. Sperber. (2011). Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 34(02): 57–74.

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92   Monti, M. M. and D. N. Osherson. (2012). Logic, language and the brain. Brain Research, 1428: 33–42. Murray, S. E. (2017). The Semantics of Evidentials. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nagel, J. (2015). The social value of reasoning in epistemic justification. Episteme, 12(2): 297–308. Papafragou, A., P. Li, Y. Choi, and C. Han. (2007). Evidentiality in language and cognition. Cognition, 103(2): 253–99. Pomerantz, A. (1980). Telling my side: “Limited access” as a “fishing” device. Sociological Inquiry, 50(3–4): 186–98. Reed, B. (2012). Fallibilism. Philosophy Compass, 7(9): 585–96. Schiffer, S. (2009). Evidence = knowledge: Williamson’s solution to skepticism. In: Williamson on Knowledge. P. Greenough and D. Pritchard (eds.) Oxford: Oxford University Press: 183–202. Simons, M. (2007). Observations on embedding verbs, evidentiality, and presupposition. Lingua, 117(6): 1034–56. Smithies, D. (2019). The Epistemic Role of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Van Wietmarschen, H. (2013). Peer disagreement, evidence, and wellgroundedness. Philosophical Review, 122(3): 395–425.

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Von Fintel, K. and A. S. Gillies (2010). Must . . . stay . . . strong! Natural Language Semantics, 18(4): 351–83. White, R. (2014). What is my evidence that here is a hand? In: Scepticism and Perceptual Justification. D. Dodd and E. Zardini (eds.) Oxford: Oxford University Press: 298–321. Williamson, T. (2000). Knowledge and its Limits. New York, Oxford University Press. Williamson, T. (2014). Knowledge first. In: Contemporary Debates in Epistemology. 2nd Edition. M. Steup, J. Turri, and E. Sosa (eds.) New York: Wiley: 1–9. Ye, R. (2018). Higher-order defeat and intellectual responsibility. Synthese, 197: 5435–55.

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5 Dispositional Evaluations and Defeat Maria Lasonen-Aarnio

5.1. Success and Good Dispositions Consider the following example, which many would diagnose as involving defeat by so-called higher-order evidence:

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Lobelia and evidence about hypoxia It’s just the first day, but Lobelia is getting bored on her vacation in the Pyrenees, waiting in the hut while her friends climb a mountain. To pass the time, she starts working through some real forensic cases for practice. Her task is to identify the culprit in a case, given a range of evidence (laboratory evidence, evidence about the crime scene, etc.). The task is far from straightforward. Lobelia competently evaluates a case, and forms the opinion that Penelope committed the crime (p). In fact, she comes to know this. Shortly thereafter one of her friends, a doctor specialized in expedition medicine, comes in, examines Lobelia, and tells her that given the altitude and various symptoms she exhibits, Lobelia is suffering from hypoxia. Such hypoxia impairs one’s reasoning while making it seem perfectly fine—it is likely, her friend warns Lobelia, that her belief in p is the output of a flawed process. This time, however, Lobelia’s friend is mistaken: Lobelia’s original reasoning was impeccable. Despite being an expert, on this occasion Lobelia’s friend is deeply confused: though Lobelia does not know this, people just don’t normally develop hypoxia at her altitude. Let us assume that despite the warnings, Lobelia retains her belief in p. Many epistemologists think that a variety of familiar epistemic statuses are defeated in such cases: Lobelia’s belief in p is no longer rational, no longer justified, and no longer constitutes knowledge. Yet, as many have argued, familiar stories of these statuses fail to yield defeat. Of all proposed conditions on knowledge apart from truth and belief, safety is perhaps the most widely endorsed. But it is far from clear that

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94  - Lobelia’s belief is no longer safe from error.¹ Nor is it easy to see why it is no longer produced by a reliable process.² Perhaps more promising would be to argue for knowledge defeat via justification defeat. A popular way of thinking about justification is in terms of evidential support. But, it is far from clear whether Lobelia’s total evidence ceases to support p (e.g., by ceasing to make p likely): a peculiar feature of higher-order evidence is that it often seems to have no bearing whatsoever on the relevant first-order propositions.³ And wholly independently of particular conditions on knowledge, consider the following verdict: “Lobelia can just see, based on the evidence, that Penelope did it!” To me this sounds like a perfectly natural thing to say. But, if seeing that is a way of knowing that, then Lobelia still knows p.⁴ Further, I have argued that there are principled reasons to think that correct epistemic norms cannot allow for a systematic phenomenon of defeat by higher-order evidence,⁵ and that there is a serious tension within views that aim to accommodate it.⁶ My aim here is not to argue that there is no possible theory able to adequately accommodate and explain defeat by higher-order evidence. The project of this paper is more positive: to explore a new kind of strategy for explaining the seeming badness of retaining a belief in the face of evidence that it is flawed.⁷ Though my main focus will be on defeat, this paper is an implementation and application of a broader framework. What I see myself as doing is providing the most promising account of a kind of evaluation indispensable for making sense of cases ranging from ones involving victims of massive deceit to so-called Jackson cases—and most importantly for my present purposes, cases involving higher-order evidence like Lobelia’s.⁸ As I see things, cases structurally similar to those that originally prompt the search for more “subjective” or “internalist” kinds of evaluations and norms—evaluations

¹ See Lasonen-Aarnio (2010); Baker-Hytch and Benton (2015). ² See Beddor (2015) for a discussion of process reliabilism. ³ David Christensen (2010) argues that it is peculiar to higher-order evidence that conditionalizing on it leaves the degree to which one’ s evidence supports the relevant proposition p intact. Indeed, that is why he thinks that one must “bracket” part of one’s evidence. See Schoenfield (2018) for a discussion of whether conditionalizing on a self-locating proposition might help. See also Baker-Hytch and Benton (2015). ⁴ I think this is also a natural thing to say at least in some putative cases of ordinary undercutting defeat. If Lobelia is looking at a red object, but then acquires misleading evidence about trick lighting, it seems natural to say that she can still see that the object is red. ⁵ Lasonen-Aarnio (2014). ⁶ Lasonen-Aarnio (2019). ⁷ This diagnosis is continuous with one that I sketch in my 2010 paper, Unreasonable knowledge. I here outline the approach in more detail and refine it, applying it, in particular, to putative cases of defeat by higher-order evidence. ⁸ For so-called Jackson cases—and more generally, cases that have been invoked to argue for socalled subjective oughts—see Lasonen-Aarnio (Forthcoming B). For the New Evil Demon problem, see Lasonen-Aarnio (Forthcoming A).

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normally expressed by epistemologists using the ideology of justification and rationality—keep cropping up for a wide range of views, and there are principled reasons to think that they will keep cropping up.⁹ The inability of various views of justification to deal with higher-order defeat is, I think, yet another symptom of this general malaise. The reason we want to negatively evaluate Lobelia, I will argue, is that she manifests dispositions that are bad relative to a range of candidate epistemic successes such as true belief and knowledge. My hypothesis is that, for pretty much any success, manifesting good dispositions is neither necessary nor sufficient for success: even knowing is compatible with manifesting dispositions that lead one astray across a range of relevant counterfactual cases. This general hypothesis, however, is too big a claim to defend in this paper. Rather, I will argue that given considerations about humanly feasible ways to be, subjects such as Lobelia who obstinately retain beliefs in putative cases of defeat by higher-order evidence are naturally construed as manifesting problematic dispositions. This, I will argue, is ultimately why Lobelia is criticizable.¹⁰

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5.2. Ways and Dispositions The kinds of evaluations I will be concerned with evaluate doxastic states (choices, actions, etc.) in a manner that is sensitive to the way in which those doxastic states are formed and retained (the choices made, the actions performed, etc.). Instead of thinking of these ways in terms of methods, processes, or bases, I will let the dispositions that manifest themselves as one’s ϕ’ing (coming to believe something, retaining a belief, making a choice) do the work of identifying these ways. I will simply assume—like I think everyone should— that there are dispositions of a wide variety of different kinds, and that inanimate objects and rational subjects alike are constantly manifesting them.¹¹

⁹ See Lasonen-Aarnio (2014, 2019, Forthcoming B). ¹⁰ Someone might take manifesting good dispositions to be a condition on knowledge. I won’t here take on the task of arguing against such views, though see Lasonen-Aarnio (2010). ¹¹ Given a realist background metaphysics of dispositions, thinking about ways of forming and revising beliefs in terms of dispositions makes progress with the generality problem: there simply is a fact of the matter regarding what dispositions a subject has and manifests. On my view, the goodness of a disposition depends on the values of its manifestations across relevant counterfactual cases, and what might be seen as a version of the problem re-arises in connection with what counts as relevant. I endorse the context-sensitivity of dispositional evaluations: I think it is a good outcome that our

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96  - Metaphysicians (e.g., Lewis 1986) often draw a distinction between a sparse and abundant notion of a property; correspondingly, we can distinguish between a sparse and abundant notion of a disposition.¹² Being formed in the same or very similar ways should make for a real, objective similarity between two beliefs. A project aimed at drawing evaluative conclusions about doxastic states based on what dispositions they are manifestations of is best served by focusing on sparse dispositions. I will assume that we can find sparse dispositions at every level of reality, not just the microphysical level. The kinds of dispositions of interest when evaluating beliefs and choices occupy the same level of reality as these objects of evaluation—namely, the psychological level, broadly construed.¹³ My starting point will be that when an action, doxastic transition, or doxastic state can in some sense be attributed to an agent, it is the manifestation of some of these dispositions. (Sometimes things more or less happen to us: if, for instance, my mind comes to be controlled by some external force causing me to be in a neural state that makes for believing p, then, believing p is not something properly attributable to me.) The claim that, in standard cases, our actions and beliefs are manifestations of our dispositions, should not be conflated with the false claims that actions attributable to an agent always arise out of habit, or that we only ever do things that we are disposed to do. We sometimes act out of character but are still criticizable in a way that I want to be able to capture. Consider, for instance, a subject who uncharacteristically snaps at another person due to being tired and hungry. Even if she is

focus as evaluators can shift what counts as relevant. Further, I don’t think there is any view in epistemology that can escape all versions of the generality problem. ¹² Abundant properties come cheap. As a general rule, there is one corresponding to every coherent, non-paradoxical predicate of a language. They can be wildly extrinsic and unnatural, and any two things share an indefinite number of them. They are closed under various logical operations, satisfying various comprehension principles. For instance, if there is the property of being an F, there is also the property of being either an F or a G, and the property of not being an F. By contrast, from the fact that F and G are sparse properties, we cannot trivially infer that having either F or G is a sparse property; that having F and G is a sparse property, or that not having F is a sparse property. For arguments that we should distinguish between fundamental properties pertaining to a fundamental level of nature (assuming there to be one) and sparse properties, see Schaffer (2004). ¹³ Corresponding to these different levels of reality are different levels of explanation. Dennett (1969: 93) famously distinguished between personal and subpersonal levels of explanation, taking both to be psychological explanations. Dennett’s concern was with explanations of behavior, but such a distinction could be extended to explanations of belief. Following Dennett, we could distinguish between personal and subpersonal dispositions. Dispositions that work at the personal level are dispositions of (entire) persons. By contrast, subpersonal dispositions are dispositions of subsystems or parts of persons. There is much controversy about whether subpersonal explanations are really psychological in the first place (for a good overview, see Drayson, 2014). I will remain neutral on these issues. The dispositions I am interested in are psychological, whether or not this means that they must be dispositions of persons.

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uncharacteristically irritable, she might still be disposed snap at others in circumscribed conditions, when very tired and hungry, or perhaps she is disposed to become irritable (acquiring a new disposition) in these conditions. But further, doing something can originate in and be a manifestation of one’s dispositions even in the absence of such more local or circumscribed dispositions: one might do it because of the way various specific situational factors interact with one’s dispositions.¹⁴ For instance, a combination of certain company, an uncommonly boisterous mood, and some recent life-changing news might activate various dispositions a subject has (to try new things, to do things that are putatively good for her health, etc.), while masking others (having to do with avoiding discomfort). In these circumstances, jumping into an icy lake can be a manifestation of the subject’s dispositions, even if she is disposed to avoid cold water. In this way, even doing things that one is not disposed to do can be a manifestation of one’s dispositions. These points are related to an important way in which my dispositional evaluations differ from virtue-theoretic ones appealing to the notions of virtue and competence. Even if we think of competences and virtues dispositionally, the associated dispositions are general, complex, and entrenched, impinging on a very wide range of different situations. In the case of moral virtue, for instance, what is at issue is character traits bearing on how one responds to and weighs reasons, how one feels, acts, deliberates, and reacts; what one notices and attends to, desires, and values. Subjects can on particular occasions act excellently, in ways that an evaluative perspective oriented on good dispositions should be able to pick up on, without manifesting anything like full-blown virtue or competence. An unkind person might have a soft spot, responding on this occasion in a commendable way to the needs of those around her. Similarly for a person who is only in the process of learning to be kind—she might only unreliably be able to manifest dispositions to act kindly. Even when people act out of character, or fail to manifest full-blown competence or virtue, we can ask how good the dispositions they manifest on this occasion are.¹⁵ Dispositional evaluations share important features with evaluations standardly expressed by epistemologists using the ideology of justification or rationality and differ from evaluations having to do with mere blamelessness ¹⁴ Cf Sher (2006: 23), and the range of cases he discusses. ¹⁵ Though I am not offering a theory of blameworthiness, for similar reasons, I am very sympathetic to Sher’s (2006: Ch. 2) criticism of a Humean theory on which one can only be blameworthy for doing something bad if it originated from a vice or defect in one’s character, thought of as some more general disposition to act in bad ways. See also Hurka’s (2006) criticism of contemporary virtue ethics.

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98  - or excuses. First, the evaluative perspective I outline forthwith can be directed at an agent’s acts in a broad sense of the term: for instance, one’s coming to believe a proposition—and hence, one’s belief—can be positively or negatively evaluated depending on whether it is a manifestation of good dispositions (which is not to say that a person cannot be criticized for manifesting bad dispositions). By contrast, blame is a reaction to a person on the basis of what they have done, or on the basis of their character traits; it is persons who are blameworthy or blameless.¹⁶ Second, manifesting good dispositions is not merely a matter of a negative evaluation being inappropriate, in the way that blamelessness is. I share a common dissatisfaction with appeal to blamelessness and excuses in defense of more externalist or objectivist norms, which is that the tool is too blunt to carve out distinctions we want to make: our reactions to a range of cases seem to involve a kind of positive evaluation distinct from a mere failure to blame an agent.¹⁷ Blamelessness is disunified in the sense that there are multiple different ways of being blameless, and manifesting good dispositions is but one. Further, just as being positively evaluable from the dispositional perspective is not a matter of mere blamelessness, being negatively evaluable is not a matter of blameworthiness. Agents who manifest problematic dispositions are often, but not always, blameworthy. For instance, had Lobelia grown up in a community that instilled in her bad dogmatist habits under the guise of epistemic virtue, or had she been cognitively impaired in a way that excused her dogmatic habits, she might be blameless, but she would still be manifesting problematic dispositions.¹⁸ Let me now outline in more detail how I think of good dispositions.

¹⁶ Cf Sher (2006: 7). Just as we may blame the hurricane for the low voter turnout, we may blame one’s way of forming a belief for the falsity of the belief, but this kind of blaming is standardly taken to be is essentially different from e.g., moral blame directed at persons (cf. Sher 2006: ix)—it is not normative in a broad sense of the term. ¹⁷ This is a widespread criticism; for a recent elaboration in epistemology, see Simion, Kelp, and Ghijsen (2016). ¹⁸ What about praise? The objects of praise appear to be broader than those of blame. We often praise ways of acting or believing: we might praise Mahler for his orchestration, but we can also praise the orchestration itself, just as we can praise the technique displayed by an expert archer’s shot. Indeed, by praising the orchestration in a Mahler symphony, we bestow praise on the symphony itself, and by praising the technique displayed by a shot we praise the shot. One reason I am cautious, however, of expressing my view in terms of praise is that where failing to merit blame is not positive enough, meriting praise seems excessively positive. A composer’s orchestration might not be praiseworthy, but not criticizable or negatively evaluable, for it might simply be perfectly fine. By contrast, subjects who fail to manifest good dispositions in the sense I will outline below are criticizable. Relatedly, it is not clear, for instance, whether it is appropriate to praise the forming of an ordinary perceptual belief in good conditions, or other routine acts that require little expertise or effort. Nevertheless, such beliefs are positively evaluable, being paradigmatic examples of beliefs labelled justified or rational.

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5.3. Dispositional Evaluations We form beliefs, normally retain them for some period of time, and often retrieve them from memory. One might, for instance, originally form a belief about a particular event through an exemplary perceptual process, but the belief about the event retrieved from memory might involve misremembering or confabulation. Conversely, one’s memory about a past event might correspond to one’s past experience, but the experience itself may have involved misperception that manifests bad dispositions, such as cognitive biases. Hence, our focus should not be exclusively on belief-formation, on acts of coming to believe. Especially important in connection with discussions of defeat will be ways of retaining beliefs in light of new evidence. Despite the good credentials of one’s original belief, the dispositions at play in its retention might be problematic. Indeed, this will be my diagnosis of what happens in many putative cases of defeat. Hence, for a belief to be evaluated positively from the dispositional perspective, the formation of the belief must manifest good dispositions, and similarly for its retention and possible retrieval from memory. Assume that a subject ϕ’s (e.g., comes to believe a proposition p, retains belief in p, or retrieves a belief in p from memory), and that her ϕ’ing is the manifestation of some disposition D.¹⁹ What makes D good? Goodness is always relative to some success: the dispositions at play when one comes to believe that one’s lottery ticket will lose just based on the odds may be good if epistemic success is a matter of believing truly, or believing what is likely on one’s evidence, but not if it is a matter of knowing. The goodness of a disposition will depend on how successful its manifestations are across relevant counterfactual cases in which it manifests itself—more precisely, on the values of its manifestations in counterfactual cases, weighted according to relevance. Given a weighting of counterfactual cases in which a disposition manifests itself according to relevance, and a value function, we can determine an overall score for the disposition. We then need to say how the overall goodness of a disposition is related to its score. On the account I favor, manifesting good dispositions is a matter of manifesting the best feasible alternative dispositions, or at least ones that compare favorably enough with the best feasible alternatives. One’s ϕ’ing is to be evaluated positively just in ¹⁹ For the purposes of stating my view, I will assume for simplicity that there is just one disposition. It is, however, more realistic to assume that one’s ϕ ’ing is the joint manifestation of multiple dispositions. In that case, the relevant cases will be ones in which all of these dispositions jointly manifest themselves.

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100  - case it is a manifestation of the best (or close enough to the best) feasible alternative dispositions. I will take up the different components of the account in turn. I will then say how the role played by feasibility in my account allows for taking shortcuts in making dispositional evaluations. Relevance: I think that dispositional evaluations are highly malleable and context-dependent: what counts as relevant can easily shift depending on our focus and context as evaluators. Nevertheless, there are some general structural points to be made. The first thing to emphasize is that relevance should not be understood in terms of any relation that a case trivially bears to itself (to a maximal degree). In particular, relevance is not a matter of relevant similarity: counterfactual cases are not weighted according to how similar they are to the actual case. Similarly, relevance is not a matter of what could easily have occurred. This is because the case a subject is actually in might be deviant or abnormal and as a result, it—and cases very much like it—may be irrelevant when evaluating the goodness of a disposition. I won’t here offer a theory of what such normality consists in, but even lacking a precise account, we have some initial grasp on what sorts of cases count as normal. Various circumstances involving highly misleading evidence, for instance, are abnormal: it is abnormal to encounter a real-looking fake tree among real ones, to experience an intricately crafted perceptual illusion with no hints that one is experiencing it, and so on. The dispositions manifested by a subject who comes to form a belief on the basis of such an illusion might be good, for across somewhat normal cases they manifest as knowledge-constituting (or otherwise epistemically successful) belief.²⁰ Here is a toy model that at least comes close to how I think about relevance. As evaluators, we consider some features of a case to be idiosyncratic, while holding others fixed. We can think of the features held fix as determining a contextually determined type of case. Relevant cases are somewhat normal or typical instances of the type. The relevance weighting might be binary, each normal case instantiating the relevant type getting the same, positive weight. Or, relevance might come in degrees, a case being assigned more weight the more normal or typical it is. In the case of Lobelia, for instance, a very natural type to focus on is Lobelia receiving a certain kind of higher-order evidence regarding her own cognitive functioning from a certain kind of expert. We ²⁰ In my treatment of the new evil demon problem, I have argued that what counts as normal often depends on the kind of world or case that a subject is anchored to—she might in fact be in a case that is abnormal for her (see Lasonen-Aarnio, Forthcoming A). Hence, “alien cognizers” living in environments that are abnormal by our lights can be evaluated positively from the dispositional perspective, for their dispositions fare well in counterfactual cases that are not too abnormal for them.

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then consider other counterfactual cases falling under this type in which the same dispositions that Lobelia actually manifests manifest themselves. Scores: the score of a disposition, representing how well the disposition does across counterfactual cases, is a function of the weighting of these cases according to relevance, and a value function. I will assume that the score of a disposition is a weighted average of the values of its manifestations in counterfactual cases, the weightings being by relevance. (I think this is a natural view, though it is not the only possible one.) The nature of the value function will, of course, depend on what the relevant success under consideration is. For some successes all that matters is whether a manifestation is a success or failure—coming close to succeeding doesn’t get assigned any extra value (e.g., penalty shots in football). In other cases, success itself comes in degrees. Consider, for instance, throwing darts, where one gets more points the closer the dart lands to the central region. And even if knowledge, for instance, itself is an all-or-nothing matter, one might think that a value function should assign less value to a belief that is false than to a belief that is merely true, but doesn’t constitute knowledge. I return to these issues below. It is worth noting that even fixing the success being focused on, the framework sketched is compatible with the value function shifting depending on the situation under consideration—being sensitive, for instance, to what is practically at stake for a given subject. Compare a subject in a low-stakes situation in which the practical cost of holding a false belief is not great, and a subject in a high-stakes situation in which false belief has dire practical consequences. The serious cost of false belief might incline us, as evaluators, to assign greater disvalue to false belief. The result of this may be that whereas disposition D₁ gets a higher score than D₂ when considering the low-stakes situation, this order is reversed when considering the high-stakes situation. As a result, though D₁ might be better for a low-stakes subject, D₂ will be better for the high-stakes subject. This is one of the ways in which the framework can accommodate a stakes-sensitive kind of epistemic evaluation. Goodness and feasible alternative dispositions: how does the score of a disposition determine its overall goodness? There are various approaches one could take here. On one possible view, goodness is a matter of having a score that is high enough in absolute terms. According the approach I favor, dispositional goodness is a matter of doing the best one feasibly can, or at least coming sufficiently close: whether one manifests good dispositions depends on what feasible alternatives there are. If D₁ and D₂ are both feasible alternatives in one’s situation, then D₁ is better D₂ than just in case it has a higher score.

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102  - Just how close a disposition must be to the best feasible alternatives might depend on context. There are various constraints, of different strengths, on how we could be disposed in the first place, and on what dispositions could be manifested in specific circumstances. Some are logical, some nomological, some metaphysical. Of particular importance below will be feasibility constraints flowing from broad features of our cognitive design: as a general rule, feasibility is constrained by our cognitive architecture, allowing for some idealizing.²¹ Hence, feasible alternative dispositions are dispositions that could, in a relevant sense of ‘could’ determined by context but constrained by our cognitive architecture, be manifested in the situation under consideration. An alternative disposition is one that would manifest itself as a relevant doxastic state, choice, or action in one’s situation. For instance, relevant alternative dispositions in the Lobelia case manifest in the situation at hand as some doxastic state regarding proposition p.²² (It is feasible in Lobelia’s situation to manifest a disposition to scratch one’s head, but this disposition is not an alternative to the doxastic dispositions Lobelia manifests when retaining her belief in p.) Of particular importance below will be considerations of feasibility regarding dispositions that discriminate between various cases. For instance, the rationale for safety precautions that we routinely take is that we cannot be disposed to only take those precautions in situations in which they are not redundant. We cannot be disposed to only use safety belts on car rides that end in crashes, or to buy insurance only for trips that end up involving some sort of calamity. But there are other, perhaps more interesting cases, in which our dispositions cannot pick up on certain features of the case we are in, even if the good and bad cases differ in some respects “from the inside”. For instance, climbers are taught to check their harnesses and knots every time before relying on them. The aim is to be almost automatically disposed to go through certain checks in every situation. It would of course be more efficient to only ²¹ Consider the literature on heuristics and biases—for instance, the systematic patterns of fallacious probabilistic reasoning exhibited by humans. Psychologists tend to think that such errors flow from features of our cognitive design, which consists of different systems tacked together (e.g., what is known as System 1 and System 2). If a subject commits the so-called bankteller fallacy, thinking a conjunction to be likelier than its individual conjunct, then even if she manifests some dispositions typical of human beings, she is not manifesting good dispositions: there is a better available disposition—indeed, we are sometimes able to pick up on such errors ourselves. ²² Assume that the subject in fact manifests disposition D₁. Then, in the actual case she manifests D₁, and no other disposition. Nevertheless, we can ask whether some other disposition that could have been manifested is better. This is why I talk about situations: when asking what the best feasible dispositions are in one’s situation, we keep fixed other features about the actual case, but not facts about what dispositions (if any) one manifests. My account also assumes counterfactual facts regarding what doxastic state a given disposition would have manifested as in one’s situation.

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double check when one has made some sort of error, but the problem is that in situations in which one has made an error, and in which double checking would reveal (or would at least be likely to reveal) the error, the error has already gone undetected until the procedure of double checking. These are, of course, often precisely the kinds of situations in which one’s cognitive skills are somehow compromised due to fatigue, altitude, dehydration, etc. In order to be disposed to double check only when one has committed an error, one would have to be sensitive to having committed the error. But how could one be thus sensitive when the error was undetected in the first place, often due to compromised cognitive skills? Cases involving higher-order evidence that one’s doxastic state is flawed are, I will argue, similar in many respects. The thought will be that given natural assumptions about human psychology, it is plausible that in a wide range of somewhat paradigmatic cases involving putative higher-order defeaters, a subject cannot be disposed to retain belief in light of higher-order evidence pointing to some sort of cognitive error only when no such error has in fact occurred. It is not humanly feasible to have retention-dispositions that discriminate between cases in which the higher-order evidence is misleading and cases in which it is not. As a result, the dogmatic subject’s dispositions manifest as retaining belief whether or not the higher-order evidence is misleading. Her dispositions are problematic, for they will lead her to retain a botched belief—a belief that fails to constitute knowledge, and that fails to be appropriately based on one’s reasons or evidence—across many relevant counterfactual cases. This is why she is negatively evaluable: there are significantly better feasible dispositions. According to the evaluative standard I have sketched, then, a doxastic state is positively evaluable just in case it is a manifestation of dispositions that compare favorably with feasible alternatives. A subject is criticizable if she manifests dispositions that are is worse (or significantly worse) than feasible alternatives. I think that evaluations that thus take into account feasibility constraints arising, in particular, from a subject’s cognitive architecture are the most promising for capturing a more subjective dimension of evaluation across both the theoretical and practical realms—a dimension often picked out by talk of justification, or of a subjective sense of ‘ought’.²³ That is not to say, however, that how good a disposition is in absolute terms is of no evaluative significance. Assume that a subject succeeds at something (for instance, at goaling in football, or at knowing). We can now ask: given the ²³ See Lasonen-Aarnio (2019).

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104  - dispositions manifested, would she have succeeded across a sufficiently wide range of cases involving somewhat normal variations of the idiosyncraticseeming features of her situation? If so, the relevant dispositions have a kind of non-accidental connection to success: the subject’s success does not essentially hinge on idiosyncrasies of her situation.²⁴ The non-accidentality of a success seems important, in particular, for being praiseworthy or creditworthy for succeeding.²⁵ Hence, not all cases of manifesting the best feasible dispositions are on a par. I claimed at the outset that we often deploy the kind of dispositional evaluative perspective I have outlined. But at this point the reader might worry whether this is so, for occupying the perspective requires making judgments we rarely make or are in a position to make. For instance, it seems to require tracking exactly which dispositions a belief manifests. But surely, the thought goes, we have very little access to the fine details of another subject’s psychological processes. Moreover, the evaluations involve engaging in complicated calculations involving indefinitely many counterfactual cases. In response to these worries, let me point to various shortcuts one can deploy to make dispositional evaluations. First, we often have plenty of knowledge about how good the dispositions manifested are, even if we are unable to identify the exact dispositions at play. If, for instance, a belief was formed as a result of ordinary perception, we don’t need to be able to identify the exact dispositions, many of which might be subpersonal, to be able to judge that the dispositions involved are good: we have, after all, plenty of knowledge about how ordinary perception fares across counterfactual cases. Moreover, it is important to see that considerations of feasibility alone can help determine that a subject’s belief manifests bad dispositions. Consider the following simple case. You observe a subject not putting on a seatbelt. You are not sure exactly what dispositions she manifests, and just how circumscribed they are. (Perhaps, for instance, the subject is only disposed to forget when very distracted.) Nevertheless, you know that certain possible ways to be— certain possible dispositions to have—are just not ways that ordinary human

²⁴ Virtue epistemologists often talk about success being creditable to a subject: a subject succeeding in virtue of, or because of her competence. Knowledge, then, is belief that is true in virtue of being competent. As I am thinking about things, a belief can constitute knowledge, and be evaluated positively from the dispositional perspective, even if the fact that it constitutes knowledge is largely explained by somewhat invariant features of one’s situation. I think this is plausibly true in many cases of testimony—indeed, testimony has been raised as a problem for virtue epistemologists (e.g., Lackey 2007). ²⁵ See Lasonen-Aarnio (Forthcoming B).

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beings could be. It is not feasible to be disposed to not put on a seatbelt only when the ride won’t end in a crash. So, whatever the dispositions in fact being manifested are, it is reasonable to assume that they cannot discriminate between cases in which the safety belt will prove useful and cases in which it won’t. But dispositions that are thus indiscriminate between good and bad cases are problematic; it would be better to take the safety precaution and be systematically disposed to put on a seatbelt. Note also that this judgment does not depend on actually calculating the precise scores of the no-seatbelt and seat-belt dispositions, and then comparing these. We simply know that when crashes do happen, the outcomes for subjects wearing seatbelts tend to be much better, and that there are no significant harms to wearing seatbelts. To sum up: we often have a good idea of what kinds of dispositions are humanly feasible. We often have a good idea of what kinds of humanly feasible dispositions a subject’s belief (choice, action) could be a manifestation of. If all of the feasible dispositions are dominated by (significantly) better alternatives, then this is all we need to know in order to correctly negatively evaluate her belief (choice, action) from the dispositional perspective. Let me now finally apply dispositional evaluations to Lobelia’s case.

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5.4. Putative Defeat and Dispositional Discrimination Consider again the example Lobelia and evidence about hypoxia presented in the very beginning of this paper. Assume that despite the testimony of her friend, Lobelia retains her original belief. In what follows, I will evaluate Lobelia’s dispositions relative to the success of knowing, but parallel points could be made given other kinds of epistemic success, such as true belief. (Indeed, the reasoning in the section that follows is neutral between veritism and gnosticism.) What dispositions does Lobelia’s belief manifest? Some of these are no doubt excellent: her belief was originally formed in an exemplary way. But as pointed out previously, we must also evaluate the dispositions at play when Lobelia retains her belief in light of expert testimony that it was formed by a flawed process. In fact, we don’t need to know exactly what dispositions Lobelia manifests, for considerations of feasibility provide a shortcut. Begin with the following question: could Lobelia be disposed to retain belief in the face of similar evidence (e.g., expert testimony) about her cognitive malfunctioning only when such evidence is misleading? It is plausible that she could not, if she is an ordinary human being. Consider, in particular, counterfactual

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106  - cases in which Lobelia has similar higher-order evidence that is not misleading, cases in which she holds a belief formed through a flawed process that nevertheless seems to her to be perfectly fine. Being disposed to only give up belief in response to such higher-order evidence when that evidence is not misleading would require Lobelia to have dispositions that discriminate between cases in which her original cognitive process is fine, and cases in which it merely seemed to be fine. But such dispositions are not humanly feasible. Someone might object that by retaining her belief, Lobelia is acting in a way that is highly atypical of human subjects. In fact, most of us might be psychologically incapable of retaining belief in Lobelia’s situation, and for this reason Lobelia’s case might seem puzzling. But a natural response to such puzzlement is to start looking for explanations of what might make it feasible for Lobelia to retain her belief. Perhaps Lobelia has a dogmatic strain resulting from being overconfident in her own epistemic abilities. Or perhaps she has a high need for closure, tending to seize on the first piece of evidence available, and to then freeze her opinion, being more generally indifferent to subsequent evidence. The fact that Lobelia’s obstinacy is atypical seems to only strengthen my case, for all such explanations involve problematic dispositions. Hence, whatever the precise dispositions manifested by Lobelia are, it is natural to take her to manifest a kind of obstinacy that is indiscriminate in problematic ways—obstinacy that manifests itself as retaining a belief formed by a flawed cognitive process in cases in which her higher-order evidence is not misleading. Though I cannot defend these further claims here, on my view Lobelia can still know that Penelope committed the crime. (After all, she can just see that this is what the evidence points to—there is nothing whatsoever wrong with her cognitive faculties!)²⁶ Further, perhaps she could even come to know that the testimony of her friend is on this occasion misleading. She might, for instance, reason that if she was hypoxic, it would be very unlikely for her to have come to truly believe p, and yet, she does truly believe p. If Lobelia knows that her higher-order evidence is misleading, then there is a perfectly good sense in which she can discriminate the case she is in from those in which she

²⁶ Hence, when it comes to judgments about knowledge, my view is error theoretic: many epistemologists have misdiagnosed cases like Lobelia’s as ones involving knowledge defeat, falsely inferring failure to know from the manifestation of problematic dispositions. I can here only gesture toward an error-theoretic explanation, but the rough idea is that in paradigm cases knowledge is accompanied by good dispositions—indeed, in paradigm cases, good dispositions play an important role in explaining knowledge.

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is in fact hypoxic, or the victim of some other cognitive defect. Call such discrimination epistemic. This is compatible, I think, with Lobelia not being able to discriminate her case and cases in which she is hypoxic in a dispositional sense. It is not feasible, I have argued, for Lobelia to only be disposed to ignore the kind of higher-order evidence she has in cases in which it is misleading, and her original cognitive process was in perfect order. In retaining her knowledge, Lobelia is manifesting dispositions that fail to discriminate between cases in which her cognitive process was flawed and cases in which it was not. As a result, the very dispositions she manifests lead her to retain belief formed by a botched process across a wide range of counterfactual cases. Epistemic access or discrimination does not entail dispositional doxastic discrimination, or vice versa. It is worth emphasizing that the mere fact that our doxastic dispositions indiscriminately issue false beliefs in some counterfactual cases may be of no significance, for these cases might not be relevant. For example, assume that I come to believe the there is a tree just outside the window. Now consider counterfactual cases in which I am looking at a very realistic-looking tree replica instead. My dispositions cannot discriminate between cases involving real trees and ones involving very realistic fakes. Nevertheless, my belief may still be dispositionally good, manifesting the best (or close enough to the best) feasible dispositions, for recherché cases involving highly realistic tree-replicas planted outside windows are just not relevant. What is different about putative cases of defeat by higher-order evidence is that in such cases subjects have fairly strong evidence that their cognitive abilities are malfunctioning or, more generally, that a doxastic state they are in fails by some normative standard. It is very natural to evaluate Lobelia’s belief, now retained in light of the higherorder evidence, by looking at other, somewhat normal cases involving such evidence. (Indeed, epistemologists tend to talk about cases involving higherorder evidence as forming one epistemically salient kind.) There is nothing abnormal about such higher-order evidence not being misleading. In fact, if anything, it is more normal for expert testimony not to be misleading than for it to be misleading. In sum, I have argued that by retaining her belief despite the expert testimony that it is the output of a flawed process, Lobelia manifests dispositions that fail to discriminate between cases in which her higher-order evidence is misleading and cases in which it is not. As a result, these dispositions manifest as retaining a belief that is in fact the result of a flawed cognitive process across a wide range of relevant counterfactual cases—namely, cases in

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108  - which the higher-order evidence is not misleading. I will now argue that there are better feasible alternative dispositions.

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5.5. A Better Feasible Disposition There are two salient kinds of dispositions that a subject in Lobelia’s situation could manifest. First, she could retain her true belief (and, on my view, knowledge), thereby manifesting dispositions that would have her retain flawed beliefs in other relevant cases involving higher-order evidence. Second, she could give up her belief by suspending judgment, manifesting dispositions that in other relevant cases manifest as giving up belief, whether or not the belief was formed by a flawed process. For ease of exposition, in what follows I will simply speak of a “retention-disposition” and a “suspension-disposition”. Many epistemologists have urged that a subject in Lobelia’s situation ought to give up her belief. I will now argue that given plausible assumptions about the value of knowledge/true belief and the disvalue of false belief, the best feasible dispositions manifest in Lobelia’s situation as suspending judgment. This is so even if we concede, as I think we should, that Lobelia can retain knowledge. We will evaluate the retention-disposition by only looking at cases in which Lobelia retains her belief and evaluate the suspension-disposition by only looking at cases in which Lobelia suspends judgment. Nevertheless, the relevant counterfactual cases are otherwise similar: for instance, those assigned some significant weight, or considered relevant, are ones in which Lobelia gets higher-order evidence that is similar to the evidence that she acquires in the actual case. Whichever disposition we are evaluating, we can divide the relevant counterfactual cases into three classes: (1) Lobelia’s initial belief is the result of a good doxastic process, p is true, and the higher-order evidence is misleading. (2) Lobelia’s initial belief is the result of a flawed process, but nevertheless true. (3) Lobelia’s initial belief was false (whether as a result of a good or bad doxastic process). Instead of assigning each individual case a weight, for each disposition, we can just divide all of the counterfactual cases into these three classes according to which kind they fall under, and assign these classes weights (I will assume

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that these weights sum up to 1). Assuming each relevant case to have the same weight, we can think of the weight assigned to the first class of cases, for instance, as corresponding to the proportion of counterfactual cases in which Lobelia’s higher-order evidence is misleading. Moreover, it is plausible that these weights should be the same whether or not we are evaluating the retention-disposition or the suspension-disposition: the weighting of counterfactual cases should depend on issues like how normal it is for expert testimony of the sort that Lobelia receives to be misleading. In order to score the two dispositions, we need to determine the values of believing p (Bp) and not believing p (~ Bp) in cases falling into each of the three classes. I have assumed that if Lobelia is able to retain her belief, then the higher-order evidence need not destroy her knowledge. I will assume that if Lobelia retains belief in cases that fall under (1), she continues to know (this will just make it more difficult, not easier, to argue that the suspensiondisposition is better).²⁷ In the following table, ঋ denotes the value of knowing, ঔ the value of truly believing, and Àআ the disvalue of falsely believing. Not believing (for instance, suspending judgment), I will assume, has a neutral value 0 across the board.

(1) (2) (3)

Kind of case

U (Bp)

U (~Bp)

HOE misleading, p HOE not misleading, p ~p

ঋ ঔ Àআ

0 0 0

There are different ways of thinking about the value of true belief versus the value of knowledge versus the disvalue of false belief. According to veritists, true belief is valuable, and there is no added value to knowing; knowing inherits its value from the value of true belief. Veritist evaluations :

ঋ ¼ ঔ>0> À আ

According to gnosticists, knowledge is valuable, and more valuable than true belief. Gnosticists have various options when it comes to the value of true belief.²⁸ They nevertheless all agree that knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief, and that mere true belief is no worse than false belief: ²⁷ One might object that there are some cases in which p is true, and the HOE is misleading, but Lobelia nevertheless does not know p, due to being in some sort of Gettier case. I agree but relaxing this idealization would only make a suspension-disposition better, not worse. ²⁸ See Dutant and Fitelson (Unpublished manuscript).

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110  -

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Gnosticist evaluations :

ঋ > 0 > À আ; ঋ > ঔ  Àআ

All of this, I take it, is rather uncontroversial. I will also make the following assumption: ঋ < আ. That is, the disvalue of false belief is greater than the value of true belief or knowledge.²⁹ Whether one is a veritist or a gnosticist, it follows from these assumptions that if the weight assigned to (3) is at least .5, then not believing does better than retaining belief across the relevant counterfactual cases. Assume for simplicity that each individual case is assigned the same non-zero weight. We can then rephrase the point as follows: if at least half of the relevant counterfactual cases are ones in which Lobelia’s initial belief is false, then suspending judgment is a better overall strategy—that is, the suspensiondisposition is better. And it is plausible that Lobelia’s initial belief is false in at least half of the relevant counterfactual cases, cases in which she gets evidence akin to the testimony of an expert that her cognitive process is flawed. Assume, for instance, that in 90 per cent of relevant counterfactual cases, Lobelia’s higher-order evidence is not misleading: she is in fact hypoxic (or suffers from some other defect). In those cases, Lobelia’s dispositions will manifest as retaining a flawed belief. In none of those cases does the belief constitute knowledge (presumably, even true beliefs that are outputs of flawed cognitive processes don’t constitute knowledge). Moreover, Lobelia’s belief will be false in the vast majority of these cases, for flawed processes rarely happen to produce true beliefs. One consequence of this approach is that if Lobelia’s higher-order evidence was weaker, retaining belief might manifest good dispositions. Assume, for instance, that Lobelia is told that at an earlier time, prior to forming her initial belief, there was an objective chance of 10 percent that she would be hypoxic by the time she formed this belief. Depending on the value of knowledge/true belief, and the disvalue of false belief, in this case the best feasible dispositions might manifest as retaining belief. I think this is a very good result. After all, we should almost always assign some credence to the hypothesis that any given belief was formed by a flawed process. Nevertheless, this shouldn’t lead us to an unending process of second-guessing ourselves or calibrating our opinions. Before wrapping up, I want to distinguish my way of evaluating dispositions from a more instrumentalist one, and to say how my view is not susceptible to various objections leveled against consequentialist views in epistemology. ²⁹ See Dutant and Fitelson (Manuscript) for discussion.

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5.6. Contrast with Instrumentalist Views On the broad approach outlined, doxastic states are evaluated by evaluating the dispositions that these states are manifestations of, dispositions being evaluated by looking at the values of their manifestations across relevant counterfactual cases. Consider a success S, and a disposition D manifested by a subject in a given situation. Here are two importantly different ways of evaluating the goodness of D, relative to S.³⁰ Take manifestations of D across relevant counterfactual cases. First, we could ask whether manifestations of D tend to be successful—or at least as successful as those of feasible alternative dispositions. (This is a rough and ready way of putting things: I intend it to be compatible with assigning values to these manifestations depending on how close to success they come.) Second, we could evaluate manifestations of D by asking whether they tend to produce the relevant success, whether they tend to be good means to success, or whether they tend to have the relevant success as a downstream consequence. It should be clear that I have been assigning values to dispositions in accordance with the first approach. I think it would be wrong to restrict epistemic evaluations to dispositions that manifest as forming, revising, retaining, or retrieving doxastic states. For instance, engaging one’s rational brain before reasoning about difficult, emotionally laden topics and consulting a variety of sources are good things to do from the epistemic perspective. This is a point I return to later. Nevertheless, I have focused on a specific kind of epistemic evaluation of doxastic states. Some dispositions are good when evaluated from the more instrumental perspective focused on the consequences of their manifestations, but bad when evaluated from the perspective focused on the manifestations themselves. To take an example from Horowitz (2019), consider an arachnophobic subject who is almost bound to form botched beliefs about a wide range of topics whenever she believes that there are spiders nearby. She has plenty of evidence about the proximity of spiders, but she manages to believe that there are in fact no spiders nearby. For such a subject, a disposition to believe, no matter what evidence she has, that there are no spiders nearby might be an instrumentally good disposition, since it allows her to form other good beliefs (beliefs that are true, proportioned to the evidence, that constitute knowledge, etc.). Nevertheless, such a disposition is not good in the sense that I have

³⁰ Earlier statements of my view did not clearly distinguish between these, though it was always the first kind of view I had in mind. For instance, in Lasonen-Aarnio (2010), I talk about “adopting or being guided by policies, thought of as sets of rules, that have certain consequences for knowledge.”

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112  - outlined, for it does not tend to have successful manifestations: across a range of counterfactual cases including the actual one, it manifests as belief that is false, that fails to be proportioned to the evidence, and that fails to constitute knowledge. It should be clear, then, that the view outlined is not susceptible to an objection often levelled against more consequentialist views—namely, that it allows for problematic kinds of tradeoffs.³¹ Relatedly, one might object that evaluating dispositions in terms of the epistemic consequences of their manifestations takes us out of the traditional epistemic realm: though failure to get enough sleep might have bad epistemic consequences, norms telling one to get enough sleep are not epistemic, but practical ones.³² But of course, the manifestations of a dispositions to stay up too long at night are not doxastic states, and hence, not the sorts of things that could constitute epistemic successes like knowing. Whether we call dispositions that are good in the more direct way outlined knowledge-conducive is a terminological choice. Similarly, whether the evaluations I have outlined are consequentialist may be a terminological issue: there might be a perfectly good sense in which a disposition has good consequences in virtue of its manifestations tending to be successful. What matters is that there is an important difference between two ways in which a disposition could be said to be conducive to success, or to have good consequences for success. The kinds of dispositional evaluations I have outlined evaluate dispositions by looking at how successful their manifestations are across relevant counterfactual cases, compared with feasible alternatives.³³ Nevertheless, I think it is a virtue of focusing on dispositions that while we can simultaneously make sense of the kinds of more narrow epistemic evaluations that epistemologists have often been exclusively concerned with, the kind of framework outlined can be tweaked to make sense of epistemic

³¹ For a discussion of consequentialist views in epistemology and how they allow for tradeoffs, see Berker (2013). ³² Cf. Horowitz (2019). ³³ Though this should be very clear by now, it is also worth emphasizing that my account does not evaluate dispositions in terms of subjective expectations. Consider the success of having accurate credences, where a credence in a proposition p is more successful the closer it is to 1 if p is true, and the closer it is to 0 if p is false. Schoenfield (2018) proposes a way of evaluating doxastic plans by asking what the (subjective) expected accuracy of making the plan—of trying to update in accordance with a given procedure—is. (Similarly, we could evaluate doxastic dispositions by asking what the expected accuracy is of credal states produced by those dispositions.) Though our accounts have some structural similarities, dispositional evaluations are more objective: a subject’s opinions about the goodness of a disposition might themselves be inaccurate, or she might lack any such opinions. Note also that Schoenfield’s results (like many results concerning the expected accuracy of update procedures) also rely on assumptions about evidence that I would reject, like partitionality.

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evaluations in a broader sense. Indeed, we can evaluate a wide range of dispositions relevant to successful inquiry. As an example, consider a very narrowly focused subject whose everyday habits don’t expose him to much evidence. There isn’t anything wrong, as such, with his sources, it’s just that they are not very plentiful or diverse: he tends to read a single newspaper, restricting his attention to certain topics within it. His beliefs are reasonable in light of the available evidence—indeed, many are even true, and constitute knowledge. Or consider an even more worrying case involving limited evidence. As a result of subconscious biases, an employer only superficially glances over a job candidate’s CV. He fails to gain relevant evidence about her—for instance, he never learns about a highly pertinent degree. However, given the evidence he has, he reasonably decides that she is not a suitable candidate: among other things, he knows that she has a(nother) degree in an area not very relevant for the job. The employer’s beliefs might be perfectly proportioned to the reasons and evidence he has.³⁴ A broader evaluative perspective focused on dispositions allows criticizing the evidence-seeking dispositions of these subjects. For instance, one might point out that they are not as conducive, in the instrumental sense, to knowledge as alternatives. Or we might instead focus on the success of having a representative, sufficiently comprehensive body of evidence. The evidence-seeking dispositions of these subject are not very good (in the more direct, non-instrumental sense) when it comes to this success.

5.7. Conclusions I have outlined an evaluative perspective that explains why Lobelia, as well as other subjects who acquire seemingly defeating higher-order evidence, are criticizable for retaining their beliefs. I argued that, given plausible assumptions, it is not feasible to manifest dispositions that discriminate between cases in which the kind of higher-order evidence Lobelia has is misleading and cases in which it is not. Whatever dispositions Lobelia manifests, her obstinacy is indiscriminate in problematic ways—it manifests itself across a range of relevant cases involving similar evidence as retaining flawed beliefs. There are better feasible dispositions, dispositions that would manifest in her situation as suspending judgment. This is so given a range of veritist and gnosticist ³⁴ See Miracchi (2019) and Flores and Woodard (manuscript) for a more detailed discussion of such cases.

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114  - views and hence, given a range of different ways of assigning epistemic values to doxastic states.³⁵

References Baker-Hytch, Max and Benton, Matthew A. (2015). Defeatism defeated. Philosophical Perspectives, 29: 40–66. Beddor, Bob. (2015). Process reliabilism’s troubles with defeat. The Philosophical Quarterly, 65(259): 145–59. Berker, Selim. (2013). Epistemic teleology and the separateness of propositions. Philosophical Review, 122(3): 337–93. Christensen, David. (2010). Higher-order evidence. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 81(1): 185–215. Dennett, Daniel C. (1969). Content and Consciousness. Routledge & Kegan Paul. Dutant, Julien, and Fitelson, Branden. Unpublished Manuscript. KnowledgeCentered Epistemic Utility Theory. Drayson, Zoe. (2014). The personal/subpersonal distinction. Philosophy Compass, 9(5): 338–46.

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Flores, Carolina and Woodard, Elise. Manuscript. Easy evidence and epistemic upgrades: In defense of a duty to gather evidence. Horowitz, Sophie. (2019). Predictably misleading evidence. In: M. Skipper and A. Steglich-Petersen (eds.) Higher-Order Evidence: New Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hurka, Thomas. (2006). Virtuous act, virtuous dispositions. Analysis, 66(1): 69–76. Lackey, Jennifer. (2007). Why we don’t deserve credit for everything we know. Synthese, 158(3): 345–61. Lasonen-Aarnio, Maria. (2010). Perspectives, 24(1): 1–21.

Unreasonable

knowledge.

Philosophical

Lasonen-Aarnio, Maria. (2014). Higher-order evidence and the limits of defeat. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 88(2): 314–45. Lasonen-Aarnio, Maria. (2019). Higher-order defeat and evincibility. In: M. Skipper and A. Steglich-Petersen (eds.) Higher-Order Evidence: New Essay. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

³⁵ I am grateful to Jessica Brown, Julien Dutant, Giada Frantantonio, Jaakko Hirvelä, Aleks Knoks, and Niall Paterson for helpful comments on earlier drafts. Many thanks to Chris Kelp for detailed comments on a closely related talk. Many thanks to Daniel Drucker, Jeremy Goodman, John Hawthorne, and Tim Williamson for discussions.

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Lasonen-Aarnio, Maria. (Forthcoming A). Competent failure and victims of deceit. In: Dutant and Dorsch (eds.) The New Evil Demon. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lasonen-Aarnio, Maria. (Forthcoming B). Perspectives and good dispositions. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Lewis, David. (1986). On the Plurality of Worlds. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Miracchi, Lisa. (2019). When evidence isn’t enough: Suspension, evidentialism, and knowledge-first virtue epistemology. Episteme, 16(4): 413–37. Schoenfield, Miriam. (2018). An accuracy-based approach to higher order evidence. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 96(3): 690–715. Schaffer, Jonathan. (2004). Two conceptions of sparse properties. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 85: 92–102. Sher, George. (2006). In Praise of Blame. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Simion, Mona, Kelp, Christoph, and Ghijsen, Harmen. (2016). Norms of Belief. Philosophical Issues. A supplement to Nous, 26(1): 375–92.

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6 Suspension, Higher-Order Evidence, and Defeat Errol Lord and Kurt Sylvan

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6.1. Introduction In regulating one’s intellectual life, one should pay heed to the evidence. Often this is a matter of considering which facts confirm or disconfirm some hypothesis one is considering. Although this is hard enough, it turns out that reckoning with the evidence would be much easier if this were the only task. For besides evidence that confirms or disconfirms a hypothesis one is considering (first-order evidence), there is also evidence that bears on our rationality in inquiring into the hypothesis (higher-order evidence). So, for example, you might know that you are prone to make mistakes when reasoning about the significance of certain statistical information; or you might know that, given the fact that you’ve been driving all night, you are in less than ideal condition for doing mental math; or you might know that, despite your having conscientiously reached a conclusion on a difficult subject, someone you take to be cleverer disagrees. All these facts about one’s competence, condition, or situation bear on whether one’s stance is rational, but it is unclear at best how they bear on truth-value of the hypothesis one is considering.¹ As it happens, this basic contrast between first-order evidence and higherorder evidence raises a host of puzzles and problems. These difficulties have led many philosophers to adopt some extreme views in two related debates. The first debate is about the rational impact of disagreement. The second is about whether it is possible for there to be rational epistemic akrasia (e.g., cases where one rationally has a doxastic attitude D even though one believes one shouldn’t have D).

¹ There are possible cases in which higher-order evidence alters first-order relations of evidential confirmation. But we will be arguing that the distinctive significance of higher-order evidence HOE does not consist in this kind of impact.

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, - ,  

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When it comes to disagreement, extreme views abound. On one extreme, it has become popular to think that the higher-order evidence provided by peer disagreement always has a dramatic impact; on this view, higher-order evidence provided by peer disagreement always requires us to converge in some way with those with whom we disagree. On the other extreme lies the view that the higher-order evidence provided by disagreement has no rational impact whatsoever. According to this view, we should always just go with the firstorder evidence and hence stick to our guns. Extreme views also have considerable popularity in the other debate. Some think nothing prevents higher-order evidence from giving rise to rational epistemic akrasia. According to this view, there are not the right sorts of systematic connections between first-order evidence and higher-order evidence to prevent such uncomfortable situations. Although this view has its opponents, little has been done by them to explain why avoiding epistemic akrasia is required. It is hard to believe that avoiding akrasia is a fundamental obligation: as the vast literature on the normativity of rationality suggests,² coherence requirements of this kind are dubious as absolute requirements, and even dubious as principles there is any reason to follow, barring some further story about what this reason is. Without a vindication of the normativity of coherence requirements, it is not easy to feel comfortable ruling out the extreme view. We think such extreme views must be wrong. But we want a framework that explains why they are wrong, and partly for this reason we also aren’t satisfied with existing moderate approaches.³ Hence, our central task is to develop a principled moderate framework for accommodating the normative significance of higher-order evidence. The work in the paper can be divided into two parts: negative and positive. Our negative claim is that the gridlock between extreme views and the existing moderate views owes to mistaken background assumptions about the relationship between first-order relations of evidential favoring, reasons for belief, and reasons for suspension. We think, however, that more work needs to be done to provide a systematic explanation of why these background

² For overviews, see Way (2010) and Lord (Forthcoming A). ³ As we will acknowledge again in the next section, some principled moderate stories have been told—e.g., the accuracy-based epistemic consequentialist story of Schoenfield (2018). But we think these stories are overly committal on foundational normative questions on which we think the best general view about the impact of higher-order evidence would be non-committal. One of us is also an epistemic non-consequentialist (see Sylvan (2020)), and for this reason cannot accept Schoenfield’s story as the fundamental story.

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118      assumptions fail in the cases that interest us. For this reason, we also have a positive project. The positive view in turn has two parts. The first part is the idea that higherorder evidence provides direct reasons for suspending judgment that typically leave evidential support relations on the first order intact: instead of destroying these relations, the reasons for suspension defeat or compete with the epistemic reasons for belief generated by these relations. Secondly, and more importantly, our framework explains how this defeat is possible by showing how these distinctive reasons for suspension of judgment flow from the constitution of suspension of judgment. As a result, our framework is embedded within an account of suspension of judgment that shows how new insights about its nature lead to a different picture of its rational profile. This framework provides a compelling basis for more moderate positions about disagreement and epistemic akrasia, which show the puzzles about these topics to rest on more fundamental mistakes about suspension and the relationship between reasons for suspension, reasons for belief, and evidence. Our framework for explaining the reasons for suspension that derive from higher-order evidence might be described as a sort of constitutivist framework. But we would want to stress two things before having the reader embrace this description. Firstly, we’re neutral on whether to think about the constitutivism as a constitutivism of aims (leading to teleology) or a constitutivism of norms (leading to a non-teleological view). Secondly, to be neutral in a further way, we are here understanding constitutivism differently than it is normally understood, following Markovits (2014)’s understanding of Kantianism about reasons. Markovits took the Kantian view to be consistent with nonnaturalism, and to be a substantive view according to which reasons are ultimately given by but perhaps not reductively explained by facts about the nature of agency. Although we happen to like reductive constitutivist views (see Lord and Sylvan (2019)), we here don’t use ‘constitutivism’ to refer to such views. Hence, we take this paper to be neutral on the obviously quite controversial question of whether a constitutivist reduction of normativity is possible. With these aims and ideas in view, here is our plan. In the next section, we will provide some initial motivation for thinking that a framework like ours is needed by looking at the gridlock that has emerged between principled but extreme views and moderate but unsatisfying or unprincipled views about epistemic akrasia and disagreement. The gridlock owes, we’ll see, to overlooked assumptions about the relationship between first-order relations of evidential favoring, reasons for belief, and reasons for suspension. But a

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systematic framework like ours is needed to explain how these assumptions could fail. Having made these points, we turn to our positive work in Section 6.3, seeking to provide a more fundamental motivation for the claim that higher-order evidence provides reasons to suspend judgment. We will do this by showing both how this claim fits into a more general view of the nature and rational profile of suspension, and by showing that pure evidentialists about epistemic rationality have a hard time accounting for the full range of higher-order evidence. In Section 6.4, we explain how our view accounts for the full range of higher-order evidence, and why it is preferable to existing views. We then draw things to a close in Section 6.5 by taking a step back to consider two ways in which our view can be incorporated into more fundamental frameworks in the ethics of belief.

6.2. Extremism, Moderation, and a New Third Way 6.2.1 Extremism and Moderation

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To appreciate why some have been led to extreme views about the epistemically appropriate response to disagreement and other sources of higher-order evidence, it will help to reflect on examples. Consider a now-classic example that we take verbatim from Christensen (2010: 187): Drugs. ‘I am asked to be a subject in an experiment. Subjects are given a drug, and then asked to draw conclusions about simple logical puzzles. The drug has been shown to degrade people’s performance in just this kind of task quite sharply. [ . . . ] I accept the offer, and, after sipping a coffee while reading the consent form, I tell them I’m ready to begin. Before giving me any pills, they give me a practice question: Suppose all bulls are fierce and Ferdinand is not a fierce bull. Which of the following must be true? (a) Ferdinand is fierce; (b) Ferdinand is not fierce; (c) Ferdinand is a bull; (d) Ferdinand is not a bull. I become extremely confident that the answer is that only (d) must be true. But then I’m told that the coffee they gave me actually was laced with the drug. My confidence that the answer is ‘only (d)’ drops dramatically.’

On the one hand, it is tempting to think that the subject’s reaction in this case is rational, and that it would be irrational to maintain confidence that ‘only

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120      (d)’ is the correct answer. This thought is tempting because it is tempting to think that Christensen should not be confident that he has sufficient reason to believe this conclusion, and hence should not believe it. On the other hand, this conclusion does follow from the premises, and we can imagine that the subject sees that this is the case before learning about the coffee. Hence, it appears that ‘only (d)’ is the conclusion that there is conclusive reason to believe, given straightforwardly apprehensible logical truths. It is hard to think the subject ceases to possess this reason just owing to the information about the drug. From these apparent facts, we already have a strong intuitive tension, which can be more officially seen with the help of two plausible principles: Conclusive Reason: If there is a conclusive reason R to believe that p, and S possesses this reason, then it cannot be irrational for S to believe p on the basis of R.

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Level-Bridging: If there is a strong undefeated reason to believe that one lacks sufficient reason to believe that p, then one is rationally required not to believe p. From the Conclusive Reason principle and the thought that there is conclusive reason to believe simple logical consequences of rational beliefs, we get the conclusion that the subject in Christensen’s example cannot be irrational to believe that the answer is ‘only (d).’ But from the Level-Bridging principle, we appear to get the opposite conclusion. Something, it seems, must go. Three kinds of extreme views have emerged to explain what should go. On the one hand, some accept Conclusive Reason but reject Level-Bridging. This option is defended by Coates (2012). He agrees that if there is a strong undefeated reason to believe that one lacks sufficient reason to believe that p, then one ought to believe that one lacks sufficient reason to believe that p. But he denies that if one rationally believes that one lacks sufficient reason to believe that p, it cannot still be rational for one to believe that p. Hence, he thinks that rational epistemic akrasia is possible. This idea is, we think, worth avoiding if possible. On the other hand, some try to accept both principles but deny that they conflict by denying that one can have a strong undefeated reason to believe a false proposition about what the reasons recommend. Titelbaum (2015) and Way and Whiting (2016) in effect defend this option. Although we respect the arguments given by these authors, we also think that it would be nice to avoid the view that mistakes about what the reasons recommend are impossible. Such mistakes seem possible.

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Finally, some accept the Level-Bridging Principle but reject Conclusive Reason. Worsnip (2018) recommends an intriguing version of this option. He follows philosophers of practical reason like Scanlon (1998), Kolodny (2005), and Broome (2013) in distinguishing between what reasons require and what rationality requires. Defenders of this option would then recommend replacing Conclusive Reason with a principle that swaps the ‘it cannot be irrational’ for ‘it cannot be contrary to reason.’ Although we agree that we should distinguish between what reasons simpliciter require and what formal rationality requires (and we take this to be all Scanlon and Kolodny believe), we think it is extremely counterintuitive to deny that possessed reasons and rationality can issue conflicting requirements. For this reason, we also see Worsnip’s tack as a last resort. In the narrower literature on the higher-order evidence provided by disagreement, we find a different batch of extreme views. On the one hand, there are those who hold the equal weight view, which maintains that whenever you disagree with epistemic peers,⁴ you are rationally required to split the difference between your credence and theirs. Translating to ‘coarse-grained’ or outright attitudes (our focus here),⁵ the equal weight view predicts that whenever you disagree with an epistemic peer, you are rationally required to suspend judgment. On the other extreme there are what we’ll call extreme steadfasters. Extreme steadfasters maintain that you are never required to change your mind in the face of peer disagreement. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most popular strategies for defending these positions rely on the idea that one sort of evidence is irrelevant. Equal weight theorists argue that when you disagree, you are required to set aside the firstorder evidence you initially heeded.⁶ Once you bracket this evidence, though, there isn’t anything left to support belief or disbelief. Thus, suspension is required. On the other side, there are theorists arguing that the higher-order evidence is not relevant at all. According to them, the evidence says what it says, and we should just follow it. Most of the arguments for this position contend that ⁴ Various definitions of epistemic peerhood are provided in the literature. The rough idea is that your epistemic peers are those with whom you share evidence and who are just as good as you at processing that evidence. ⁵ It is important to note that the view we develop below is, in the first instance, about outright attitudes. There is then a hard and interesting question about the relationship between these attitudes and credences. We don’t know how to resolve that question. But we would want to resolve it before saying anything directly about credences. Thanks to Jade Fletcher for pressing for clarification here. ⁶ This is often done by appealing to a principle like David Christensen’s Independence principle (see Christensen (2007), Christensen (2011), Christensen (2009); and also Elga 2007; Cohen (2013); for criticism, see Kelly (2013); Sosa (2013); Lackey (2010); Lord (2014)).

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122      giving higher-order evidence rational power creates more problems than it is worth. Weatherson (2019), for example, argues that thinking that higherorder evidence generates first-order reasons gives rise to vicious regresses, which are avoidable only by ‘screening off ’ the rational impact of higher-order evidence. He uses this view to support a steadfast line on disagreement. Each extreme view about the rational impact of disagreement is a member of a wider class of views. The equal weight view is a form of conciliationism, a more general view which holds that the fact that some peer disagrees is always a reason to reform one’s opinion. Conciliationism on its own says nothing about how much one should reform one’s opinion. The equal weight view takes an extreme line on this. On the other hand, the extreme steadfast view is a member of a wider class of steadfast views, which all maintain that at least sometimes it is rational to maintain one’s original belief in the face of disagreement.⁷ Steadfasting per se is compatible with disagreement having massive rational effects in many cases. It just denies that it always has these effects. Steadfasting is compatible with conciliationism. It is compatible with the claim that at least sometimes one can maintain one’s original view that facts about disagreement always provide reasons against belief. And, indeed, this combination of views is downright commonsensical. It is, we think, a moderate position worth fighting for, and we intend to fight for it. The problem, though, is that it is unclear how to vindicate it. Extant versions of moderate conciliationism and steadfasting have been light on the details,⁸ with the notable exception of Schoenfield’s consequentialist conciliationism (which we think is overly committal on foundational normative questions). They fail to offer views about the mechanics of the rational impact of disagreement that vindicate common sense. One of our main goals is to provide a framework for delivering these mechanics.

6.2.2 Making Room for Moderation To shed light on the under-explored area of logical space we would like to inhabit, we need to consider an insufficiently targeted background assumption lurking behind our earlier formulation of the akrasia puzzle. Here it will help

⁷ Most extant opponents of the equal weight view (and other extreme conciliationist views) are in fact moderate steadfasters rather than extreme steadfasters, with Tom Kelly being the exemplar. ⁸ See Lord (2014) for discussion.

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to consider a further kind of case and a specific version of the reasoning that has appeared in the literature. Worsnip (2018)’s discussion is, we think, instructive. Worsnip suggests that in cases where we can rationally believe false propositions about what the evidence supports, it can be rational to hold doxastic attitudes that are not supported by the epistemic reasons that this evidence provides. Now, to get to Worsnip’s conclusion in such cases, we will need the following assumption:

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Evidential Confirmation-Reasons Principle: Necessarily, if the evidence confirms attitude A, then the epistemic reasons favor attitude A. From this assumption and our two earlier principles, we can infer that in such cases, it could be rational to hold doxastic attitudes which are not supported by the epistemic reasons. But if this assumption is false, we cannot make this inference. We could give a different diagnosis: while the evidence bears a strong probabilistic relation to a certain conclusion, and favors that conclusion more than others, there is not yet sufficient reason to jump to that conclusion. This diagnosis would avoid a tension between our two principles. It would restore the connection between levels at the cost of weakening the link between strength of evidential confirmation and overall strength of reasons. Is this option worth considering? We think so. Reflecting on another hidden assumption in the discussion of our first example gives strong reason to consider it. Notice that in Drugs, we cannot generate a tension between the Conclusive Reason and Level-Bridging principles without the help of the following assumption: Entailment-Reasons Principle: Necessarily, if the facts entail that p and one is aware of them, then one’s epistemic reasons decisively favor believing p. This principle is far from obvious, as the literature querying the relationship between logic and reasons for belief already suggests.⁹ Admittedly, the existing literature mainly suggests that there cannot necessarily be objective reason to believe whatever is entailed by one’s beliefs, since these beliefs may be unjustified. But as both of us have more recently stressed in developing accounts of possessed normative reasons,¹⁰ it is also not plausible that one possesses a reason to believe p simply in virtue of having a justified belief which entails that p: one must also be sensitive to the relevant ground of the reason-for ⁹ For the locus classicus, see Harman (1984).

¹⁰ See Sylvan (2015); Lord (2018).

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124      relation (e.g., some relevant logical relation or evidential relation). What we want to suggest here is that the example of higher-order evidence gives a further reason for doubting this principle.¹¹ We can now state the more general doctrine that we take to be indispensable for generating a tension between the Conclusive Reason and Level-Bridging principles:

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Logico-Evidentialism about Epistemic Reasons: If evidence E entails or strongly confirms p, then there is always a correspondingly strong reason to believe p. Of course, a story does need to be told about why this doctrine fails in the cases that interest us. It may, after all, remain tempting to think that this principle at least generates default reasons that would need to be defeated by competing reasons, and we need to know more about the mechanics of this interaction. As Christensen and others have noted, it isn’t enough here to appeal to the notion of undercutting defeat, since undercutting defeaters are meant to sever evidence-for relations, and these relations are not severed in the examples that concern us.¹² Here, however, we think some further existing literature serves as a useful guide. Note that we are not the first theorists to reject this doctrine. Defenders of pragmatic encroachment have already rejected it. Schroeder (2012)’s story is instructive. He suggests that even if all epistemic reasons for belief are generated by the logical and probabilistic relations between the evidence and further propositions, it does not follow that all reasons against belief have the same foundation. And if not, then it cannot be obvious that there is sufficient epistemic reason to believe even straightforward consequences of one’s evidence. For even if there is an impeccable reason for belief, one cannot follow it if there is an impeccable reason against. Schroeder suggests that stakes generate such reasons against belief, yielding a deeper explanation of how pragmatic encroachment works.¹³ ¹¹ Gonzalez de Prado Salas (2020)) argues that higher-order evidence casts doubt on the EntailmentReasons Principle precisely because it makes it the case that one fails to possess the first-order evidence, by making one insensitive to the grounds of the reason. This does happen, but we don’t think it is a fully general explanation. ¹² See, for example, Christensen (2010); Lasonen-Aarnio (2014); and Pryor (2013). ¹³ As a matter of detail, Schroeder does not maintain that the stakes directly provide reasons to suspend. Instead, he holds that the stakes provide reasons against belief, and that sometimes those reasons are strong enough that the balance of the reasons for and against belief requires suspension. EL argues against this in favor of the view that we need to posit direct reasons to suspend in Lord (Forthcoming B). On pragmatic encroachment, EL then defends similar conclusions to Schroeder.

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We think that higher-order evidence plays a similar role to the role Schroeder thinks the stakes play.¹⁴ In one respect, we are on easier footing than Schroeder, since it is more obvious why the reasons here should be properly epistemic.¹⁵ But again, to get an account that is preferable to extant views, more will need to be said about why such reasons for suspension exist. Thankfully, ideas already on the shelf provide a guide. Many epistemologists and philosophers of normativity are attracted to the idea that epistemic reasons for belief are generated by standards derived from the essential nature of belief.¹⁶ A common example of such a story is the attempt to ground epistemic reasons for belief by appealing to the essential aim or standard of correctness for belief. Given Schroeder’s observations, it would be natural to tell a similar story about how the nature of suspension might be able to generate properly epistemic but non-evidential reasons for belief. One might claim that suspending judgment essentially aims to protect us from the risk of being wrong, where the relevant notion of risk isn’t purely evidencedetermined. This is why, one might suggest, it is possible to suspend judgment in a high-stakes case on the basis of the stakes attaching to acting on the belief. The naturalness of extending a constitutivist account of epistemic reasons for belief to reasons for suspension provides a strategic basis for our project. The resulting derivation of reasons for suspension from the nature of suspension will take place at a high level. It could then be interpreted differently by theorists with different larger normative frameworks; epistemic nonconsequentialists, for example, might develop the story about the details in one way, and consequentialists in another way. But while the account leaves some theoretical options open in this respect, it is clearly a principled and explanatory account. We suggest that this kind of account provides the best general explanation of why higher-order evidence generates defeaters. We will turn in the next section to consider the nature of suspension of judgment and how this leads to higher-order defeaters, and then return in the section after to explain in more detail how the account resolves the gridlock and fits in the literature on

Similar moves are made within a contrastivist framework in Snedegar (2017: Ch. 6). We want to be neutral in this paper on whether contrastivism is true. KS indicates some sympathy for contrastivism in Fogal and Sylvan (2016). We might be willing to embrace it if it is needed to explain the weight of some reasons for withholding, as Snedegar suggests. ¹⁴ But again, we think that the higher-order evidence provides direct reasons to suspend, not just reasons against belief. ¹⁵ See Lord (Forthcoming B) for a more systematic argument that they are properly epistemic. ¹⁶ See, for example, Velleman (2000); Sosa (2007); Sosa (2010); Sosa (2015); Shah (2003); Wedgwood (2002); Lord and Sylvan (2019).

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126      disagreement and higher-order evidence. We will conclude with some directions for further research, noting two importantly different avenues left open: one avenue unites the story with Schroeder’s account of pragmatic encroachment, while a different avenue remains within a non-pragmatic, purely accuracy-based epistemology.

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6.3. Higher-Order Evidence and Reasons to Suspend In this section we will provide motivation for thinking that higher-order evidence generates reasons to suspend. This motivation has two parts. Firstly, continuing the train of thought started in the last section, we will argue further against the idea that we can fully explain epistemic rationality by appealing to facts that confirm or disconfirm a hypothesis. We will do this by arguing that such views cannot account for the rational impact of all higherorder evidence. This argument will provide independent motivation for denying the Logico-Evidentialist background assumptions at the heart of the debates canvassed in the previous section. It will also motivate the claim that higher-order evidence provides direct reasons to suspend judgment. The second ambition of this section is to argue that a plausible general account of the nature of suspension and reasons to suspend implies that higher-order evidence provides direct reasons to suspend. We will sketch this general account and provide some motivation for it, but we won’t fully defend it. Our goal is merely to show that we have a plausible story about how higher-order evidence provides direct reasons to suspend.

6.3.1 When the Evidence Gives Out Those attracted to broadly evidentialist views—i.e., nearly all the main participants in our two debates—might doubt the need to use direct reasons to suspend to understand the rational impact of higher-order evidence. Why posit direct reasons to suspend if you can get by just with the evidence? There are several reasons why we need reasons to suspend which aren’t determined just by evidential confirmation relations and logical relations between evidence and attitudes.¹⁷ One of these reasons is particularly germane here: there is no plausible straightforward evidentialist explanation of the full ¹⁷ See Lord (Manuscript) for a more comprehensive survey.

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range of cases involving higher-order evidence. This is because some higherorder evidence is merely higher-order evidence—i.e., it is evidence that only bears on your rational standing vis-à-vis some question. It doesn’t speak to the first-order question at all. This fact precludes any straightforward evidentialist account of the rational role of the higher-order evidence.¹⁸ Let’s unpack the thought. Consider Drugs again:¹⁹ Drugs. ‘I am asked to be a subject in an experiment. Subjects are given a drug, and then asked to draw conclusions about simple logical puzzles. The drug has been shown to degrade people’s performance in just this kind of task quite sharply. [ . . . ] I accept the offer, and, after sipping a coffee while reading the consent form, I tell them I’m ready to begin. Before giving me any pills, they give me a practice question: Suppose all bulls are fierce and Ferdinand is not a fierce bull. Which of the following must be true? (a) Ferdinand is fierce; (b) Ferdinand is not fierce; (c) Ferdinand is a bull; (d) Ferdinand is not a bull.

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I become extremely confident that the answer is that only (d) must be true. But then I’m told that the coffee they gave me actually was laced with the drug. My confidence that the answer is ‘only (d)’ drops dramatically.’

Plausibly, the fact that the coffee is laced with the drug has some impact on what the subject epistemically ought to do. Indeed, it is plausible that he is forbidden from believing that (d) is the right answer. He ought to suspend judgment. Furthermore, this intuition remains even if we emphasize that his reasoning was logically impeccable, and he had proof that (d) is the correct answer. How might the evidentialist explain this result? One sort of evidentialist simply can’t. This character accepts what we will call Strong Evidentialism: Strong Evidentialism: The rational doxastic attitude toward p is solely determined by the evidence for p and for ~p. The balance of the evidence for and against whether (d) is the correct answer is clear. Again, we could even imagine that the subject has a proof that (d) is right. So, if all we have is the first-order evidence, we can’t explain why he ¹⁸ In one way or another, this fact has been pointed out frequently in the literature. See Christensen (2010); Schoenfield (2015a); Schoenfield (2015b). Related but more general issues are discussed by Pryor (2013). ¹⁹ See Lord (MS); Lord (Forthcoming B) for further discussion of a similar case that is inspired by Elga (Ms) and Schoenfield (2015a).

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128      should suspend judgment. Of course, not all evidentialists are committed to Strong Evidentialism. The natural place to turn is Weak Evidentialism:

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Weak Evidentialism: The rational doxastic attitude for S to adopt is solely determined by S’s total evidence. This view is the sort of view that both conciliationists and steadfasters have in mind. But here’s the problem: it is wholly unclear how the ‘total evidence’ makes it the case that I should suspend judgment. This result cannot simply be explained by probability relations. The interaction between first and higherorder evidence doesn’t affect the probability relations between the first-order evidence and proposition at issue. Maybe it’s fine to say in these cases that the total evidence ‘points toward’ suspension. But we want some explanation of why it points toward suspension.²⁰ Reasons to suspend offer resources to explain how it is that the higher-order evidence has the requisite effect. It isn’t because it evidentially interacts with the first-order evidence to yield sufficiently low confirmation or make the needle on some metaphorical evidential dial move in some direction. Rather, the higher-order evidence directly provides a reason to suspend, which balances against the reasons to believe. In this case, it makes sense for me to suspend. Given what I know about my possible impairment, this is the proper response. Thus, the reason to suspend is intuitively weightier than the reasons to believe. Opponents will now likely complain that we haven’t provided an adequate explanation. For we haven’t given a deeper story about why the reason to suspend is weightier. That’s true, but it wasn’t what we were after. We don’t think we need to give a general normative theory of weight; this could only be descried through the correct fundamental normative theory, a matter on which we wish to remain neutral here. Rather, what we want is a structural explanation of how suspension could be required, and direct reasons to suspend provide that explanation.²¹ The evidentialist lacks a clear explanation at the same level, since it is not clear what they can invoke to do the explanatory work.

²⁰ Christensen (2010) suggests that we understand the evidence just in terms of the facts that bear on the rationality of belief. EL argues in (MS) that this view trivializes the debate between evidentialists and pragmatists. Better, we think, to conceive of the evidence as the facts that confirm or disconfirm hypotheses. But doing this necessitates positing reasons to suspend. ²¹ There may be more of a puzzle in cases where one has very strong evidence for p and equally strong evidence against p. Plausibly, these evidential relations generate correspondingly strong reasons, and the reason to suspend must be sufficiently weighty to outweigh them both if we want to explain why one ought to suspend here. Here it may be necessary, as Snedegar (2017: Ch. 6) suggests, to combine the kind of account we are offering with a contrastivist picture of the reason-relation.

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They cannot exploit the aspect of evidence one usually exploits to do the work—i.e., to the amount of confirmation or evidential support. By appealing to direct reasons to suspend, we get additional structural resources to explain how suspension could be required despite the confirmational facts. This fact yields strong initial motivation for appealing to reasons for suspension in the context of theorizing about the rational power of higherorder evidence. In our view, this motivation is decisive. We can’t get by simply by with the evidence for and against p. But even if we retreat to Weak Evidentialism, we need a tool to help explain how mere higher-order evidence can require suspension. Reasons to suspend furnish this tool. In the next subsection we will further bolster this point by showing how the existence of direct reasons to suspend in higher-order evidence cases flows naturally from a plausible account of suspension of judgment, before turning to argue that reasons to suspend provide the right tool to prop up a principled moderate account in the two debates discussed at the outset.

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6.3.2 The Nature of Suspension and What it Tells us about the Rational Profile of Suspension Whether or not one is a functionalist about mental states, it should seem undeniable that function is a helpful tool for differentiating mental states. With that thought in mind, we will be arguing for a view about suspension which yields direct reasons for suspension on the grounds that it best captures key functional desiderata. In fact, we will argue that there are two different varieties of suspension, and that there are interesting and underappreciated direct reasons for both varieties. Let’s start by thinking about the function of belief and disbelief. A helpful tool in this project is an intellectual agenda, which one could represent by a set of questions on which one takes a stand or is seeking to take a stand. Belief and disbelief are ways of determining the status of a question on your agenda. Determining is a way of taking a settled stance on some issue. When you determine the status of some claim via belief or disbelief, you settle the question for yourself, and thereby add some belief to your doxastic corpus. A functional upshot of this is that when you determine the status of a claim in this way, the claim is available to you for rational purposes. Suspending judgment is another way of taking a settled stance. However, unlike belief and disbelief, when you suspend you do not add any beliefs to your doxastic corpus. To use Scott Sturgeon’s apt phrase, when you suspend about

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130      whether p, you adopt a settled neutrality when it comes to p.²² While you don’t add any belief to your doxastic corpus, you do adopt some attitude that leaves the issue on your agenda. This thought captures the datum that suspension is an honest-to-goodness attitude, not merely the absence of belief and disbelief. What is the functional upshot of adopting a state of settled neutrality? Or, to put the question in normative terms, why should one ever adopt such an attitude when one could just remain unopinionated about p—i.e., not form a settled stance at all? To answer this question, we need to further investigate the contours of settled neutrality. Cutting to the chase, we think there are two important forms of settled neutrality.²³ On the one hand, you can form an interrogative attitude about whether p.²⁴ As etymology and syntax suggest, interrogative attitudes seem to be mental states directed at questions.²⁵ Paradigm examples include curiosity and wonder. When you are curious whether p, you have an attitude directed at the question of whether p is the case: the question is what piques your interest. In paradigmatic cases of curiosity, you don’t believe or disbelieve, but you do have some sort of attitude toward the question of whether p. The functional role of this kind of state is to dispose you to determine whether p. For example, it grounds dispositions to be on the lookout for evidence salient to whether p, to perform actions that will help you settle whether p, to draw your attention to other knowledge germane to p, and so on. Hopefully it is obvious why this state often has a rational point. Frequently we lack the resources to rationally determine the answer to some question we ought to keep on the agenda. For example, in many cases where one’s evidence is evenly split, it makes sense to keep the question of whether p on one’s agenda even though neither belief nor disbelief is rational. It would be unfortunate if this evidential situation forced us to drop the issue off the agenda completely. Indeed, it is precisely in these sorts of situations that we need a state that disposes us to settle whether p. Interrogative attitudes fit the bill. Thus, interrogative attitudes allow us to take a settled stance without adding some claim (or its negation) to our doxastic corpus. They do this because they are directed at questions. We can thus take a settled stance about whether p, and this stance can keep the issue of whether p on the agenda without determining the answer. Furthermore, by adopting an interrogative attitude, ²² See Sturgeon (2010). ²³ For much more, see Lord (MS); Lord (Forthcoming B). ²⁴ See Friedman (2013a), Friedman (2013b), Friedman (2017). ²⁵ It is controversial whether the fundamental objects of interrogative attitudes are questions. But as we have previously indicated, the surface appearances certainly make them appear to be questiondirected: verbs for interrogative attitudes take questions rather than that-clauses as complements, and the word ‘interrogative’ is derived from the Latin word for questioning. For deeper arguments, however, see Friedman (2013a).

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we adopt an attitude that disposes us to settle whether p. Often this attitude is the rational one to adopt. Interrogative attitudes are useful in situations where we need to keep an issue on the agenda because settling the issue is important. This is why it makes sense to form an interrogative attitude rather than drop the question in cases where one’s evidence doesn’t justify belief or disbelief. On the other end of the spectrum, there are anti-interrogative attitudes. Anti-interrogative attitudes allow us to take a settled stance towards an issue in a way that disposes us not to settle the question in the future. Staunch agnosticism in the religious case provides a good example of such an attitude in action: one settles to avoid the question of whether God exists because one doesn’t believe one will ever have the evidence needed to settle it. Hence, while forming an interrogative attitude is a way of taking a settled stance that disposes one to settle the issue, and deciding to be unopinionated is a way of dropping the issue, forming an anti-interrogative attitude is a way of burying the issue. Staunch agnosticism aside, it may seem less obvious why forming an antiinterrogative attitude might make rational sense in ordinary cases. To get a better sense of why, notice that there are situations where it makes sense to adopt a settled neutrality even though it doesn’t make sense to form an interrogative attitude. For example, consider the question of whether Karl Marx had an odd or even number of food particles in his beard when he died. We take it you are like us and have no evidence bearing on this question. Furthermore, you are highly unlikely to ever get such evidence. Dropping the issue is one option. But if we were to adopt an attitude regarding the issue, it doesn’t look like any of the options considered so far fit. Belief and disbelief are out. Interrogative attitudes dispose us to determine truth-values, but there is little point in having an attitude like that in this case. It is plausible that we know that we will never have sufficient evidence to rationally determine the truth-value. In virtue of this last fact, though, it makes sense to form an attitude that insulates you from the question. We don’t merely want to forget about it. We want to take steps to make sure it doesn’t bother us again. This is what anti-interrogative attitudes do. They dispose you to not be on the lookout for evidence, to not pick up on salient background knowledge, to not perform actions that would uncover evidence, and so on. Such attitudes make sense in cases where a stand is needed towards a claim that is unlikely to be rationally settled.²⁶

²⁶ In other work (Lord Forthcoming B), EL argues that anti-interrogative attitudes are also called for in cases where you owe it to yourself (e.g., cases of so-called grit a la Morton and Paul (2018)) or others (e.g., cases where you owe it to your friends to think well of them) to become insulated from evidence. Reasons, Justification, and Defeat, edited by Jessica Brown, and Mona Simion, Oxford University Press USA - OSO, 2021.

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132      Now we have enough to start to see the contours of reasons to suspend. They will be reasons to form either interrogative or anti-interrogative attitudes. Both sorts of attitudes are forms of settled neutrality. The crucial difference between them is that interrogative attitudes open us up to the evidence relevant to some question, whereas anti-interrogative attitudes insulate us from such evidence. Reasons to suspend are reasons for such attitudes. As we saw in the last section, there is good reason to think that higher-order evidence provides reasons to suspend, and this is plausible even before investigating suspension and its normative profile. After all, what we want to explain in the most interesting cases involving higher-order evidence is the fact that one ought to suspend judgment on the basis of the higher-order evidence. A natural explanation of this fact is that the higher-order evidence directly provides reasons to suspend that are decisive in the relevant cases. The plausibility of this claim is reinforced by the positive account given here. Interrogative attitudes are especially relevant. In many of the interesting cases involving higher-order evidence, it is plausible that one should form an interrogative attitude. That is, one should take a stand about the relevant question, but only insofar as one adopts a state that disposes one to determine the answer to the question. This is because in most of the relevant cases, the question is important, and it is also important for one to be disposed to determine its answer. We can confirm this by thinking about Drugs. There it is plausible that the subject should form an interrogative attitude upon learning about the laced coffee. After all, he was asked to form a view about the question. So, he should be on the lookout for ways to determine the answer. But given what seems to him to be his likely impairment, it is too risky to rely on the first-order evidence. Forming an interrogative attitude is the thing to do.

6.4. A Wondrous Resolution Having sketched our framework, the first thing that we want to note is that it is on track to vindicate conciliationism of some sort.²⁷ Of course, the claim that We put these cases to one side because of the controversy surrounding them. For other reasons to adopt anti-interrogative attitudes, see Rosenkranz (2007). ²⁷ It’s not for nothing that we say, ‘on track.’ For there are important exceptions. For example, it is not plausible that there will be a reason against belief every time there is disagreement. For there can be undercutting defeaters of the reason to suspend provided by the fact about disagreement. A second

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higher-order evidence generates reasons for suspension is strictly speaking compatible with the further claim that these reasons are never sufficient, since reasons are one thing and sufficient reasons another. And so full-fledged conciliationism may not appear to be automatically vindicated. But we think our framework gives novel reasons for rejecting extreme steadfast views that deny that there is ever sufficient reason to suspend in the cases at issue. To see why, let’s first consider extreme steadfast views that seek to accept both of the principles that initially seemed to generate our puzzle while also holding on to Logico-Evidentialism about Epistemic Reasons. These views seek to avoid this implication by holding that one cannot rationally be misled about what the evidence supports. These views imply, we believe, that it cannot be rational even to wonder whether one might have been wrong in thinking that one’s evidence supports p if it does support p. They imply not only that Christensen’s confidence shouldn’t drop, but also that he shouldn’t even be curious about whether his evidence supports p. This opposition to curiosity and wonder strikes us as worse than obstinacy or dogmatism: it smacks of anti-intellectualism and illiberalism. Only in cases where it is just obvious that p might it seem right to claim that wondering whether p involves a failure of rationality. Yet it is not obvious from the subject’s perspective that the evidence gives sufficient reason for belief in the Drugs case.²⁸ Here is a reductio argument for thinking that the steadfast view in question invites this implication. Suppose what is plausible for the sake of argument: the subject in Christensen’s example should wonder whether the answer he first embraced is, after all, the right one. More specifically, he should wonder whether he has sufficient evidence for this conclusion. If our view is right, it follows that he should suspend judgment, since suspension of one sort just is the holding of some interrogative attitude. Hence if some interrogative attitude point to stress here is that it matters here how you define conciliationism. We don’t think our view necessarily provides a vindication of conciliationism about confidence or credence. It’s an open question how reasons to suspend impact our credences. So, it might be that facts about disagreement don’t always provide reasons to lower our confidence, at least on some ways of understanding what it means to lower one’s confidence. So, what we think is vindicated is conciliationism about belief: facts about disagreement provide reasons against belief. If facts about disagreement provide higher-order evidence and higher-order evidence provides reasons to suspend, then facts about disagreement will provide reasons to suspend. These are reasons that compete with the reasons to believe, and thus are reasons against believing. ²⁸ Perhaps there is some purely objective sense in which the underlying logical truths here are obvious, but this sense is not the relevant sense for understanding rationality. Indeed, as far as we can see, no logical truth L is so obvious from an objective point of view that it couldn’t make sense to wonder whether L is true. Otherwise wondering about the possible correctness of various non-classical logics would be necessarily irrational. But it just doesn’t seem right to claim that one becomes irrational merely by taking non-classical logics seriously in meta-logical inquiry. Graham Priest may be wrong, but he is not irrational; similarly, for people who seriously engage with his work.

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Further Level-Bridging Principle: If one ought rationally to suspend judgment about whether one has sufficient reason to believe that p, then one ought rationally not to believe that p. Since the subject ought rationally to wonder whether he has sufficient reason to believe p in Christensen’s case, it follows that he ought rationally to suspend on whether his evidence supports p. Given the bridging principle, it follows that the subject ought rationally not to believe that the answer is ‘only (d).’ Yet he intuitively continues to possess conclusive evidence for this conclusion. So, if Logico-Evidentialism is preserved, the tension between Level-Bridging principles and Conclusive Reason is preserved. But this is contrary to the steadfast view at issue. Hence—barring revisions—the view implies that Christensen’s subject would be irrational to wonder about whether his attitude was rational. We say that it isn’t irrational to wonder in such cases. We offer a simpler solution: reject the background assumption of Logico-Evidentialism. This allows us to keep our principles and the data without contempt for curiosity. And again, rejecting Logico-Evidentialism is not an extreme option. It is what the nature of suspension of judgment together with the systematic links between reasons for belief and reasons for suspension recommend. Other views encourage the same contempt for curiosity. Consider Worsnip again. Although Worsnip doesn’t try to resolve the puzzle by keeping all the principles, he will embrace modified versions of these principles which will still condemn curiosity unless Logico-Evidentialism is rejected. In particular, although Worsnip denies that reasons and rationality go together, he doesn’t deny that there is some other normative status that co-travels with the reasons. One such status we can call the ‘should’ of all-things-considered reason. Here is a modified principle that Worsnip would accept: Modified Conclusive Reason: if there is a conclusive reason R to believe that p, and S possesses this reason, then S should (given the reasons) believe that p. Yet assuming Logico-Evidentialism, this principle still conflicts with an equally plausible modified version of the second principle:

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Modified Level-Bridging Principle: if there is a strong undefeated reason to believe that one lacks sufficient reason to believe that p, then one shouldn’t (given the reasons) believe that p. The only way out for Worsnip is to agree with Titelbaum about the ‘should’ of all-things-considered reason and deny that one can have strong undefeated reason to believe false normative propositions of the relevant sort. But this also requires gratuitous condemnation of intellectual curiosity and wonderment. Our view again gives a happier resolution. Although we think extreme steadfast views are too quick to condemn wonderment, we don’t recommend jumping to the opposite extreme. Sometimes it is irrational to wonder whether p. If it is plain that p from the perspective you occupy, it is less clearly acceptable to wonder whether p. For example, if it is clear from your perspective that p (e.g., if you can easily see that p), wondering and wondering whether p would seem to manifest inattention or some other lapse of reason. If one avoids such lapses, one can easily go ahead and get the knowledge from the plain facts. And, if that knowledge is obtained, one would do oneself an injustice by allowing the disagreement to obscure one’s plain view of the facts. One deserves better. There is a spectrum of cases between the case of wondering whether p when it is evident that p and wondering whether you selected the right answer in a Drugs-like case. At what point does wondering become sensible? Common sense suggests that it is later than extreme conciliationists say, but earlier than extreme steadfast views say. This was why the steadfast conciliationism introduced in Section 6.2 was commonsensical. Now, we can see how our view can vindicate common sense. Higher-order evidence provides reasons to suspend; hence, conciliationism. Sometimes those reasons to suspend are not weighty enough to defeat the reasons to believe provided by the evidence; hence, steadfasting.

6.5. The Substantive Options for a Finer Resolution We now have principled structural reasons for accepting a more moderate view about the normative significance of higher-order evidence and disagreement. We do not, however, yet have anything like an exact formula for determining just how strong the reasons for suspension will be in some case, or a systematic normative theory which spits out such a formula. Although it is beyond the scope of this paper to develop these things, our framework affords a new way of organizing the options.

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The options can all be viewed as answers to the question of what fundamentally determines whether it is epistemically appropriate to inquire into whether p, where inquiry is understood as seeking to help determine whether p.²⁹ These options are constrained by obvious truths. It isn’t epistemically appropriate to inquire into whether p in our sense if it is already clear that p or already clear that ~p, at least where clarity entails knowledge or being in a position to know (as we assume). It also isn’t epistemically appropriate to inquire into whether p in our sense if it is clear that it couldn’t be determined whether p.³⁰ These obvious truths give us minimal necessary conditions on epistemically appropriate inquiry: S’s inquiry into whether p is epistemically appropriate only if (a) the truth-value of p isn’t evident to S, and (b) it isn’t evident to S that S couldn’t help to determine whether p by her inquiry. What else is necessary? Strong liberalism would say nothing else is necessary. Unfortunately, this view may seem to give a thumbs-up to foolhardy inquiry. If it is unlikely that S could even help to determine whether p, it may seem a fool’s errand for S to inquire into whether p with any earnestness.³¹ Barring rejection of this intuition, it seems we need other conditions on epistemically appropriate inquiry. We can now see some important large-scale divisions. On the one hand, we can make a broad distinction between consequentialist views and non²⁹ We say ‘help determine’ to indicate that one’s contribution to inquiry may be part of a larger inquiry—say, the inquiry of a research team, a social group tasked with answering certain questions (e.g., political figures interested in whether certain acts would be constitutional), or even a whole academic discipline or intellectual tradition. It may be clear that one couldn’t alone determine whether p in one’s life even if it is clear one could partly help some relevant group could determine whether p. Here it may make sense to inquire. But if it is evident that one couldn’t even help advance an inquiry, it does seem to us foolhardy to inquire into whether p. (Thanks to Justin Snedegar for making us clarify our beliefs here.) It is worth stressing that there is an important contrasting notion of reflection on an issue that doesn’t assume that the issue could ever be rationally decided by an individual or a group. It doesn’t, we assume, make sense to seek to determine whether p if it is obvious that p can’t be determined. Does it follow that it makes no sense to think about p? This seems extreme and indeed anti-philosophical: even if we know we can’t settle whether p, it may be worth thinking about what it would take to settle whether p, and what would need to be true for p to be true. Even if no intuitive evidence could ever decide between whether natural properties are tropes or universals, it doesn’t follow that the nature of naturalness isn’t worth contemplating. For this reason, we might call the wider notion of inquiry contemplation. It can even make sense to contemplate what it would be for a proposition to turn out true even if one knows it is false: one might deny that gods are actual but still find theology a worthy study in speculative metaphysics. We leave the constitutive norms of contemplation (if there are any) for other theorists to determine. It does, however, seem plausible to us that ideas can be worth contemplating even if we know we will never be able to determine whether they are right. (Indeed, ideas can be worth contemplating even if they are obviously false: consider Leibniz’s delightful ontology of monads, for example.) ³⁰ In this case, the only sort of attitude that is rational is an anti-interrogative attitude (although, sometimes one should form no attitude at all). ³¹ Again, in these cases, it is tempting to think one should form an anti-interrogative attitude. These reasons aren’t as strong as the reasons to form anti-interrogative attitudes when we know p is undeterminable, but they might be very strong.

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consequentialist views. Consequentialist views work under the assumption that the fundamental norm of inquiry is productivity: inquiry ought to efficiently yield results. It is important to emphasize ‘fundamental’ here, since other theorists needn’t deny that productivity has some derivative significance. At a minimum, they merely deny that a person’s intellectual economy should be governed by a principle of ‘growth for growth’s sake.’ The distinction is helpfully illustrated by contrasting the value of research from the researcher’s point of view and the value of research from the point of view of a university driven by managers concerned with its profile in the ‘knowledge economy.’ The sole fundamental intellectual value of such a manager is research output as such. This fact is suggestive: unless the manager is genuinely confused about the structure of intellectual value, it is tempting to think that they don’t really care about the research at all, but rather about some extra-intellectual source of value, such as prestige, power, or money. Although researchers can become alienated cogs by internalizing managerial ideology, their natural interest is not in output for output’s sake. Still, an unalienated researcher needn’t deny value to productivity: they just treat productivity as an upshot of genuine passion for the issues, and as having value as an indicator or manifestation of passion. A true consequentialist in our sense will view things the other way around: what is fundamentally important is productivity, and since passion is required for it, one should be passionate. Such a consequentialist may recommend the ideology of pure research, but only because of the bad effects of alienation through obsession with productivity for its own sake.³² From the objective point of view, this consequentialist may then adopt two sorts of views. A purist consequentialist will say that the constitutive norms of inquiry are constrained by purely intellectual value. Her third condition on epistemically proper inquiry might then be something like: inquiry into p is epistemically proper only if it is likely enough that p can be determined in good time, compatibly with a research program that maximizes production of intellectual value. Inquiry into matters that are very unlikely to be determined will often be spurned on the grounds of opportunity cost: the effort would be better spent in areas more likely to yield fruit, and so no research program should permit wasting time on such matters. In such cases, anti-interrogative attitudes or even dropping of the issue are needed to move one into more ³² Compare Railton (1984)’s discussion of the alienation objection to ethical consequentialism; it is a sad irony that Railton’s idea would here be used to prop up the epistemic analogue of capitalism (or at least the epistemic analog of neoliberal managerial ideology). Recently, Singer (2018) explicitly extends the Railtonian view to epistemology.

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138      fertile fields. Such a consequentialist may, however, believe that some matters have great enough intellectual importance that even if they are not particularly likely to be determined in good time, spending more time on them is worth the risk. Impurist consequentialism allows further values that are not purely intellectual to encroach on the significance of some issue. Such a consequentialist might instead propose a third condition on epistemically proper inquiry along the following sorts of lines: inquiry into whether p is epistemically proper only if it is likely enough that p can be determined in good time, compatibly with a plan for conduct that maximizes the production of practically important knowledge. These two kinds of consequentialism have different implications about the conditions under which higher-order evidence can defeat belief. To see why, let’s first consider more officially what our framework would say about when suspension of judgment is rational. According to our framework, suspending judgment about whether p is rational if and only if it is rational to have either an interrogative attitude toward whether p or an anti-interrogative attitude toward whether p. More briefly, given the foregoing points: suspending judgment on whether p is rational if and only if it is epistemically proper to inquire into whether p, assuming the issue shouldn’t just be tabled. For simplicity, we can bracket issues that should be tabled by restricting attention to live issues (to borrow some language from William James (1896). It is then epistemically proper to suspend judgment on some live issue if and only if inquiry into the issue is epistemically proper. Higher-order evidence will be sufficient to defeat first-order evidence supporting some belief if it makes it fitting to (re)inquire into the issue. The wider significance of the inquiry is what matters on this view. Let’s consider cases where one hasn’t already formed a belief. And let’s imagine that one possesses evidence for p which is, in fact, sufficient to establish that p. Let’s also imagine that one possesses higher-order evidence which raises some doubt about the fact that the evidence is sufficient to establish that p. How serious must that doubt be to prevent the evidence from giving sufficient reason for belief? According to the consequentialist proposals we’ve been considering, the answer is determined by the importance of the issue, since such importance will determine the strength of the reason to inquire. Purist views will deny that the case for scrupulous inquiry is determined by the practical significance of the issue. Intellectual significance alone can justify inquiring longer than might otherwise seem justified. Still, there is a sort of encroachment here by considerations beyond strength of evidential confirmation.

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, - ,  

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These implications fit with some important intuitions. The intuitions in the case of impurist consequentialism are the familiar ones behind pragmatic encroachment: as practical importance increases, any reasons for hesitancy about whether one has got the data right are magnified, and first-order evidential reasons for belief are defeated. But there is also an overlooked intuition with a structurally similar basis that arguably isn’t pragmatist: namely, when the intellectual importance of some issue is great, any reasons for hesitancy about whether one has got the data right are magnified, and firstorder evidential reasons for belief are defeated. This idea may help to explain why higher-prestige journals rightly have lower rates of acceptance: more work is needed to quell doubt when the discovery would be significant enough for publication in such a journal. Our reflections also shed light on an insufficiently noticed attraction of epistemic consequentialism. Although it can be difficult to believe that the consequences of forming a belief should bear on whether there is reason of the right kind for that belief, it is much easier to believe that they bear on whether there is reason of the right kind to inquire into some issue. We can, it seems, respond in a way that isn’t roundabout to incentives for and against inquiry that rest on the importance of the discovery. If this is true, then it is easier to understand how the sufficiency of some epistemic reason for belief may depend on possible consequences of getting it right or getting it wrong. Other theorists have already used the framework of epistemic utility theory to provide a systematic and principled account of when higher-order evidence defeats, as we noted earlier. What we have just said suggests a deeper potential reason for signing up to their story: the nature of suspension of judgment together with the systematic connections between the weight of reasons for belief and the weight of reasons for suspension provide independent reasons to think that certain sorts of consequences might decide the sufficiency of the evidence. Nonetheless, we think it would be too quick to assume that the nature of suspension of judgment and data about higher-order defeat force a consequentialist treatment; indeed, one of us is a diehard Kantian. We will conclude with some thoughts about the compatibility of non-consequentialism with our framework, and how a non-consequentialist might offer a different story about higher-order defeat and explain away the apparent evidence for consequentialism. Epistemic non-consequentialists will deny that fundamental epistemic values such as accuracy are merely ‘to be promoted,’³³ and for this reason oppose ³³ See, e.g., Sylvan (2018); Sylvan (2020); Littlejohn (2011); Gibbons (2013).

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140      the extension of the ideology of sheer productivity to epistemology. Some of these theorists follow Kant and suggest that fundamental epistemic value is, at bottom, to be respected rather than promoted. Now, this kind of picture is well-positioned to explain the significance of higher-order evidence. Even if the evidence entails that p, if you have strong reason to think you’re in a state of mind in which you’re an unreliable judge of what the evidence supports, it would seem reckless to just go ahead and believe that p, other things being equal. These non-consequentialist views will hence fit well with common sense and avoid the pitfalls of extreme steadfast views. There is, however, some worry that such views might license a kind of stalling. For notice that the constraint of respect for truth is primarily a negative constraint. It rules out believing when doing so would be reckless or negligent by the lights of the value of accuracy. But it does not seem to encourage believing when it wouldn’t be reckless or negligent. Of course, if one denies that there are positive epistemic duties, one might be happy with this result: believing is never required. Still, an epistemic version of Hamlet does seem open to a distinctively epistemic sort of criticism. Worrying too much about an issue may seem excessive, and not merely for practical reasons: paranoia is an epistemic vice. It would, for example, seem silly for the subject in Christensen’s case to suspend with an interrogative attitude for too long after rethinking the issue multiple times and coming to see each time that the evidence entails ‘only (d)’ to be the correct answer.³⁴ If epistemic non-consequentialists lacked resources to explain these intuitions, it would represent a significant cost of their approach, though perhaps one that could be partly surmounted by casting doubt on whether the criticisms are genuinely epistemic. Thankfully, however, there are other, more direct responses available to epistemic non-consequentialists. One of these responses is able to capture what seems attractive about some of the consequentialist options described previously, while also avoiding some so far unmentioned bad features of epistemic consequentialism. One option turns on a familiar point about many non-consequentialist views in ethics. Non-consequentialists needn’t deny that there is reason to bring about good states of affairs, and indeed needn’t even deny that there is an underived reason to promote the good. At a minimum, they only must insist that the project of promoting the good take place within the constraints

³⁴ Perhaps the subject should adopt an anti-interrogative attitude instead, but this also seems a bit extreme: more plausibly, one can and should just go with what repeated witnessing of truth makes plain.

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, - ,  

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imposed by respect. Provided that it wouldn’t be disrespectful of truth to believe p, there might then be a promotion-based reason to believe p on such a view. A view of this kind would be reminiscent of a modest deontology that accepts side constraints but recommends doing as much good as possible within these constraints. Such a view may, however, not be the best kind of non-consequentialist view. This is because it would inherit some of the bad predictions of epistemic consequentialism discussed by Berker (2013).³⁵ Views of this kind would invite serious inquiry into p in cases where such inquiry would generate unrelated epistemic payoffs, even when it is extremely probable that p and there are no real reasons to doubt that p. Indeed, it is hard to see why views of this kind wouldn’t recommend inquiry into p when it would have such unrelated benefits even when it is evident that p. To be sure, the consequentialist views mentioned previously were supposed to be constrained: it is only fitting to inquire into p in cases in which it is not already evident whether p. But this constraint lacks a straightforwardly consequentialist motivation, and so the views discussed earlier were already in one way not fully consequentialist (though their additional condition was specified only in terms of consequences). Accordingly, there seems to be good reason to pursue a more purely non-consequentialist view. How, though, can such a view generate even proposition-relative reasons for closing inquiry in the aim of thereby learning a truth? Here it is instructive to remember that Kant centrally claimed in his later work—i.e., the Metaphysics of Morals in contrast to the Groundwork— that personhood demands not only respect but also love, and used this to explain positive duties of beneficence, directed at particular individuals. One might similarly claim that truth demands something more like love in addition to respect, and use this requirement to explain why there is something epistemically objectionable about thinkers who are overly chary in forming beliefs, as well as about thinkers who are simply uninquisitive. Such love would be favored on a proposition-by-proposition basis, in much the way that love for personhood is shown through love for particular persons (though unconditionally, as persons, in the case of the morally required sort of love). Of course, some have had doubts about love of truth and its relevance to epistemology (e.g., Sosa (2000)). But while there is no requirement to love truth, the intuitions considered previously do suggest that there is some

³⁵ For other kinds of objections that we think would generalize, see Sylvan (2020).

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142      properly epistemic reason to love truth. At some point, we should all learn to stop querying and embrace the truth.³⁶

6.6. Conclusion We must leave the task of deciding between these options for future work: it is a task worthy of many papers and books. What we would like to emphasize in conclusion is that our wondrous structural resolution of the puzzles indicates that wider controversies—most centrally, consequentialism vs. nonconsequentialism and purism vs. impurism—must be settled in order for us to know exactly how weighty the higher-order evidence will be in a given case. As far as the general rationale for accepting higher-order defeat goes, we don’t think much more can be said beyond what we’ve said earlier. This fact is heartening for those of us who are more interested in theory than application: for what we’ve seen suggests that some of the apparent gridlock in the literature on disagreement and higher-order evidence owes simply to the fact that these topics are applied topics, and could never be fully resolved without the help of a systematic normative theory (barring epistemic particularism).

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References Berker, S. (2013). Epistemic teleology and the separateness of propositions. Philosophical Review, 122: 337–93. Broome, J. (2013). Rationality through Reasoning. Oxford: Blackwell. Christensen, D. (2007). Epistemology of disagreement: The good news. Philosophical Review, 116: 187–217. Christensen, D. (2009). Disagreement as evidence: The epistemology of controversy. Philosophy Compass, 4: 756–67. Christensen, D. (2010). Higher-order evidence. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 81: 185–214. Christensen, D. (2011). Disagreement, question-begging, and epistemic selfcriticism. Philosophers’ Imprint, 11: 6. Coates, A. (2012). Rational epistemic akrasia. American Philosophical Quarterly, 49: 113–24.

³⁶ Thanks to Jade Fletcher, Mona Simion, Justin Snedegar, and Daniel Whiting for detailed comments, and to audiences at the University of Southampton and New York University for questions which shaped the paper.

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Cohen, S. (2013). A defense of the (almost) equal weight view. In: J. Lackey and D. Christensen (eds.) The Epistemology of Disagreement: New Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Elga, A. (2007). Reflection and disagreement. Nous, 41: 478–502. Elga, A. Ms. Lucky to Be Rational. Unpublished paper (written 2008), Princeton University. Fogal, D. and Sylvan, K. (2016). Contextualism about epistemic reasons. In: J. Ichikawa (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Contextualism. London: Routledge. Friedman, J. (2013a). Question-directed attitudes. Philosophical Perspectives, 27: 145–74. Friedman, J. (2013b). Suspended judgment. Philosophical Studies, 162: 165–81. Friedman, J. (2017). Why suspend judging? Nous, 51(2): 302–26. Gibbons, J. (2013). The Norm of Belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gonzalez de Prado Salas, J. (2020). Dispossessing defeat. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 101: 323–40. Harman, G. (1984). Logic and reasoning. Synthese, 60: 107–27. James, W. (1896). The will to believe. Reprinted in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1956). New York: Dover.

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Kelly, T. (2013). Disagreement and the burdens of judgment. In: D. Christensen and J. Lackey (eds.) The Epistemology of Disagreement: New Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kolodny, N. (2005). Why be rational? Mind, 114: 509–63. Lackey, J. (2010). A justificationist view of disagreement’s epistemic significance. In: A. Haddock and D. Pritchard (eds.) Social Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lasonen-Aarnio, M. (2014). Higher-order evidence and the limits of defeat. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 88: 314–45. Littlejohn, C. (2011). Reasons and belief ’s justification. In: A. Reisner and A. Steglich-Petersen (eds.) Reasons for Belief. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lord, E. (2014). From independence to conciliationism: An obituary. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 92: 1–13. Lord, E. (2018). The Importance of Being Rational. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lord, E. (2020a). The normativity of rationality. In: R. Chang. and K. Sylvan (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Practical Reason. London: Routledge. Lord, E. (2020b). Reasons to suspend, rationality’s competition, and the reach of the epistemic. In: G. Ernst and S. Schmidt (eds.) The Ethics of Belief and Beyond: Understanding Mental Normativity. London: Routledge. Reasons, Justification, and Defeat, edited by Jessica Brown, and Mona Simion, Oxford University Press USA - OSO, 2021.

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144      Lord, E. and Sylvan, K. (2019). Reasons: Wrong, right, normative, fundamental. Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 15: 43–74. Lord, E. (2020). Reasons to suspend and the failure of evidentialism. Unpublished draft paper. Markovits, J. (2014). Moral Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morton, J. and Paul, S. (2018). Ethics, 129: 175–203. Pryor, J. (2013). Problems for credulism. In: C. Tucker (ed.) Seemings and Justification: New Essays on Dogmatism and Phenomenal Conservatism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Railton, P. (1984). Alienation, consequentialism, and the demands of morality. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 13: 134–71. Rosenkranz, S. (2007). Agnosticism as a third stance. Mind, 116: 55–104. Scanlon, T. (1998). What We Owe to Each Other. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Schoenfield, M. (2015a). Bridging rationality and accuracy. Journal of Philosophy, 112: 633–57. Schoenfield, M. (2015b). A dilemma for calibrationism. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 91: 425–55. Schoenfield, M. (2018). An accuracy-based approach to higher-order evidence. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 96: 690–715.

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Schroeder, M. (2012). Stakes, withholding, and pragmatic encroachment on knowledge. Philosophical Studies, 160: 165–85. Shah, N. (2003). How truth governs belief. Philosophical Review, 112: 447–82. Singer, D. J. (2018). How to be an epistemic consequentialist. Philosophy Quarterly, 68: 580–602. Snedegar, J. (2017). Contrastive Reasons. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sosa, E. (2000). For the love of truth? In: A. Fairweather and L. Zagzebski (eds.) Virtue Epistemology: Essays on Epistemic Virtue and Responsibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sosa, E. (2007). A Virtue Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sosa, E. (2010). Knowing Full Well. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sosa, E. (2013). The epistemology of disagreement. In: J. Lackey and D. Christensen (eds.) The Epistemology of Disagreement: New Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sosa, E. (2015). Judgment and Agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sturgeon, S. (2010). Confidence and Coarse-Grained Attitudes. In: T. S. Gendler and J. Hawthorne (eds.) Oxford Studies in Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 3–126.

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Worsnip, A. (2018). The conflict of evidence and coherence. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 96: 3–44.

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7 Reasons for Reliabilism Bob Beddor

7.1. Two Approaches to Justification What determines whether a belief is justified? One answer comes from the reliabilist tradition:

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Reliabilist Answer: reliably formed.¹

whether a belief is justified depends on whether it is

Reliabilism holds considerable appeal. First, it captures the intuition that there is an important connection between justification and truth: a reliable process is standardly defined as a process that produces a high ratio of true to false beliefs. Second, it explains how justification reduces to non-epistemic properties. Justification is explained in terms of reliability, which is explained in terms of truth and falsity. Reliabilism holds considerable appeal. First, it captures the intuition that there is an important connection between justification and truth: a reliable process is standardly defined as a process that produces a high ratio of true to false beliefs. Second, it explains how justification reduces to non-epistemic properties. Justification is explained in terms of reliability, which is explained in terms of truth. Reliabilism thus offers a way of locating epistemic properties within a naturalistic worldview.² Despite its appeal, reliabilism faces significant challenges. Many of these are by now well-known, and have elicited replies from reliabilists, which in turn have elicited counter replies.³ In this paper, I will bypass this well-worn terrain ¹ The locus classicus of reliabilism about justification is Goldman (1979). For further development and defense, see Goldman (1986, 2012); Kornblith (2002); Lyons (2009). ² The reductive goals of reliabilism are clearly announced by Goldman, who writes: “I want a theory of justified belief to specify in non-epistemic terms when a belief is justified” (1979: 90). As Kim (1988) notes, one motivation for seeking a reductive account is that epistemic properties supervene on natural properties. A reductive account offers to explain this supervenience. ³ For an overview of the major challenges and replies, see Goldman and Beddor (2015).

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to focus on a challenge that has received comparatively little attention—one that attacks the heart of reliabilism’s reductive aspirations. The challenge arises from the fact that a belief can be reliably formed even though the believer has good reason to think the belief is false, or that it was unreliably formed. When this happens, the belief is defeated. In order to account for such cases, reliabilists need to provide a theory of defeat. And, in order for this account to be faithful to reliabilism’s reductive ambitions, it had better not use any epistemic terms in the analysans. Providing such an account is no easy task. The standard reliabilist approach says that a belief is defeated when there is an alternative reliable process that would have led the believer to abandon the belief, had it been used. But, as we’ll see shortly, this approach faces serious problems. This raises the worry that reliabilists are unable to explain a central facet of justification. Faced with this difficulty, it is tempting to look beyond the reliabilist tradition for help. Another prominent account of justification comes from the ‘Reasons First’ tradition. This tradition offers a different answer to our starting question:

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Reasons First Answer: whether a belief is justified depends on whether it is supported by adequate reasons. An advantage of the Reasons First framework is that it provides a promising account of defeat. A belief is prima facie justified if it is supported by the agent’s prima facie reasons. Defeat occurs when this support is undermined by the acquisition of further reasons. This approach to defeat has been elaborated in great detail by John Pollock, who develops a rigorous system for computing the defeat statuses of an agent’s beliefs on the basis of their prima facie reasons.⁴ Despite these advantages, the Reasons First framework faces difficulties of its own. As standardly developed, the Reasons First framework lacks the explanatory benefits that make reliabilism attractive. It leaves unexplained the intuitive connection between justification and truth, and it does not reduce epistemic properties to non-epistemic properties. After all, Reasons Firsters take the notion of a reason to believe as a primitive. But this is clearly an epistemic notion. Given this tradeoff, we might hope for a theory that combines the attractions of both traditions. This paper develops one such theory: “Reasons Reliabilism.” ⁴ See Pollock (1987, 1992, 1994, 1995, 2001). For a useful overview of the development of Pollock’s framework, see Prakken and Horty (2012).

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148   The theory follows the Reasons First tradition in explaining defeat in terms of the notion of a reason to believe, which is taken to be the most fundamental normative notion. But, unlike most Reasons First views, my theory does not leave this notion unanalyzed. Rather, it goes on to explain this notion in reliabilist terms. Simplifying slightly, I identify an agent’s reasons for belief with the states that serve as potential inputs to their reliable processes. What emerges is a more reasonable form of reliabilism, one that preserves the best of both traditions. In particular, it provides an elegant treatment of defeat while remaining faithful to reliabilism’s reductive project. Of course, I am not the first to advocate an ‘impure’ or ‘hybrid’ version of reliabilism. In recent years a number of other authors have proposed syntheses of reliabilism and evidentialism.⁵ However, I argue that extant evidentialistreliabilist hybrids lack one of the chief advantages of the view advocated here: namely, its ability to explain defeat. Much like the ‘pure’ Reasons First framework, extant hybrids struggle to provide a theory that is both reductive and predictive. They also problematically single out a privileged class of beliefs—those entailed by the agent’s evidence—as immune to defeat. The synthesis developed here fares better on both counts.

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7.2. The Classic Reliabilist Account of Defeat 7.2.1 Why Reliabilists Need an Account of Defeat In order to introduce reliabilism’s difficulties with defeat, it will be helpful to start with a simple version of reliabilism: Simple Reliabilism: an agent’s belief is justified iff it is formed by a reliable belief-forming process. Next, consider a stock example of defeat: Seeing Red: Lori is gazing at a wall, which appears red. Consequently, she comes to believe : The wall is red. Just then, a generally reliable

⁵ See Alston (1988); Henderson et al. (2007); Comesaña (2010, 2018); Goldman (2011); Tang (2016); Pettigrew (2018); Miller (2019). Most of these syntheses have been motivated by considerations other than defeat, though Miller (2019) is an important exception.

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acquaintance, Sal, mentions to Lori that there are hidden red lights angled towards the wall.⁶ According to Simple Reliabilism, Lori’s belief in  remains justified even after she receives Sal’s testimony. After all, her belief is formed via vision, and we can stipulate that she has excellent eyesight. But, intuitively, Sal’s testimony defeats Lori’s justification for believing .⁷ In view of such cases, most reliabilists conclude that Simple Reliabilism is at best an adequate account of prima facie justification. In order for a belief to be ultima facie justified (that is, justified full-stop) it is not enough for it to be reliably formed. It also needs to satisfy a ‘No Defeaters’ condition.⁸ However, introducing a ‘No Defeaters’ condition raises a difficult question. Defeat is clearly an epistemic notion. In order to fulfill their reductive ambitions, reliabilists need to explain this notion in non-epistemic terms. Can this be done?

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7.2.2 The ARP Account of Defeat Reliabilists have not left this question unanswered. The standard reliabilist strategy is to explain defeat in terms of counterfactuals about what the agent would have believed, were they to have used some alternative reliable process.⁹ More precisely:

⁶ For discussion of this sort of case, see a.o., Chisholm (1966); Pollock (1995); Lasonen-Aarnio (2010a). ⁷ Perhaps, some may suggest, once Lori receives Sal’s testimony, her belief in  is no longer the result of vision alone. Rather, it’s the result of a complex process: using vision while disregarding testimony that vision is locally unreliable. Arguably, this complex process is unreliable. However, I think there is reason to be skeptical of this ‘typing maneuver.’ In order for it to handle all cases of defeat, we would need to take on board a substantive commitment: in every case of defeat, there is some way w of typing the agent’s belief-forming process on which it comes out unreliable. And in order to ensure that this approach is not ad hoc, we’d need to give some independent motivation for typing the beliefforming process using w. For further development of this concern, see Beddor (2015a): 147–8, where I argue that this typing maneuver stands in tension with promising solutions to the generality problem. For related criticisms of the typing maneuver, see Lasonen-Aarnio (2010a): 4–7; Baker-Hytch and Benton (2015): 45–7. ⁸ Adding a ‘No Defeaters’ condition may also help the reliabilist deal with other challenges. Take Bonjour’s (1985) famous example of Norman the clairvoyant. Norman has a reliable clairvoyant faculty but has no reason to suspect that he does. One day his clairvoyance causes him to believe that the president is in New York. Bonjour contends that Norman’s belief is not justified, even though it is reliably formed. As Goldman notes (1986: 112), one strategy for handling this case is to maintain that Norman’s belief is prima facie justified but defeated. ⁹ This proposal dates back to Goldman (1979), and has been recently defended by Lyons (2009, 2016). Close cousins are defended in Grundmann (2009) and Bedke (2010).

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150   Alternative Reliable Process (ARP) account: an agent A’s belief B is defeated iff there is some alternative reliable (or conditionally reliable) process available to A which, if it had been used in addition to the process actually used, would have resulted in A’s not holding B. At first blush, ARP looks promising. It appears to explain defeat in entirely naturalistic terms. It also seems to deliver the right verdicts in many cases. Take Seeing red: since Sal is stipulated to be generally reliable, deferring to Sal’s testimony is a reliable process. And if Lori had used this process in addition to vision, she wouldn’t have continued to believe . These advantages notwithstanding, ARP faces three serious challenges.

7.3. Difficulties for the Classic Reliabilist Account 7.3.1 Defeater Defeaters

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An initial difficulty for ARP—noted in passing by Lyons (2009): 124—is that it yields the wrong results when defeaters are themselves defeated. An example: Two Testimony Seeing Red: as before, Lori believes the wall is red, based on its appearance. And, as before, Sal comes along and mentions that the wall is illuminated by red lights. But now another reliable acquaintance, Anne, comes along and provides compelling—though ultimately misleading—testimony that Sal is a compulsive liar. According to ARP, Lori’s belief in  is defeated, even after receiving the evidence of Sal’s mendacity. After all, Anne’s testimony is misleading, and so trusting Sal’s testimony continues to be a reliable process. And this process remains available to Lori. (Lori could, after all, simply disregard Anne’s testimony.) But this is the wrong verdict. Intuitively, Anne’s testimony defeats the defeater provided by Sal’s testimony. In doing so, it reinstates Lori’s justification for believing .

7.3.2 Hidden Circularity A second concern for ARP was raised by Fumerton (1988) but has not received much attention in the subsequent literature. The worry is that ARP,

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when properly unpacked, smuggles the notion of ultima facie justification into the analysis of defeat. As a result, the reliabilist account of justification fails to be reductive; worse still, it is circular. Fleshing out this worry requires some stage setting. Many reliabilists opt for a theory that distinguishes between inferential and non-inferential beliefs. To motivate this complication, consider an inferential process such as deducing the consequences of what one already believes. This process is not reliable or unreliable simpliciter; it is only conditionally reliable. In order to handle beliefs formed through conditionally reliable processes, Goldman (1979) officially formulates reliabilism as a recursive theory: Recursive Reliabilism Base Clause: if (i) A’s belief B results from a belief-independent process that is unconditionally reliable, and (ii) B is undefeated, then B is ultima facie justified.

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Recursive Clause: if (i) A’s belief B results from a belief-dependent process that is conditionally reliable, (ii) the inputs to this process were ultima facie justified, and (iii) B is undefeated, then B is ultima facie justified.¹⁰ The recursive clause requires that the conditionally reliable processes operate on ultima facie justified beliefs. Despite this, the theory is still reductive. After all, we can use the theory to explain what it is for these input beliefs to be ultima facie justified. Either these inputs are themselves inferential or they are not. If they are, we appeal once again to the recursive clause; if not, we appeal to the base clause. Either way, we eventually arrive at some foundational beliefs whose justificatory status can be explained using the base clause. Now, the only epistemic notion that appears in the base clause is the notion of being undefeated. Assuming ARP provides a reductive account of this notion, Recursive Reliabilism is reductive. Where, then, lies the problem? Fumerton observes that, according to ARP, conditionally reliable processes sometimes function as defeaters: a belief is defeated if there is some conditionally reliable process available to the agent which, had it been used, would have resulted in the agent no longer holding the belief. But a conditionally reliable process cannot lead someone to abandon a belief all on its own; it can only do so if it is fed certain inputs. This raises the question: what epistemic status do these input beliefs need to have? Fumerton ¹⁰ See also Lyons (2013), who argues that distinguishing between inferential and non-inferential beliefs can help reliabilists handle the new evil demon problem (Cohen 1984).

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152   suggests that just as Recursive Reliabilism required that the inputs be ultima facie justified, so too should ARP. And so, ARP really amounts to the following: ARP unpacked:

A’s belief B is defeated iff either:

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1. There is some reliable belief-independent process that A could have used, which would have resulted in A not holding B, or 2. There is some conditionally reliable belief-dependent process that A could have used to process ultima facie justified inputs, which would have resulted in A not holding B. But, if this is the proper way of understanding ARP, then reliabilism’s reductive project is in trouble. After all, Recursive Reliabilism qualified as reductive because the base clause purported to tell us what it takes for a foundational belief to be ultima facie justified without using any epistemic terms in the analysans. But if we use ARP Unpacked to explain what it is for a belief to be undefeated, the base clause will itself rely on the notion of ultima facie justification. Perhaps, some may reply, this just shows we should reject the assumption that the inputs to a conditionally reliable process need to be ultima facie justified. Perhaps the input beliefs need only be prima facie justified; or perhaps they do not even need this slender epistemic merit.¹¹ To make trouble for this reply, consider a variant of Seeing Red where Lori unjustifiably believes that the wall is illuminated by red lights, but continues to believe  anyway. Clearly, her overall set of beliefs is epistemically defective. But does this defect render her belief in  unjustified? To answer this, it will help to consider a slightly different question: Should Lori abandon her belief in ? I think not. After all, she has no good reason to abandon it. Instead, it’s her belief about the lighting that should get the boot. But if Lori should retain her belief in , it becomes hard to maintain that this belief is defeated. (If it is defeated, then she should abandon it!) This intuition motivates the idea that only ultima facie justified inputs can serve as defeaters. But if we hang on to this idea, the circularity problem remains.¹² ¹¹ A number of authors have defended the idea that unjustified beliefs can function as defeaters, e.g. Lackey (1999); Bergmann (2006). Goldman himself flirts with this view in places (1986: 62, 111). ¹² One way out of this problem would be to reinterpret ARP as providing a theory of prima facie defeat rather than ultima facie defeat. So, in our variant of Seeing Red, Lori’s belief is  is prima facie defeated, but this defeater is itself defeated by whatever considerations make her belief about the lighting conditions unjustified. But this response is unavailable to proponents of ARP, since—as we’ve seen—ARP lacks the resources to handle defeater defeat.

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7.3.3 Alternative Processes that One Should Not Use

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According to ARP, an agent’s belief is defeated whenever they have an available reliable process that meets a certain counterfactual condition— namely, that if they were to use it, they would abandon their belief. But it seems that an agent can have an available reliable process that meets this condition without having any good reason to use it. When this happens, the mere availability of the process does not seem to defeat the belief. Here’s a case I offered in an earlier paper (Beddor 2015a: 149–50) that illustrates this point: Thinking About Unger: Harry sees a tree in front of him; he consequently believes : There is a tree in front of me. Now, Harry happens to be very good at forming beliefs about what Peter Unger’s skeptical 1975 time-slice would advise him to believe in any situation. Call this process his ‘Unger Predictor’: in any situation, Harry’s Unger Predictor spits out an accurate belief about what doxastic attitudes Unger’s 1975 time-slice would advise an agent to adopt in that situation. Moreover, Harry has a high opinion of Unger’s 1975 time-slice. Were he to realize that Unger would advise him to suspend judgment on some proposition, this would lead him to suspend judgment on that claim. So, if Harry had used his Unger Predictor, he would have come to believe Unger would advise me (Harry) to suspend judgment regarding . This would, in turn, have caused Harry to suspend judgment regarding . According to ARP, Harry’s belief in  is defeated. After all, there is a reliable process available to him (his Unger Predictor) that would have resulted in him no longer believing , had it been used. But this seems wrong. Harry is not, as a matter of fact, using his Unger Predictor; perhaps he hasn’t used it in many years. As it stands, he has an excellent reason to believe  (the testimony of his senses). The mere availability of his Unger Predictor does not seem undermine this reason. Defenders of ARP may suggest there’s an easy fix. A natural reaction to Thinking About Unger is that the example exploits a subject matter mismatch. Harry’s belief is about trees. The Unger Predictor does not produce doxastic attitudes about trees, but only about Unger’s advice. This suggests a simple patch to ARP: simply require that in order for an alternative process to defeat an agent’s belief in p, that process must produce beliefs about p-related matters.

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154   However, it is doubtful whether this simple fix suffices. Suppose Harry had used his Unger Predictor. Then some process would have led him to suspend judgment on . It’s just that this would have been a two-stage process. This first stage would have been his Unger Predictor; the second stage would have been a process that implements Unger’s predicted advice. Call this two-stage process his ‘Unger Emulator,’ Now, this Unger Emulator produces doxastic attitudes towards all sorts of subjects, including the presence of trees. Assuming that this process is reliable, then ARP—even once amended—still delivers the wrong result. Some might question whether this Unger Emulator process is really reliable. Sure, it avoids all errors, but only at the cost of avoiding all truths! Perhaps this is too high a cost; perhaps the right conception of reliability will classify this process as unreliable.¹³ But even if we concede the point, we can simply tweak the example (Beddor 2015a: 153–4). Meet Shmunger, whose skepticism is much more modest. Shmunger has lots of true beliefs about all sorts of subjects; she is only a skeptic when it comes to trees. We can then run the case using Shmunger instead of Unger. Simply stipulate that Harry has an extremely reliable Shmunger Predictor, which is part of a Schmunger Emulator: were Harry to reflect on what Shmunger would advise, he would come to believe: Schmunger would advise me to suspend judgment on whether there is a tree in front of me, which would in turn cause him to suspend judgment on . Proponents of ARP cannot plead that Harry’s Schmunger Emulator is unreliable. After all, it systematically produces true beliefs on a wide array of subjects; it only leads to suspension of judgment on arboreal matters.¹⁴ ¹³ The formal epistemology literature offers a natural place to look for a measure of reliability along these lines. See the discussions of credal scoring rules in Joyce (1998); Moss (2011); Pettigrew (2016), among many others. ¹⁴ In my earlier paper, I also offered a counterexample to the necessity of ARP for defeat. In the proposed counterexample, Clarence reliably forms a belief that p; a reliable interlocutor later tells him that p is false. But Clarence irrationally disbelieves everything this interlocutor says. Moreover, no amount of reflection or counseling would ever uproot this deep-seated mistrust. Intuitively, Clarence’s belief is defeated. But ARP seem unable to deliver this result: there is no process available to Clarence which would lead him to trust his interlocutor; hence there is no process available to him which, if used, would lead him to abandon his belief in p (cf. Baker-Hytch and Benton 2015: 53). However, in this case—unlike Thinking About Unger—it now seems to me that a modification of ARP will suffice. The key is to reformulate ARP in terms of dispositions rather than counterfactuals: A’s belief that p is defeated iff there is some alternative reliable process available to A which, when fed A’s current states as input, is disposed to lead A to cease believing p. Defenders of ARP could then propose that Clarence has a general testimony-believer process available to him. This is a process that, for any testifier (or, perhaps, any testifier that he has no good reason to distrust), produces a relatively high credence in their testimony. This process is generally reliable. Moreover, it is disposed to lead Clarence to cease believing p, when fed the experience of receiving his interlocutor’s testimony as input. It’s just that this disposition is masked by Clarence’s mistrust of his interlocutor.

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7.3.4 Looking Forward Taken together, these problems provide compelling grounds for abandoning ARP. But it would be premature for reliabilists to admit defeat. The rest of this paper develops a more promising approach, which draws on the resources of the Reasons First tradition. Here is the plan for what follows. I start (Section 7.4) by outlining the most well-developed version of the Reasons First framework to date, which is due to John Pollock. While Pollock offers a promising formal framework for understanding the structure of justification and defeat, I argue that it should not supplant reliabilism (Section 7.5). Rather, we should seek a theory that combines the structural features of Pollock’s framework with the core reliabilist strategy for reducing the epistemic to the non-epistemic. Section 7.6 develops such a theory; Section 7.7 advertises its advantages; and Section 7.8 compares it to other hybrid views.

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7.4. Pollock’s Reasons First Framework According to the Reasons First tradition, justification is intimately connected with reasons. This idea has considerable intuitive appeal. ‘A justified belief is supported by reasons’ has the ring of a platitude; ‘A belief can be justified, even though all the reasons count against it’ has the ring of a contradiction. In addition to capturing these intuitions, the Reasons First approach offers a promising treatment of defeat. For a belief to be prima facie justified is for it to be based on prima facie reasons that support it. Defeat occurs when the agent acquires reasons that either count against the belief itself, or against the support provided by the reasons on which it is based. This way of understanding defeat has been given a systematic development by John Pollock in a series of papers spanning over thirty years.¹⁵ Pollock’s framework has proven influential beyond epistemology, laying the groundwork for much research in computer science and AI—an influence that attests to the explanatory fruitfulness of its core ideas. In this section, I offer a streamlined overview of Pollock’s framework. (Readers uninterested in the formal nuts-and-bolts should feel free to skim.) Pollock’s key piece of formal machinery is an inference graph: a labeled directed graph providing an abstract representation of all the reasons that bear ¹⁵ See the references in fn. 4.

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156   on the justificatory status of an agent’s beliefs. The agent’s reasons—as well as the conclusions they support—are represented by nodes. Support and defeat relations are represented by directed edges. An agent need not actually perform all of the inferences encoded in their inference graph. Rather, the inference graph represents all the inferences that are available to them. For illustration, Fig. 1 provides an inference graph for Seeing Red. Dashed arrows represent support relations; solid arrows represent defeat relations. Here Lori’s visual experience provides a prima facie reason in support of the node, . And Sal’s testimony provides a prima facie reason in support of the node, The wall is illuminated by red lights (). This in turn supports the node, Lori’s visual experience doesn’t reliably indicate the truth of  (), which defeats . β ST

Sal’s testimony

VE

RL

wall illuminated by red lights

R

U

ve doesn’t reliably indicate R

α

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Lori’s visual experience

wall is red

Fig. 1 Seeing Red

Inferential support often involves multiple steps. Pollock represents multistep arguments with inference branches. An inference branch is an ordered sequence of nodes, each of which is the immediate ancestor of the next. For example, in Fig. 1 branch α is the directed path from Lori’s visual experience to . Branch β is the directed path originating in the experience of receiving Sal’s testimony, leading through , and terminating in . Using these resources, we can now flesh out the animating idea behind the Reasons First framework as follows: Justified Belief as Undefeated Reasoning: an agent’s belief is ultima facie justified iff it is the result of an ultimately undefeated inference branch.

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This formulation invites two questions. First, what does it mean for a belief to be the result of an inference branch? For starters, the belief must be supported by the sequence of reasons represented by the inference branch. But this is not sufficient: the agent must actually have gone through this reasoning and hold the belief on this basis. Second, what does it mean for an inference branch to be ultimately undefeated? This question is harder, and Pollock’s answer proceeds in stages. The first stage is to give an account of what it means for one reason to be defeated by another. According to Pollock, there are two species of defeat: rebutting defeaters and undercutting defeaters. A rebutting defeater for a node n is a prima facie reason to think that n is false. By contrast, an undercutting defeater for n targets the inferential connection between n and the reasons that support it. Seeing Red is like this: Sal’s testimony that the wall is illuminated by red lights is not itself a reason to believe that the wall is not red, but it is a reason for thinking that the building’s appearance does not give good grounds for thinking that the wall is red. While there are different ways of fleshing out the notion of an undercutting defeater, for our purposes we can define an undercutting defeater for n as a prima facie reason for thinking that the considerations that support n do not reliably indicate its truth in the agent’s present circumstances.¹⁶ If we follow Pollock in assuming that these are the only two species of defeat,¹⁷ we can venture the following disjunctive definition of when one inference branch defeats another (cf. Pollock 1992): Branch Defeat: an inference branch ψ defeats an inference branch χ iff a node of ψ defeats a node of χ, where a node n defeats a node n0 iff n either rebuts or undercuts n0 , • i.e., either n is a prima facie reason to believe ¬n0 , or n is a prima facie reason to believe that the immediate ancestors of n0 do not reliable indicate the truth of n0 in the agent’s present circumstances.

¹⁶ The ‘in the present circumstances’ qualification is important. After all, Sal’s testimony does not provide a reason for doubting that reddish wall appearances usually indicate the presence of a red wall. ¹⁷ This is a controversial assumption; some have suggested that cases of higher order evidence constitute a distinct species of defeat (e.g., Christensen 2010). My own inclination is to think that when higher order evidence functions as a genuine defeater, it does so by indicating that the agent’s actual (or believed) grounds for their belief do not reliably indicate the truth of this belief. If this is right, then defeat by higher order evidence is really just a type of undercutting defeat. But this is a debate that will need to be deferred to another occasion.

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158   This gives us a definition of when one inference branch defeats another. But what we really want is a definition of when an inference branch is ultimately undefeated. The simplest option would be to say that an inference branch is ultimately undefeated just in case there is no inference branch that defeats it. But this delivers the wrong results in cases of defeater defeat. Recall Two Testimony Seeing Red, in which Anne testifies that Sal is a compulsive liar. As in Seeing Red, Sal’s testimony supports the node, The wall is illuminated by red lights (), which supports the node, Lori’s visual experience doesn’t reliably indicate the truth of , which undercuts . Hence the simple account predicts that branch α is ultimately defeated, and hence that Lori’s belief in  is unjustified. But this is wrong. After all, Anne’s testimony provides a prima facie reason to believe that Sal is a liar, which provides a prima facie reason to believe that Sal’s testimony does not reliably indicate , which undercuts . As noted in Section 7.3.1, it thereby reinstates Lori’s justification for believing  (see Fig. 2). For this reason, Pollock opts for a somewhat more complicated account of what it takes for an inference branch to be ultimately undefeated. Here we will

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γ Anne’s testimony

at

Sal is a compulsive liar

cl

β Sal’s testimony

st

wall illuminated by red lights

rl

α Lori’s visual experience

ve

uʹ st doesn’t reliably indicate rl

wall is red

r

u

ve doesn’t reliably indicate R

Fig. 2 Two Testimony Seeing Red

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follow the treatment in Pollock (1987), who introduces a technical notion of being in at a level, defined recursively as follows: In At A Level 1. All inference branches are in at level 0. 2. An inference branch ψ is in at a level n + 1 iff ψ is not defeated by any inference branch that is in at level n; otherwise, ψ is out at level n + 1. Next, we use the notion of being in at a level to characterize what it is for an inference branch to be ultimately undefeated, as follows: Undefeated Inference Branch: an inference branch ψ is ultimately undefeated iff there is an m such that for every n  m, ψ is in at level n.

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To get a feel for this proposal, let’s walk through how it applies to Two Testimony Seeing Red. While all three inference branches depicted in Fig. 2 are in at level 0, only γ is in at every level, since only it lacks a defeater. Since γ defeats β, the latter is out at every level  1. And so, while α is out at level 1 (since it is defeated by a branch that is in at level 0), it is back in at level 2, and remains in at every level thereafter (see Table 1). So, α is ultimately undefeated. Hence Lori’s belief in  qualifies as ultima facie justified, as desired. Table 1. Computing Defeat Level

α

β

γ

0 1 2 n>2

in out in in

in out out out

in in in in

7.5. Reason to Want More Pollock’s framework thus offers a promising way of handling some of the cases that created trouble for ARP—in particular, cases of defeater defeat. Why not just jettison reliabilism in favor of the Reasons First program? There are a number of reasons why one might be dissatisfied with Pollock’s theory as it stands. Some of these are issues of detail which Pollock himself

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160   sought to address in later work. For example, Pollock later refines his characterization of what it takes for an inference branch to be ultimately undefeated refinements that are mainly motivated by self-defeating inferences. He also complicates the account by adding additional structure in order to represent the strengths of reasons for belief.¹⁸ Other concerns focus on specific applications of Pollock’s framework to various philosophical puzzles, such as the lottery paradox.¹⁹ I will set these worries aside, since they are not directly relevant to our purposes. Rather, I want to raise two more fundamental concerns. One concern is that Pollock’s account does not accommodate the intuitions and impulses that motivate reliabilism. First, it does not capture the intuition that there is an important connection between justification and truth. Suppose a belief is based on undefeated reasons that support it. Why should we expect the belief to be connected with the truth in any interesting way? Pollock’s framework provides no answer. Second, and more critically, Pollock’s framework does not satisfy the reductive impulse behind reliabilism. Pollock explains ultima facie justification and defeat in terms of the notion of a prima facie reason for believing. But this is surely an epistemic notion. Those who want an analysis of justification in non-epistemic terms will be left empty-handed. Of course, some Reasons Firsters might retort that we should never have hoped for a reductive analysis in the first place. Reductive analyses of other epistemic phenomena have a spotty track record, the analysis of knowledge being a case in point. Why think that the prospects for a reductive analysis of justification will be any better? But this brings me to my second concern, which that even if we renounce our reductive hopes, it is natural to expect some account—reductive or not—of prima facie reasons. After all, without some account, the Reasons First framework will not offer a predictive theory at all. Unless we have some independent grip on prima facie reasons for belief, we will not be able to apply Pollock’s framework to particular cases in order to make predictions about whether a belief is justified or defeated. Pollock was sensitive to this concern, and in various places he offers remarks intended to fill this lacuna. For example, he states that perceptual appearances provide prima facie reasons to believe; so does memory; so does statistical syllogism; so does deduction and induction (Pollock 1987: 486–90).

¹⁸ See Pollock (1994, 1995) for his refined treatment of self-defeating inference branches. See Pollock (2001) for discussion of strengths of reasons. ¹⁹ See Lasonen-Aarnio (2010b).

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These remarks go some distance towards giving us a grip on the notion of prima facie reasons. However, I think there are still grounds for dissatisfaction. As it stands, Pollock’s remarks look more like a list of various sources of prima facie reasons than a genuine theory thereof. A genuine theory should be explanatorily satisfying: it should tell us what perception, memory, and induction have in common, in virtue of which they furnish prima facie reasons for belief, whereas, say, wishful thinking and counterinduction do not. By comparison, reliabilism offers a much more unified and theoretically satisfying account of the ultimate grounds of justification. According to reliabilism, all the ultimate sources of justification have one property in common: their reliability.²⁰ For these reasons, we should not simply replace reliabilism with Pollock’s framework. Instead, we should seek a synthesis that preserves the virtues of both approaches.

7.6. Reasons Reliabilism

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7.6.1 A Reliabilist Account of Reasons The basic idea behind my proposal is simple. Reliabilists should identify reasons for belief with the inputs to reliable or conditionally reliable beliefforming processes. A more careful statement proceeds recursively. The base clause gives an account of an agent’s foundational reasons: Reliable Reasons (Base Clause): if s is a non-doxastic state of an agent A, and there is a reliable process available to A which, when given s as input, is disposed to produce a belief in p, then s is a prima facie reason for A to believe p. What states play this role? The clearest candidates are perceptual experiences. For example, Lori’s visual experience of a red-looking wall is a prima facie reason to believe . Why? Because she has a reliable process that takes the contents of her perceptual experiences as input and produces a belief in those

²⁰ Cf. Goldman’s criticism of disjunctive accounts of justification (1979: 90).

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162   contents as output. And this process is disposed to produce a belief in , when applied to her visual experience of a red-looking wall.²¹ Do states other than perceptual experiences also fit the bill? Perhaps, depending on one’s views, rational intuitions and seemings may also serve this foundational role. Perhaps even non-experiential states could play the part. For our purposes, there is no need to take a stand on this issue. Next, we add a recursive clause, which gives an account of an agent’s derivative reasons:

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Reliable Reasons (Recursive Clause): if A has a prima facie reason to believe p, and there is some conditionally reliable process available to A which, given a belief in p as input, is disposed to produce a belief in q, then p is a prima facie reason for A to believe q. To illustrate, suppose Lori is capable of inferring, At least one thing in my vicinity is red from . Since this inferential process is conditionally reliable, the recursive clause tells us that  provides a prima facie reason for Lori to hold this inferential belief. Round everything out with the customary closure clause (nothing else is a prima facie reason for A to believe p), and you have a complete reliabilist theory of reasons. Of course, this theory could—and perhaps should—be complicated in various ways. For example, in Section 7.5 I mentioned that Pollock’s final inference graphs include representations of the strengths of an agent’s reasons. A natural way of modeling this in a reliabilist framework is to take the strength of an agent’s reasons to correspond to the degrees of reliability (and conditional reliability) of the relevant processes. Thus, if there is an extremely reliable process that is disposed to produce a belief in p, given state s₁ as input, but there is only a somewhat reliable process that is disposed to produce a belief in p, given state s₂ as input, then s₁ is a stronger reason to believe p than s₂. Some might worry that Reliable Reasons fails to do justice to our ordinary conception of reasons. After all, many proponents of a Reasons First approach embrace internalism about reasons. They are thus inclined to say that an

²¹ Here the details will depend on how we individuate perceptual processes. Is veridical perception a different process from non-veridical perception? If yes, then Reliable Reasons predicts that whether Lori’s experience provides a genuine reason for believing  depends on whether she is hallucinating. For our purposes, we can refrain from taking a stand on this issue; I intend my reliabilist account of reasons to be compatible with various positions on how to individuate processes, perceptual processes included.

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agent’s reasons supervene on their non-factive mental states, and that agents have privileged access to their reasons for belief. From this internalist perspective, the account offered here risks mangling the concept of reasons beyond recognition. But is the ordinary conception of reasons really internalist? Compare the dialectic here with debates over the nature of justification. Prior to 70s, most epistemologists embraced some form of internalism about justification. But from this the fact alone it does not follow that the folk notion of justification is internalist, as reliabilists will take pains to insist. Similar remarks apply to reasons. It is questionable whether the folk concept of reasons is committed— even implicitly—to technical claims about the supervenience of reasons on our non-factive mental states. A more plausible view is that the folk concept of reasons is exhausted by various platitudes connecting reasons with other epistemic notions—e.g., ‘A justified belief is supported by reasons’ (Section 7.4). Such platitudes are consistent with both internalist and externalist construals of the relevant notions, as well will now see.

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7.6.2 From Reasons to Justification Equipped with Reliable Reasons, reliabilists can embrace Pollock’s framework. In particular, they can accept Justified Belief as Undefeated Reasoning: for a belief to be ultima facie justified is for it to be the result of an ultimately undefeated inference branch. But what this means is now given a reliabilist interpretation. Let’s take this step by step. Recall that in order for a belief B to be the result of an inference branch ψ, B must be supported by the reasoning in ψ, and must be held as a causal consequence of this reasoning. On the reliabilist interpretation advocated here, an inference branch is just a chain of reliable or conditionally reliable processes. If B is a foundational belief, then this chain consists of a single reliable process applied to some non-doxastic state. If B is an inferential belief, then the first link in this chain is a conditionally reliable process applied to some further belief B0 , which is itself the result of a chain of reliable or conditionally reliable processes. Next, what does it mean for an inference branch to be ultimately undefeated, on a reliabilist picture? Here too, reliabilists can accept Pollock’s account. Following Pollock, reliabilists can explain this in terms of the notion of being in at a level, which is in turn characterized in terms of when one

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164   inference branch defeats another. And they can go on to analyze what it is for one inference branch to defeat another in terms of prima facie reasons. But what it takes for there to be such a reason is now explained in reliabilist terms. Call the resulting combination of Reliable Reasons and Pollock’s framework, ‘Reasons Reliabilism.’ I now argue that this synthesis preserves the primary advantages of both frameworks.²²

7.7. Problems Solved

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7.7.1 A More Satisfactory Reasons-Based Framework In Section 7.5, I raised some grounds for dissatisfaction with a ‘pure’ version of Pollock’s Reasons First framework. The first concern was that a pure Reasons First framework fails to accommodate the intuitions and commitments that lend plausibility to reliabilism. The synthesis advocated here fares better in this respect. First, it captures the intuition that there is an important connection between justification and truth. On the approach defended here, for an agent to have a reason to believe p is for them to have a reliable—hence truthconducive—process that is disposed to produce a belief in p. Second, our synthesis remains faithful to reliabilism’s reductive ambitions. Rather than resting content with a non-reductive analysis of justification in terms of the notion of a reason to believe, Reliable Reasons shows how this notion can be cashed out in non-epistemic notions. It thus fulfills the reliabilist goal of providing a naturalistic account of justification. The second concern for a pure Reasons First framework was that it lacks an explanatorily satisfying account of what all reasons have in common. Why is it that perception, memory, induction, and so on all provide reasons to believe?

²² My proposed synthesis bears comparison to the theory advanced in Graham and Lyons (Forthcoming)—a proposal which was developed independently of the theory offered here. Graham and Lyons suggest a theory of defeat built around the notion of prima facie warrants, which they define in terms of available cognitive processes which would likely produce certain outputs if they were used. In many respects, their approach is complementary to the account offered here. However, there are some important differences. First, their theory is structured around the notion of warrants rather than reasons—indeed, Graham and Lyons reject the need to appeal to reasons in a theory of justification. By contrast, it is one of the contentions of the present essay that once we naturalize reasons, they pose no threat to the reliabilist. Second, their account is not explicitly reliabilist: they define prima facie warrants in terms of available processes that satisfy the requirements of prima facie justification, without taking a stand on how best to cash out the latter requirements. Third, Graham and Lyons’ analysis of warrants takes a counterfactual form. This raises the worry that it will be subject to versions of the counterfactual fallacy-style worries that beset ARP (e.g., the sort of worries raised in Section 7.3.3). By contrast, I’ll be arguing shortly that Reasons Reliabilism avoids these concerns.

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Reliable Reasons answers this question. What all reasons have in common is that they serve as the inputs to reliable (or conditionally reliable) processes. The upshot: Reasons Reliabilism avoids the main concerns with a pure Reasons First approach.

7.7.2 A More Satisfactory Treatment of Defeat

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I’ll now argue that my proposed synthesis also preserves the main advantage of Pollock’s framework—specifically, its superior treatment of defeat. To make this point, let us revisit the difficulties facing ARP and see how Reasons Reliabilism avoids them. 7.7.2.1 Defeater Defeat The first difficulty for ARP was that it has trouble with defeater defeat. As we have seen, Pollock’s definition of an undefeated inference branch is tailormade to handle such cases. Since Reasons Reliabilism makes use of Pollock’s definition of an undefeated inference branch, it can reap the fruits of Pollock’s labors. To illustrate, recall Two Testimony Seeing Red. Reasons Reliabilists can accept the inference graph we sketched for this case (Fig. 2). And they can say all the things that we said earlier about this inference graph. In particular, they can say that the inference branch responsible for Lori’s belief in  is ultimately undefeated, since the only inference branch that defeats it is out at every level 1. However, Reasons Reliabilists do not stop there. They supplement this formal representation of Lori’s reasons with a reliabilist account of where the nodes come from, and why the various support and defeat links hold. According to Reliable Reasons, the reason why the experience of receiving Anne’s testimony is a prima facie reason to believe that Sal is a compulsive liar is that there is a reliable process (believing reliable interlocutors) available to Lori that, when fed this experience as input, is disposed to produce a belief that Sal is a compulsive liar. Similar remarks apply, mutatis mutandis, to the other nodes depicted in the graph. 7.7.2.2 Circularity Worries The second difficulty was that ARP turns out to be circular. To recap: the worry was that the proper way of unpacking ARP will rely on the notion of ultima facie justification. But ARP is used to articulate the conditions under

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166  

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which a belief is undefeated—a concept that occurs in the base clause of Recursive Reliabilism. Reasons Reliabilism avoids this worry. Following Reasons Firsters, we define ultima facie justification in terms of the notion of a prima facie reason for believing. And we then recursively define this notion in terms of the inputs to various belief-forming processes. Crucially, the base clause of this definition (Reliable Reasons) does not itself rely on the notion of defeat, or any other epistemic notion for that matter.²³ 7.7.2.3 Alternative Processes that One Should Not Use The final difficulty for ARP came from cases where an agent has an alternative reliable process that they have no good reason to use. In Thinking About Unger, ARP predicts that Harry’s belief in  is defeated merely in virtue of the fact that he has an available reliable process (his Unger Predictor) which, were he to use it, would lead him to suspend judgment on whether there’s a tree in front of him. The theory advocated here avoids this prediction. To see this, recall that if Harry’s Unger Predictor were fed Harry’s current states as input, it would produce as output a belief in the proposition: Unger would advise me to suspend judgment on . As we saw in Section 7.3.3, this belief could itself be viewed as the input to a further process, which leads Harry to suspend judgment regarding . But neither process would produce either a belief in ¬ or a belief that Harry’s current states do not reliably indicate the truth of . And so, according to Reliable Reasons, Harry doesn’t have either a rebutting or an undercutting defeater for his belief in . Perhaps, some may suggest, the problem re-emerges if we amend the case. Meet Elijah the eliminativist. Elijah thinks trees do not exist, and he wants others to share this belief. Suppose that Harry has a highly reliable Elijah Predictor, which is part of an Elijah Emulator: if he were to predict that Elijah would advise him to believe p in his current situation, this would in

²³ At the same time, Reasons Reliabilism respects Fumerton’s claim that a conditionally reliable process can only serve as a defeater if it is applied to ultima facie justified inputs. Proof: Suppose A’s inference graph contains some node n, and suppose that A unjustifiably believes some proposition q that, when fed into a conditionally reliable process, is disposed to produce a belief in d, where d is either of the form, ¬n or n’s immediate ancestors do not reliably indicate n. Since A’s belief that q is unjustified, it follows (from Justified Belief as Undefeated Reasoning) that either (i) A’s belief in q is not the result of any inference branch, or (ii) it is the result of some inference branch, but one of the branch’s nodes is ultimately defeated. If (i), then A doesn’t even have a prima facie reason to believe q, and so (by Reliable Reasons) q is not a prima facie reason to believe d. If (ii), then q is a prima facie reason to believe d, but q is ultimately defeated. Either way, n is not ultimately defeated.

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turn lead him to believe p. And so, if Harry were to apply his current experiential states to his Elijah Predictor, he would be led to believe ¬. Does Reasons Reliabilism predict that this gives Harry a rebutting defeater for his belief in ? An initial point: given this way of describing the case, it is doubtful whether Harry’s Elijah Emulator is reliable. After all, it systematically misleads him about the presence of trees, which hardly bodes well for its reliability! However, the objector might try to circumvent this point by tempering Elijah’s eliminativism. Just stipulate that, much like Shmunger before him, Elijah has entirely correct beliefs about all sorts of topics—astronomy, geography, physics, whatever. It is only when it comes to trees that Elijah is an eliminativist. And so, Harry’s Elijah Emulator is overall reliable, even though it is unreliable on arboreal matters. Suppose we grant all of this. Then Reasons Reliabilism does indeed predict that Harry has a rebutting defeater for his belief in . However, this need not worry us, provided that this defeater is itself defeated. Consider: why, exactly, would Harry be unjustified in using his Elijah Emulator in his current situation? Presumably, because he has good reason to think that his visual experience of trees reliably correlates with the presence of trees. Where does this reason come from? Presumably from his past experiences, which support the generalization that having a visual experience representing x is a reliable indicator of the presence of x. Plausibly, there is a reliable process available to him that, given these past experiences as input, is disposed to produce a belief that his current tree-like experiences reliably indicate  rather than ¬. If so, these past experiences constitute an undercutting defeater for his rebutting defeater for believing  (see Fig. 3). And so, his belief in  counts as ultima facie justified, as desired. Could proponents of ARP co-opt this response? No. After all, the key move here is to diagnose this variant scenario as a case of defeater defeat. But we’ve seen that ARP lacks an adequate treatment of defeater defeat.

Harry’s visual experience

ve

ea

Elijah would pe advise believing ¬t

Tree in front of Harry

t

¬t

u

past experiences

ea doesn’t reliably indicate ¬t

Fig. 3 Thinking about Eliminativism

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168  

7.7.3 Capturing the Role of Reasons in Justification The primary payoff of recasting reliabilism in terms of reasons is that it provides a satisfactory treatment of defeat. However, a further benefit is also worth noting. Historically, reliabilism has had little to say about reasons for belief. While it has not denied their existence, it has maintained a conspicuous silence about their nature.²⁴ But clearly there are such reasons, and any complete epistemology should have something to say about them. Reasons Reliabilism offers a natural way of bringing reasons into the reliabilist fold. And it does so in a way that underwites the intuitive connections between reasons and justification.

7.8. Comparison with Evidentialist Hybrids

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7.8.1 The Two-Component View I’ve advocated integrating reliabilism with a reasons-based framework—a framework that has traditionally been viewed as a rival to reliabilism. In doing so, I may appear to be joining my voice to a rising chorus. In recent years, a wave of authors has suggested integrating reliabilism with evidentialism—a view that has also been viewed as a competitor to reliabilism.²⁵ How, then, does my synthesis differ from more familiar evidentialist-reliabilist hybrids? To answer this, it will be helpful to look in some detail at how evidentialistreliabilists handle defeat. On a standard evidentialist view, justification and defeat are explained in terms of evidential support. A belief is prima facie justified when it is supported by some initial body of evidence e₁. Defeat occurs when the agent acquires further evidence e₂ which, when combined with e₁, no longer supports the belief. There are various ways one could integrate this general approach with reliabilism. A particularly straightforward strategy is suggested by Goldman (2011), who proposes that ultima facie justification involves two components: a reliable process condition and an evidential support condition. That is:

²⁴ This is at least true of process reliabilists in the tradition of Goldman (1979, 1986). The work of Tyler Burge offers a very different sort of reliabilist approach in which reasons play an important role. See e.g., the papers collected in Burge (2013). ²⁵ See the references in fn. 5.

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   Two Component View:

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A’s belief that p is ultima facie justified iff both:

Reliable Process Condition: A’s belief that p is the result of a reliable beliefforming process, Evidential Support Condition: A’s total evidence supports believing p.²⁶,²⁷

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It is easy to see, at least in broad brushstrokes, how the Evidential Support Condition helps with defeat. Take Seeing Red. When Lori first has the visual experience of a red-appearing wall, her total evidence supports believing , hence her belief is ultima facie justified. But once she receives Sal’s testimony, her total body of evidence expands. This more inclusive body of evidence no longer supports believing . As Miller (2019) notes, a view along these lines also avoids many of the problems facing ARP. Take defeater defeat: when Lori acquires Anne’s testimony in Two Testimony Seeing Red, her total body of evidence changes once again, and  regains its former level of support. Or take Thinking About Unger: arguably, Harry’s total evidence supports believing , despite the availability of his Unger Predictor. Given these virtues, is there any reason to prefer Reasons Reliabilism to the Two Component View? While a full adjudication of this issue is beyond the scope of this paper, I want to briefly raise two reasons for thinking that the answer is ‘yes.’

7.8.2 First Advantage: Reductive and Predictive As it stands, the Two Component View is not reductive. After all, the Evidential Support Condition packages together two epistemic notions: (i) The notion of an agent’s total evidence,²⁸ (ii) The notion of a body of evidence supporting a belief.

²⁶ The Two Component View could be complicated in a number of ways. For example, we might hold that the two conditions are not entirely independent. Rather, we might follow Comesaña (2010) in holding that the reliable process needs to take evidence as input. (According to Comesaña, this helps with both the generality problem and Bonjour’s case of Norman the clairvoyant.) For my purposes, I will set such complications aside. ²⁷ Hybrid views that impose some version of an Evidential Support Condition include Tang (2016); Comesaña (2018); and Miller (2019). ²⁸ Note that the challenge here is not just to give an account of evidence in non-epistemic terms. It’s to give an account of what it is for an agent to possess evidence in non-epistemic terms. See Beddor (2015b, 2016: Ch. 1) for discussion of some difficulties on this front.

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170   Perhaps, some might suggest, this just shows that we need to supplement the Two Component View with a reductive analysis of these notions. To do so, proponents of the Two Component View could try taking a page from the Reasons Reliabilists. According to Reliable Reasons, prima facie reasons are the inputs to reliable and conditionally reliable processes. Why not say the same about evidence? An agent’s total evidence, on this view, is the total set of states of the agent that can serve as potential inputs to the reliable processes available to the agent. This would give us a reductive analysis of (i). What about (ii)? According to one common approach, evidential support should be understood in probabilistic terms: a body of evidence e supports believing p just in case the probability of p given e is sufficiently high. Putting these two suggestions together, we get: Evidential Support Condition (Unpacked): A’s total evidence supports believing p iff Pr(p|A is in states s₁ . . . sn) >t, where

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• s₁ . . . sn are all the states of A that can potentially serve as inputs to A’s reliable belief-forming processes, • t is some threshold. What sort of probability is at issue here? One option would be to define Pr in epistemic terms: for example, we could say that Pr reflects the credences that are justified by the evidence. But clearly this is to give up any reductive ambitions.²⁹ Perhaps, then, we should follow Tang (2016) in taking Pr to reflect objective probabilities. This would result in a reductive theory, but it gives rise to a further concern: Is the theory predictive? And do the predictions vindicate our pretheoretic judgments about defeat? To flesh out this concern, go back to Seeing Red. On the view under consideration, to determine whether Lori’s belief is defeated by Sal’s testimony, we check the objective probability of  conditional on Lori’s total post-Sal-testimony evidence. But how do we check this? Perhaps via intuition, but it is questionable whether we have clear-cut intuitions about such probabilities. And things only get worse when consider defeater defeat. In Two Testimony Seeing Red, how do we determine the objective probability of  conditional on Lori’s post-Sal+Anne-testimony evidence? The worry, then, is

²⁹ See Comesaña (2018), who embraces this consequence.

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that while this version of the Two Component View may be consistent with our intuitions about defeat, it does not yet predict these intuitions. While this is hardly the final word on the matter, these considerations highlight the hurdles that arise when we try to develop the Two Component View in a way that is both fully reductive and predictive.

7.8.3 Second Advantage: No Immunity to Defeat

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The second advantage of Reasons Reliabilism over the Two Component View stems from a structural difference between the two frameworks. One hallmark of Pollock’s framework is that nothing is exempt from defeat. For any proposition p, it’s easy to concoct a defeater for p—just imagine a reliable source tells you either ¬p or that your reasons do not support p. By contrast, the Evidential Support Condition singles out a class of propositions that get a free pass from defeat. Let me explain. It’s a familiar observation that whenever some part of an agent’s evidence entails p, their total evidence also entails p, hence the probability of p conditional on their total evidence is 1. So, probabilistic approaches to defeat predict that one cannot have a defeater for something entailed by any part of one’s current evidence: Limited Indefeasibility: if some subset of A’s evidence entails p at t, then A’s total evidence supports p at t. At least two sorts of cases suggest that Limited Indefeasibility runs contrary to intuition. First, consider cases where an agent has a defeater for a belief in a necessary truth: Logical Luck: Tom comes up with a soundproof of a particular logical theorem L. Sometime later, he is told by his highly accomplished logic professor that his proof contains a mistake. Tom nonetheless disregards her testimony, continuing to believe L on the basis of his proof. Intuitively, the professor’s testimony provides an undercutting defeater for Tom’s belief in L. But any view that validates Limited Indefeasibility cannot account for this intuition: since L is a necessary truth, Tom’s total evidence trivially entails L.

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172   Some might regard necessary truths as a special case, to be dealt with via independent means.³⁰ Still, a second class of counterexamples remains: cases where one has a defeater for some proposition that is itself part of one’s evidence. According to the view of evidence under consideration, one’s evidence consists in various states that serve as inputs to reliable processes. But why think that these states enjoy some special exemption from defeat? Consider:

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Emotional Introspection: Kilian is happy for his brother, who recently received a promotion. By introspection, Kilian comes to justifiably believe, I am happy for my brother (). Later that day, he has a therapy session with an extremely well-credentialed psychiatrist, who tells him that he is mistaken: Kilian is actually jealous of his brother; he is simply unwilling to acknowledge this. While the psychiatrist mounts a compelling argument, Kilian ignores her, continuing to believe . Kilian’s total evidence includes his happiness for his brother, since this state serves as the input to a reliable process (introspection). And this experience entails .³¹ Limited Indefeasibility thus predicts that his justification for this belief is undefeated. But this seems wrong. Even though the psychiatrist is mistaken, her testimony still provides a rebutting defeater for his belief.³² Reasons Reliabilism fares better here, since it is not committed to Limited Indefeasibility. Even if p is entailed by one of your reasons, you could still have a reliable process that is disposed to deliver either a belief that ¬p, or a belief that your basis for believing p does not reliably indicate its truth. In Logical Luck there is a reliable process available to Tom (trusting the testimony of ³⁰ For example, some might take a page from Stalnaker’s (1999) strategy for handling the problem of logical omniscience. According to this proposal, our intuitions about Logical Luck are not really tracking Tom’s justification for believing L, but rather Tom’s justification for believing some contingent proposition associated with L—for example, the proposition: SL is true, where SL is some sentence that expresses L. However, even if this strategy can be made to work, it is a mark in favor of Reasons Reliabilism that it has no need of such maneuvers. ³¹ It entails it both in the sense that its content (trivially) entails , and in the sense that the fact that Killian has this experience entails . So regardless of whether we understand evidential support in terms of probabilities conditional on the contents of an agent’s states or in terms of probabilities conditional on the fact that the agent is in these states, the counterexample goes through. ³² Faced with this counterexample, one option would be to try to complicate the Evidential Support Condition. Perhaps in order for A’s belief that p to satisfy the Evidential Support Condition, we should also require that every sufficiently similar body of evidence would also support believing p. (Cf. Miller (2019), who suggests quantifying over ‘partial psychological duplicates’ to handle this sort of case.) According to this diagnosis, Killian could have been in an internally indistinguishable mental state that only included the appearance of happiness. Had he been in this state, his total evidence arguably would not have supported . However, going this route raises a difficult question: can we give a principled and reductive characterization of when a body of evidence is “sufficiently similar”?

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experts) that, when applied to the experience of receiving his professor’s testimony, is disposed to produce a belief that his proof is not a reliable guide to the truth about L. Similarly, in Emotional Introspection the same reliable process is available to Kilian. When applied to the experience of receiving his psychiatrist’s testimony, this process is disposed to produce a belief in ¬. For the Reasons Reliabilist, no belief is immune to defeat.

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7.8.4 Taking Stock Reasons Reliabilism has certain affinities with extant hybrids of evidentialism and reliabilism: both are attempts to meld reliabilism with theoretical frameworks that are usually associated with internalism. However, there are important theoretical differences between the two approaches. I’ve given some reason to think that these differences speak in favor of Reasons Reliabilism. First, Reasons Reliabilism is both reductive and predictive, whereas it proves difficult to develop the Two Component View in a way that enjoys both these virtues. Second, the Two Component View—and probabilistic approaches to defeat more generally—grant a certain class of propositions a principled exemption from defeat. Reasons Reliabilism bestows no such favors. Of course, given the affinities between the two approaches, some may be inclined to classify Reasons Reliabilism as a type of hybrid view. Should they do so, I would raise no objection. The important point is that if it is a hybrid view, it is the most promising one to date, at least when it comes to handling defeat.³³

7.9. Conclusion For most of their history, the reliabilist tradition and the Reasons First tradition have been developed in isolation from each other. In this paper, I’ve argued that an integration of the two approaches proves mutually beneficial. The synthesis developed here avoids reliabilism’s difficulties with defeat, ³³ Another view that bears some resemblance to Reasons Reliabilism is the Reasons First virtue epistemology developed in Sylvan and Sosa (2018). According to Sylvan and Sosa, facts about what an agent is justified in believing are determined by facts about what she has sufficient epistemic reason to believe, which are in turn determined by facts about her competent attractions to assent to various propositions. While there are a number of similarities between the two approaches, there is also a crucial difference. Sylvan and Sosa do not offer their Reasons First virtue epistemology as a reductive approach. Rather, they take the notion of a ‘competent attraction to assent’ to be a normatively loaded notion—a notion that cannot be reduced to talk of reliable processes.

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174   while still preserving the explanatory advantages that make reliabilism attractive. While I have focused on justification, my conclusions also have implications for the study of knowledge. Recently, some authors sympathetic to externalism have argued for the surprising conclusion that knowledge is indefeasible.³⁴ One argument for this bold conclusion is that we have no satisfactory externalist story about how knowledge defeat works.³⁵ The view developed in this paper shows one way developing such a story. As long as justification is a necessary condition on knowledge, we can use this account of justification to explain how knowledge is likewise subject to a defeat condition.³⁶

References William Alston. (1988). An internalist externalism. Synthese, 74: 265–83. Max Baker-Hytch and Matthew Benton. (2015). Defeatism defeated. Philosophical Perspectives, 29: 40–66. Bob Beddor. (2015a). Process reliabilism’s troubles with defeat. The Philosophical Quarterly, 65(259): 145–59. Bob Beddor. (2015b). Evidentialism, circularity, and grounding. Philosophical Studies, 172: 1847–68.

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Bob Beddor. (2016). Reduction in Epistemology. PhD thesis, Rutgers University. Matthew Bedke. (2010). Developmental process reliabilism: On justification, defeat, and evidence. Erkenntnis, 73(1): 1–17. Michael Bergmann. (2006). Justification without Awareness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Laurence Bonjour. (1985). The Structure of Empirical Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tyler Burge. (2013). Cognition Through Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roderick Chisholm. (1966). Theory of Knowledge. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

³⁴ See e.g., Lasonen-Aarnio (2010a); Baker-Hytch and Benton (2015). ³⁵ See, in particular, Baker-Hytch and Benton (2015), who use the failure of ARP as a premise in an argument for the indefeasibility of knowledge. ³⁶ For helpful comments on this material, I am grateful to Simon Goldstein, Peter Graham, Jack Lyons, Carlotta Pavese, Mona Simion, participants in the NUS Philosophy reading group, and audiences at Hong Kong University, the Bled Epistemology Conference, the Goldman Retirement Conference at Rutgers University, and the Knowledge First Epistemology Workshop at Cardiff University. Special thanks are due to Alvin Goldman for many illuminating conversations about reliabilism and defeat.

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David Christensen. (2010). Higher-order evidence. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 81(1): 185–215. Stewart Cohen. (1984). Justification and truth. Philosophical Studies, 46: 279–96. Juan Comesaña. (2010). Evidentialist reliabilism. Noûs, 44(4): 571–600. Juan Comesaña. (2018). Whither evidentialist reliabilism? In: Kevin McCain (ed.), Believing in Accordance with the Evidence. New York: Springer: 307–25. Richard Fumerton. (1988). Foundationalism, conceptual regress, and reliabilism. Analysis, 48(4): 178–84. Alvin Goldman. (1979). What is justified belief? In: Pappas (ed.) Justification and Knowledge. Dordrecht: Reidel. Alvin Goldman. (1986). Epistemology and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Alvin Goldman. (2011). Towards a synthesis of reliabilism and evidentialism. In: Dougherty (ed.) Evidentialism and its Discontents. New York: Oxford University Press: 254–80. Alvin Goldman. (2012). Reliabilism and Contemporary Epistemology: Essays. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Alvin Goldman and Bob Beddor. (2015). Reliabilist epistemology. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/ entries/reliabilism/. Peter Graham and Jack Lyons. The structure of defeat: Pollock’s evidentialism, Lackey’s distinction, and prospects for reliabilism. In: Simion and Brown (ed.) Reasons, Justification and Defeat. Oxford: Oxford University Press, (Forthcoming). Thomas Grundmann. (2009). Reliabilism and the problem of defeaters. Grazer Philosophische Studien, 79(1): 65–76. David Henderson, Terry Horgan, and Matjaž Potrč. (2007). Transglobal evidentialism—reliabilism. Acta Analytica, 22: 281–300. James Joyce. (1998). A nonpragmatic vindication of probabilism. Philosophy of Science, 65(4): 575–603. Jaegwon Kim. (1988). What is “naturalized epistemology”? Philosophical Perspectives, 2: 381–405. Hilary Kornblith. (2002). Knowledge and its Place in Nature. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Jennifer Lackey. (1999). Testimonial knowledge and transmission. The Philosophical Quarterly, 49(197): 471–90. Maria Lasonen-Aarnio. (2010a). Unreasonable knowledge. Philosophical Perspectives, 24: 1–21.

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176   Maria Lasonen-Aarnio. (2010b). Is there a viable account of well-founded belief? Erkenntnis, 72: 205–31. Jack Lyons. (2009). Perception and Basic Beliefs. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jack Lyons. (2013). Should reliabilists be worried about demon worlds? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 86: 1–40. Jack Lyons. (2016). Goldman on evidence and reliability. In: Kornblith and McLaughlin (eds.) Goldman and his Critics. Oxford: Blackwell. Emelia Miller. (2019). Liars, tigers, and bearers of bad news, oh my! Towards a reasons account of defeat. The Philosophical Quarterly, 69(274): 82–99. Sarah Moss. (2011). Scoring rules and epistemic compromise. Mind, 120(480): 1053–69. Richard Pettigrew. (2016). Accuracy and the Laws of Credence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Richard Pettigrew. (2018). What is justified credence? Episteme, 1–18. John Pollock. (1987). Defeasible reasoning. Cognitive Science, 11: 481–518. John Pollock. (1992). How to reason defeasibly. Artificial Intelligence, 57: 1–42. John Pollock. (1994). Justification and defeat. Artificial Intelligence, 67: 377–408. John Pollock. (1995). Cognitive Carpentry. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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John Pollock. (2001). Defeasible reasoning with variable degrees of justification. Artificial Intelligence, 133(2): 233–82. Henry Prakken and John Horty. (2012). An appreciation of John Pollock’s work on the computational study of argument. Argumentation and Computation, 3: 1–19. Robert Stalnaker. (1999). Context and Content. New York: Oxford University Press. Kurt Sylvan and Ernest Sosa. (2018). The place of reasons in epistemology. In: Star (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weng Hong Tang. (2016). Reliability theories of justified credence. Mind, 125 (497): 63–94.

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8 Knowledge, Action, and Defeasibility Carlotta Pavese

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8.1. Introduction One can intentionally do something only if one knows what one is doing while they are doing it. For example, one can intentionally kill one’s neighbor by opening their gas stove overnight only if one knows that the gas is likely to kill the neighbor in their sleep. One can intentionally sabotage the victory of one’s rival by putting sleeping drugs in their drink only if one knows that sleeping drugs will harm the rival’s performance. And so on. In a slogan: Intentional action is action guided by knowledge.¹ This essay reviews some motivations for a ‘knowledge-centered psychology’— a psychology where knowledge enters center stage in an explanation of intentional action (Section 8.2). Then it outlines a novel argument for the claim that knowledge is required for intentional action (Section 8.3) and discusses some of its consequences for the debate about know-how. Section 8.4 argues that a knowledge-centered psychology motivates the intellectualist view that knowhow is a species of know-that. In its more extreme form, the view is committed to an epistemologically substantial claim—i.e., that the epistemic profile of knowhow is the same as that of propositional knowledge. Now, it is widely believed that know-that can be defeated by undermining and rebutting defeaters (e.g., Chisholm 1966; Goldman 1986; Pollock and Cruz 1999; Bergmann 2000). If that is correct, one corollary of intellectualism is that the defeasibility of know-how patterns with that of knowledge. A knowledge-centered psychology does predict that, for it predicts that both know-how and knowledge are defeated when one’s ability to intentionally act is defeated. In Section 8.5, by replying to a challenge raised in the recent literature (Carter and Navarro 2018), I argue that this prediction is actually borne out.

¹ I am grateful for comments to Adam Carter, Clayton Littlejohn, and Mona Simion.

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8.2. Towards a Knowledge-Centered Psychology A long tradition in the philosophy of mind assigns beliefs a central role in folk psychological explanations of intentional behavior (e.g., Stich 1978; Fodor 1987; Lewis 1976; Stalnaker 1984; Humberstone 1992). More or less explicitly, this tradition confines psychological explanations to an explanation of attempts. Consider the usual example of a psychological explanation, where one’s belief that there is water in the fridge and one’s desire to drink it together are supposed to explain one’s attempt to grab a bottle of water from the fridge. Success happens when the belief is true—when there is indeed water in the fridge. If one’s belief is true, then one will succeed at finding a bottle; if one’s belief is false, one will not succeed at finding water. The dominant thought behind a belief-centered psychology is the idea that, as far as the psychological explanation of behavior goes, whether the world makes the belief true (e.g., whether there is water in the fridge) is irrelevant: what is to be explained is the fact that one attempted to get water from the fridge, whether or not one has succeeded. And one’s belief that there is water in the fridge, together with one’s desire to drink it, suffices to explain one’s attempt, whether or not the belief is true.² Let us get a bit clearer about the underlying assumption of a belief-centered psychology. Let a condition be something that obtains or fails to obtain at a case, and let a case be a centered possible world or situation—an ordered triple of a subject, a time, and a location. Some conditions are mental, such as that I feel pain or believe that it is raining. Other conditions are non-mental, such as that I have broken my leg. Beliefs are mental conditions and so are attempts—e.g., my trying to get on the bus is a mental condition.³ Like beliefs, attempts are non-factive mental conditions: an attempt to ϕ does not entail successful ϕ-ing, for an attempt might be successful or might fail. As a nonfactive condition, an attempt does not encompass those external aspects of the world that make for an agent’s success. The assumption that psychological explanation should be confined to explaining attempts relies on the idea that actions are decomposable into mental conditions and non-mental conditions—into attempts, on the one hand, and into those external conditions that makes for the agent’s success, on the other. Call this the decomposability assumption and suppose it is true. If so, we can appreciate one of the main motivations that underlie a belief-centered psychology. A psychological explanation of intentional ² See in particular Stich (1978).

³ This terminology follows closely Williamson (2000: Ch. 3).

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behavior, understood as attempts, does not need to appeal to anything more than to non-factive mental states—i.e., such as mere beliefs. If when we are explaining behavior, all we are trying to explain is an attempt (e.g., the attempt at finding a bottle of water in the fridge) rather than one’s intentional success (e.g., one’s intentional success at finding the bottle in the fridge) then all we need is a psychological theory that encompasses non-factive attitudes such as beliefs and desires (e.g., one’s belief that water is in the bottle and the desires to drink). But is the decomposition assumption true? Indeed, there are good reasons to think that actions are not decomposable into mental and non-mental components and that even if attempts were in some sense components of actions, the mentality of actions would not be exhausted by the mentality of attempts. Here is an argument for this conclusion. If attempts exhausted the mentality of actions, then provided that one attempted to ϕ, one’s eventual success at ϕ-ing would have to be intentional. For on this picture, the intentionality, and hence the mentality, of an action would be exhausted by its attempt. However, there are a variety of cases in which one attempts at ϕ-ing, succeeds, and yet fails to act intentionally. That suggests that the intentionality of actions cannot be reduced to the intentionality of attempts; and intentionality being a mark of the mental (e.g., Brentano 1874/1995: 68), that suggests that the mentality of actions cannot be reduced to the mentality of attempts. A well-known example in action theory which illustrates how attempts and intentionality can come apart is Mary the Bomber (cf. Mele and Moser 1994; Gibbons 2001): Mary the Bomber: Mary intends to kill her uncle by setting off a bomb by a bomb in his house and then, after moving a safe distance away, pressing the large red button on the remote-control device. She does not know much about how these things work and thinks that pressing the button will cause the bomb to detonate but has no idea about the details of this process. Her belief is true and justified and here is what happens. A satellite, launched by the National Security Agency and designed to prevent bombings of just this kind, intercepts Mary’s transmission which causes the satellite to send a warning to the intended victim. But, because of an unfortunate choice of frequency, this causes the bomb to detonate.

Mary killed her uncle and caused the bomb to detonate and did intend both things. But she did not do either of these things intentionally. Hence, the intentionality and mentality of this action is not reducible to the intentionality

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and mentality of the attempt. This residual ‘mentality’ of actions calls for an explanation—and presumably an explanation that reduces the intentionality of the action to some mental state of the agent. And for this sort of explanation, belief alone cannot suffice.⁴ For intentional action is a factive mental condition: if one intentionally ϕs, then (trivially) one ϕs. And, if the mental condition to be explained is factive in the way intentional action is factive, then its explanation calls for a factive condition. Non-factive (attempts) might be explainable by non-factive (i.e., beliefs). But factive (intentional actions) ought to be explained by factive (i.e., knowledge). Mary the Bomber can be accounted for by a knowledge-centered psychology (Gibbons 2001). Mary does not really know that she can provoke the explosion by implementing her plan. That is why her success is too coincidental to count as intentional. More generally, the prediction of a knowledgecentered psychology is that if one’s belief is Gettiered, then one cannot act intentionally on that belief. This prediction is borne out. To see this, consider two more examples. The next is also from Gibbons (2001) but slightly revised:⁵ Cindy and the Lottery: Cindy mistakenly believes that someone rigged a lottery in her favor and that she will be handed the winning ticket at the ticket store. On this basis, she believes of a particular ticket that is being handed to her, that if she buys it, she will win. She buys the ticket and wins. So, her belief that she will win the lottery by buying that ticket is true. It is even justified. Buying a winning ticket is a perfectly reliable way of winning a lottery. Still, intuitively, she did not intentionally win the lottery.

Here again, Cindy intends to win the lottery and attempts to do it by buying a ticket that she believes truly and justifiably to be a winning ticket. This case differs from the previous one, for here no deviant causal chain plays a role in explaining her success (i.e., in making her ticket win). And yet, Cindy’s victory is not intentional: fair lotteries cannot be intentionally won. That suggests, once again, that the intentionality of actions is not exhausted by the intentionality of attempts. But if so, we need a sort of psychology that differs from a belief-centered psychology in that it is not only tailored to explaining attempts. ⁴ Cf. also Levy (2013) and Williamson (2017) for similar remarks about the non-decomposability of actions. Gibbons (2001) also argues that psychological explanations should explain intentional successes and not merely attempts. ⁵ Revised in order to overcome an objection raised by Cath (2015) to Gibbons’ original example. See Pavese (2018) for a detailed discussion of Cath (2015) on Gibbons. Cath’s objection does not extend to Cindy and the Lottery as presented in the text, nor does it extend to the next example from Pavese (2019)—i.e., Daniel and the Barn.

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As a final example supporting the claim that intentional action requires more than true belief or even justified true belief, consider the following variation on Carl Ginet’s fake barn case (Pavese 2019; Beddor and Pavese 2019):⁶

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Daniel and the Barn: along the road to Larissa, Daniel is instructed to stop at any barn that he finds and to await further instructions. However, the road to Larissa passes through fake-barn county. Daniel passes the first barn-looking construction but does not stop for he thinks “There is not enough shadow for me to wait comfortably.” At the second barn-looking construction, Daniel stops and parks. As it turns out, only the second barn-looking construction was a real barn.⁷

In Daniel and the Barn, Daniel ends up stopping at a barn and intended to do so. However, intuitively, he did not intentionally stop at a barn. In fact, he would have easily stopped at a fake barn, had the shadow been present there. In all Mary the Bomber, Cindy and the Lottery, and Daniel and the Barn, the success of the agent does not count as intentional. This fact can be explained on a knowledge-centered psychology. If one possesses knowledge, then one’s belief cannot be lucky (Sosa 1999; Williamson 2000).⁸ In all of these examples, the subject’s belief turns out to be true by luck and the same sort of luck undermines the intentionality of their actions.⁹ A knowledge requirement on intentional action can explain why the luck of their successes can undermine the intentionality of Mary’s, Daniel’s, and Cindy’s successes: by undermining their knowledge. In contrast, it is unclear that a belief-centered psychology has the resources to explain why these actions are not intentional.

⁶ Cf. also Goldman (1976). ⁷ Some take fake barn cases to be cases of knowledge (see e.g., Sosa 2007: 31), for they think in those cases, the success of the belief is clearly due to ability. Many, however, disagree about this diagnosis, either on the grounds that it is too little intuitive (e.g., Pritchard 2012; Beddor and Pavese 2018) or on the ground that there is a clear virtue-theoretic rationale for thinking that success in fake barn cases is not attributable to ability. For the latter style of argument, see Littlejohn (2014). ⁸ Some object to a modal requirement on knowledge. See Beddor and Pavese (2018) for a recent defense. ⁹ It is important to register that not all luck is epistemically harmful. The kinds of luck that seem most clearly malignant are the ones that seem to show that it is at least partially accidental that a belief ‘turns out’ to be accurate, correct, and so on. When it is lucky that someone believes but not lucky that the belief (given the conditions under which its formed) is correct, the luck does not seem to be malignant. Something similar seems to hold for tryings, attempts, and intentional actions. It seems to matter that the connection between trying and succeeding is lucky or accidental, not whether it’s lucky or accidental that the person tried. Thanks to Clayton Littlejohn for the discussion.

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182   But could one act intentionally on the basis of extremely high probabilistic evidence that however falls short of knowledge?¹⁰ Consider: Mary, the Bomber, and the Lottery: Mary intentionally plays a trillion ticket lottery such that the bomb fails to go off and fails to kill her uncles only if she wins the lottery (and let’s suppose the satellite stuff is left out of the story).

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Like in standard lottery cases, arguably Mary does not know that she will lose the lottery (Williamson 2000). But, the objection goes, it seems as though Mary could intentionally kill her uncle by simply intentionally playing that lottery. This is the case even though (like in Gettier cases) she doesn’t know that playing the lottery will detonate the bomb. In response, granted, Mary does not and cannot know that playing the lottery will detonate the bomb. But there is another thing that she does know— i.e., that it is sufficiently likely that playing the lottery will detonate the bomb, for she knows that it is sufficiently likely that she will lose the lottery. In fact, as I will explain later in the essay, it is independently plausible that probabilistic knowledge of this sort is central to an explanation of intentional action (Pavese 2020). To see this, consider Davidson’s (1971: 50) example: Carbon Copying: I have a stack of carbon paper in front of me. In order to save time, I try to sign the top page of the stack with enough force to that I sign all the copies simultaneously. I do this despite the fact that I do not believe that I will succeed. In this case, I might succeed in this endeavor while failing to know that my signature would be legible on the last page because I do not have sufficient confidence for full belief.

This seems to be a case of intentional action. But it is tempting to say in this case that I do not have knowledge because of my lack of confidence. This would be too quick, however. As several people have argued in the recent literature (Weisberg 2013; Moss 2018), credences can amount to knowledge too. Although I do not know that I will succeed at signing all the carbon copies, I still estimate that I will succeed with some probability. And although I do not know that I will succeed, I still know that it is sufficiently likely that I will. And, knowing that requires believing that it is sufficiently likely that I will. This belief can be modeled as a credence of sufficiently high degree that I will sign all the carbon copies. If that is correct, then Davidson’s (1971) carbon copy ¹⁰ Thanks to Adam Carter for the example.

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example—or Mary, the Bomber, and the Lottery, or other similar examples¹¹—raise no issue for a knowledge requirement on intentional action, for what guides intentional action in these cases can still be knowledge, albeit probabilistic. In conclusion, explanations of intentional action do seem to essentially appeal to knowledge. These explanations are plausibly psychological in nature, for they aim at explaining a factive mental condition (intentional action) in terms of a more primitive factive mental condition (the mental state of knowledge).¹² As such, they provide support to a knowledge-centered psychology, for they support the view that knowledge plays a central role in psychological explanations of intentional action.

8.3. Intentional Action does Require Knowledge

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The claim that intentional action requires knowledge has been recently challenged. It is instructive to consider the challenge for it points towards a more principled argument for thinking that knowledge is required for intentional action. Cath (2015: 11) argues that one can have intentional action without knowledge, upon considering cases like the following: Bob the Pilot: Bob wants to learn how to fly in a flight simulator. He is instructed by Henry. Unbeknownst to Bob, Henry is a malicious imposter who has inserted a randomizing device in the simulator’s controls and intends to give all kinds of incorrect advice. Fortunately, by sheer chance, the randomizing device causes exactly the same results in the simulator as would have occurred without it, and by incompetence Henry gives exactly the same advice as a proper instructor would have done. Bob passes the course with flying colors. He has still not flown a real plane. Bob has a

¹¹ Setiya (2012) puts forward an example of the subject believing their hand to be paralyzed who tries nonetheless to clench their fingers. This case too can be handled by appealing to probabilistic knowledge, for although one does not know that one will succeed by intending to succeed, one knows that one might succeed by intending. Cf. Pavese (2020). For a different sort of diagnosis of Setiya’s case, cf. Pavese (2018). ¹² Gibbons (2001) emphasizes that the role of knowledge in explaining intentional action provides a novel argument for the claim that knowledge is a mental state—a claim famously defended by Williamson (2000) and Nagel (2013). Although both Williamson (2000) and Nagel (2013) provide arguments for the role of knowledge in explaining behavior, neither focuses specifically on the role of knowledge in action theory. For a comparison, see Pavese (2019).

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justified true belief about how to fly, but that justified true belief does not amount to knowledge.¹³

Cath uses this example to argue that one can have know-how even though one’s relevant belief is Gettiered. Cath claims that intuitively Bob can intentionally fly. And for some action ϕ, if one can intentionally ϕ, then one knows how to ϕ (Williamson and Stanley 2001; Hawley 2003; Setiya 2012; Cath 2015; Pavese 2018, 2020). Therefore, Bob must know how to fly, even though he does not know the relevant instructions. Cath thinks that this diagnosis is supported by comparing the case of Bob with the case of Joe, who is a near perfect counterpart of Bob except that his belief is not Gettiered: his simulator operated correctly and did so nonaccidentally; his instructor intentionally gave him the correct advice, and so on. If Joe were to try to fly a plane in normal circumstances, he would typically succeed in so doing and his successful actions would be unquestionably intentional actions. And it is an implicit stipulation of the flight simulator case that if Bob were to try to fly a plane in normal circumstances then he would be just as likely to succeed as Joe. Cath contends that not only would Bob succeed as often as Joe but, like Joe, his actions would appear to have all the standard kind of properties that are thought to distinguish merely successful actions from intentional actions. Hence, according to Cath, it is plausible that Bob’s successful actions of flying, like Joe’s, would be perfectly under his control or guidance as he performs them. But is Cath (2015) right in assuming that, in Bob the Pilot, Bob’s performance is under his control? Both intuitive and theoretical considerations suggest that the answer to this question ought to be “No.” Compare Joe and Bob. Note that, strictly speaking, Joe knows what he is doing while he flies the plane: he knows that he is following instructions that are conducive to successful flying. In contrast, by assumption, Bob does not know that. Hence, he does not know what he is doing while he flies the plane. But consider how unintuitive it is to ascribe intentional action to one who lacks knowledge of what they are doing: Awful: Bob intentionally landed the plane, but he did not know that he was landing the plane by following the given instructions.

¹³ This example is initially due to Stanley and Williamson (2001) who actually give it as an example showing that know-how is incompatible with epistemic luck. Poston (2009) also discusses it and so does Stanley (2001: Ch. 8).

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A similar intuition has been voiced by several philosophers in the past. Hampshire claims that “[I]f a man is doing something without knowing that he is doing it, then it must be true that he is not doing it intentionally” (Hampshire 1959: 95). Anscombe (1959: Section 8.8) holds that if someone is ϕ-ing intentionally, she knows without observation that she is ϕ-ing. More recently, Gibbons claims that “talk of intentional action presupposes a certain degree of control on the part of the agent. Control, like perception, requires the right kind of connection between the agent and the facts. An essential ingredient in this kind of connection is knowledge” (2001: 591). Hence, the intuition that an intentional action’s control depends on one’s knowledge is very widespread. Of course, no important philosophical claim should be motivated merely by intuitions, for they are too unstable and possibly theoretically driven to be conclusive. There is, however, a positive theoretical argument to the effect that, contra Cath, one’s actions cannot be intentional unless they are guided by knowledge.¹⁴ Here is the gist of the argument. Cath assumes intentional action ought to be “under one’s control” and assumes that Bob’s success is under his control. But as in Mary the Bomber, the belief in question is Gettiered, and so happens to be true by luck. According to the standard account, a belief is lucky just in case it could easily fail to be true. If so, both Bob and Mary could easily have the beliefs they have even if they were false. In this case, an attempt of theirs based on those beliefs could easily fail. Arguably, then, their success is too lucky to count under their control. More precisely, here is the argument step by step: (a) If one’s action is intentional, then it is under one’s control. (Premise) (b) If one’s action is (too) lucky, then it is not under one’s control. (Premise) (c) If an action is based on a Gettiered belief about how to perform it, then it is (too) lucky. (Premise) (d) Hence, if an action is based on a Gettiered belief about how to perform it, then it is not under one’s control. (From b, c) (e) Hence, if an action is based on a Gettiered belief about how to perform it, then that action cannot be intentional. (From a, d)

¹⁴ Greco (2016) considers a different sort of argument for the claim that knowledge is necessary for explaining action—one that relies on the nature of explanation as counterfactually robust. See also Pavese (2018).

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As rarely happens in philosophy, we have here a deductively valid argument to the effect that intentional actions ought to be based on knowledge. Is the argument sound? Premise (a) relies on rather minimal assumptions about the nature of the action, widely endorsed in action theory (e.g., Mele and Moser 1994; Gibbons 2001), according to which intentional action is under the agent’s control. (Because this premise is actually granted by Cath (2015: 10–11), I will assume it without much argument.) Premise (b) is the rather uncontroversial claim that, if a certain success is (too) lucky, then it is not under the control of the agent. This is a common assumption in action theory, where it is customary to infer from the fact that an act is too coincidental that it is, therefore, not intentional (e.g., Melse and Moser 1994: 40), as well as in debates on moral responsibility (Nagel 1979: 59; Williams 1981: 126, 1993), where moral luck is deemed to be incompatible with control.¹⁵,¹⁶ The most controversial premise is, I take it, Premise (c)—i.e., the claim that, if an action is based on a Gettiered belief, then the action is (too) lucky to qualify as under the agent’s control. Here is an argument for thinking that it is true. The following is a plausible sufficient condition on a lucky action: Sufficient: if S succeeds at ϕ-ing at a world @ but S fails to ϕ in many of the sufficiently close worlds where S tries to ϕ, then S’s ϕ-ing at @ is (too) lucky.¹⁷

Note that Sufficient does not require that for one’s action at @ to be not-toolucky, one succeed at performing it when one tries it in every sufficiently close world.¹⁸ This would be too demanding a requirement: as Austin (1961: 218) put it, “a human ability or power or capacity is inherently liable not to produce success, on occasion, and that for no reason.” If Austin is right, many actions might be under the control of their agent and even manifest their skills and

¹⁵ It is worth noting that some recent work takes moral luck to be a species of a larger genus of luck, of which there are other species as well, such as epistemic luck. Such an approach does not build in the idea that luck is opposed to control. See Pritchard (2006) and Coffman (2015) for similar approaches. Thanks to Mona Simion for the discussion. ¹⁶ It is, of course, a difficult and partly a context-sensitive matter, what counts as “under one’s control.” But, for our purposes, we do not need to settle this question, the idea being that if a certain success counts as too lucky, it is not sufficiently under the control of the agent to count as intentional. ¹⁷ Beddor and Pavese (2018: 6) for a defense of this sort of condition on lucky actions. ¹⁸ Although strictly speaking only attempts might fail to succeed, it will simplify my exposition to talk as if one’s action might fail to succeed in some worlds where it is tried.

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still fail in some close worlds, for no particular reason.¹⁹ Rather, according to Sufficient, an action is too lucky if it fails in more than just some close worlds when tried—if it fails in many close worlds (for that is what “many” means: more than just some). My argument for Premise (c) is that actions based on Gettiered beliefs are doomed to satisfy Sufficient, and hence are doomed to be too lucky in the relevant sense. Here is why. If an action is based on a true belief about how to bring it about, then it might nonetheless fail when tried in some close worlds. In fact, even if the action is based on knowledge, it might still fail in some close worlds. That might be because in those close worlds, something interferes with the agent’s basing their action on the relevant belief. For example, an archer’s shot might fail in a counterfactual circumstance where the archer gets distracted by a passer-by and hence fails to appropriately base their shot on their knowledge about how to shoot. Or it might fail also because, although their shot is appropriately based on their knowledge, the world does not cooperate in the way required for success. For example, the archer’s shot might fail in a circumstance where a fluke happens, and an unexpected gust of wind interferes. Or it might fail because their hand was for no reason slightly less firm than they expect it to be a moment ago. In those counterfactual circumstances, the belief on which the agent’s performance is based might still be true—it is still true that one must do this and this to shoot the target under certain conditions (e.g., in non-windy conditions and when one’s hands are firm). It is just that there the world does not cooperate in the way required for success. Now, when an agent acts on a Gettiered belief, there will be an additional reason for why they might fail in some close worlds—i.e., because the belief they act upon there is false and so does not accurately represent the world. Gettiered beliefs are generally assumed to be lucky precisely in the sense that they might fail to be true in some close worlds (Sosa 1999; Williamson 2000; Pritchard 2005). If so, then an action based on a Gettiered belief will fail in more close worlds than it would have if it had been based on knowledge. For it will not just fail in those close worlds where it is not properly based on the relevant belief or where, even though properly based, the world does not cooperate. It will also fail in those close counterfactual circumstances where the basing belief about how to perform the action is false. Hence, it will fail in more than just some close worlds. Hence, an action based on a Gettiered belief is doomed to satisfy Sufficient. And if it satisfies Sufficient, then Premise (c) is true. ¹⁹ Thanks to Clayton Littlejohn for discussion on this point.

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188   This concludes my argument for Premise (c). With Premise (a) to Premise (c) in play, the conclusion deductively follows actions based on Gettiered beliefs cannot be intentional. Intentional action ought to be guided by knowledge.

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8.4. From a Knowledge-Centered Psychology to Intellectualism About Know-How Hence, a knowledge-centered psychology can be motivated on the basis of intuitions about cases (Section 8.2). But there are, also, more theoretical considerations on behalf of a knowledge-centered psychology, ones that rely on rather minimal assumptions about the nature of Gettiered beliefs, control, and intentional actions (Section 8.3). This section explores some of the consequences of a knowledge-centered psychology and details an argument from a knowledge-centered psychology to an intellectualist view about knowhow. First, note that the kind of knowledge that, on a knowledge-centered psychology, explains intentional action is exactly the same kind of knowledge that, on a broadly intellectualist picture, is required by know-how. To see this consider the kind of knowledge that would be needed to explain intentional action. Start with Goldman’s (1970) action theory, according to which one intentionally ϕs when one has a plan to ϕ, where a plan to ϕ is a belief that specifies the means to ϕ (cf. also e.g., Audi 1986; Bratman 1987; Ginet 1990; Harman 1976; Velleman 1989, 2007; Mele and Moser 1994): (Intentionality/Belief): if s intentionally ϕs, then there are some means m₁, . . . , mn to ϕ such that s truly believes that m₁, . . . , mn are means for them to ϕ.

(Intentionality/Knowledge) can be formulated along the same lines: (Intentionality/Knowledge): if s intentionally ϕs, then there are some means m₁, . . . , mn to ϕ such that s knows that m₁, . . . , mn are means for them to ϕ.

It is independently plausible that the content of one’s knowledge in (Intentionality/Knowledge) ought to be spelled out in probabilistic terms. To see this, start with (Intentionality/Knowledge). It requires of intentionally ϕ-ing that one have knowledge, of some means, that they are means for one

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to ϕ. What does it mean for some means to be means for one to ϕ? Not that, for some way ψ of ϕ-ing, one will ϕ by ψ-ing: that is far too strong, for one might intentionally ϕ even though one has some doubts about whether one will succeed (Goldman 1970; Harman 1976). Recall, for example, Davidson’s (1971: 50; 1980: 91–4) carbon copy example, discussed earlier. Should the relevant knowledge be that, for some means ψ of ϕ-ing, one would in most cases succeed at ϕ-ing by ψ-ing? This is also too strong: one might intentionally ϕ even though one might fail in most circumstances, as the baseball player who fails at batting nineteen times out of twenty may nonetheless intentionally bat the one time they succeed. That suggests that the relevant knowledge is that, for some means ψ of ϕ-ing, one could ϕ by ψ-ing. But what does it mean that one could ϕ by ψ-ing, if not that one is sufficiently likely to ϕ by ψ-ing, where what counts as sufficiently likely may vary from task to task? This gives us: (Intentionality/Probabilistic Knowledge): if s successfully and intentionally ϕs at t, then at t s knows, for some means ψ of ϕ-ing, that oneself is sufficiently likely to ϕ by ψ-ing.

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Now, according to standard formulations of intellectualism (Stanley and Williamson 2001; Stanley 2011; Pavese 2015, 2017), one knows how to ϕ only if, for some means ψ to ϕ, one knows that ψ is a means for one to ϕ: (Intellectualism about Know-How) s’s knowing how to ϕ is at least in part of a matter of knowing, for some means ψ to ϕ, s knows that ψ is a means for them to ϕ.²⁰

Consider Intellectualism about Know-How. In the original formulation, it is the view according to which knowing how to ϕ is at least in part a matter of knowing that certain means are means for one to ϕ. But what does that mean? We do not want to require, for some means to be means for one to ϕ that one’s ψ-ing invariably result in one’s successfully ϕ-ing; nor that it result in one’s successfully ϕ-ing in most cases. That would be too demanding: after all, Babe Ruth does know how to hit a home run and yet fails at successfully hitting a home run in many circumstances. In order for ψ to be a way for one ²⁰ I am stating Intellectualism as the view that know-how requires knowledge of the means for action, rather than as a fully reductive claim. Stating Intellectualism as a fully reductive claim would require talking about practical modes of presentation, which I cannot discuss here. See Pavese (2015, 2017, 2019a).

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190   to ϕ, all that is required is that one be sufficiently likely to successfully ϕ by ψ-ing, where what counts as “sufficiently likely” may vary with the task at hand (and the circumstances under which the task is being performed). This gets us to:

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(Intellectualism about Know-How): s knows how to ϕ only if, for some means ψ for s to ϕ, s knows that it is sufficiently likely for them to succeed at ϕ-ing by ψ-ing.

Hence, if one unpacks the clause means for one to ϕ, a plausible upshot is that both (Intellectualism about Know-How) and (Intentionality/Knowledge) should be stated through a probabilistic language: they both require knowledge that one is sufficiently likely to succeed at ϕ-ing through certain means. Following Moss (2018), one might know that it is sufficiently likely for oneself to succeed at ϕ-ing by ψ-ing in virtue of possessing a sufficiently high credence that one will succeed at ϕ-ing by ψ-ing. Because possessing this credence does not require that one grasp the concepts of likelihood or probability, Pavese (2020) argues that this rendition of (Intellectualism about Know-How) overcomes the challenge of over-intellectualization that Setiya (2012) and other authors have raised against it. Hence, the knowledge that (Intentionality/Knowledge) requires for intentional action is the same that intellectualists require for know-how. I suggested that we can use a knowledge-centered psychology to argue for intellectualism about know-how. How would such an argument go? Start from (Know-How/ Intentionality), endorsed by intellectualists and anti-intellectualists alike (Ryle 1949; Stanley and Williamson 2001; Stanley 2011; Hawley 2003; Hornsby 2004, 2011; Setiya 2012; Pavese 2018): (Know-How/Intentionality): if s intentionally ϕs, s knows how to ϕ.

Among the motivations behind (Know-How/Intentionality) is the idea that operations which cannot be performed intentionally, such as digesting, are ones that one cannot know how to perform (Williamson and Stanley 2001). Moreover, manifestations of know-how seem to be characteristically intentional: as Ryle (1949) put it, what distinguishes the clumsy person, who falls and tumbles by accident, and the skillful clown is that the latter, but not the former, falls and tumbles on purpose. Further, suppose that (Intentionality/Knowledge) is true and so that the intentionality of an action is to be explained at least in part in terms of propositional

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knowledge. Then by (Know-how/Intentionality) and (Intentionality/Knowledge), we get that, if one intentionally ϕs, one both knows how to ϕ and has propositional knowledge of some means to ϕ: (Know-how, Intentionality, Knowledge): if s intentionally ϕs, s both knows how to ϕ and for some means m₁, . . . , mn, knows that means m₁, . . . , mn are means for then to ϕ.

The intellectualist picture provides the best explanation for why (Know-How, Intentionality, Knowledge) should hold. According to this explanation, (KnowHow, Intentionality, Knowledge) is true not just out of a coincidental aligning of propositional knowledge and know-how in intentional action. Rather, its truth is grounded in the very nature of know-how. By mostly appealing to a linguistic argument when motivating their views (Stanley and Williamson 2001; Stanley 2011), intellectualists have sold the view short.²¹ The chief motivation for the view does not come from linguistics: it comes from the sort of action theory that a knowledge-centered psychology recommends.

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8.5. The Defeasibility of Know-How I have argued on behalf of a knowledge-centered psychology by looking at the role of knowledge in explaining intentional action. Knowledge-centered psychology naturally goes together with an intellectual picture of know-how that vindicates the relation between know-how and intentional action. Now, the intellectualist picture motivated by a knowledge-centered psychology and outlined in the previous section makes a very clear prediction: that know-how is defeated exactly when knowledge is defeated. Against this prediction, Carter and Navarro (2018) argue that the defeasibility of know-how does not go together with the defeasibility of knowledge. They use this claim to argue against the intellectualist claim that know-how consists in a state of propositional knowledge. We are now in a position to assess the problems with Carter and Navarro’s (2018) argument, which turns on a failure to appreciate the relation between knowledge and intentional action.

²¹ For worries concerning the linguistic argument on behalf of intellectualism, see Brown (2013).

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192   Carter and Navarro (2018: 666) propose the following example:

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Ana and the Grenade Factory: Ana and Marıa work in a grenade factory during the Spanish Civil War. They are thoroughly instructed when hired, with examples and practical explanations. By controlled trial and error, they learn their job, and both continue working at the factory for years, believing they are making working grenades. However, one day each comes to realize that the other is making grenades in an importantly different way, and they identify the origin of the problem: as it turns out, the instructions were ambiguous and allowed for two different interpretations. The instructors were not aware of this, and there is nobody above them now who may say who is right. Given that the grenades may only be used in battle, which is very far away, neither Ana nor Marıa knows whose grenades actually work, and so there is no way to find out who is making them the right way. As a matter of fact, Ana got the instructions right (she produces grenades in way w, which is the correct way); she is very successful in producing grenades that later work perfectly. It is Marıa who got something wrong (she makes them in w’, the possible interpretation of the instructions that the instructors did not foresee), and her grenades are always duds. Unaware of this, both have reasonable doubts they did not have before, but they have to keep on working.

According to Carter and Navarro (2018), before receiving information about how her knowledge has been acquired (call this piece of information ‘MISLEADING’), Ana might know, for some means to make grenades, that it is a means to make grenades; but her knowledge is defeated as soon as the misleading evidence is acquired. On the other hand, they think that Ana still knows how to make grenades after receiving MISLEADING. If they were right, this would be a case where know-how stands undefeated whereas the corresponding knowledge is instead defeated. They conclude (2018: 669): If know-how really were a case of know-that, we should expect it to be defeasible by the same kinds of mechanisms by which propositional knowledge is defeated. But it is not. In other words: garden variety defeaters of knowledge-that do defeat the knowledge agents have about the ways in which they do what they do.²² ²² The argument assumes that knowledge can be easily defeated by high-order evidence. This assumption is controversial and is not granted by prominent epistemologists (Aarnio 2010, 2014). Let us play along, however, and see that the putative challenge rests on other false assumptions about the nature of know-how.

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Carter and Navarro’s argument hinges on two claims. The first claim is that the relevant propositional knowledge is defeated in this case; the second is that Ana still knows how to make grenades, upon receiving MISLEADING. Let me grant the former claim and focus on the latter. Why think Ana still knows how to make grenades, upon receiving MISLEADING? The intuition that she does is not nearly as robust as they seem to think. And the only argument Carter and Navarro (2018: 666) provide in support of their intuition is the following:

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The claim that Ana preserves her know-how along all the variations of the case is supported by the fact that she is still able to make grenades proficiently, and the doubts she acquires do not seem to imperil this ability in any relevant sense.

Carter and Navarro (2018) are going far too quickly here. Granted, Ana still preserves some ability that is relevant to grenades-making. What is much less obvious, and as I argue ultimately incorrect, is to assume that Ana preserves the sort of ability that goes together with know-how. As the discussion in the previous section already suggests, know-how does not just go together with any ability. It goes together with the ability to intentionally perform a certain task. For example, knowing how to make risotto does not merely go together with the ability to make risotto but with the ability to intentionally make risotto. For if one had the ability to make risotto but lacked the ability to intentionally make it, one would not count as knowing how to make risotto. This point is well-known in the literature at least since Hawley (2003) and is accepted by both intellectualists and antiintellectualists (Ryle 1949; Setiya 2012; Pavese 2017). For example, the clumsy person has the ability to fall and tumble, as they reliably do so. But only the clown has the ability to intentionally do that. As another illustrative example, Susie may have the ability to irritate Ben, for she would succeed at irritating him if she tried. But suppose she falsely believes that it is the smell of the smoke, rather than the noise she makes whenever she smokes, that irritates Ben. In this case, she does not intentionally irritate Ben: her success is too coincidental to count as intentional. Because of this, it seems that she does not know how to irritate Ben. On the bases of similar examples, intellectualists and anti-intellectualists alike endorse the claim that know-how goes together with the ability to intentionally perform the task. Suppose it is true that know-how goes together with the ability to intentionally perform a task. If so, it is independently plausible that there is an important

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194   sense in which, upon receiving MISLEADING, Ana does not know any longer how to make grenades. For upon receiving MISLEADING, when asked to make grenades, she will be at a loss. Not only that: she will also refuse to teach others how to make grenades. And she will even stop performing at the workplace, until she is told that she has been making grenades correctly all along. Suppose she were forced to reproduce whatever process she initiated before MISLEADING. She would unknowingly succeed at making grenades. But the success would be too out of her control to count as intentional. She is still able in some sense to make grenades but in an important sense she now lacks the ability to intentionally make grenades. If so, then she also lacks know-how. If the reader is not yet ready to grant this conclusion, it is because, actually, things are more complex, and some additional distinctions are called for. Ascriptions of abilities of the form “s can intentionally perform a task” are opaque, for as it is well known in action theory, “intentionally” is an intentional operator (cf. Davidson 1971; Goldman 1970). For example, Lois might intentionally kiss Superman but not intentionally kiss Clark Kent. Because of the opacity of intentionality reports, it is paramount to distinguish between (de re ability) and (de dicto ability): (de re/ability): there is some task t that is in fact the task of making grenades such that Ann has the ability to intentionally perform t.

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(de dicto/ability) Ana has the ability to intentionally make grenades.

While (de re/ability) ascribes Ana a de re ability, (de dicto/ability) ascribes Ana a de dicto ability. Now, with this distinction in play, consider again Ana’s situation upon receiving MISLEADING. (De dicto/ability) is now false: Ana does not have a de dicto ability any longer. For one to have the relevant de dicto ability, one needs to be able to make grenades on demand (to be in a situation such that, if asked to make grenades, Ana would do so). Ana does not have that ability: were she asked, after receiving MISLEADING, to make grenades, she would now be at a loss. If know-how goes with the ability to intentionally perform a task, then, to this distinction between a de dicto ability and a de re ability, there corresponds the distinction between de re know-how and de dicto know-how: (de re/KH): there is a task t that happens, unknown to Ana, to be the task of making grenades, such that Ana still knows how to perform t. (de dicto/KH): Ana knows how to perform grenades.

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(de re/KH) and (de dicto/KH) ascribe different kinds of know-hows—de re know-how and de dicto know-how—which go along with different dispositions in behavior. One might have de re know-how even if one has no idea that what one is doing when doing t is making grenades. Suppose, for example, one is simply instructed to follow a certain procedure but has no idea of its outcome. In this case, one might have de re know-how without de dicto know-how. This is plausibly Ana’s quandary: Because Ana still knows how to execute whatever task she was executing before MISLEADING, she plausibly still has de re know-how. After all, if she were told at the workplace to do whatever she was doing before she received MISLEADING, and she obeyed the order, she would intentionally perform a task, which, unknown to her, is the task of making grenades. Hence, Ana preserves her de re ability upon receiving MISLEADING. So, Ana plausibly also retains her de re know-how upon receiving MISLEADING. However, Anna does lose de dicto know-how. For her to possess de dicto know-how, it is not sufficient to possess de re ability; she would need in addition to have the corresponding de dicto ability, which as we have seen she lacks. While Ana loses de dicto know-how and de dicto ability upon receiving MISLEADING, Ana preserves de re know-how and de re ability, for she still knows how to do whatever it was that she was doing before (which, as far as she knows, is not accurately making grenades!), and she still preserves the de re ability to make grenades upon receiving the misleading information. Crucially, intellectualists can accept all of this. According to intellectualism, de re know-how only requires de re knowledge while de dicto know-how requires de dicto knowledge: (de re/K): there is a task t that is in fact, but unknown to Ana, the task of making grenades such that Ana knows for some way w that w is a way to execute t. (de dicto/K): Ana knows for some way w that w is a way to make grenades.

Upon receiving MISLEADING, (de dicto/K) becomes false: Ana loses the relevant de dicto knowledge. However, Ana arguably still also preserves the relevant de re knowledge (ascribed by (de re/K)). MISLEADING only defeats (if anything) her de dicto knowledge—i.e., the knowledge that the procedure she was implementing was for making grenades. Her de re knowledge, instead, is not at all defeated by MISLEADING: Ana continues to have it, as she might continue to know what procedure she was following before receiving

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196   MISLEADING, when she was intending to make grenades. And so, by intellectualism’s lights, she might continue to know how to make whatever she was making when she thought (correctly, it turns out!) that she was making grenades: because Ana retains her de re knowledge, by intellectualism’s lights, Ana can retain her de re know-how as well as her de re ability. Let me end by considering two possible responses. I have argued that Ana might lose her de dicto know-how upon receiving MISLEADING, while possibly retaining her de re know-how. Could not Carter and Navarro (2018) reply that Ana does retain he de dicto know-how and her de dicto ability all along but upon receiving MISLEADING, she simply cannot act on those, because of her new doubts? Compare: many Olympic gymnasts know how to do the fancy tricks they do even though many—in the heat of the competition—have doubts about whether they can do them successfully. In response, the analogy with the Olympic gymnasts is misleading. In the case of Olympic gymnasts, it is plausible that despite their doubts, they still know how to perform their fancy tricks (de dicto). After all, they can still intentionally do their fancy tricks (de dicto) outside of the heat of the competition. Their ability to intentionally act on that knowledge is not lost but only ‘masked.’ This can be explained on the current picture: These athletes retain their (de dicto) knowledge all along and simply cannot access it in some circumstances. By contrast, Ana has lost her de dicto knowledge and unless she regains it, there is no circumstance where she can still intentionally make grenades (de dicto). In Ana’s case, then it is utterly implausible that her ability to intentionally act is simply masked. A second possible response goes as follows. Maybe, Ana does preserve her de dicto know-how and her de dicto ability upon receiving MISLEADING. What she lacks is knowledge that she does know how and that is what explains the lack of de dicto ability. If one embraces this position, one commits oneself to replacing (Know-how/Intentionality)—a claim that, as we have seen, both intellectualists and anti-intellectualists agree upon—with a considerably stronger claim that intentionally ϕ-ing requires knowledge that one knows how to ϕ. This stronger claim is rather implausible. For one thing, some non-human animals can certainly intentionally act, though lacking the concept of know-how. For another, suppose one learns how to make grenades but has not had the occasion to form a belief one way or another about whether one has indeed learned. If one is asked to produce one and one tries, surely one can still intentionally do it (even de dicto!), even though one does not know that they knew how to make them.

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8.6. Conclusions There is a lot going for a knowledge-centered psychology: it explains our intuitions in a variety of cases where intentionality of an action seems absent because of the agent’s lack of knowledge (Section 8.2). The role of knowledge in explaining intentional action is also demonstrated by more theoretical considerations showing that an action cannot be under one’s control unless it is guided by knowledge (Section 8.3). A knowledge centered psychology, in turn, motivates intellectualism about know-how, for it explains why knowhow and the ability to intentionally act go hand in hand (Section 8.4). Having motivated a knowledge-centered psychology, I have appealed to it in a discussion of Carter and Navarro’s (2018) argument to the effect that know-how differs from knowledge in its pattern of defeasibility Section 8.5). I have argued that Carter and Navarro’s (2018) challenge fails, for they fail to show that know-how remains undefeated when knowledge is defeated. Their alleged challenge turns on the failure to appreciate the relation between knowledge, know-how, and intentional action. Because of that, they fail to distinguish between different sorts of abilities that go together with know-how. Once one appreciates that know-how goes with the ability to act intentionally, because ascriptions of this sort are opaque, it becomes paramount to distinguish between de re abilities and de dicto abilities. With this distinction comes the corresponding distinction between different sorts of know-hows and between the different sorts of knowledge that Ana preserves or loses upon receiving MISLEADING. As we have seen, against Carter and Navarro (2018), the sort of de re abilities Ana does preserve can be fully accounted for on a picture on which know-how is knowledge. And those de dicto abilities that she does lose are also correctly predicted to get lost on the same intellectualist picture. Far from coming apart in their pattern of defeasibility, know-how and knowledge go hand in hand, just as one would expect on the sort of intellectualist picture that is motivated by a knowledge-centered psychology.

References Aarnio, M. L. (2010). Unreasonable knowledge. Philosophical Perspectives, 24: 1–21. Audi, R. (1986). Intending, intentional action, and desire. In: Joel Marks (ed.) The Ways of Desire. Chicago: Precedent: 17–38. Austin, J. L. (1961). Philosophical Papers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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198   Beddor, B. and Pavese, C. (2018). Modal virtue epistemology. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Early View. Beddor, B. and Pavese, C. (2019). Manuscript. Skill as knowledge. Bergmann, M. (2000). Deontology and defeat. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 60(1): 87–102. Bratman, M. (1987). Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason. Center for the Study of Language and Information. Brentano, F. (1874/1995). Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. New York, NY: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Brown, J. A. (2013). Knowing-how: Linguistics and cognitive science. Analysis, 73 (2): 220–7. Carter, A. J. and Navarro, J. (2018). The defeasibility of knowledge-how. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 95(3): 662–85. Carter, A. and Pritchard D. (2015). Knowledge-how and epistemic luck. Noûs 49: 440–53. Cath, Y. (2015). Revisionary intellectualism and Gettier. Philosophical Studies, 172 (1): 7–27. Chisholm, R. (1966). Theory of Knowledge. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Coffman, E. J. (2015). Luck: Its Nature and Significance for Human Knowledge and Agency. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Davidson, D. (1971). Agency. Reprinted in Davidson (1980), pp. 43–61. Davidson, D. (1980). Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dretske, F. (1988). Explaining Behavior. MIT Press. Gibbons, J. (2001). Knowledge in action. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 62(3): 579–600. Ginet, C. (1990). On Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goldman, A. (1970). A Theory of Human Action. Englewood Cliff, NJ. Prentice Hall Inc. Goldman, A. (1976). Discrimination and perceptual knowledge. The Journal of Philosophy, 73(20): 771–91. Goldman, A. (1986). Epistemology and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hampshire, S. (1959). Thought and Action. London: Chatto and Windus. Harman, B. (1976). Practical reasoning. The Review of Metaphysics, 79: 431–63. Hawley, K. (2003). Success and knowledge-how. American Philosophical Quarterly, 40(1): 19–31.

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Hornsby, J. (2004). Agency and actions. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements, 55: 1–23. Hornsby, J. (2011). Ryle’s knowing-how, and knowing how to act. Knowing how: Essays on Knowledge, Mind, and Action, 80–100. Humberstone, I. L. (1992). Direction of fit. Mind, 101(401): 59–83. Levy, Y. (2013). Intentional action first. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 91(4): 705–18. Lewis, D. (1974). Radical interpretation. Synthese, 27: 331–44. Lewis, D. (1979). Attitudes de dicto and de de. The Philosophical Review, 88(4): 513–43. Littlejohn, C. (2014). Fake barns and false dilemmas. Episteme,11(4): 369–89. Mele, A. and Moser, P. (1994). Intentional action. Noûs, 28: 39–48. Moss, S. (2018). Probabilistic Knowledge. Oxford/NY: Oxford University Press. Nagel, J. (2013). Knowledge as a mental state. Oxford Studies in Epistemology, 4: 275–310. Nagel, T. (1979). Mortal Questions. New York: Cambridge University Press. Pavese, C. (2015). Practical senses. Philosophers’ Imprint, 15(29): 1–25. Pavese, C. (2017). Know-how and gradability. Philosophical Review, 126(3): 345–83. Pavese, C. (2018). Know-how, action, and luck. Synthese, 1–23.

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Pavese, C. (2019a). The psychological reality of practical representation. Philosophical Psychology, 32(5): 784–821. Pavese, C. (2019b). Manuscript. Knowledge and mentality. Pavese, C. (2020). Probabilistic knowledge in action. Forthcoming in Analysis. Pritchard, D. (2005). Epistemic Luck. New York: Clarendon Press. Pritchard, D. (2006). Moral and epistemic luck. Metaphilosophy, 37: 1–25. Pritchard, D. (2012). Anti-luck virtue epistemology. The Journal of Philosophy, 109(3): 247–79. Pollock, J. L. and Cruz, J. (1999). Contemporary Theories of Knowledge, 2nd edition. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Ryle, G. (1949). The Concept of Mind. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Setiya, K. (2012). Know-how. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 112(3): 285–307. Sosa, E. (1999). How to defeat opposition to Moore. Philosophical Perspectives, 13: 141–53. Sosa, E. (2007). A Virtue Epistemology: Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge (Vol. 1). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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200   Stalnaker, R. (1984). Inquiry. The MIT Press. Stanley, J. (2011). Know How. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stanley, J. and Williamson, T. (2001). Knowing how. The Journal of Philosophy, 98 (8): 411–44. Stich, S. (1978). Autonomous psychology and the belief-desire thesis. The Monist, 61. Velleman, D. (1989/2007). Practical Reflection. CSLI Publications. Weisberg, J. (2013). Knowledge in action. Philosophers’ Imprint. Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library. Williams, B. (1981). Moral Luck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, B. (1993). Postscript. In: Moral Luck. D. Statman (ed.) Albany NY: State University of New York Press. Williamson, T. (2000). Knowledge and its Limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Williamson, T. (2017). Acting on knowledge. Knowledge-First: Approaches in Epistemology and Mind, 163–81.

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9 Undercutting Defeat When it Happens and Some Implications for Epistemology

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Matthew McGrath

It’s commonplace to lose a justification for believing something. It can happen through simple forgetting. This paper focuses on another way: through defeat. When you lose a justification through defeat, the ground for your earlier justification remains but no longer justifies you in believing the target proposition, due to the operation of a “defeater” of that justification. Defeat strictly speaking encompasses not only loss of a justification but also reduction the degree of support provided by a justification. John Pollock has distinguished between two types of defeaters: rebutting and undercutting.¹ Let’s start with an intuitive gloss. Rebutters defeat by striking against the target proposition itself, undercutters by striking against the connection between the ground of a justification and the target proposition. For an example of a rebutter, suppose I obtain some justification from a Buzzfeed news report for believing that a certain public official suborned perjury, but later I lose my justification when I learn that The New York Times and The Washington Post independently reported later that this official did no such thing. In this case, the information I received the newspapers strikes against the claim that the official suborned perjury. It defeats the justification I obtained from Buzzfeed. For an example of undercutting defeat, we can vary the Buzzfeed example: suppose I obtain the same justification from the Buzzfeed report but subsequently learn that their reporters relied exclusively on the testimony of a single anonymous source known to have personal interests at stake. The new information doesn’t strike against the claim that the official suborned perjury. It defeats, rather, by striking against the connection between my reason—that Buzzfeed reported that the official suborned

¹ See for instance, Pollock (1970, 1975, 1987); Pollock and Cruz (1999).

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202     perjury—and the proposition I believe—that the official did this.² The category of undercutters is often thought to represent an important advance in epistemology, for it promises to help us explain the defeating power of considerations that don’t bear on the truth of the target proposition, such as evidence that a testifier is unreliable or evidence that one is hallucinating. Although there is disagreement about the details, the distinction between rebutting and undercutting defeat—defeat by striking against the target proposition vs. defeat by striking against the connection between a ground and the target proposition—is now part of the received wisdom in analytic epistemology. Not only that, but many epistemologists think Pollock’s account of how these defeaters work is roughly on the right track. Recently, however, cracks have appeared in the consensus. While not questioning the existence of undercutting defeat, Scott Sturgeon argues that Pollock misconceives it: undercutting operates differently from rebutting in that it occurs only in conjunction with certain higher-order contributions, i.e., with beliefs about (or justifications to believe propositions about) the basis on which one does or would believe. I will argue, contrary to Sturgeon, that in the case of inferential justification, undercutting defeat takes basically the shape Pollock suggests it does, not needing contributions from higher-order beliefs or justifications. However, I agree with Sturgeon that for noninferential justification, the Pollockian account is in trouble. I try to explain why there should be this difference. My interest, however, is not merely in determining what makes for a good account of defeat. This difference in types of defeat has important implications for other parts of epistemology. In a final section, I use the defeat-related difference between inferential and noninferential justification to argue that there is less immediate perceptual or testimonial justification than is commonly thought.

9.1. Pollock on Defeaters Let’s start by reviewing the basic elements of Pollock’s mature account of defeat as developed in his 1999 book with Joseph Cruz. First, there is the notion of a reason to believe something:

² In principle, the same defeater could be at once a rebutter and an undercutter, if it strikes against both the target proposition and the connection between the reason and that proposition.

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A state M of a person S is a reason for S to believe Q if and only if it is logically possible for S to become justified in believing Q by believing it on the basis of being in the state M.

As I understand the terminology here, ‘become justified in believing Q’ ascribes doxastic justification, i.e., coming to have a justified belief in Q. In terms of this notion of a reason, Pollock and Cruz define defeaters in general: If M is a reason for S to believe Q, a state M* is a defeater for this reason if and only if the combined state consisting of being in both the state M and the state M* at the same time is not a reason for S to believe Q.

Next, rebutters: (Rebutters): if M is a defeasible reason for S to believe Q, M* is a rebutting defeater for this reason if and only if M* is a defeater (for M as a reason for S to believe Q) and M* is a reason for S to believe ~Q.

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For undercutters, they give two definitions, one for doxastic reasons and another for nondoxastic reasons: (The doxastic case): if believing P is a defeasible reason for S to believe Q, M* is an undercutting defeater for this reason if and only if M* is a defeater (for believing P as a reason for S to believe Q) and M* is a reason for S to doubt or deny that P would not be true unless Q were true. (The nondoxastic case): if M is a nondoxastic state that is a defeasible reason for S to believe Q, M* is an undercutting defeater for this reason if and only if M* is a defeater (for M as a reason for S to believe Q) and M* is a reason for S to doubt or deny that he or she would not be in state M unless Q were true.

We can simplify these definitions, even by Pollock’s and Cruz’s own lights. They go on to tell us that undercutting defeaters are reasons to believe the appropriate subjunctive conditional is false (Pollock and Cruz 1999: 196). Their suggestion, I take it, is that it’s because undercutters are reasons to doubt or disbelieve such conditionals that they manage to be defeaters. This in turn suggests that the clause that “M* is a defeater for . . . as a reason for S to believe Q” is redundant in the previous definitions. The same goes for rebutters. Thus, I attribute to them the following simplified definitions of undercutting defeat:

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204     Rebutters: If M is a defeasible reason for S to believe Q, M* is a rebutter for this reason if and only if M* is a reason for S to believe ~Q. Undercutters: (The doxastic case): if believing P is a defeasible reason for S to believe Q, M* is an undercutter for this reason if and only if M* is a reason for S to doubt or deny that P would not be true unless Q were true.

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(The nondoxastic case): if M is a nondoxastic state that is a defeasible reason for S to believe Q, M* is an undercutter for this reason if and only if M* is a reason for S to doubt or deny that he or she would not be in state M unless Q were true.

So revised, the definitions function as intended only if something’s meeting the conditions for being a “rebutter” or an “undercutter” guarantees its meeting the conditions for being a “defeater.” This will be important in the following. Pollock and Cruz (1999: 197) suggest a simpler replacement for the complex proposition that it’s not the case that P would not be true unless Q were true, namely that P does not guarantee Q (in the circumstances). I follow them. Thus, undercutters in the doxastic case are reasons to think that P does not guarantee Q, and in the nondoxastic case they are reasons to think that one’s being in state M does not guarantee Q. This is their attempt to capture the key intuitive idea of undercutting defeat as defeat that strikes against the connection between a reason and the target proposition. This striking-against-theconnection is explained in terms of having reasons to doubt or deny a certain sort of proposition about that connection. One might raise a number of questions about Pollock’s account of defeat, or the parts of it I have described.³ One could ask about the ontology of reasons. Why should we take reasons to be mental states (e.g., beliefs, experiences) rather than facts or propositions? One could ask about the normative conditions a defeater must meet to defeat: must doxastic defeaters be justified? If I form a silly unjustified belief that I am hallucinating, will that defeat my perceptual justification? One could also ask about the sort of conditional in terms of which Pollock defines undercutters. Is “P doesn’t guarantee Q” the right one? Is that really equivalent to the negation of the unless-statement “it’s not the case that P wouldn’t be true unless Q”? Or should we build the account around the ³ I omit exposition of Pollock’s discussion of defeated defeaters, as well as his full account of justification in terms of status-assignments assigning statuses of “defeated” and “undefeated” to elements of arguments (see Pollock and Cruz 1999: 197–200).

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indicative conditional, or some other conditional? These worries concern, relatively speaking, matters of detail that likely won’t sink the project of defending a Pollockian account of defeat. One might also worry that Pollock’s account is incomplete. Are there other kinds of defeaters? And of course one can ask for clarifications about key notions such as the notion of its being possible to become justified in believing something based on a combination of states.⁴ My concern in this paper is whether the Pollockian picture is approximately right as far as it goes. We might need to change certain details. We might need to supplement it in a number of ways. My particular question, more precisely, is whether there is a serious error in the picture when it comes to undercutting defeat.

9.2. Sturgeon against Pollock

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Sturgeon argues against Pollock’s account of undercutting defeat, claiming it is both too strong and too weak. Here I focus on his argument that it is too weak.⁵ The argument in question is based on a case, the Milk Taster. I have revised the example to avoid a certain objection.⁶ The Milk Taster: The milk taster thinks her conclusions about whether a batch of milk is spoiled are based solely on taste and not at all on smell. However, this is not true. It turns out that her conclusions are based on smell only and not taste. Relying on her olfactory experience, she concludes that a particular batch of milk is ok. She is then given misleading information to the effect that she is suffering a random olfactory hallucination. She comes to think that her olfactory experience does not guarantee that the milk is OK. ⁴ As Sturgeon (2014: 108–14) patiently shows. ⁵ Sturgeon’s argument (using the Presupposer case) that it is too strong is convincingly criticized by Casullo (2018: 2900–1). ⁶ In the original, Sturgeon (2014, 114–15) uses the more realistic example of relying on a complex gustatory-cum-olfactory experience to believe the milk is OK, while getting evidence of olfactory hallucination. The subject in his case thinks she is relying on taste alone. Sturgeon says that after a bit of thinking the subject will deny the relevant unless-statement. She will deny that she wouldn’t have the complex experience unless the milk was OK. But this seems wrong. The subject has no reason to think that the olfactory hallucination affects either the milk or whether the taste experience would covary with the state of the milk. So, she is in a position to reason like this: I am relying on taste experience T; although I’m having an olfactory hallucination in having olfactory experience O, this is no reason to doubt that I wouldn’t have T unless the milk was OK; given that O has no bearing on either T or the state of the milk, I wouldn’t have T+O unless the milk was OK. Of course, strengthening of the antecedent is not valid for subjunctive conditionals, but in cases where the proposition added to the antecedent is irrelevant, it may be fine to reason from the original to the strengthened conditional. My revized case avoids these issues and gives Sturgeon the result he wants.

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206     Sturgeon thinks that the milk taster remains justified in her conclusion about the milk, in virtue of the same non-doxastic reason that justified her previously. No defeat occurs. Nevertheless, her belief that she is undergoing olfactory hallucination meets the (simplified) Pollockian definition of an undercutter. Putting things in terms Pollock’s framework: although the olfactory experience o is a reason to believe the milk is OK, and the belief that one is suffering an olfactory hallucination (H) is a reason to believe that having o doesn’t guarantee the milk is OK, the combination is still a reason to believe the milk is OK—i.e., one can become justified in believing that the milk is OK by believing the milk is OK on the basis of being in this combination of states, and the Milk Taster case is a case in point.⁷ Sturgeon concludes that Pollock’s account of undercutters is too weak—it implies that there is an undercutter for a reason in this case when there is no defeat at all. However, Sturgeon thinks that there is defeat if we modify the case so that the milk taster has a correct belief about the source of her belief about the milk. This suggests to him that we need to revise Pollock’s account of undercutting defeaters by giving an essential role to beliefs about one’s mental states, in particular to beliefs about the sources of one’s belief. More generally, let U be the claim that source S is untrustworthy about whether P and BOS-P be the claim that your belief in P is (or would be or likely would be) based on source S. Suppose you believe U and believe P. Sturgeon proposes that in such a situation: Your belief in U undercuts your belief that P iff you believe BOS-P.⁸

⁷ As noted earlier, more information is needed about what it is to become justified in believing something on the basis of being in a certain combination of states. It would be too much to demand that the combination be used as one’s grounds for the belief. When defeat occurs, it’s not because it would be wrong to use the combination of states as one’s ground in any intuitive sense. I wouldn’t think of using the combination of John told me that p and John was insincere in his remark to me on whether p as my ground to believe p; rather, I might use John told me that p as my ground to believe p despite being also in the state of believing that John was insincere in his remark to me on whether p. I will read ‘on the basis of being in state M’ in such a way as to allow for such possibilities. To believe p on the basis of being in state M, then, as I will understand it within Pollock’s framework, is to be in state M and to believe p using some component state of M (proper or improper) as one’s ground. ⁸ As Casullo (2018) points out, it’s implausible that the mere having of higher-order beliefs does much epistemological work. What counts is justification to have such beliefs. We could reformulate Sturgeon’s proposal so that it concerns justification to believe rather than belief. But as I mentioned, my main concerns don’t hinge on such tweaks, so I will not bother with reformulation. Mellis (2014: 438) usefully refines Sturgeon’s proposal, bringing in the concept of a justificatory process in addition to the concept of a source of justification.

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If we accept Sturgeon’s understanding of undercutting, we must revise Pollock’s general definition of a defeater to make it disjunctive. The needed revision would presumably be something like this: If M is a reason for S to believe Q, a state M* is a defeater for this reason if and only if either (i) the combined state of being in M and being in M* is not a reason for S to believe Q, or (ii) the combined state of being in M, being in M* and believing that one’s basis for believing Q is or would be M is not a reason for S to believe Q.

Finally, to handle undercutting defeat of reasons for beliefs one already has, we would need to adjust the definition of ‘reason’ slightly as well: A state M of a person S is a reason for S to believe Q if and only if it is logically possible for S to become or remain justified in believing Q by believing it on the basis of being in the state M.

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Presumably the issue for the milk taster isn’t becoming justified but remaining justified, and Sturgeon’s thought is that if you have a belief about the identity of the source of your belief that p, together with a doubt or disbelief that having that source guarantees P, you can’t remain justified in believing P. Undercutting for Sturgeon is thus a matter of believing both: • My belief that P is (or will be) based on source S. • Source S is (or has a good chance of being) unreliable in the circumstances on whether P. Whether one’s belief actually is or will be based on source S is neither here nor there, as Sturgeon himself notes (2014: 117). All that matters is what the believer thinks about her beliefs’ sources. The resulting view implies that if you think you are using taste and you think that taste is unreliable in the circumstances, then even if you aren’t using taste (and are using a source you believe to be reliable), still your belief is undercut.⁹ ⁹ Thus, if Sturgeon is right about undercutting, Pollock’s account is not only too weak; it is also too strong. An alternative view is that undercutting happens iff Pollock’s conditions are satisfied and one believes one source is M. On this view, Pollock’s account would not be too strong. I don’t have the space to examine this view in any detail. But note that even if this view is correct, undercutting doesn’t happen solely in virtue of having reason to believe something that strikes against the connection between one’s reason and the target proposition—higher-order contributions are also part of the explanatory story.

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There is something odd about Sturgeon’s account of undercutting. The whole idea of such defeat was that it was to be defeat by virtue of striking against the connection between an actual ground of justification and the target proposition. What Sturgeon gives us under the banner of “undercutting defeat” has nothing to do with the actual ground, as Juan Comesaña (Forthcoming) notes. Sturgeon-undercutters strike at best against the connection between one’s perceived basis or ground and the target proposition, whether or not this perceived basis is one’s real basis. What Sturgeon is pointing to, I think, is actually a third kind of defeat, what I’ll call “higher-order” defeat. M* is a higher-order defeater of M as a reason to believe P iff M* is a reason to think that one’s belief that P is (or would be) unreliably based. Something can be a higher-order defeater of a reason M without being a rebutter, i.e., without being a reason to believe not-P, and without being an “undercutter” in the intuitive sense of something that defeats by striking against the connection between one’s actual reason and P.¹⁰,¹¹ Casullo (2018: 2904) comes to Pollock’s defense. He questions whether Sturgeon has put his finger on an asymmetry between undercutters and rebutters: Consider a cognizer A. Suppose that source S1 justifies A’s belief that P to degree d1, that source S2 justifies A’s belief that not-P to degree d2, and that d1 = d2. (S1 and S2 need not be different sources). Is this sufficient for A’s belief that not-P to defeat A’s justification for the belief that P? There are three possible responses: 1. Weak Internalist: No, A must believe that d1 = d2. 2. Strong Internalist: No, A must believe that d1 = d2 and that belief must be justified. 3. Externalist: Yes.

¹⁰ We saw an example of this previously. You falsely think you are relying on taste, which you think (and even know) to be unreliable, but in fact you’re relying on olfaction: you rely on an olfactory reason O. Then your belief that you are using the unreliable source of taste is a higher-order defeater of O as a reason to believe P, but it is not a reason to believe not-P (and so not a rebutter) and it does not it strike against the connection between O and P (and so is not an undercutter). ¹¹ Note that higher-order defeat does not boil down to the same thing as “defeat involving defeaters with higher-order content.” Perhaps some defeaters with higher-order content, such as I have strong evidence against p are rebutters, and perhaps others can be undercutters. “Higher-order defeat,” as I am stipulatively using this terminology, refers to defeat by virtue of being a reason to believe that one’s belief is unreliably based.

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Since Sturgeon sees no role for higher-order beliefs or justifications in the case of rebutting defeat, Casullo thinks Sturgeon must give the externalist answer. Casullo’s claim is then that there is no reason to think that if the externalist position is correct here it wouldn’t also be correct for cases of undercutting defeat. He concludes that the two sorts of defeat work in the same way—they both work with—or without—the help of higher-order beliefs/justifications. Casullo, as I read him, doesn’t strictly take a stand on whether rebutting defeat needs higher-order help. But it is implausible to think that it does. If I have evidence for P, and I then gain equally good evidence for not-P, I don’t need to have higher-order beliefs or justifications about these matters in order for the different justificatory forces to weigh up in one direction or another. This is intuitive as it stands. But we can add as well that if higher-order contributions were necessary, worries would arise about how creatures that don’t grasp these higher-order propositions could have rebutting defeaters (e.g., young children or higher animals).¹² There is also reason to worry that if rebutting defeat requires higher-order contribution, the same would hold for a single source’s justificatory power. We could ask: in order for a source to justify a subject’s belief to a certain degree, must the person believe that the belief is justified (by that source) to that degree? It is difficult to see why the facts about how justificatory forces weigh up should require beliefs about those forces while the existence of a single justificatory force doesn’t. But it is implausible to think that in order for a source to provide justification for a belief the person would have to believe (or be justified in believing) some proposition about its doing so. I conclude that rebutting defeat does not require higher-order contribution. This doesn’t of course show Sturgeon is correct to distinguish the way rebutting and undercutting defeat do their work. For, as we saw with help from Comesaña, what Sturgeon describes is not really undercutting defeat at all— at least not in the intuitive striking-against-the-connection sense; it is what I have called “higher-order defeat,” which naturally requires higher-order contribution.

¹² Using a distinction from Audi (1993), we can distinguish two ways that a justificatory fact—such as my having justification from a piece of evidence or my justification being defeated—could depend on higher-order beliefs (or justifications). One way is negative dependence: the justifications obtain only if you do not have certain negative higher-order beliefs (justifications), such as a belief that your basis is a poor one. But this is not the kind of dependence at issue. At issue is positive dependence: in order for justificatory facts to obtain one must have a higher-order beliefs (justifications) about those facts.

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9.3. In Defense of Pollockian Undercutting Defeat (in the Inferential Case)

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We have seen that what Sturgeon says about the Milk Taster case is plausible: Pollock’s conditions for undercutting are met but there is no defeat. I agree with Sturgeon that the failure is not a minor one: there are no defeaters of nondoxastic reasons that do their work by attacking the connection between one’s actual reason and the proposition believed. The closest things are defeaters that work by giving one a reason to think one’s belief is unreliably based. But Sturgeon draws a much broader conclusion: there are no defeaters—even for doxastic reasons—that work in this attacking-the-connection way. I now argue that this broader conclusion is false: we find just such defeat in the case of inferential justification, i.e., of defeat of doxastic reasons. Consider an example of undercutting defeat described by Sturgeon (similar to one discussed by Pollock and Cruz): The Polling Case A pollster surveys 1000 voters in Texas at random, asking whether they will vote Republican or Democrat in the next election. The pollster believes G(oing) = Roughly 87 percent of Texans are going to vote Republican. On the basis of believing T(ell) = 87 percent of respondents tell the pollster they will vote Republican. Suppose the pollster then comes to believe U = Respondents decided their answer by coin flip. Belief in U fits the (simplified) Pollockian definition of an undercutter. Is there defeat? On Pollock’s own definition of defeat, it appears the answer is yes: it seems impossible to become (or remain) justified by believing in G based on the combination of . Moreover, this fits with the intuitive thought that there is defeat in this case. Notice that higher-order beliefs don’t come into it. The pollster might even lack such a belief.¹³

¹³ What if higher-order beliefs are present? Suppose, despite believing respondents decided their answers by coin flip (U), and despite believing that roughly 87 percent of Texans are going to vote Republican (G) on the basis of the belief this is what 87 percent of the Texan respondents told you (T), you think you believe G on the basis of some other belief, H, which you think makes G likely true. In such a case could you become or remain justified in believing G based on ? I think not. These false beliefs about your basis even if justified do not seem to restore your actual basis as a reason to believe G by somehow defeating your defeater (U) for that reason. Intuitively, you’re on the hook, epistemically, for the basis you have; and you can’t get off the hook by having beliefs (even justified beliefs) about having some other basis.

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Why is it not possible to become justified in believing G based on this combination? Having a plausible explanation will bolster the previously mentioned intuitive judgments. I want to explore two accounts. The first appeals to the well-known taking condition on inference. This is the condition that one must take the premise(s) to support the conclusion in order to infer the conclusion from the premise(s). Once the pollster comes to think that the respondents were determining their answers by coinflip (U), it seems the pollster is no longer entitled to a number of crucial claims about the connection between T and G, such as:

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• If T, then G ◦ If 87 percent of Texas respondents told me they will vote Republican, then roughly that percentage of Texans are going to do so. • It wouldn’t be that T unless G ◦ It wouldn’t be that 87 percent of Texas respondents told me they will vote Republican unless roughly that percentage of Texans are going to. • T indicates in the circumstances that G ◦ 87 percent of Texas respondents telling me they will vote Republican indicates in the circumstances that roughly that percentage of Texas are going to do so. In fact, the pollster gains reason to believe these are false. Notice that each of these conditionals seems to be a plausible way of spelling out what T guaranteeing G amounts to, and similarly for T supports G.¹⁴ Assume, then, that the taking condition is a genuine condition on inference. Then there is an explanation available for why you cannot become justified in believing G based on , as follows: This combination provides at best inferential justification from T to believe G. So, in coming to be justified in believing G based on you must be epistemically appropriate to infer G from T, ¹⁴ Isn’t guaranteeing much stronger than mere support? As the terms are used in ordinary parlance, yes. I use ‘support’ here only because it is the standard term used for the taking condition on inference. However, its ordinary meaning is not sufficiently strong for the purposes of giving an account of inference. I might take the presence of some clouds in the sky to support rain, but I certainly won’t infer it will rain based just on such slim support. By contrast, if I take the particular clouds to establish, ensure, imply, indicate—guarantee—rain then I will make the inference. If I don’t so take them, I may well not make the inference. There are complexities here about whether ‘guarantee’ is too strong, but I don’t think they matter to our discussion, since the undercutters at issue are reasons not merely to deny that there is a guarantee but also to deny that there is strong support. To keep things simple, then, I use ‘support’ and ‘guarantee’ interchangeably.

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despite believing U; but for your inference to be epistemically appropriate, since inference in this case requires taking T to support G, your taking T to support G must be epistemically appropriate, too, which it is not, because U gives you reason to doubt that T guarantees or supports G.¹⁵

Believing U spoils the epistemic appropriateness of taking T to support G, which prevents one from becoming justified in believing G based on . This argument relies on the assumption that for an inference to be epistemically appropriate, the relevant taking must be epistemically appropriate. Suppose you have good reason not to take P to support Q, say because you have reason to think that P does not support Q. Then if inferring involves taking, it seems you should not make the inference. But is the taking condition a plausible condition on inference? There are prima facie reasons to accept it. It helps to explain, as Hlöbil (2014) notes, why “P, so Q, but P does not support Q” seems incoherent. In affirming the second conjunct you are explicitly denying something which you are taking to be the case insofar as you are making the inference expressed in the first conjunct. The taking condition would also help to explain, as Boghossian argues, how inference differs from mere association: we can be responsible for the inference itself and not merely for the output belief—and we can be directly responsible, rather than merely responsible for it in virtue of being responsible for doing something or omitting doing something which could foreseeably have led to the inference, as is the case for associations. The taking condition is not perhaps the only way to explain these facts, but it is one way. But the taking condition brings with it a host of problems as well. What is taking? Is it believing? If so, then presumably for inference to transmit justification from premises to the conclusion, the taking state must itself be justified, which raises at least the threat of a regress.¹⁶ If taking isn’t believing, ¹⁵ One could alternatively recast the previous explanation in terms of remaining justified in believing G on the basis of the combination . In place of the language of “being appropriate to infer G from T” one could substitute “being appropriate to continue to base inferentially one’s belief that G on one’s belief that T.” ¹⁶ However, one might claim that both this linking belief and its justification are derivative from the disposition to make the inference and the transmissibility of justification available through the inference. For an example of someone who argues that the linking belief is derivative from the reasoning, consider Broome (Forthcoming): “my account of reasoning entails that, if you reason from premises to conclusion, you implicitly have the linking belief. You believe the conclusion as a result of a reasoning process starting from your believing the premises. This shows you implicitly believe that the conclusion follows from the premises. This implicit belief is constituted by your disposition to derive the conclusion from the premises by a process of reasoning.” If one accepts this view of linking beliefs, it’s natural to claim that their justification derives from the justificational properties of the available inference.

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what is it? And why should taking P to support Q be epistemically inappropriate if you have good reason to think P doesn’t support Q? The taking state presumably cannot be a seeming, for instance, since it is not in general epistemically inappropriate for it to seem to you that something is the case when you have good reason to think it isn’t the case. Given such worries about the taking condition, it might seem I’m hitching my wagon to a controversial position about inference. Fortunately, a similar, second explanation doesn’t presuppose the taking condition. In essence, we can just omit the taking step in the previous explanation. Why is it not possible to become justified in believing G based on ? The answer is:

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This combination provides at best inferential justification from T to believe G. So, in coming to be justified in believing G based on you must be epistemically appropriate to infer G from T, despite believing U, which you are not, because U gives you reason to doubt that T guarantees G.

Continuing to assume that ‘guaranteeing’ and ‘supporting’ are interchangeable in this context, the crucial claim is that it cannot be epistemically appropriate to infer G from T because U gives you a reason to doubt that T supports G. This is explanation does not depend on the taking condition. The fact that inferring from the premise T to conclusion G would be epistemically inappropriate if one has reason to doubt that the premise wouldn’t be true unless the conclusion was true—or if you prefer that T supports G—is plausible on its own without assuming the taking condition. In fact, its plausibility provides at least some reason to accept the taking condition, insofar as the taking condition would help explain why inference would be epistemically inappropriate in such situations. A key background assumption in these two explanations is that inference from premise(s) to a conclusion is something that itself can come up for assessment as epistemically appropriate or not, ex ante and ex post. This seems plausible.¹⁷ You can be epistemically inappropriate to infer even when you know the premises, and epistemically appropriate to infer—to draw the inference—even if your beliefs in the premises are epistemically inappropriate or unjustified. Once you’ve inferred, if you weren’t epistemically appropriate to infer, we can criticize your actual inference as epistemically inappropriate (ex post). ¹⁷ See also Balcerak Jackson and Balcerak Jackson (2013: 115). They focus on normative evaluation of inferences people draw, and so on ex post rather than ex ante epistemic appropriateness.

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9.4. Undercutting Defeat for Noninferential Justification? The conclusion of the previous section raises a question. Given that there is genuine undercutting defeat in the Polling case and in other cases of inferential justification, why wouldn’t the same hold for cases of noninferential justification such as the Milk Taster case? Why, in particular, wouldn’t the explanations discussed in the last section apply just as well to non-inferential cases? This section aims to answer these questions. Is there a taking condition on experience-to-belief transitions (of the sort that can result in non-inferential justified belief)? This might seem implausible on its face (how could a taking be required for noninferential transitions; wouldn’t that make them inferential?¹⁸), but it’s worth looking into the details. If a taking condition holds for these transitions, then either the taking state must be explanatory of the transition or it needn’t be. Let’s look at both possibilities in turn. A taking condition for experience-to-belief transitions cannot be explanatory of these transitions. Consider Boghossian (2014) on inference. He thinks that it’s because you take your premises to support your conclusion that you “draw” your conclusion. But this clearly depends on your already believing the premises. If you take P to support Q but don’t believe P, you will not be in a position to infer Q. In the same way, your taking some fact about your experience to support Q, or even your taking your experience itself to support Q, can’t by itself explain why you come to believe Q. Takings are relevantly like commitments to conditionals, and for a commitment to a conditional to explain belief in the consequent, one needs a commitment to the antecedent, so that the content of this state together and that of the taking state “lock together” to explain the transition to the belief in Q. Thus, one must be committed to that which one takes to support Q—the fact about the experience or the experience itself. Plausibly, a belief is needed for commitment to

¹⁸ Balcerak Jackson and Balcerak Jackson (2013) claim that where there is no gap between the contents of states involved in a transition, it is implausible to posit inference. One might think that in genuinely perceptual justification, the transition is from an experience with the content P to a belief that P.

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the antecedent. I must believe this fact about the experience obtains or that the experience itself exists.¹⁹ What if a taking state is required for the relevant transitions but isn’t explanatory of them? John Broome (Forthcoming) is sympathetic to the view that if one reasons from beliefs in P1, . . . , Pn to a belief in Q then one has a disposition to reason from the former to the latter, and that this disposition is an implicit belief that Q follows from P1 . . . Pn. This implicit “linking belief” doesn’t help explain inference; rather, the nature of inference guarantees that one has such a belief. Could something like this hold for experience-to-belief transitions? I don’t think so. The relevant disposition exercised in a noninferential experience-to-belief transition doesn’t seem, by itself, to constitute such a linking belief. Why not? It’s instructive to consider why Broome himself denies that every instance of reasoning requires a linking belief. He gives the example of reasoning involving transitions between intentions, such as instrumental reasoning in which one starts with an intention for an end and a belief about the means to that end and concludes with an intention concerning the means. Unlike the case of inference involving only beliefs, in which the contents for the linking belief would not go significantly beyond the contents of the beliefs involved, adding only whatever content is needed for the conditional, the contents of the linking beliefs corresponding to the instrumental reasoning with intentions would contain new material going far beyond the contents of the intentions/beliefs involved and beyond the contents needed for a conditional; the linking belief would have to be about intentions—it would have to be a belief that if I had such and such intention, then . . . . The same goes for experience-to-belief transitions; the linking belief, here too, would need to be about experiences. But it isn’t plausible that your having the disposition to make experience-to-belief transitions ensures that you have a linking belief with such a rich content. Not only that, but as Broome notes, it’s implausible to think that young children have such linking beliefs, but not implausible to think that they engage in the relevant instrumental reasoning with intentions. The same goes for the experience-to-belief transitions. So, the explanation based on the taking condition, even if successful in the case of inferential justification, doesn’t carry over to explain how there can be

¹⁹ It’s seeming that a fact obtains or that an experience exists is not enough. Seemings do not ensure the needed commitment of the subject. The point is familiar: if it seems to me that one rod being longer than another, I need not be committed to its being longer.

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undercutting defeat in the case of noninferential justification from experience. But, perhaps the second explanation, which omits reference to a taking condition, does carry over. For the second explanation to extend to the noninferential case, we would have to be able to see how having reason to believe that being in experiential state E doesn’t guarantee Q could, without higher-order help, make it epistemically inappropriate for you to make a noninferential transition from being in E to believing Q. Of course, with the right higher-order help, we can explain the inappropriateness of forming a belief. Supposing you knew that if you believe Q, it would be on the basis of experience E, you could reason like so:²⁰ there is a good chance that I could have E without Q being the case; now, if I believe Q it would be on the basis of E; and so, if I believe Q there is a good chance I would be basing my belief on a source that is unreliable in the circumstances. And if you (justifiably) believed the conclusion of this reasoning, this would explain why it would be epistemically inappropriate for you to form that belief. All this is with the higher-order help. But without it, how can we devise any reasoning, available to the subject, that concludes with something belief in which, or justified belief in which, makes the formation of the belief epistemically inappropriate? The conclusion there is a good chance that I could have experience E without Q being the case doesn’t seem by itself to make forming a belief in Q (based on E) epistemically inappropriate, for one might have no idea that one would be relying on E. The best we can get is this: If I rely on E in believing Q, my belief that Q has a good chance of being formed in a way that is unreliable in the circumstances.

But this by itself doesn’t make the transition from experience E to believing Q epistemically inappropriate. Whereas in the inferential case a reason to doubt that P wouldn’t be true unless Q seems by itself to make the transition from the belief that P to the belief that Q inappropriate, a reason to doubt that having experience E supports Q at most makes it inappropriate to transition from the belief that you have E to the belief that Q, but doesn’t make it inappropriate to transition from the experience E itself to the belief that Q. The Milk Taster case exemplifies this contrast well. If the milk taster believed she was basing her belief on smell, it would be inappropriate for her ²⁰ I assume here that a doubt could appear in thought as an affirmation of a statement about chance. One might question this. However, these issues could be bypassed by thinking of a case in which the subject believes (justifiably) that it’s not true that she wouldn’t have E unless Q. We could then just load this negation into the reasoning.

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to keep the belief; but if not, and especially if she believes (justifiably) that she isn’t basing her belief on smell, it doesn’t seem inappropriate. One might balk here, and indeed balk at Sturgeon’s (and my) judgments about the Milk Taster case. Isn’t there something epistemically inappropriate about basing a belief on a source while believing that there is a good chance that that source is unreliable, even if you don’t have believe it’s your source? But just what is inappropriate about doing this? It’s true that an ideal cognitive agent would do no such thing, but that is because an ideal cognitive agent would know its sources (Mellis 2014). It doesn’t follow that we lack justification from the fact that we are non-ideal in this way. It might be claimed that the real problem is that you’re conducting yourself in such a way as to guarantee that your resulting belief fails to be knowledge if your belief about your source’s unreliability were true and you still believed on the basis of that source. If the milk taster’s belief that olfaction is unreliable in the circumstances were true, and if she still based her belief about the milk on olfaction, it’s true that her belief wouldn’t be knowledge. But it’s hard to see what the bearing of these facts is on whether the milk taster is in fact justified in believing the milk is ok. Thus, while there may be senses in which the milk taster’s belief is epistemically non-ideal and senses in which the belief would be problematic if the belief about the unreliability of olfaction were true, I don’t think these defects are ones a theory of defeat needs to capture, because they do not eliminate or reduce justification.

9.5. A Tool for Distinguishing Inferential from Non-inferential Justification The conclusions from the previous two sections imply that there is no such thing as Pollock-style undercutting defeat of noninferential justification, only of inferential justification. The nearest thing to genuine Pollockian attack-theconnection defeat of a noninferential justification is what I’ve called higherorder defeat: defeat in virtue of having reason to think that one’s belief is unreliably based, a kind of defeat that requires beliefs about one’s bases or sources and so about oneself and one’s mind. If these conclusions are correct, we might use them to help us determine whether a justification in a certain case is inferential or not. This section considers the implications for perceptual and testimonial justification.

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218     First, perception. Suppose there can be no undercutters for noninferential justification, only higher-order defeaters. And suppose you have noninferential justification from experience to believe that a wall is red. Then, if you learn that the lighting is abnormal, and this defeats your justification, it must be because this belief, together with a belief about the basis for your belief about the color of the wall, give you a reason to think that your belief is (or would be) unreliably formed. That is, the defeat occurs only because you have reason to think something about your own mind, about your belief and its formation. Or suppose you have noninferential justification from experience to believe that the thing before you is an eggplant, and then you learn that there are look-alike fake eggplants about. This, too, would serve as a defeater for your justification only if, together with your belief about the source of your belief, it gives you reason to think your belief is or would be unreliably formed. This is surprising. It is surprising that defeat in such a case should require beliefs about oneself. Where you have a certain perceptual justification for believing P, borrowing terminology from Pryor (2004), let’s say that a non-perceiving possibility for you for P is a possibility in which you have this same justification but you are not be in a position to perceive that P. Some such possibilities are objective: they are conditions of the world around that preclude you from perceiving that P solely by affecting the stimuli available to you. Objective non-perceiving possibilities include the abnormal lighting or the abundance of look-alike fakes. It is implausible that evidence for objective non-perceiving possibilities should require evidence about oneself. This is not so implausible in the case of defeat through learning of subjective non-perceiving possibilities such as hallucination or some defect of one’s eyes. (I don’t claim these categories exhaust non-perceiving possibilities.) It wouldn’t be surprising to find out that the way evidence of the obtaining of these possibilities defeat is by helping give you reason to believe your belief is or would be unreliably formed. To further confirm these claims, consider what it would take to reply adequately to a persistent challenger, when the two of you are standing in front of something that looks like an eggplant: : “Why don’t you conclude it’s an eggplant?” : “Because there are look-alike non-eggplants all about.” : “What does there being look-alike non-eggplants all about have to do with it?” : “Because if there are, then my experience would be unreliable, and since if I believed it would be on the basis of experience, my belief would be unreliable.”

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It might be surprising that you start talking about yourself in the last line, but it’s these facts about oneself that articulate the source of your justification for not concluding it’s an eggplant. Contrast this final reply with a more natural one: : “Because if there are look-alike fakes around, then, even though this looks like an eggplant, it could easily be one of the fakes.” Similarly, in reply to a challenge about why you don’t conclude the wall is red in a case of strange lighting, you might say:

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: “Because if the lighting conditions are abnormal, then, even though the wall looks red, it could easily be some other color.” These more natural final replies don’t appeal to one’s own mental states. The proposition that the thing looks like an eggplant does not entail anything about my mind, or arguably about other people’s minds. It is a fact about eggplants that can survive my demise and that of the rest of humanity. Is there a way to block the “mentalization” of such defeaters for perceptual justification? The classical foundationalist takes one’s justification in the relevant cases to be inferential but still takes the justification to come from equally mentalized premises, about which experiences one has. But there is another sort of inferential approach available, suggested by the more natural replies to the previous Challenger character. Suppose the structure of my perceptual justification for believing this is an F (e.g., this is an eggplant) is as follows: I’m inferentially justified in believing this is an F in virtue of being justified in believing it looks like an F.²¹ If such an account is correct, information about rampant look-alikes can defeat my inferential justification for thinking a thing is an F without the assistance of higher-order contributions. The information about look-alike fakes can defeat in the way that genuine undercutters do, by being a reason to doubt a connection holds between one consideration—this thing has a certain look—and another—

²¹ There would need to be a story of how the visual experience contributes to the justification of the belief about the thing’s looking like an F. Are the latter beliefs noninferentially justified, or are they themselves inferentially justified? Eventually, we must get down to beliefs that are not inferentially justified. For them, undercutting defeat would be impossible. I am sympathetic to the view that the noninferentially justified beliefs are beliefs about things having certain looks, and I suspect that such beliefs aren’t subject to undercutting defeat, only higher-order and rebutting defeat of an object justifies me in believing it looks like an F, and this, perhaps together with some background information or a default assumption, inferentially justifies me in believing that it is an eggplant.

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220     this thing is an eggplant. Such a doubt makes it epistemically inappropriate to make the inference. A similar explanation would hold for how information about lighting conditions defeats. Information about lighting condition spoils the connection between a thing’s having a certain look that distinctive of red and a thing’s being red, making the inference epistemically inappropriate. There are various worries one might raise about such an account.²² What are these “objective looks”? Isn’t the resulting view of perceptual justification too intellectualized? Relatedly, do we really go through these reasoning processes when we see an eggplant? I will not try to answer these objections here. I only note that this view has one point in favor of it against the standard view according to which one’s perceptual justification for believing this is an F is noninferential. On that view, if the conclusions of this paper are right, there is no such thing as simple attack-the-connection defeat—Pollock-style undercutting defeat—of one’s perceptual justification. Even objective-condition defeaters about lookalike fakes or lighting conditions only defeat because they join up with beliefs about one’s beliefs’ sources to generate a higherorder defeater. And that is implausible. An easier case, though, is testimony. One familiar epistemological theory of testimony holds that being told that p provides noninferential justification for believing that p (Burge 1993; Graham 2006). If this view is correct, then information that one’s testifier is insincere or incompetent cannot by itself defeat one’s testimonial justification; rather one must build up a higher-order defeater such as “if I believe p, it would be on the basis of this testimony, which is unreliably in the circumstances, and therefore my belief would also be unreliable in the circumstances.” But again, this seems wrongly to assimilate objective and subjective non-learning possibilities. Non-learning possibilities for me for P are possibilities in which I have the same P-related testimonial justification that I actually have but in which I’m not in a position to learn that P through this testimony. Non-learning possibilities such as insincerity or incompetence of a testifier are objective ones, whereas possibilities such as my now suffering a momentary bout of receptive aphasia are subjective ones. The subjective ones do seem to defeat only because they contribute to a higherorder defeater, but this doesn’t seem true of the objective ones. Again, it doesn’t seem that adequate replies to challenges invoking objective nonlearning possibilities must ultimately appeal to considerations about oneself and one’s beliefs. It seems adequate to point out, e.g., that if the testifier is being insincere then they could easily have told me that P despite not-P. ²² For some development of this sort of account, see McGrath (2017, 2018).

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We can avoid these consequences if we take testimonial justification to be inferential. For then we can appeal to Pollockian undercutting. The information that the testifier is insincere gives you a reason to doubt that the testifier word guarantees the truth, and this is a reason not to infer its being so from the testifier’s saying it.

9.6. Conclusion Contrary to Sturgeon, I’ve argued that Pollock-style undercutting defeat— defeat via attacking-the-connection between a reason and the proposition believed—is possible in cases of inferential justification. But, I’ve agreed with him that there is no such thing in the case of noninferential justification, and that the nearest cousin to it is what I’ve called higher-order defeat, i.e., defeat by having reasons to believe the source of one’s belief is unreliable. Finally, I’ve explored how we can use this difference between the ways inferential and noninferential justification can be defeated to make progress on questions on whether a certain sort of justification is inferential or not, my test cases being perceptual and testimonial justification.²³

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References Audi, R. (1993). The Structure of Justification. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Balcerak Jackson, Magdalen and Brendan Balcerak Jackson. (2013). Reasoning as a source of justification. Philosophical Studies, 164: 113–26. Boghossian, Paul. (2014). What is inference? Philosophical Studies, 169: 1–18. Broome, John. (Forthcoming). Linking beliefs. In: Balcerak Jackson, Magdalen and Brendan Balcerak Jackson (eds.) Reasoning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burge, Tyler. (1993). Content preservation. Philosophical Review, 102(4): 457–88. Casullo, Albert. (2018). Pollock and Sturgeon on defeaters. Synthese, 195: 2897–906. Comesaña, Juan. (Forthcoming). Empirical justification and defeasibility. Synthese,

²³ I am grateful for comments from an audience at the University of Pavia, especially Tommaso Piazza, James Pryor, and Crispin Wright. For comments on written drafts, I thank Jessica Brown, Al Casullo, Juan Comesaña, and Jack Lyons.

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222     Graham, Peter J. (2006). Testimonial justification: Inferential or noninferential? Philosophical Quarterly, 56: 84–95. Hlöbil, Ulf. (2014). Against Boghossian, Wright and Broome on inference. Philosophical Studies, 167: 419–29. McGrath, Matthew. (2017). Knowing what things look like. Philosophical Review, 126(1): 1–41. McGrath, Matthew. (2018). Looks and perceptual justification. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 96(1): 110–33. Mellis, Giacomo. (2014). Understanding undermining defeat. Philosophical Studies, 170: 433–42. Pollock, John. (1970). The structure of epistemic justification. American Philosophical Quarterly, 4: 62–78. Pollock, John. (1974). Knowledge and Justification. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pollock, John. (1987). Defeasible reasons. Cognitive Science, 11: 481–518. Pollock, John and Cruz, Joseph. (1999). Contemporary Theories of Knowledge. 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Pryor, James. (2004). What’s wrong with Moore’s argument. Philosophical Perspectives, 14: 249–378.

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Sturgeon, Scott. (2014). Pollock on defeasible reasons. Philosophical Studies, 169: 105–18.

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10 Defeaters as Indicators of Ignorance Julien Dutant and Clayton Littlejohn

10.1. Introduction Consider three desiderata for a theory of defeat.

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1. The theory should be extensionally adequate. We figuratively scoured the globe to give you this list of the different types of defeaters proposed in the literature: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Opposing Defeaters Undercutting Defeaters Reason-Defeating Defeaters Collective Defeaters Pragmatic Defeaters Identification Defeaters Higher-Order Defeaters Negative Self-Appraisal Defeaters

We can think of the different items as standing for the different mechanisms by which something threatens rationality. A good theory of defeat should tell us which of the things on the list, if any, are genuine defeaters.¹ 2. Monistic views are prima facie preferable to pluralistic views. Monists and pluralists agree that there are different kinds of defeaters, but the monist

¹ In addition, there are discussions about whether defeaters are pieces of evidence, psychological states or contents, things that we should have known about or believed, or facts. As interesting as these discussions are, they don’t directly address questions about how defeaters defeat. And that is our focus. For good discussions of normative defeat, see Goldberg (2017); Lackey (2006); Madison (MS). For discussions of psychological defeat, see Bergmann (2006); Lackey (2006).

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224      thinks that there’s some unifying explanation of their rational toxicity.² Monistic views have greater explanatory power. 3. It is prima facie preferable that our theory of defeat can be embedded in a larger normative framework.³ We want a theory of what makes rational belief rational that explains why defeaters threaten rationality. As Grundmann (2011) observes, many theories of rational belief include non-redundant nodefeat clauses. Such views would fall short of this ideal.

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Here is our plan for what follows. In Section 10.1, we give a brief presentation of some of Pollock’s seminal ideas about defeat and introduce an alternative view that seems to satisfy our second and third desiderata. This account characterizes rational belief in terms of confirmation and then characterizes defeat in terms of things that have a negative impact on confirmation. We shall argue that this approach cannot handle certain kinds of higher-order defeat and that it mischaracterizes some epistemically beneficial factors as defeaters. It doesn’t satisfy our first desiderata. In Section 10.2, we explain where defeat should be located in a normative theory and argue that the first view ran into trouble because it is a truth-centred view. In Section 10.3, we propose a knowledge-centric view as an alternative, one that builds on the strengths of the first truth-centred approach but improves upon it because it handles the cases that cause trouble for the truth-centred approach.

10.2. Defeaters as De-Confirmers Recall Pollock and Cruz’s characterization of defeat:  : if p is a reason for S to believe q, r is a defeater for this reason iff (p & r) is not a reason for S to believe q. (Pollock and Cruz 1999: 37)

They use the notion of a reason in their characterization of defeat. On their view, p is a reason to believe q iff it is possible for this thinker to rationally ² Recall Spohn’s (2002) complaint that some theories (e.g. Pollock’s) were normatively deficient because they offered laundry lists of (alleged) defeaters and no unified explanation as to why these different defeat relations were toxic. ³ See Williams (1965: 107) for an interesting argument that the reasons we have to believe in pluralism in the practical domain do not carry over to the epistemic domain. There might be reasons to prefer a pluralistic view to a monistic one, but the existence of such reasons doesn’t change the facts about what’s prima facie preferable to what.

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    

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believe q by believing it on the basis of p. A reason, so understood, is defeasibly sufficient (i.e. something that is sufficient for ex ante rationality in the absence of defeaters). They also say that defeaters are themselves reasons. For example, in the case of opposing defeat, they say that when p is a reason for S to believe q, r is a rebutting defeater when r is a reason for S to believe not-q. We think that this reliance on defeasibly sufficient reasons is problematic.⁴ If we wanted to give accounts of partial and full defeat, we wouldn’t want to deploy the concept of a defeasibly sufficient reason in characterizing partial defeat. If a thinker acquires some evidence against p, that might have some negative impact on the rational status of the thinker’s belief even if relevant evidence is not a defeasibly sufficient reason for believing p’s negation. Partial defeat doesn’t require defeasibly sufficient reasons. Full defeat doesn’t require them, either. Suppose that it’s rational to believe p only if the total evidence provides sufficiently strong support for believing p. It’s possible for even very weak evidence to bring the degree of support below the threshold. Something can function like a full defeater for a belief in p without being a defeasibly sufficient reason to believe ~p. We might try to improve upon this by introducing some other notion of a reason, such as evidential reasons:

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: e is a reason to believe h iff e confirms h, that is, P(h|e) > P(h).⁵

Evidence is better suited to account for partial defeat. To characterize a full defeater, further normative machinery is needed. We need to introduce a normative standard so that we know when evidence would be sufficient: : it is rational for S believe q iff P(q) is sufficiently high.⁶

⁴ We should note that much of the literature on the defeat of rationality or justification is concerned with the way in which defeaters defeat status or standing. On Pollock and Cruz’s characterization, however, defeaters defeat reasons. The connection between defeating reasons and status is not obvious without appeal to further assumptions about reasons and rationality. Because one of us doesn’t believe that all beliefs need to be supported by reasons to be rational, it’s not clear to us how to connect the defeat of reasons to the defeat of status. For arguments that beliefs needn’t be based on evidence or reasons to be knowledge or to be rationally held, see Anscombe (1962); Littlejohn (2017); McGinn (2012). For discussion of a more reason-centric approach, see Lord (2018). ⁵ Let’s assume that the relevant notion of probability is some kind of subjective probability or evidential probability that captures the confirmation relation in question. Maria Lasonen-Aarnio rightly pointed out that Pollock’s approach is not probabilistic. We are thinking of this as a way of trying to build on some of his ideas in a probabilistic approach. ⁶ See Dorst (2019); Easwaran (2016); Sturgeon (2008) for defences of .

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226      If we incorporate  into our account of rational belief, we can give an account of partial and full defeat in terms of confirmation. Any defeater (partial or full) has to have a negative impact on ex ante or ex post rationality. Plausibly, it must be in the confirmation game. We can distinguish between different kinds of defeaters by thinking about the different ways that they negatively impact confirmation. In keeping with , we can determine whether a partial defeater constitutes a full defeater by thinking about the degree of support that remains after we have taken account of the partial defeater’s impact. We can now characterize defeat as follows:

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-: defeaters are de-confirmers.⁷

A de-confirmer negatively impacts the confirming support the evidence provides. As with confirmation and disconfirmation, de-confirmation is a matter of degree. A de-confirmer/defeater only has to confirm to some degree to be a partial defeater. A partial defeater constitutes a full defeater when it ensures that the total evidence doesn’t provide sufficiently strong support. - satisfies our second and third desiderata. The view is monistic. We know what it is that makes a defeater a defeater (i.e. it is a deconfirmer). The view can be embedded in a larger normative framework. Although we can include a no-defeat clause in , it would be redundant. As an added bonus, the normative framework that supports this view of defeat is independently quite plausible. Most epistemologists currently accept this theory of the epistemic good: : the fundamental epistemic good is true belief and false belief is the fundamental epistemic evil.⁸

Rational believers have the twin goals of acquiring true beliefs and avoiding false beliefs. They’re often uncertain about whether they achieve these goals by forming a belief and so they need to strike a balance between unreasonable aversion to risk and recklessness. They rationally ought to believe in ways that maximize expected epistemic value. This gives us the argument for .⁹

⁷ Chandler (2013) and Kotzen (2019) provide sophisticated formal characterizations of different defeaters in the spirit of -. ⁸ See Goldman (1999); Lynch (2004); Sylvan (2018) for defences of veritism. ⁹ See Easwaran and Fitelson (2015); Dorst (2019) for details.

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    

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Not all epistemologists want to characterize rational belief in terms of a connection to epistemic value. Some prefer to characterize rational belief in terms of a connection to epistemic norms. This would be in keeping with a truth-centric approach:

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 : we ought to believe p if we can believe it and therein believe the truth. We ought not to believe p if we cannot believe it and therein believe the truth.

If we believed in such objective norms, we wouldn’t think that rational belief required conforming to such norms. If we are rationally uncertain, say, about whether, say, this coin will land heads when flipped, there’s a sense in which we ought to suspend. One way to characterize this more subjective normative notion is by providing a theory of what would be rational to do give uncertainty about our objective obligations. One approach begins by ‘consequentializing’ the truth-centric theory of what we objectively ought to believe (e.g. by giving a cardinal ranking of our options that represents the weights of the reasons associated with these norms). We could characterize what we subjectively ought to believe or what we could rationally believe in terms of the minimization of expected objective wrongfulness.¹⁰ This gives us a new rationale for . The reason we ought (in a sense) believe in accordance with  is that by so believing we rationally respond to the two normative pressures that we’re under.

10.2.1 Back to the List It is easy to see how - accommodates opposing and undercutting defeaters. In cases of opposing defeat, a thinker acquires a defeater that suggests that the thinker’s belief is false (e.g. the thinker believes that it is Sunday but sees neighbors rushing to work). In cases of undercutting defeat, a thinker acquires a defeater that suggests that her grounds for believing do not support her belief (e.g. the thinker believes that it rained last night because of the wetness of the pavement but sees that a sprinkler has been running all

¹⁰ This approach to subjective permissibility is developed in Lazar (Forthcoming); Olsen (2018). Littlejohn (2020) applies these ideas to the epistemic case by consequentializing knowledge norms and showing how this gives us a theory of what we ought to believe in objective and subjective senses.

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228      morning).¹¹ If P is your initial probability function and you acquire p as a reason to believe q, P(q|p) is higher than P(q). When r is an opposing defeater, it confirms ~q in the context one’s current evidence or beliefs, namely, P(~q|p&r) > P(~q|p), so we have P(q|p&r)< P(q|p). When r is an undercutting defeater, it takes q towards its prior probability P(q) in that context, so we have P(q)≤ P(q|p&r) and P(q|p&r) < P(q|p). In cases of reasons-defeating defeat, a thinker acquires a defeater that suggests that the thinker’s supporting reason is false (e.g. you initially believe because of your perceptual experiences that there is beer in the fridge (b) and this convinces you that your partner has been shopping (s) but then you discover later that there was no beer there at all). Here are two ways to think about these cases. First, we might think that b was incorporated into our body of evidence, it supported the belief in s, but then a later a discovery kicks b out of the evidence and thus defeats the thinker’s belief in s. The problem is that in the probabilistic setting, once b is incorporated into the evidence and treated as an input to conditionalization, there is no rational process for removing b. Its probability on the evidence is 1, so no new evidence can lower it. If we want to give an account of how s’s status is threatened by a reason-defeating defeater and we are supposed to model this by explaining how learning b boosts s’s probability and then s’s probability decreases because new evidence knocks b out of the evidence, this cannot be done. Perhaps those who believe in reason-defeating defeat don’t think that our reasons for believing things like s are necessarily part of our evidence. Perhaps some of our reasons for believing things like s are just the contents of justified beliefs. Perhaps b is just such a reason in this sense. In that case, we might imagine that there is some evidence e which supports b and which supports s. (Perhaps e is a proposition about our perceptual experiences, but the precise content doesn’t matter provided that e does not entail b or s.) Then we could say that upon learning e, the probability of b and s increase and allow that it’s possible that we learn something, d, where d is a reason-defeating defeater because d lowers b’s probability without affecting the conditional probabilities of s on b or on ~b.¹²

¹¹ Undercutting (or undermining) is sometimes understood very broadly (e.g., by Brown (2018) who treats higher-order defeat as a kind of undercutting or undermining defeat), but we want to understand it narrowly because we think that - cannot accommodate certain kinds of higher-order defeat. ¹² Let P be your probability after e is acquired. For b to be a reason to believe s it must be that P(s|b) > P(s|~b). Recall d doesn’t affect the conditional probabilities P(s|b) and P(s|~b), so P(s|b&d) = P(s|b) and P(s|~b&d) = P(s|~b). Finally, d lowers the probability of b, so P(b|d) < P(b). From this, it follows that d de-confirms s, namely, P(s|d) < P(s).

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    

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Consider collective defeat. In cases of collective defeat, a thinker is said to acquire a defeater that suggests that some belief in a set involving multiple beliefs is false without suggesting that any belief in particular is false (e.g. you memorize the phone book and believe each entry in it only to discover the errata slip that says that the book contains an error without providing further information). We are skeptical of some of the things that have been said about the power of collective defeaters. Some epistemologists have defended views on which it’s not possible to have a set of justified beliefs known to be inconsistent (e.g. because that this knowledge of the presence of an unidentified falsehood defeats the justification for each belief in the set).¹³ We think that this is not what happens in the case we’ve just described. What might happen is that reading the errata slip lowers our confidence in some of the things we believe on the basis of what we read, but it’s clear that it wouldn’t bring the degree of support for each belief below threshold. One virtue of  is that it seems to explain why so-called collective defeaters might diminish the strength of support without being full defeaters for the relevant set of beliefs.¹⁴ One further virtue of - is that it can shed light on principles of justification associated with collective defeat, such as those that impose a consistency requirement on justified belief. Suppose that you were .95 confident that each of the entries in the phone book that you had committed to memory were correct. And suppose you learn that there was precisely one error in this book. Under these conditions, it seems that you acquire a reason to increase your confidence in your beliefs. While fans of collective defeat might think that this piece of information is rationally toxic, it might seem to actually be either neutral or beneficial. - should have no difficulty accommodating pragmatic defeaters if this is desired.¹⁵ The way that pragmatic defeaters are usually understood, they are taken to be practical considerations that are not directly connected to the truth-indicative factors. They defeat by giving us reason not to believe without stronger evidence than might otherwise be required. ¹³ See Leitgeb (2017); Pollock (1986); Smith (2016); Ryan (1991, 1996) for defences of views that include this consistency requirement on justified belief. ¹⁴ See Christensen (2004); Easwaran and Fitelson (2015); Makinson (1965); Worsnip (2016) for arguments that collective defeaters don’t invariably defeat the rational status of our beliefs. In Dutant and Littlejohn (2020), we argue that views that posit collective defeaters are either overly sceptical or too externalist (i.e. they deny us too much justification or they pick winners and losers on the basis of considerations beyond the thinker’s ken). ¹⁵ For arguments that pragmatic considerations can help to determine whether a body of evidence provides sufficient support for belief, see Fantl and McGrath (2009); Owens (2000); Schroeder (2012). We think Schroeder is the first to describe these pragmatic considerations as defeaters.

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230      If readers believe that practical considerations (e.g. the stakes or the odds of a salient bet) can create rational pressure to suspend without acquiring more evidence than might normally be necessary, - can accommodate this kind of pragmatic defeater by positing that such defeaters move the threshold.¹⁶ While - has a number of virtues, we struggle to see how it handles further kinds of defeat that are discussed in the literature. Peacocke, believes there are identification defeaters:

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[I] distinguish two kinds of defeasibility, which I will call defeasibility of identification and defeasibility of grounds. A ground for accepting a proposition can be conclusive even though our entitlement to believe that we have identified such a ground is defeasible. Identifying something as a conclusive ground is one thing; its being a conclusive ground is another. My confidence that something is a proof can be rationally undermined by the report of mathematicians whose competence I have reason to believe far outstrips my own. Nonetheless, a proof is a conclusive ground. Here we have defeasibility in respect of identification but not defeasibility in respect of grounds. (Peacocke 2004: 30)

At first glance, this might look like a case of undercutting defeat. The expert tells you that the proof is flawed so you might agree that the putative support doesn’t actually support the conclusion. If this is a case of undercutting defeat, - handles it straightforwardly. However, Peacocke intends this case to be one in which the defeater fails to de-confirm one’s belief. The idea is that if we have maximal support for the proposition. So, if we have a defeater, it is not a de-confirmer. We can see why some might be cool to the idea of so-called identification defeaters. It doesn’t seem that we need to be able to identify conclusive grounds as such to be justified on their basis. If so, it’s not obvious that the considerations that show that we cannot know that some ground is conclusive are enough to make it irrational to hold the relevant belief. Still, scale and degree seem to matter. If some considerations show that it’s insufficiently likely that you have suitable means for settling some question (e.g. because an expert has shown you that you’ve made a large number of mistakes in your

¹⁶ For discussion of such cases, see Fantl and McGrath (2009); Owens (2000); Weatherson (2005). For discussion of the ways in which moral considerations might provide pragmatic defeaters, see Basu and Schroeder (2019); Moss (2018).

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    

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reasoning), perhaps these considerations can defeat. If so, we might assimilate them to the category of higher-order defeaters. The defeaters described as higher-order defeaters cover a wide variety of considerations. Some consist of evidence about our evidence (e.g. evidence that our evidence provides only weak support for our beliefs). Some consist of evidence that our rational faculties have been compromised (e.g. evidence that we have been slipped a drug that affects our reasoning, that we suffer from hypoxia, etc.). Some might consist of evidence that our beliefs would not attain some desirable status (e.g. evidence that we could not know, evidence that it would be irrational to believe something, etc.). Some of these cases might be assimilated to cases of opposing, undercutting, or reason-defeating defeat, but it doesn’t seem that all can be. Suppose you acquire some misleading evidence that you have been slipped a drug that interferes with your reasoning abilities. Suppose there were a simple test that could determine whether the drug was present in the bloodstream. You simply need to place a strip of paper on your tongue and check its colour. And suppose that you acquired this evidence that you were slipped the drug during an important exam. If the test costs nothing to administer, it seems to make sense to take it before submitting your exam. Perhaps this is some indication that that the evidence that you’ve been drugged defeats the justification you have for the beliefs that you would rely on in answering exam questions. Note that if the evidence is indeed misleading and you haven’t been drugged, it isn’t clear that this evidence defeated by being an opposing, undercutting, or reason-defeating defeater. We can anticipate three responses from fans of -. First, they might deny the possibility of the case as we described it. They might argue that there are level-connecting principles according to which higher-order evidence necessarily is connected to the first-order evidence that either confirms or disconfirms our first-order beliefs.¹⁷ We will explain below why we doubt that there is any true level-connecting principle that will cover the full range of cases. Second, someone might simply bite the bullet and deny that the putative higher-order defeaters defeat. This would allow someone to say that all genuine defeaters are de-confirmers. This view seems to be a kind of levelsplitting view insofar as it denies that higher-order considerations bear on the justification or rationality of first-order beliefs. We worry that such views suggest that certain apparently dogmatic or seemingly reckless attitudes are ¹⁷ See Dorst (2020); Dorst, Fitelson, and Husic (Forthcoming); and Williamson (2019) for discussion of level-connecting principles.

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232      rational. Moreover, we think that the account will struggle with a kind of higher-order defeat that we call negative self-appraisal defeat. The third response is to our mind the most promising. The de-confirmers might try to account for higher-order defeat by suggesting that it threatens ex post rationality rather than ex ante rationality.¹⁸ The standard view is that ex post rationality involves a basing requirement (i.e., that we competently base our beliefs on the support that warrants them). We might account for higher-order defeat by saying that it impacts ex post rationality on the grounds that anyone who believes in spite of the presence of these defeaters cannot meet the basing condition. Perhaps if Agnes believes (falsely but reasonably) that she has been drugged, it is ex ante rational to believe the conclusion of a proof but it fails to be ex-post rational because she cannot competently base her beliefs on the good reasons that she has. This strategy might help proponents of - accommodate some higher-order defeat, but we don’t think this covers negative selfappraisal defeat. A negative self-appraisal defeater is provided by considerations about the epistemic status of some particular belief. Agnes might believe something about, say, the afterlife. She might then be convinced that she couldn’t possibly know anything about the afterlife. There seems to be a rational tension between the belief that we’ll survive our own bodily deaths and the belief that we couldn’t possibly know whether people can survive their own bodily deaths. Negative self-appraisal defeaters differ from the previous higher-order defeaters in two ways. First, they concern the epistemic status of particular beliefs (e.g. whether we know, whether we rationally believe, whether it is okay to believe given the evidence we have, etc.) rather than pertaining directly to the thinker’s belief forming processes or strength of evidence. Second, they have a kind of epistemic content missing from more widely discussed cases of higher-order defeat. How can - handle cases like these? Suppose that a thinker believes p and acquires evidence that confirms any of the following: 1. That she couldn’t know p. 2. That it’s irrational for her to believe p. 3. That she doesn’t have evidence that warrants belief in p.

¹⁸ This idea was inspired by Di Paolo (2018); Silva (2017). They do not endorse -, but we thought this work might help fend off one kind of objection. See also van Wietmarschen (2013).

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    

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On its face, it seems that the evidence may raise the probability of (1)–(3) without lowering that of p itself.¹⁹ So, if negative self-appraisal defeaters defeat, they might show that there are defeaters that are not de-confirmers.²⁰ Think about lottery cases. Harman nicely captures part of what makes the lottery case so puzzling:

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In the testimony case a person comes to know something when he is told about it by an eyewitness or when he reads about it in the newspaper. In the lottery case, a person fails to come to know he will lose a fair lottery, even though he reasons as follows: “Since there are N tickets, the probability of losing is (N-1)/N. This probability is very close to one. Therefore, I shall lose the lottery.” A person can know in the testimony case but not in the lottery case . . . The contrast between the two cases may seem paradoxical, since witnesses are sometimes mistaken and newspapers often print things that are false. For some N, the likelihood that a person will lose the lottery is higher than the likelihood that the witness has told the truth or that the newspaper is right. (Bergmann 1968: 166)

Given the weak anti-sceptical assumption that our testimonial beliefs are rational and Harman’s observation about the chance of error,  tells us that it is rational to believe lottery propositions. Suppose this is so and suppose that we know a priori that we cannot know that we’ve lost the lottery. If so, some Moorean absurdities cross the threshold. - cannot account for some negative self-appraisal defeaters. Could the proponents of - maintain that negative selfappraisal defeaters defeat because they threaten ex post rationality by ensuring that we don’t satisfy a basing requirement? Probably not. We fail to satisfy the basing requirement when we cannot competently base a belief on sufficient

¹⁹ See Dorst (2020) and Williamson (2019) for arguments that show that once we allow that we can be rationally uncertain to even a slight degree about what our evidence supports, we should expect that there can be bodies of evidence that both make it very probable that p and very probable that it is not sufficiently probable that p. Given , this would be evidence that would make it rational to believe p and rational to believe that it is irrational to believe p. In truth-centric accounts, then, it seems we can only account for the toxicity of (2) by denying  or by accepting a kind of negative introspection principle that says that where t is the relevant threshold for rational belief (which we assume is less than 1), P(p) .5 only if P(~Kp) > .5. But it cannot be that P(~Kp) >.5 if P (Kp) >.5. Thus,   tells us that it cannot be ex ante rational for a thinker to believe both propositions in (1). If we understand ‘having sufficient evidence’ as meeting a condition necessary for knowing, then this reasoning rules out evidence that makes it ex ante rational to believe the propositions mentioned in (3). The difficult case is (2). If ex ante rationality were necessary for being in a position to know, our treatment of (1) would cover this case.²⁸ Unfortunately for us, we cannot say that rationality is necessary for knowledge. If we assume probable knowledge, we should expect that there will be some ‘unreasonable knowledge’ in the sense that there will be some things that we know that will not be sufficiently likely to be known to also be rational to believe.²⁹ Still, while we might want to allow for the possibility of unreasonable knowledge, we might want to deny that it can be rational to both believe p and believe that this belief is irrational. ²⁸ Let t be the threshold in  . Suppose knowledge entails rational belief: by  , P(Kp) ≤ t entails ~Kp. Now suppose it is rational to believe that it is not rational to believe p. By  , P(P(Kp) ≤ t) > t. Since P(Kp) ≤ t entails ~Kp, P(~Kp) > t. Assuming t ≥ ½, P(Kp) < t. ²⁹ See Lasonen-Aarnio (2010) for discussion and defence of unreasonable knowledge and Sylvan (2018b) for defence of the idea that knowledge is a non-normative state that needn’t have a normative dimension. We think that a non-normative account of knowledge can help address some concerns about the very idea of defeat raised by Baker-Hytch and Benton (2015).

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240      Whether   prohibits a pair of beliefs like (2) depends upon whether a high probability of knowledge is compatible with a high probability (that one knows) that knowledge is improbable. If we take t > ½ to be the threshold of sufficient probability in  , a sufficient condition to prohibit the pair is:

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 t-: if P(Kp)> t then P(P(Kp)>t)≥ 1-t.

For note that P(Kp)> t obtains just if P(Kp)≤ t doesn’t. Hence P(P(Kp)> t)≥ 1-t is equivalent to P(P(Kp) ≤ t) ≤ t. Given the factivity of being in a position to know, P(P(Kp)≤ t)≤ t only if P(KP(Kp) ≤ t) ≤ t. Hence given  t-, if P(Kp)>t then P(KP(Kp)≤ t)≤ t. This would mean that if the probability that one knows p is above threshold, the probability that one knows that it is not above threshold is itself below threshold, as desired. Note that while  t- is an inter-level constraint, it does not force us to accept strong access constraints like the idea that it is rational to believe p only if it is rational to believe that one knows that p. It still allows the combination of P(Kp)>t and P(P(Kp)>t)≤ t and the combination of Kp and P (Kp)≤ ½.³⁰ Note also that the higher t is, the milder the  t- requirement is. At t=.9, for instance, it merely requires that if it is highly (.9) probable that one knows, it is at least somewhat (i.e. .1) likely that it is highly probable. While we don’t have a full defence of  t-, we think that it has some prima facie appeal and is worth exploring. Its initial appeal comes from the idea that whatever makes it probable that one knows will typically also make it probable that it is probable that one knows. What confirms to you that you know p by memory or perception, for instance, is typically the fact that your perception or memory is particularly clear or detailed, the fact that you can give additional details pertaining to p, and so on. But those facts are also evidence that you have evidence that you know, which is to say that they contribute to make it probable that it is probable for you that you know. The thought gets further support from an unlikely source: Williamson’s (2014) unmarked clock models. While these models are meant to illustrate the failure of various access constraints on knowledge, they turn out to validate  t-. We can illustrate how this works with an example and we provide a proof in the Appendix. In Williamson’s models, a parameter (e.g. time, temperature, etc.) takes different values along a line. Worlds correspond ³⁰ But, see Goodman (2013) for helpful discussion of such constraints.

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    

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to points on the line. What you know at a world is whatever holds at worlds within a margin of error m to the left and to the right of the point on the line. Your evidential probability is given by conditionalizing a uniform prior on what you know. When you update in this way, every value outside of the margins is ruled out and each of the values within the margins are equally likely. Suppose the actual world (@) is at 50 and the margin for error (m) is 50. What you know leaves open any world within [0:100]. Let p be some proposition such that Kp holds throughout [30:90]. (For instance, p might be the proposition that the value of the parameter is between -20 and 140.) Because Kp occupies 60 percent of the worlds left open by what you know at @, the probability of Kp at @ is.6. Note that any world between 40 and 80 will also have within its margin the Kp-segment [30:90]: for 40 leaves open any world in [-10:90] and 80 leaves open any world in [30:130]. So, at each of these worlds, P(Kp)≥.6, too. This means that at least 40 per cent of worlds within @’s margins are Kp-worlds. So, at @, we have an instance of  0.6, P(P(Kp)≥.6)≥.4. The reasoning generalizes to any Kp-proposition that occupies a continuous stretch of 50 per cent of @’s margins.³¹ 0

30

@±m 50

90 100 p Kp

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80±m P(Kp)≥6

Informally, here is what we have shown. In these models, the features of a situation that make Kp probable (i.e. that Kp holds in a large proportion of the worlds left open by one’s evidence) are also features that put an upper limit on how improbable it can be that Kp is probable (i.e. a sufficient proportion of the worlds that are left open by one’s evidence are worlds that can see mostly Kp-worlds). This is why they validate  -. This result depends upon several features of the models that we’ve worked with, so it remains to be ³¹ Note that propositions of the form Kp have to occupy continuous stretches within a world’s margin. For if Kp holds at two points within @’s margins, those two points are at most 2m apart, which means that their own margins connect and p holds throughout the segment between them, which in turns means that Kp holds at any point between them. What happens for t below ½? Suppose for instance that Kp holds throughout [80:100]. Then it occupies 20 per cent of @’s margins, so at @ we have P(Kp) ≥.2 . Now all we can say is that every world to the right of @ ‘sees’ the whole of [80:100]. So, we have P(P(Kp) ≥.2) ≥.5. More generally, the models validate an alternative schema: for any t≤½, if P(Kp)> t, (P(Kp)> t)≥.5. This is good news as instances of  t- with low t are counterintuitive.

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242      seen how principles like  - would fare if we worked with different models (e.g. ones that do not assume a uniform prior, ones that do not have a constant margin, etc.). At the very least, we think this gives us some reason to explore principles like  - further and reason to hope that such principles will hold in a wide range of cases. If it is impossible to rationally believe the propositions mentioned in (1)– (3), our account handles cases of negative self-appraisal defeat quite nicely. When it is rational for the thinker to believe, say, that she’s not in a position to know or that it would be irrational for her to believe p, it would not be rational for her to believe p and we can see why these negative self-appraisals can function like defeaters. Alternative views that characterize rational belief in terms of the probability of truth struggle to explain why it would be rationally mandatory for a thinker who rationally believes that she doesn’t know, say, to suspend judgment. If our treatment of negative self-appraisal is correct, we can build on an interesting proposal about suspension defended by Thomas Raleigh (Forthcoming). He proposed that suspending is really a matter of believing. We suspend, on his view, when we believe the evidence doesn’t support a belief. We think that something very similar might be right. Provided that a thinker is rational, her rational belief that she’s not in a position to know whether p should ensure that she’s agnostic about whether p. (Even without a belief, a sufficiently high degree of confidence should also work.) It is difficult to explain why this should be in a truth-centric framework since, as we’ve seen, it’s not clear why, if  is correct, a rational thinker would suspend if she were to judge that she’s not in a position to know or that her evidence doesn’t support her belief. Our framework, however, explains why a rational thinker suspends when she rationally believes that she’s not in a position to know. We think that it’s a strength of our view that it helps us see what’s attractive about Raleigh’s proposals about belief and suspension.

10.5. Conclusion We have proposed a theory of rational full belief according to which it’s rational to believe when it’s sufficiently probable that the belief would be knowledge. From this account, we can derive a theory of defeat according to which defeaters are indicators of ignorance, evidence that if you were to believe, your belief would fail to constitute knowledge. We think that this account provides a better account of every kind of (genuine) defeat there is than the leading alternative. If we think

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of rationality as something akin to subjective rightness and think of subjective rightness as being probabilistically related to objective norms, our account of rational belief and defeat is the account we should want if we think of knowledge as the fundamental normative standard for belief.³²

Appendix

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We show that  t- (for t≥.5) holds in Williamson’s (2014) unmarked clock models. Worlds are points in the real number line, propositions are regions of the line;|p|is the size of the region p; for every p, q, the proposition p&q is the intersection of p and q. At each world w one knows every proposition entailed by the parameter’s value being within a margin m>0 of w. We let k(w) = [w-m:w+m] and for any p, the proposition that one knows p, Kp, is the set {w:k(w) ⊆ p}. The evidential probability at w, πw, is a uniform prior conditionalized on k(w): πw(p)=|p&k(w)|/|k(w)|. Without loss of symmetry we set m=½ which gives us|k(w)|=1 and the simple relation: πw(p)=|p|. The proposition that the evidential probability of p is above t, P(p)>t, is the set {w: πw (p)>t}. Now let t≥½, @ some world and p such that π@(Kp)>t. Our aim is to show that π@(P(Kp)>t)≥1-t. Let a be greatest lower bound and b the least upper bound of Kp&k(@). Since Kp holds at worlds (arbitrary close to) a and b, p holds throughout the regions]a-m:a+m] and [b-m:b+m[. Since a and b are within k(@),|b-a|t,|]a:b[|>t. Now let w be any world within]a+(t-½):b-(t-½)[. (This interval has positive size since |]a:b[|>t≥½.) Since w>a+(t-½), w-m=w-½>a+t-1, which given t≤1 entails w-m>a, and by parallel reasoning, w+m t, πw(Kp)>t. So P(Kp)>t holds at any world w within ]a+(t-½):b-(t-½)[. Now since |]a:b[|>t≥½,|]a+(t-½):b-(t-½)[|>t-2(t-½)=1-t. Therefore π@(P(Kp)>t)>1-t.

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244      Bergmann, Michael. (2006). Justification Without Awareness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, Jessica. (2018). Fallibilism: Evidence and Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chandler, Jake. (2013). Defeat reconsidered. Analysis, 73: 49–51. Christensen, David. (2004). Putting Logic in its Place. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Di Paolo, Joshua. (2018). Higher-order defeat is object-independent. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 99: 248–69. Dorst, Kevin. (2019). Lockeans maximize expected accuracy. Mind, 128: 175–211. Dorst, Kevin. (2020). Evidence: A guide for the uncertain. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 100: 586–632. Dorst, Kevin, Fitelson, Branden, and Husic, Brooke. Manuscript. Evidence of evidence: A higher-order perspective. Dutant, Julien and Fitelson, Branden. Manuscript. Knowledge-centered epistemic utility theory. Dutant, Julien and Littlejohn, Clayton. (2020). Justification, knowledge, and normality. Philosophical Studies, 177: 1593–1609.

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Easwaran, Kenny. (2016). Dr. Truthlove or: How I learned to stop worrying and love Bayesian probabilities. Noûs, 50: 816–53. Easwaran, Kenny and Fitelson, Branden. (2015). Accuracy, coherence, and evidence. In: Tamar Szabo Gendler and John Hawthorne (eds.) Oxford Studies in Epistemology. Vol. 5. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 61–96. Fantl, Jeremy and McGrath, Matthew. (2009). Knowledge in an Uncertain World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ghijsen, Harmen, Kelp, Christopher, and Simion, Mona. (2016). Norms of belief. Philosophical Issues, 26: 375–92. Gibbons, John. (2013). The Norm of Belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goldberg, Sandy. (2017). Should have known. Synthese, 194: 2863–94. Goldman, Alvin. (1999). Knowledge in a Social World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goodman, Jeremy. (2013). Inexact knowledge without improbable knowing. Inquiry, 56: 30–53. Graham, Peter A. (2010). In defense of objectivism about moral obligation. Ethics, 121: 88–115. Grundmann, Thomas. (2011). Defeasibility theory. In: S. Bernecker and D. Pritchard (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Epistemology. New York: Routledge: 156–66.

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Harman, Gilbert. (1968). Knowledge, inference, and explanation. American Philosophical Quarterly, 5: 164–73. Hyman, John. (1999). How knowledge works. Philosophical Quarterly, 49: 433–51. Kotzen, Matthew. (2019). A formal account of epistemic defeat. In: Fitelson, B., Borges, R., and Braden, C. (eds.) Themes from Klein. Cham, Switzerland: Springer: 213–34. Lackey, Jennifer. (2006). Learning from words. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 73: 77–101. Lasonen-Aarnio, Maria. Perspectives, 24: 1–21.

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Lazar, Seth. (2019). Deontological decision theory and the grounds of subjective permissibility. In: Mark Timmons (ed.) Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics. Vol. 9. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 204–22. Leitgeb, Hannes. (2017). The Stability of Belief: How Rational Belief Coheres with Probability. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Littlejohn, Clayton. (2017). How and why knowledge is first. In: A. Carter, E. Gordon, and B. Jarvis (eds.) Knowledge First. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 19–46. Littlejohn, Clayton. (2018). The right in the good: A defence of teleological nonconsequentialism. In: K. Ahlstrom-Vij and J. Dunn (eds.) Epistemic Consequentialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 23–48.

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Littlejohn, Clayton. (2020). Truth, knowledge, and the standard of proof in criminal law. Synthese, 197, 5253–5286. Littlejohn, Clayton. (Forthcoming). On what we should believe (and when (and why) we should believe what we know we should not believe). In: K. McCain and S. Stapleford (eds.) Epistemic Duties. New York: Routledge. Lord, Errol. (2018). epistemic reasons, evidence, and defeaters. In: D. Star (ed.) Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 600–31. Lynch, Michael. (2004). True to Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press. Makinson, D. C. (1965). The paradox of the preface. Analysis, 25: 205–7. McGinn, Marie. (2012). Non-inferential knowledge. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 112: 1–28. Moss, Sarah. (2018). Moral encroachment. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 118: 177–205. Nelkin, Dana. (2000). The lottery paradox, knowledge, and rationality. The Philosophical Review, 109: 373–409. Olsen, Kristian. (2018). Subjective rightness and minimizing expected objective wrongdoing. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 99: 417–41.

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246      Owens, David. (2000). Reason Without Freedom. London: Routledge. Peacocke, Christopher. (2004). The Realm of Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pollock, John. (1986). The paradox of the preface. Philosophy of Science, 53: 246–58. Pollock, John and Cruz, Joseph. 1999. Contemporary Theories of Knowledge. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Raleigh, Thomas. (Forthcoming). Suspending is believing. Synthese. Ryan, Sharon (1991). The preface paradox. Philosophical Studies, 64: 293–307. Ryan, Sharon. (1996). The epistemic virtues of consistency. Synthese, 109: 121–41. Schroeder, Mark. (2012). Stakes, withholding, and pragmatic encroachment on knowledge. Philosophical Studies, 160: 265–85. Silva, Paul Jr. (2017). How doxastic justification helps us solve the puzzle of misleading higher-order evidence. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 98: 308–28. Smith, Martin. (2016). Between Probability and Certainty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spohn, Wolfgang. (2002). A brief comparison of Pollock’s defeasible reasoning and ranking functions. Synthese, 13: 39–56. Sturgeon, Scott. (2008). Reason and the grain of belief. Nous, 42: 139–65. Sylvan, Kurt. (2018). Veritism unswamped. Mind, 127: 381–435. Sylvan, Kurt. (2018b). Knowledge as a non-normative relation. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 97: 190–222.

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Unger, Peter. (1975). Ignorance: A Case for Scepticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weatherson, Brian. (2005). Can we do without pragmatic encroachment? Philosophical Perspectives, 19: 417–43. Weatherson, Brian. (2016). Reply to Eaton and Pickavance. Philosophical Studies, 173: 3231–3. van Wietmarschen, Han. (2013). Peer disagreement, evidence, well-groundedness. Philosophical Review, 122: 395–425. Williams, Bernard. (1965). Ethical consistency. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary, 39: 103–38. Williamson, Timothy. (2000). Knowledge and its Limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williamson, Timothy. (2014). Very improbable knowing. Erkenntnis, 79: 971–99. Williamson, Timothy. (2019). Evidence of evidence in epistemic logic. In: M. Skipper and A. Steglich-Petersen (eds.) Higher-Order Evidence: New Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 265–98. Worsnip, Alex. (2016). Belief, credence, and the preface paradox. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 94: 549–62.

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11 Competing Reasons Justin Snedegar

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11.1. Competition Between Reasons One of the most important facts about the normative domain is that some considerations are contributory, rather than decisive, when it comes to determining what we ought to, must, or may do.¹ They provide defeasible support or defeasible opposition to an option. In epistemology, the theory of practical reasoning, and ethics, it is standard to appeal to contributory or pro tanto normative reasons to capture this fact. Most of our options have some reasons in favor and some reasons against; to determine which option to take, we have to determine how these reasons compare. In particular, on the standard view reasons compete with one another, and the outcome of this competition determines what you ought to, must, or may do.² That action A would be mildly pleasant is a reason to do A, and that an incompatible action B would prevent a great deal of suffering is a reason to do B. These reasons compete with one another, since A and B are incompatible. If there are no other relevant reasons, then what you ought to, must, or may do—A or B—will depend on the outcome of this competition. An important task for normative theory, then, is to explain how the competition between reasons works. A large part of this task will involve investigating relationships of defeat between reasons, since when reasons compete, at least in many cases, some reasons will defeat others—that is how they win the competition. Though the concept of defeat is perhaps more familiar in epistemology, I will be concerned mostly with the practical domain.

¹ See Ross (1930) for an early and very influential development of this idea; for a recent overview, see Lord and Maguire (2016). ² I’m using this slightly long-winded phrase, ‘what you ought to, must, or may do,’ because the differences between these different normative statuses will be important later. To note the difference between ‘ought’ and ‘must’ here, consider the following, which may be said about some supererogatory action: “Well, no, I’m not saying you must do it, but you really ought to.”

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248   Following Pollock (1974), epistemologists have focused primarily on two distinct kinds of defeat: rebutting defeat and undercutting defeat. One reason rebuts another when it is a stronger reason for a conflicting option. In the previous case, for example, it is plausible that the reason for B, that it would prevent a lot of suffering, rebuts the reason for the conflicting option A, that it would be mildly pleasant. Importantly, in cases of (mere) rebutting, the defeated reason is in an important sense still “in force.” It isn’t that there is no reason for A in this case; after all, it would be mildly pleasant. It’s just that this reason is (rebuttingly) defeated, or outweighed. If these are the only reasons in play, then it’s very plausible at least that you ought to do B, and perhaps that you must or are required to do B, in which case it’s not true that you may do A, or that A is permissible. One reason undercuts another, on the other hand, when the first does undermine the second’s status as a reason—to use a common metaphor, it attacks the connection between the consideration and the option it would otherwise support. That you promised to buy me lunch is, or would be, a reason to do so. But that the promise was coerced or given under duress plausibly undercuts this reason, so that in fact it is no reason at all to buy me lunch. So, the first important difference between cases of rebutting and cases of undercutting is that in the former, but not the latter, the defeated reason is still in force.³ The second important difference is that in cases of undercutting, unlike in cases of rebutting, the defeating reason need not, and typically will not, be a reason for a conflicting option. Note that the fact that your promise was coerced need not be a reason against buying me lunch, or a reason to do anything incompatible with buying me lunch, even though it does defeat—in an undercutting way—the promissory reason you would otherwise have to buy me lunch. A third way in which reasons compete, at least in the practical domain, is captured in Raz’s (1999) notion of an exclusionary reason. There is some debate about the best way to understand exclusionary reasons, but on a natural understanding, one reason excludes another when the first is a reason to take the second out of consideration. To borrow Raz’s example, suppose I promise my partner that my decision about where to send our daughter to school will be guided entirely by the quality of the education she would get. In that case, that Fancy Private School is more expensive than Good Public School just isn’t ³ In fact, this is too simple. There are cases of partial undercutting in which a reason is not fully undercut, but just weakened. So, a bit more precisely: when a reason is merely rebutted, it retains its full strength, but when it is undercut, it loses at least some—and perhaps all—of its strength. See Schroeder (2007): Ch. 5; compare with Dancy (2004): Ch. 3, on attenuators.

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something I should take into account in deciding where to send her. It may seem that my promise is an undercutting defeater of the financial reason to send our daughter to Good Public School. But in fact there is an important difference between undercutters, as in the coerced promise previous case, and exclusionary reasons.⁴ In the undercutting case, the initial reason is no longer in force at all—it is just not a reason anymore. But, in the exclusionary case, the reason is in force, it’s just that I have a reason not to take it into account in my deliberation.⁵ In the undercutting case, there is no reason to be taken into account. Nevertheless, even though the reason in the exclusionary case is in force, it will lose the competition—in fact, since it is taken out of consideration, it doesn’t even get to compete.⁶ So, we have seen three different ways in which a reason may be defeated, or in which reasons can compete. The reason may be rebutted, undercut, or excluded. Arguably, the most straightforward of these is a rebutting defeat, in which a reason is defeated by a stronger reason for a conflicting option. One goal for this paper is to suggest that rebutting defeat is actually not as straightforward as it seems. In particular, I will argue that we should recognize two different varieties of rebutting defeat. First, there are cases in which a reason for one option is defeated by a stronger reason for an incompatible option. Second, there are cases in which a reason for one option is defeated by a stronger reason against that same option (or vice versa). Many philosophers have not recognized this distinction between two kinds of rebutting defeat, I believe, because they have not recognized a distinction between reasons for and reasons against. It is a common, though usually implicit, assumption that reasons against an option are just reasons for incompatible alternatives. I argue in Snedegar (2018) that this is a mistake. In this paper, I explore the consequences of recognizing the distinction between reasons for and reasons against for accounts of how reasons compete, focusing on rebutting defeat. The overall goal is to make some progress in understanding how the competition between pro tanto reasons determines the overall status of our options.

⁴ See Horty (2012) and Horty and Nair (2018) for the claim that exclusionary reasons are just undercutters. See Raz (1999): 184; and Whiting (2017): 400, for a rejection of this identification. ⁵ Whiting (2017) makes essentially the same point, but he understands exclusionary reasons as second-order reasons not to base one’s actions or attitudes (including decisions) on certain ordinary, first-order reasons. Raz (1999), especially in the postscript, often seems to understand them in this way as well. ⁶ I am glossing over some complications here. For example, there may be cases in which the excluded reason is so weighty that it should not be excluded. A full theory of the competition between reasons, and in particular of how exclusionary reasons function, will need to explain this.

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250   First, I’ll introduce what I take to be the most common way of thinking about the competition between reasons, which I call balance accounts. Then, I’ll argue this picture—as so far developed—is inadequate, primarily because it does not recognize the importance of reasons against. I then consider a very different way of thinking about the competition between reasons, which I call criticism-based accounts. This kind of view does recognize the importance of reasons against but misses out on the importance of the competition between reasons bearing on competing options. Finally, I sketch a positive view that incorporates elements of both kinds of view. Open questions remain, but I argue that it gives us the beginnings of an attractive account of how the competition between reasons determines the overall status of our options.

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11.2. Balance Accounts According to balance accounts, reasons compete by weighing against each other in a way that’s broadly analogous to how physical objects on a scale compete to let us see which is the heaviest.⁷ In fact, discussions of competing reasons often use a scale as a metaphor.⁸ The reasons are like differently weighted marbles that go on the pans of a scale, which correspond to the conflicting options. The pan with the most weight in it once all the reasons have been taken into account corresponds to the option you are required to perform. Asking what there is ‘most reason’ to do is naturally understood as asking about the total amount of support provided by the individual reasons for each of the options, which involves the accrual of these reasons.⁹ This is probably the most common picture of the competition between reasons; it is suggested by the platitudinous claim that you are required to do what you have most reason to do.¹⁰ This gives us the most natural version of the balance account:¹¹

⁷ A different metaphor comes from Ross (1930), who thinks of the competition between pro tanto considerations as analogous to the competition between different forces acting on an object. I take the two physical metaphors to suggest the very similar conceptions of the competition between reasons. ⁸ See, e.g., Broome (2004). ⁹ On accrual, see Nair (2016). ¹⁰ Often authors use ‘ought’ instead of ‘required’ here. I think that most of them have in mind what I’ll mean by ‘required,’ including that you’d be acting impermissibly by not doing what you “ought” (in their sense) to do. In any case, this won’t matter much for my discussion of the Balance Account, though the difference between these overall normative statuses will become important later. ¹¹ Compare Parfit (2011): 32; Schroeder (2015); and Lord (2018): 10–11.

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Balance: you are required to A when the reasons for A outweigh the reasons for any of the alternatives. The intuitive thought here is that if you have more reason for A than for anything else, then you are required to A. On this view, we imagine the deliberating agent facing a range of alternatives. Each alternative will have some reasons in its favor. We weigh these up and find out where the balance of reasons lies; that is the option the agent is required to take. This picture relies heavily on rebutting defeat, of course: the reasons for incompatible options compete, and the weightier ones rebut the less weighty ones.¹² This is a very natural picture, but as so far described, it faces problems. Suppose that pressing either button 1 or button 2 will guarantee that I get a particular $100 bill. But while pressing button 1 has no cost, pressing button 2 will deliver a painful electrical shock. Assuming these are the only relevant factors in this case, it is clear that I am required to press button 1 and that I am required not to press button 2. But note that in this case, my reason for pressing button 1 is the same as my reason for pressing button 2—doing so will get me $100. So, I do not have more reason for pressing button 1 than for pressing button 2, and so, according to Balance, it isn’t true that I am required to press button 1. What we need, clearly, is to add reasons against: there is a reason against pressing button 2—the electrical shock—that is not a reason against pressing button 1, and this explains why pressing 1 is required and why pressing 2 is impermissible. This problem may seem fairly obvious, and so you may worry that I’ve been unfair to defenders of balance accounts. The reason this problem hasn’t been apparent, I believe, is that defenders have (in most cases, implicitly) made the assumption mentioned in the introduction, that reasons against an option are just reasons for alternatives to that option. If this were true, then Balance would take reasons against into account, since reasons against just are reasons for alternatives. The obvious thought in this case is that if we understand the fact that pressing button 2 would give you a shock as a reason for the alternative to pressing 2—that is, pressing 1—then we get an extra reason for pressing 1, and so that is what you are required to do. An alternative, defended by Schroeder (2007), can also avoid this problem. This is because Schroeder understands the relevant kind of competition to be the competition between reasons for an option and reasons against that ¹² The picture will be more sophisticated than this, to accommodate undercutting defeat, as well as what Dancy (2004) calls enablers, disablers, intensifiers, and attenuators, at least.

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252   option. However, Schroeder makes exactly this kind of assumption about reasons against: he assumes that reasons against an option are simply reasons for not performing that option.¹³ So his version of the balance account is not so different from Balance, after all; it’s just Balance with a particular conception of what the alternatives to A are—namely, not doing A. The important thing is that both focus just on the competition between reasons for incompatible options. In fact, it is important that Schroeder does make this assumption, because otherwise his account faces a similar problem. Suppose that in the previous case, the electrical shock that I will receive if I press button 2 is mild enough that I would be happy to endure it to receive $100. That is, the reason against pressing button 2 is weaker than the reason for pressing button 2. So. according to Schroeder’s view, it looks like I am required to press button 2, which is false. But if reasons against an option are simply reasons for not performing that option, we may be able to avoid this problem. In particular, if we can assume that the reason for pressing button 1—that it will get me $100—is a reason for not pressing button 2—that is, given Schroeder’s assumption, a reason against pressing button 2—then we can avoid the result that I am required to press button 2.¹⁴ So, the assumption that reasons against are simply reasons for alternatives helps different versions of the balancing account avoid problems. Moreover, this assumption is a very natural one to come to if you begin with the balancing metaphor, and then want to accommodate reasons against. We know how to think about reasons for on this picture: they’re like marbles that go into the relevant pan. It isn’t immediately obvious how to build in reasons against, on the other hand. But, if these are just reasons for alternatives, then we know how to accommodate them. Less metaphorically, this assumption will simplify our theory of the competition between reasons, since we only have to understand one kind of rebutting defeat: the kind that holds between reasons for incompatible options. But, as I argue in the next section, the assumption that reasons against an option are simply reasons for alternatives to that option is false. So, we cannot appeal to this assumption to defend the balancing account.

¹³ See Schroeder (2015) for relevant discussion, and Nagel (1970): 47, for the same assumption. ¹⁴ See Pendlebury (ms), who also makes this observation.

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11.3. Reasons For and Reasons Against I will begin by introducing a paradigmatic example of a reason against. This is borrowed from Greenspan (2005), who also argues (in a different way) for a sharp distinction between reasons for and reasons against. Then I will consider various ways of trying to reduce this reason against the option to a reason for alternatives, and argue that none are satisfactory.¹⁵ This will support the claim that the reason against relation is distinct from the reason for relation, and thus the claim that our theory of the competition between reasons should account for both the competition between reasons for competing options and the competition between reasons for an option and reasons against that same option. Suppose that I am trying to decide which shirt to wear: the blue one, the red one, or the green one. The blue shirt is boring. This fact is clearly relevant to the choice at hand. This is because it’s a reason against wearing the blue shirt. On the view that reasons against are simply reasons for alternatives, its being a reason against wearing the blue shirt must amount to its being a reason for alternatives to wearing the blue shirt. The important question, then, is: which of the alternatives? Perhaps the most natural answer—which has been endorsed by Nagel (1970) and, as we saw in the previous section, Schroeder (2007)—is that reasons against an action are just reasons for not performing that action. So, to say that the fact that the blue shirt is boring is a reason against wearing the blue shirt is just to say that this fact is a reason for not wearing the blue shirt. I believe that this answer is plausible when we think about the choice the agent is facing as a choice about whether to wear the blue shirt—that is, a choice between wearing the blue shirt and not wearing the blue shirt. But, in this case, the choice is more fine-grained than this: it is a choice between wearing the blue shirt, wearing the red shirt, and wearing the green shirt. Reasons against wearing the blue shirt, like the fact that it is boring, are clearly relevant for this choice, and not only the more coarse-grained choice between wearing the blue shirt and not wearing it, since they count against wearing the blue shirt. But, as so far stated, the view in question doesn’t really tell us how it bears on this choice. It must count against wearing the blue shirt by counting in favor of some alternative option(s). But not wearing the blue shirt is not one of the options. The same kind of objection would apply to the view that a reason against wearing the blue shirt is just a ¹⁵ See Snedegar (2018) for more detailed versions of these arguments.

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254   reason for the disjunction of the alternatives, since the disjunction of the alternatives is not one of the options, either.¹⁶ A second initially plausible answer is that the fact that the blue shirt is boring is a reason for each of the alternatives. Just as a reason for an option is or indicates something positive (in some sense) about that option, a reason against an option is or indicates something negative about that option— something we’d like to avoid if possible. Wearing the red shirt would let me avoid what’s bad about wearing the blue shirt, namely its boringness. So, would wearing the green shirt. But this view is false. Suppose that the green shirt is even more boring than the blue shirt. Then the fact that the blue shirt is boring—though it is a reason against wearing the blue shirt—is not a reason for wearing the green shirt. So, reasons against an option are not simply reasons for each of the alternatives. Moreover, this case shows that even the weaker claim that each reason against an option is also a reason for each of the alternatives (though reasons against may not be reducible to reasons for alternatives) is also false.¹⁷ A third answer is that what it is to be a reason against an option is to be a reason for some alternative to that option. The fact that the blue shirt is boring is a reason against wearing the blue shirt. On this third view, this means that this fact is a reason for some alternative to wearing the blue shirt. The two alternatives are wearing the red shirt and wearing the green shirt. Plausibly a reason for wearing the red shirt—that it’s very comfortable—is a reason against wearing the blue shirt, if the blue shirt is not as comfortable. But the fact that the blue shirt is boring doesn’t seem to be a reason for any particular alternative to wearing the blue shirt. If we suppose that the green shirt is even more boring than the blue one, as discussed, then it is clearly not a reason for wearing the green one. Maybe it is a reason for wearing the red one, but the view in question seems to get the direction of explanation backwards: it isn’t that it’s a reason against wearing the blue shirt because it’s a reason for wearing the red one, or that its being a reason against wearing the blue one just amounts to its being a reason for wearing the red one. Rather, it’s a reason

¹⁶ Appealing to a kind of transmission principle, according to which a reason for not doing A, or for doing the disjunction of alternatives to A, bears on the choice at hand by being a reason for each way of not doing A, or of doing the disjunction, makes the view equivalent to the view I discuss in the next paragraph. ¹⁷ This brings out further objection to the view that reasons against A are reasons for the disjunction of alternatives to A. Some of the alternatives to A may be even worse than A in the relevant respect (i.e. the respect which explains the reason against). If so, then doing that alternative is not plausibly a way of complying with the reason against doing A, but the view that reasons against are just reasons for the disjunction of alternatives seems to imply that it is, since it is a way of doing that disjunction.

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for wearing the red one—if it is—because it’s a reason against wearing the blue one.¹⁸ So, none of these three natural versions of the idea that reasons against an option just are reasons for alternatives to that option seem promising. We could offer more complicated answers, for example, that reasons against an option are reasons for disjunctions of only some of the alternatives (e.g., leaving out the alternatives that are even worse along the relevant dimension). But answers like this will not be very systematic, and if reasons against an option are to be identified with or reduced to reasons for alternatives, we might have hoped for a more systematic account. I think we do better to allow for the existence of reasons against options that are not just reasons for any of the alternatives to that option. These reasons against will bear on choices involving the option. There can also be reasons against an option that are not reasons for alternatives that are even worse along the relevant dimension. Finally, we do not need to find any particular alternative that the reasons against one option are reasons for, in order for them to factor into the competition. It is also good to step back and think about why we were trying to do without a distinct category of reasons against in the first place. It is indeed hard to see how a reason could count against an option other than by counting in favor of alternatives to that option if we remain wedded to the balancing metaphor. But it’s well known that this metaphor is oversimplified. Once we move past that, there seems to be no special problem with reasons against: if we can understand the idea that a reason for an option counts in favor of it, there should be no special obstacle to understanding how a reason could count against an option. Nevertheless, as I said previously, this does mean that our theory of the competition between reasons will need to recognize at least two kinds of rebutting defeat or outweighing: that between reasons for conflicting options, and that between reasons for an option and reasons against that same option. In the next section, I consider whether a different account of the competition between reasons that incorporates a distinction between reasons for and reasons against might be more successful.

11.4. Criticism-Based Accounts I call the kind of view I consider in this section a criticism-based account. Both Greenspan (2005, 2007) and Gert (2003, 2004, 2007, 2016) defend views of this ¹⁸ Compare Greenspan (2005) here.

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256   sort. As I’ll explain briefly, the version I describe here is closer to Greenspan’s version, but I take the most important part of the view (for my purposes) to be common between Greenspan and Gert. According to criticism-based accounts, the conception of reasons and rationality lying behind the balancing account of stacking up reasons for various options and weighing them against each other is mistaken. Instead, as Greenspan says, reasons are “invoked primarily to offer or answer criticism of action,” and rationality is not about doing what your reasons most strongly support, but rather “avoiding being subject to significant criticism or having a response to it available.”¹⁹ Note that there are two importantly distinct functions of reasons here, and correspondingly two distinct ways of acting rationally. First, reasons might offer, or ground, criticism of an option. Second, reasons might answer such criticism. You can act rationally either by not acting in ways for which you could be criticized (or “significantly” criticized), or by having an adequate response to such criticism. This contrasts with the balanced account, which understands reasons to have a single underlying function, that of counting in favor of options. Since one part of the challenge for balance accounts was to explain two different ways in which reasons could compete, the criticismbased account seems to be an improvement. In particular, the criticism-based account includes a distinct role for reasons against—that of grounding (or perhaps just serving as) criticisms. The competition between reasons, on this view, works as follows. Reasons against an option tend to rule it out as a permissible option—thus, they tend to generate requirements not to act in that way. Reasons for an option, on the other hand, can help justify you in performing the option even in the face of the reasons against it. For example, that you risk being killed by running into the street is a reason against doing so; it would typically be sufficient to generate a requirement not to do this. But if there is a child stranded in the street, that is a reason for running into the street that can plausibly justify you in doing so, even in the face of the requiring reason not to.²⁰ That you risk being killed by running into the street is a criticism of doing so; that the child is stranded there answers this criticism, making running into the street rationally permissible. From a moral perspective, things are reversed: the fact that the child is stranded in the street counts against staying on the sidewalk and would make it impermissible. But you have a reason for staying on the sidewalk,

¹⁹ Greenspan (2005): 389.

²⁰ I take this example from Gert (2007): 538.

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namely that there are cars hurtling past, that can morally justify you in staying on the sidewalk. So far this seems compatible with the balance account, since we could just understand all of this in terms of the weights of the reasons involved.²¹ What is distinctive of this view, for the purposes of this paper, is the insistence that reasons against an option cannot be understood as reasons for alternatives to the option (including reasons for not performing the option). The central notion of criticism gives us a basis for a substantive distinction by understanding reasons against an option as grounding criticisms of the option, and reasons for as answering those criticisms. To criticize one option is not necessarily to answer a criticism of another option. That the blue shirt is boring does not necessarily answer any criticism of wearing the red shirt. In fact, it’s plausible that criticizing one option does not even necessarily provide any support for alternatives. At the very least, we can understand the arguments against identifying reasons against with reasons for as showing that it is far from straightforward to identify which alternative a criticism of a given option would support, in a way that both gives plausible results (by not falsely claiming that a criticism of A supports B when B is subject to the same kind of criticism, for example) and explains how reasons for and against can play the appropriate role in deliberation (by explaining how they actually bear on the options under consideration). In addition, answering a criticism of one option is not the same as criticizing an alternative option, so reasons for alternatives to A cannot just be reasons against A.²² For example, that I like the way the blue shirt fits may answer the criticism that it’s boring, but it does not necessarily amount to any criticism of the alternatives. This means that the opposite kind of reduction to that suggested on behalf of the balancing account—reducing reasons for alternatives to A to reasons against A, instead of reducing reasons against A to reasons for alternatives to A—won’t work, either. Thus, on this view, we have a sharp distinction between reasons for and reasons against. Gert (2004, 2007) focuses on a distinction between the requiring and justifying strengths of reasons. The mechanics of the competition between

²¹ In fact, one of both Greenspan’s and Gert’s main points is that we cannot properly handle these kinds of cases just by appealing to some single notion of weight. In particular, we can’t explain why you are permitted to run into the street but not required to do so. ²² Though of course sometimes it can, in a sense. Kurt Sylvan (p.c.) suggests that some criticisms of one option, A, might be so serious that they suffice to answer or at least justify ignoring criticisms of the alternative, B. But here it is more natural to say that the reason for B, or the answer to the criticisms B, are that you can avoid A, or maybe just that the (only) alternative is so terrible. If so then the reason for B is not identical with but rather derivative of the reason against A.

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258   reasons are similar to that previously sketched: justifying reasons (or reasons with justifying strength) are used to justify you in performing options that you would otherwise be required not to perform, due to the requiring reasons against them. Gert’s examples often involve reasons against options with requiring strength and reasons for those options with justifying strength. For example, he holds that in the case involving the child stranded in the street, the fact that the child is stranded in the street has significant justifying strength in favor of running into the street—enough to justify you in doing so even in the face of the strong requiring reason against doing so, but no requiring strength, since it cannot generate a rational requirement to run into the street (whether it can generate moral requirements is a different question). But in fact, the distinction between requiring and justifying and that between reasons for and against are cross-cutting. Nevertheless, on Gert’s view the primary competition between reasons is always between reasons for an option and reasons against that same option, where the two kinds of reasons are playing importantly different roles. It’s just that sometimes, for Gert, the reasons for play the requiring role while reasons against play the justifying role, and sometimes the reverse is true. Thus, in focusing on the competition between reasons for an option and reasons against it, Gert’s view is relevantly similar to the one sketched in this section, which is most directly based on Greenspan (2005, 2007). The criticism-based view, understood in terms of reasons for and reasons against, gives a plausible account of the competition between reasons for an option and reasons against it. When the reasons against an option win out, you are required not to perform that option. When the reasons for an option win out, you are permitted to perform it. Both Gert and Greenspan emphasize that this is the most we can say here: we cannot go on to say that you are required to perform the option, just because the reasons for the option win out over the reasons against it. This is because both reject a maximizing conception of rationality. All that rationality requires is not acting as you have overriding reason against acting or avoiding unanswered criticism. So, your reasons will generate a requirement for a particular action only by ruling out all of the alternatives: an option is required if and only if all of the alternatives are impermissible, while it is permissible.²³ Even granting this non-maximizing conception of rationality, this leaves out an important element for a normative theory, namely an account of what you ought to do. Though what you ought to do is not always properly ²³ This last clause is important if we accept the possibility of dilemmas, in which all of our options are impermissible, and none are required.

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distinguished from what you are required to do in moral philosophy, these are two importantly distinct overall normative statuses. What you are required to do is plausibly very closely tied to what you can be criticized for not doing. But what you ought to do is not necessarily tied to criticism in this way.²⁴ Think of the way we might describe the normative status of some supererogatory action: “You really ought to help out, though of course you don’t have to.” On some demanding moral theories, there may not be a substantive distinction between what you ought to do and what you are required to do, but I think it is clear that there is at least a conceptual distinction.²⁵ The criticism-based view has trouble accounting for what you ought to do, in this sense.²⁶ This is because ought is closely connected to what’s best, in the sense of being the most strongly supported by reasons.²⁷ ‘Best’ and ‘most’ are comparative terms: you ought to do something when it’s better or more strongly supported by reasons than the alternatives. The account of the competition between reasons sketched so far on behalf of the criticism-based view is focused on the competition between the reasons for an option and the reasons against it. We don’t yet have any way of comparing different alternatives in terms of how well supported they are by the reasons.²⁸ The balance account focuses on the competition between reasons for competing options but does not have a natural way to account for the competition between reasons for an option and reasons against it. The criticism-based account focuses on the latter kind of competition but does not have a natural way to account for the former. The latter’s trouble accounting for what we ought to do, as opposed to what we’re required to do, is a symptom of this problem. Suppose that reasons for one option are also reasons against alternatives, even if we don’t identify reasons against with reasons for alternatives. Then we have some sort of relationship between the reasons bearing on different alternatives. But even if this is true, such that reasons for alternatives to an ²⁴ Perhaps some sort of criticism is appropriate in some cases in which you don’t do what you ought to do, even if you aren’t required to do it; see, e.g., Driver (1992); Macnamara (2013). But the criticism will at least typically be weaker and not call for apologies, reparations, punishment, and so on. ²⁵ For a sampling of work on this issue, see McNamara (1996a, b); Bedke (2011); Snedegar (2016). ²⁶ Bedke (2011) also argues that Gert’s view fails to explain ought as opposed to requirement, though in a different way. See also Snedegar (2016). ²⁷ For early work on the connection between ‘ought’ and ‘best,’ see Sloman (1970); Finlay (2010, 2014) also emphasizes the connection between ‘ought’ and ‘best.’ ²⁸ Perhaps using ‘ought’ to describe the best action is sometimes too strong, or at least can sound wrong, for example when the best action is only best by some trivial amount. The objection to the criticism-based view is essentially just that it leaves us no way to make comparisons between the options in terms of how strongly supported those options are. Focusing on the overall status expressed by ‘ought’ is a natural way to bring this out. Thanks to Kurt Sylvan here.

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260   option are factored into the competition between reasons for that option and reasons against it, this still doesn’t yet solve the main issue raised previously. The problem is to explain how to compare competing alternatives in terms of how well they are supported by the reasons. Without this, we won’t be able to explain how your reasons determine what you ought to do, in addition to what you must and may do. The reasons bearing on alternatives get factored into the competition between reasons for and reasons against a given option; but the outcome of this competition determines what you must or may do. So, we still don’t have an answer to the question of how your reasons determine what you ought to do. In the next section, I sketch a positive account that draws on aspects of both the balance account and the criticism-based account, and argue that it gives us a more complete picture of how the competition between reasons determines the overall normative status of our options. But I’ll also show that open questions and problems remain.

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10.5. Toward a Positive Account To sum up and simplify a bit, criticism-based accounts recognize the importance of considering the reasons against an option in determining its overall normative status, but do not seem to accommodate the importance of comparing the option to its alternatives. Balancing accounts, on the other hand, focus on comparisons between alternatives, but do not have a natural way of accommodating the importance of reasons against options. If reasons against an option were simply reasons for alternatives, then each kind of account may avoid these problems. But as I’ve argued, reasons against cannot be reduced to or identified with reasons for alternatives. In this section, I sketch a view that explicitly recognizes the two different kinds of competition between reasons—the two different kinds of rebutting defeat—that I’ve focused on in this paper. The view does not require that the two kinds of competition are radically distinct, such that what it is for a reason for A to compete with a reason for B is very different, metaphysically speaking, from what it is for a reason for A to compete with a reason against A. In sketching the account, I understand both kinds of competition as involving the weights of the reasons involved. Rather, the difference is in the normative relevance, in terms of what you ought to, must, or may do, of the outcomes of the two different kinds of competition. It may be that for the outcomes of the competitions to play these roles, the two kinds of competition must differ in some deep way, but I leave that question aside.

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The view incorporates elements from both criticism-based accounts and balancing accounts. I’ll explain the role of each kind of competition in determining the overall normative status of the options. Along the way I will flag some important questions and choice points; settling these will require further work, which will sometimes involve doing substantive normative theory. The proposal here is not radically new. I suspect it is largely just a way of spelling out an orthodox way of thinking about the competition between reasons.²⁹ What is important is (i) the distinction between the two different kinds of competition between reasons, and correspondingly, (ii) the different roles these competitions have in determining overall normative status.³⁰ The discussion will be idealized in familiar ways by assuming that we can perform something like mathematical functions on and make mathematical comparisons of the weights of reasons and sets of reasons. I assume (i) that we can compare the weights of reasons and sets of reasons using something like the greater than (>), lesser than ( W(RAA)), then A is permissible. If W(RA) is negative (i.e., if W(RFA) < W(RAA)), then A is impermissible.³² This leaves cases in which the reasons for and reasons against an option are balanced. I am inclined to think that such options are permissible, to accommodate the thought that when there’s no reason at all either for or against A, A is permissible, but there are likely interesting questions here (compare: “There was no reason to do that!” as a criticism, vs. “There was no reason not to!” as a defense). So provisionally, we can say that when W(RFA)  W(RAA), A is permissible. This takes from the criticism-based approach the idea that the reasons against an option are particularly relevant in determining whether it is permissible. They tend to rule out performing the option, and unless there are sufficiently strong reasons in favor, the option will be impermissible. Thinking of the reasons against an option as criticisms of it makes this particularly clear: if there are criticisms of some option that cannot be answered or compensated for, then it is plausible that the option is impermissible. As stated so far, though, this account of permissibility faces a problem.³³ We can see this by looking at the case I used previously to criticize balance accounts. You can press either button 1 or button 2. Pressing either button will get you a particular $100 bill but pressing 2 will also deliver a mild electric shock. You would be willing to endure this shock to get $100, so it seems that the reason for pressing 2, that it will get you the $100 bill, is weightier than the reason against, that you will be shocked. So according to the account, pressing button 2 is permissible. But this is incorrect: pressing button 2 in this case would be foolish. I have tried to explain permissibility (and, shortly, requirement) just in terms of the reasons for and against the particular option, whereas what you ought to do will be explained in terms of comparisons among the alternatives. But the lesson of this case is that even for permissibility and requirement, the alternatives matter: it is only because of the availability of pressing button 1 that pressing button 2 is impermissible. The task for now is to say exactly how it is that the alternatives matter for permissibility and requirement.

³² Compare Sher (2019): 2.

³³ Thanks to Jonathan Way here.

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One way in which the alternatives can matter is by the reasons bearing on those alternatives transmitting to the option in question. Sometimes reasons for one alternative are also reasons against incompatible alternatives. This is one way to explain the notion of an opportunity cost: among the costs of an option are the good features of the alternatives that you’ll miss out on. This is consistent with denying that all reasons against options are nothing over and above reasons for alternatives. But in this case, given that you will get the $100 either way, the reason for pressing button 1—that it will get you $100—is not a reason against pressing button 2. Rather, I think that in cases like this, the alternatives matter by helping to determine which considerations are or are not reasons for the option in question. In particular, since you will get the $100 either way, the fact that you’ll get the $100 by pressing button 2 is not a reason for pressing button 2. Hence, there is only a reason against pressing button 2 (the shock), and so it is impermissible. The surprising consequence of this view is that the $100 also does not give you reason to press button 1. So, if the money and the shock are the only relevant considerations, there won’t be any reason to press button 1. Nevertheless, pressing button 1 will be permissible, since there’s at least as much reason for it as against it (namely, no reason either way). In fact it will be required, since the only alternative is impermissible.³⁴ Though it may seem initially surprising to deny that the fact that you can get $100 by pressing button 1 (or button 2, for that matter) is a reason for pressing button 1, I think this is plausible. The crucial point is that you’ll get the $100 no matter what you do (assuming pressing 1 and pressing 2 are the only options). So, you cannot, for example, justify yourself in pressing button 1 (instead of button 2) by pointing out that you’ll get $100. Also, it would be odd to base your decision to press button 1 (instead of button 2) on the fact that you will get $100 by pressing button 1. Being able to serve as justifiers or at least sensible bases for decision are commonly thought to be earmarks, if not conceptual requirements, for some consideration’s being a reason.³⁵ So it should not seem so ³⁴ In fact, things will be a bit trickier since it seems that we can make true reasons ascriptions like, “That you will get shocked by pressing button 2 is a reason to press button 1, instead.” I think that this is true, but that the reason ascribed is a derivative reason—derivative on the reason against pressing 2. A full theory here will need to explain when we get these derivative reasons and how their weights do or do not contribute to the overall status of the options in question. It would seem to be a mistake, for example, to treat this derivative reason for pressing button 1 as having weight that is independent of and in addition to the weight of the reason against pressing button 2 on which it is derivative. Compare Maguire and Snedegar (forthcoming). ³⁵ See, e.g., Schroeder (2007): Ch. 2; Setiya (2014); Gregory (2016); Silverstein (2016); Way (2017); Snedegar (2019).

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264   surprising that in this case, that you can get $100 by pressing button 1 will not be a reason to press button 1, since you’ll get the $100 no matter what you do. If this kind of solution is on the right track, and can be generalized, then we have the start of an account that tells us when an option is permissible in terms of the reasons for and against it. We also get an account of when an option is required: an option is required when all of the other options are impermissible—that is, when the reasons against each of the other options outweigh the reasons for them. If more than one option is permissible, then no single option is required.³⁶ There are clear similarities between this understanding of permissibility and requirement and the one we get from the criticism-based account. But, as I argued in the previous section, this leaves out an important part of the normative domain—namely, what we ought to do, as opposed to what we’re required to do. To quickly review the main points from the previous section: we ought to do is very plausibly what’s best, in some sense.³⁷ But, to say that some option is the best is to say that it’s better than the alternatives. So, to account for what we ought to do, we need to introduce a comparison among the alternatives. The overall weight of the reasons bearing on an option, A, which I called W (RA), is determined by the difference between the weight of the set of reasons for A and the set of reasons against A. So, we can compare these weights of overall reason for each of the options. What we ought to do is the option that ranks at the top of this comparison: you ought to do A when W(RA) > W(RB), for all the alternatives, B. Whereas the competition between reasons for an option and reasons against that option are most directly relevant for determining which options are permissible and required, the competition between the reasons bearing on competing alternatives is most directly relevant for determining what you ought to do.³⁸ This picture has some attractive features. First, it explains important overall or verdictive normative statuses—permissibility, impermissibility, requirement, ³⁶ An open question at this point is whether it is possible for the reasons against to win out for every option, making every option impermissible. Many people think that such tragic dilemmas are impossible. We could, for example, argue that the fact that an option is the “least bad” is always a decisive reason to do it. ³⁷ Cf. Sloman (1970); Finlay (2010); von Fintel and Iatridou (2008). ³⁸ As noted in the Introduction, I am focusing on the moral case. In the epistemic domain, it is much less clear that there is a substantial difference between ought and requirement. One possible explanation for this, which I cannot explore at any length here, is that in the epistemic domain, unlike in the moral domain, reasons for believing p, or evidence for p, are always reasons against believing, or evidence against, propositions that are incompatible with p. If so, then it would plausibly turn out that any time the reasons for believing p outweighed the reasons against believing p, the reasons against believing any incompatible alternative q would outweigh the reasons for believing q.

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and ought—in terms of pro tanto reasons. This is a popular and attractive idea, but it has proved challenging to provide satisfactory accounts of all of these notions in terms of reasons.³⁹ Second, the picture captures the correct logical relationships between permissibility, requirement, and ought. To focus on the relationship between requirement and ought: if some option A is required, then it is also what you ought to do. Since A is required, the reasons against each alternative B outweigh the reasons for B; thus W(RB) will be negative for all the alternatives, B. Moreover, since A is required, it is the only permissible option, in which case it is the only option for which W(RA) is positive. So, W(RA) > W(RB) for each alternative B, and thus A is what you ought to do. But A might be what you ought to do without being required, since it is compatible with W(RA) > W (RB) that W(RB) is nevertheless positive—that is, B is permissible. This is just what we want, because it has been widely noted in both linguistics and philosophy (the former focusing on the modals that express these normative statuses and the latter focusing on the statuses themselves) that there is a one-way entailment from requirement to ought.⁴⁰ This captures the commonsense idea that there are things that you really ought to do, though you are not required to do so, and are not acting impermissibly if you don’t—think of paradigm cases of supererogation, for example. This is just a sketch, and open questions remain, but I do think it gives us the beginnings of an attractive account. As I have already noted, I don’t take this view to be any radical departure from an orthodox way of thinking about how reasons compete. Rather, what is important about it is the incorporation of the two different kinds of competition between reasons. Both the standard balance account and the criticism-based account are incomplete because they focus on just one kind of competition.

References Bader, R. (2016). Conditions, modifiers, and holism. In: Lord, E. and Maguire, B. (eds.) Weighing Reasons. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 27–55. Bedke, M. (2011). Passing the deontic buck. In: Shafer-Landau, R. (ed.) Oxford Studies in Metaethics. Vol. 6. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 128–52. Berker, S. (2007). Particular reasons. Ethics, 118(1): 109–39.

³⁹ See Snedegar (2016) for arguments against some recent attempts, including Bedke (2011). ⁴⁰ See, for example, Wertheimer (1972); McNamara (1996b); von Fintel and Iatridou (2008); Portner (2009); Snedegar (2012, 2016).

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266   Broome, J. (2004). Reasons. In: Wallace, Scheffler, and Smith (eds.) Reason and Value: Themes from the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 28–55. Dancy, J. (2004). Ethics Without Principles. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Driver, J. (1992). The suberogatory. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 70(3): 286–95. Finlay, S. (2010). What ‘ought’ probably means, and why you can’t detach it. Synthese, 177: 67–89. Finlay, S. (2014). Confusion of Tongues. Oxford: Oxford University Press. von Fintel, K. and Iatridou, S. (2008). How to say ‘ought’ in foreign: The composition of weak necessity modals. In: Guéron and Lecarme, (eds.) Time and Modality. Dordrecht: Springer: 115–41. Gert, J. (2003). Requiring and justifying: Two dimensions of normative strength. Erkenntis, 59: 5–36. Gert, J. (2004). Brute Rationality: Normativity and Human Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gert, J. (2007). Normative strength and the balance of reasons. Philosophical Review, 116(4).

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Gert, J. (2016). The distinction between requiring and justifying: nothing to fear. In: Lord, E. and Maguire, B. (eds.) Weighing Reasons. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 157–72. Greenspan, P. (2005). Asymmetrical practical reasons. In: Reicher, M. and Marek, J. (eds.) Experience and Analysis: Proceedings of the 27th International Wittgenstein Symposium. Vienna: Oebv & Hpt: 387–94. Greenspan, P. (2007). Practical reasons and moral ought. In: Shafer-Landau, R. (ed.) Oxford Studies in Metaethics. Vol. 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 172–94. Gregory, A. (2016). Normative reasons as good bases. Philosophical Studies 173 (9): 2291–310. Horty, J. and Nair, S. (2018). The logic of reasons. In: Star, D. (ed.) Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 67–84. Horty, J. F. (2012). Reasons as Defaults. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lord, E. (2018). The Importance of Being Rational. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lord, E. and Maguire, B. (2016). An opinionated guide to the weight of reasons. In: Lord, E. and Maguire, B. (eds.) Weighing Reasons. 3–24. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Macnamara, C. (2013). Taking demands out of blame. In: Coates, D. J. and Tognazzini, N. (eds.) Blame: Its Nature and Norms. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 141–61. Maguire, B. (2016). The value-based theory of reasons. Ergo, 3(9): 233–62. Maguire, B. and Snedegar, J. (Forthcoming). Normative metaphysics for accountants. Philosophical Studies. McNamara, P. (1996a). Making room for going beyond the call. Mind, 105(419): 415–50. McNamara, P. (1996b). Must I do what I ought (or will the least I can do do)? In: Brown, M. A. and Carmo, J. (eds.) Deontic Logic, Agency and Normative Systems. Berlin: Springer-Verlag: 154–73. Metz, E. (2020). How to be a deonic buck passer. Philosophical Studies, 177(11): 3193–211. Nagel, T. (1970). The Possibility of Altruism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nair, S. (2016). How do reasons accrue? In: Lord, E. and Maguire, B. (eds.) Weighing Reasons. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 56–73. Parfit, D. (2011). On What Matters. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pendlebury, M. Manuscript. Reasons, ought, must, and may. Unpublished manuscript, North Carolina State University.

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Pollock, J. (1974). Knowledge and Justification. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Portner, P. (2009). Modality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Raz, J. (1999). Practical Reason and Norms. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ross, W. D. (1930). The Right and the Good. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schroeder, M. (2007). Slaves of the Passions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schroeder, M. (2015). What makes reasons sufficient? American Philosophical Quarterly, 52(2): 159–70. Setiya, K. (2014). What makes reasons sufficient? Philosophical Studies, 167: 221–35. Sher, I. (2019). Comparative value and the weight of reasons. Economics and Philosophy, 35(1): 103–58. Silverstein, M. (2016). Reducing reasons. Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 10(1): 1–22. Sloman, A. (1970). “Ought” and “better.” Mind, 79(315): 385–94. Snedegar, J. (2012). Contrastive semantics for deontic modals. In: Blaauw, M. (ed.) Contrastivism in Philosophy. New York: Routledge: 166–33.

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268   Snedegar, J. (2016). Reasons, oughts, and requirements. In: Shafer-Landau, R. (ed.) Oxford Studies in Metaethics. Vol. 11. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 155–81. Snedegar, J. (2017). Contrastive Reasons. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Snedegar, J. (2018). Reasons for and reasons against. Philosophical Studies, 175: 725–43. Snedegar, J. (2019). Deliberation, reasons, and alternatives. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 100(3): 682–702. Way, J. (2017). Reasons as premises of good reasoning. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 98(2): 251–70. Wertheimer, R. (1972). The Significance of Sense: Meaning, Modality, and Morality. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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Whiting, D. (2017). Against second-order reasons. Noûs, 51(2): 398–420.

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12 Perceptual Reasons and Defeat Mark Schroeder

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12.1. Background: Reasons and Evidence I am going to assume in this paper that perceptual experience is a way of acquiring evidence about the world. I will assume without argument that it is more reasonable to believe things that are supported by evidence than to believe without any evidence, or at least that if that is not true, then that is one of those surprising discoveries that philosophy is often claimed to allow us to make. I am also going to move back and forth freely between claims about reasons and claims about evidence. That is because I believe, and argue elsewhere,¹ that the correct explanation for why it is more reasonable to believe things that are supported by evidence is that evidence is reason to believe, and the only kinds of reasons to believe are evidence. The claim that evidence is reason to believe is supported by the fact that the same things that are appropriately cited as evidence are also appropriately cited as reasons to believe, and conversely. ‘Reason’ and ‘evidence’ talk also exhibit parallel distinctions between objective talk about reasons or evidence that are out there, to be discovered, and subjective talk about the reasons or evidence that someone has, or from her perspective. It is also possible to do or to believe things for reasons, and similarly, it is possible to believe things on the basis of evidence. These facts, which could be enumerated at much greater length, all constitute strong evidence that reasons and evidence are closely related. From an ontological perspective, many kinds of thing can be cited appropriately as reasons. For example, the height of the Empire State Building is a reason not to jump off, Robin Jeshion is a reason to study philosophy of language at the University of Southern California (USC), and the bruise on Alyssa’s leg is reason to believe that she has gotten hurt. Heights, people, and bruises all belong, I take it, to different categories. But it is also true that one reason not to jump off of the Empire State Building—and not, intuitively, a ¹ Schroeder (2021).

Mark Schroeder, Perceptual Reasons and Defeat In: Reasons, Justification, and Defeat. Edited by: Jessica Brown and Mona

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different reason—is that it is so high. Similarly, one reason to study philosophy of language at USC is that Robin Jeshion teaches there. And one reason to believe that Alyssa has gotten hurt is that she has a bruise on her leg. So, although it makes perfect sense to cite many kinds of thing as reasons, in each case there are adequate paraphrases of what has been reported which attribute the reason in question using a ‘that’ clause. This may support the conclusion (I think it does) that strictly speaking, reasons should be identified with what is expressed by ‘that’ clauses—which I take to be propositions. But whether or not it supports this strong conclusion about the ontology of reasons, at least it supports the conclusion that it is a condition of adequacy for any view about what the reason is for someone to do something that it withstand paraphrase in terms of a ‘that’ clause. Finally, the same points go for evidence as for reasons. The height of the Empire State Building is evidence that it took a long time to build, Robin Jeshion is evidence that philosophers of language can shed light on rich and subtle social issues, and Alyssa’s bruise is evidence that she has gotten hurt. Again, the evidence that it took a long time to build the Empire State Building is that it is so high. Similarly, the evidence that philosophers of language can shed light on rich and subtle social issues is that Robin Jeshion has done so in her work on slurs and derogation. This again illustrates the close parallels between talk about evidence and talk about reasons, and I’ll rely on this point in what follows.

12.2. Perceptual Knowledge and Defeat In this paper I am concerned with the defeasibility of perceptual evidence. But we should be more careful in describing the phenomena in which we will be interested, of which there are two. Both phenomena involve cases in which it appears that someone would know but for some fact. But the kinds of fact but for which she would know are different in each case. Objective Defeat: Roberta has a visual experience as of something red in front of her. But she is wearing rose-colored glasses. Subjective Defeat: Roberta has a visual experience as of something red in front of her. But she rationally believes that she is wearing rose-colored glasses.

In Objective Defeat, Roberta cannot know that there is something red in front of her unless she has some independent source of evidence that that is so. Even

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if she does not realize that she is wearing rose-colored glasses, since they make everything look red, they are incompatible with Roberta having the discriminatory capacity to know that there really is something red in front of her, even if there is. In Subjective Defeat, it seems on the face of it that Roberta cannot reasonably believe that there is something red in front of her, since she rationally believes herself to be in Objective Defeat, and in that case she cannot know. But it seems that knowledge requires reasonable belief, so if it is not reasonable for her to believe it, then it seems that she cannot know it, either— again, unless she has some independent source of evidence, a qualification which I will henceforth ignore. There are many pairs of cases that stand to one another as Objective Defeat and Subjective Defeat stand to one another, in the first of which some worldly fact is what stands in the way of a subject knowing, and in the second of which the subject’s rational belief in that same worldly fact is what stands in the way of her knowing. Least interestingly, there is the pair in which there is in fact nothing red in front of Roberta, and in which she rationally believes that there is nothing red in front of her—exhibiting the plausibility of the truth and rational belief conditions on knowledge. Some pairs consist in the availability of compelling counterevidence and Roberta’s rational belief in the compelling counterevidence. According to pragmatic encroachers, there are also pairs in which Roberta faces high stakes and in which she rationally believes herself to face high stakes. And many pairs are like the one that I have exhibited—cases in which the force of Roberta’s evidence appear to be undercut by some further fact. Though all of these pairs are possible, the views with which I will be concerned in this paper are all accounts of the paradigmatic kind of defeasibility typically referred to as undercutting defeat—cases in which the strength or force of one’s evidence has been called into question. I want to be a little bit careful about how I describe the data about these two cases, since some of the views that I go on to discuss will disagree about how to describe them. My own view is that both cases can and should be taken at face value—that there are two dimensions along which knowledge can be defeated, both by the facts, independently of what the subject believes about them, and by the subject’s other beliefs. I will call these two dimensions objective defeat and subjective defeat, respectively. I also believe that these two dimensions are independent—cases of objective defeat without subjective defeat are (typically²) recipes for Gettier cases, and cases of subjective defeat without objective defeat undermine the justification or, as I have been putting it in this paper, the ² Failures of the truth condition are not, of course, recipes for Gettier cases.

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272   reasonability condition on knowledge. But as we will see later, some theorists are going to struggle to accommodate subjective defeat. They may still accept that there is an appearance of defeat of knowledge in cases of subjective defeat, but explain this appearance in some other way, because something else nearby, but somewhat different, is true.

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12.2.1 The Classical Theory—What According to what I will call the classical theory of the defeasibility of perceptual evidence, it can be properly subsumed to the non-monotonicity of inference. Non-monotonic inferences are cases where R is a reasonable conclusion to draw from P, but not a reasonable conclusion to draw from P&Q. For example, if you know that Tweety is a bird, it is reasonable to draw the conclusion that Tweety probably flies, but if you also know that Tweety is a penguin, then this is not a reasonable conclusion to draw. Non-monotonicity in inference is possible whenever inferences are reasonable without being entailed. So according to the classical theory, the evidence about the external world that you get when you have a visual experience as of something red in front of you does not entail anything about the external world. It is, for example, that it appears to you that there is something red in front of you, or that you have a visual experience as of something red in front of you, that you are appeared to redly, that there is a red sense-datum, or the like. There are many ways of developing the classical theory by filling in a more detailed account of the nature of perceptual evidence, according to the classical theory, but for purposes of this paper, they share a package of virtues and vices. The classical theory is, in the first instance, a theory about subjective defeat. This is because non-monotonicity is a property of reasonable inference, and only subjective defeat concerns reasonable inference, at least directly. The key idea of the classical theory is that it is reasonable to infer that there is something red in front of you from the evidence that it appears that there is something red in front of you, but not from the evidence that you are wearing rose-colored glasses and it appears that there is something red in front of you. But the classical theory can also be extended to offer a treatment of objective defeat. This was essentially the project of defeasibility analyses of knowledge, such as those offered by Klein (1970); Lehrer and Paxson (1969); Annis (1973); Ackerman (1974); Olin (1976); Levy (1977). What all of these theorists noted was that there seems to be a general pattern whereby knowledge has to be not

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only reasonable belief, but belief whose reasonability “stands up” to the facts, in some way.³ The project explored in their papers was how to say more precisely and in a way free from counterexamples exactly how knowledge must be belief whose reasonability “stands up” to the facts, but all of their accounts agree that this is what goes wrong in cases of objective defeat like Roberta’s that are not also cases of subjective defeat. In such cases, Roberta may reasonably believe that there is something red in front of her, and this belief may be reasonable because she does not realize that she wearing rose-colored glasses, but it is only reasonable because she is not aware of this. If you add this proposition to her stock of beliefs, it would no longer be reasonable for her to believe that there is something red in front of her, and that is why, on this view, its truth defeats her knowledge. The strength of the classical theory is the elegance with respect to which it subsumes the defeasibility of basic perceptual evidence under the defeasibility of evidence elsewhere, by incorporating it into a general account of nonmonotonic inference. Indeed, the literature on nonmonotonic inference in general is replete with examples that take for granted that the classical theory is correct about the defeasibility of perceptual evidence. Its home case is the case of subjective defeat, and although defeasibility theorists in the 1970s famously discovered that it was hard to pin down exactly what the “standing up to the facts” condition on reasonable belief is that is required for knowledge, so it is intelligible to worry that they will not actually be able to adequately capture all and only the correct cases of objective defeat, classical theorists at least have a well-understood strategy for trying to pin these cases down.

12.2.2 Consequences of the Classical Theory However, the weakness of the classical theory has been regarded by many to be the key assumption about the nature of perceptual evidence that is required in order for it to subsume perceptual defeasibility to the monotonicity of inference more generally. And this is the assumption that perceptual evidence does not entail anything about the external world. This assumption, in essence, set all of the central problems of epistemology in the twentieth century, and shaped the space of possible options. It is the assumption that perceptual evidence does not entail anything about the external world from which it follows that there are skeptical scenarios that ³ Compare Schroeder (2015).

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274   are completely consistent with the totality of all perceptual evidence. If perceptual evidence could entail things about the external world, then no such skeptical scenarios would be possible, after all. There would still be scenarios in which we are all brains in vats, or deceived by an evil demon, of course, but these scenarios would be inconsistent with the totality of our perceptual evidence, and so the skeptic’s claim that these are compatible with all of our evidence would be false. So, in a very real sense, classical theory’s assumption is responsible for a very important aspect of the allure or threat of skepticism about the external world. The same gap that is occupied by skeptical scenarios is one that nonskeptics, of course, would like to close. And most of the rest of twentiethcentury epistemology can be conceived of as responses to how to close this gap. If a bridge premise is needed to close the gap, for example, then it seems that that bridge premise must be either empirical or a priori. If it is empirical, then it must in turn be justified by perceptual evidence, but since by parity of reasoning, that would again require a bridge premise, this path leads toward coherentism. And this is, in fact, the most pressing motive toward adopting coherentism. In contrast, if the bridge premise is a priori, then it turns out that a priori justification is a pre-requisite to empirical knowledge, which amounts to a very strong kind of rationalism. The way to resist both coherentism and rationalism without retreating into skepticism, therefore, and without giving up on the classical theory, is to hold that no bridge premise is required, in order to make the inference from perceptual evidence to beliefs about the external world, even though these conclusions are not entailed. This is what dogmatists claim. But in order to avoid skepticism, dogmatists must claim that inferences from perceptual evidence to conclusions about the external world are more reasonable than inferences to conclusions about the intentions of the evil demon, or about the locations of ones and zeros on the hard-drive of the matrix. Since nothing in the content of the perceptual evidence breaks this symmetry, something else must be appealed to in order to explain the break in symmetry, and this is where epistemological externalism originally came in, in the late 1960s and early 1970s—it looked like every non-skeptical, non-coherentist, non-rationalist view had to give some causal, subjunctive, reliabilist, or otherwise fundamentally externalist answer to what justifies moving from basic perceptual evidence to external world beliefs over alternative conclusions. This was, as Armstrong (1973) argued for these reasons, inevitable. And so, externalists argued, everyone needed to accept the adequacy of such externalist explanations, which obviated the need to explain knowledge or the reasonability of belief in terms of evidence at all.

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I don’t mean to claim here that any of these views—skepticism, coherentism, rationalism, or pure externalism—are false, let alone that they are so obviously problematic that we need to reject the classical theory of the defeasibility of perceptual evidence in order to avoid them. But the fact that this familiar dialectic and set of choices are a consequence of the classical theory is the most important thing to understand about the classical theory, in order to come to grips with whether it is a package that is worth accepting. So, let’s turn to what some of its alternatives might look like.

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12.3. Doubly World-Implicating Views Since the classical view both requires and is enabled by the assumption that perceptual evidence does not entail anything about the external world, its alternatives adopt the assumption that perceptual evidence does entail things about the external world. They assume, as I will put it, that perceptual evidence is world-implicating. But world-implicating views disagree amongst themselves, as we will see, about exactly what sort of content perceptual evidence is, and also about what sort of condition a subject must satisfy, in order to possess this sort of evidence. Recall that classical theorists believe that perceptual evidence does not entail anything about the external world. But classical theorists also believe that being in possession of some particular piece of perceptual evidence does not entail anything about the external world. If your perceptual evidence that there is something red in front of you is that it appears to you that there is something red in front of you, then you count as having this perceptual evidence in virtue of it’s being true that it appears to you that there is something red in front of you. Or perhaps you count as having this evidence in virtue of believing that it appears to you that there is something red in front of you. Either way, not only does the content of your evidence not entail anything about the external world, the condition of your having that evidence does not entail anything about the external world, either. The first class of world-implicating views that I want to consider disagrees with the classical theory on both of these fronts. These views claim not only that the content of your perceptual evidence is world-implicating, but that the relationship that you must stand in to that evidence in order for it to be evidence that can make beliefs reasonable for you is world-implicating as well. Let us call these views doubly world-implicating. One example of a doubly world-implicating view of perceptual evidence comes from Williamson (2000). Williamson holds that your evidence is what

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276   you know (E = K), that knowledge is the most general factive stative attitude, and that seeing that there is something red in front of you is a factive stative attitude. So it follows that Williamson holds that when you see that there is something red in front of you, that makes available to you as part of your evidence the fact that there is something red in front of you. The content of your evidence is a proposition about the world outside of your head, so this view is world-implicating along the content dimension. But the condition of this being your evidence is also world-implicating—it is that you see that this is the case. And seeing that something the case is a factive relationship to the world—a relationship that only holds if there really is something red in front of you. Let us call this view the factive content view. Another example of a doubly world-implicating view comes from an interpretation of some of John McDowell’s views offered by Comesaña and McGrath (2015). According to this view, which I’ll call the factive attitude view, in normal cases your evidence that there is something red in front of you is that you see that there is something red. And you come to have this reason because it is true—you really do see that there is something red in front of you. The factive attitude view shares with the factive content view a theory about the conditions under which you have perceptual evidence about the world but disagrees about what that evidence is. But like the factive content view, it holds that both the content of your evidence and the condition of your having that evidence entail something about the external world. Both entail something about the external world because seeing that is a factive relation, and so you cannot see that there is something red in front of you unless there really is something red in front of you. So, it is doubly world-implicating. Doubly world-implicating views avoid the consequences of the classical theory explored in Section 12.2.2. But they do so by undermining the classical theory’s elegant subsumption of the defeasibility of basic perceptual evidence to the nonmonotonicity of inference more generally. The inference from ‘there is something red in front of me’ to ‘there is something red in front of me’ is not nonmonotonic, and neither is the inference from ‘I see that there is something red in front of me’ to ‘there is something red in front of me.’ This nonmonotonicity is precisely what avoids the gap between perceptual evidence and conclusions about the external world that the skeptic exploits and that the coherentist, rationalist, and externalist all try to close, so there is no avoiding the conclusion that avoiding the consequences of the classical theory also means giving up on its elegant treatment of the defeasibility of perceptual evidence. But doubly world-implicating views—at least, both of the ones that I’ve described here—come with an alternative treatment of perceptual defeasibility.

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And that is because someone who is wearing rose-colored glasses cannot see that something is red. Seeing that something is red does not only entail that it really is red—it is also incompatible with having insufficient perceptual discriminability to discriminate red from other colors. Since rose-colored glasses interfere with perceptual discriminability, wearing them is incompatible with seeing that something is red. So, if you are wearing rose-colored glasses, you do not know that something is red, just by having a visual experience as of it being red.⁴

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12.3.1 Consequences of Doubly World-Implicating Views Recall that the classical theory is most at home in its treatment of subjective defeat. That is because what it explains, in the first instance, is why certain inferences are unreasonable, in the presence of further background beliefs. In contrast, we can now see that doubly world-implicating views are most at home in their treatment of objective defeat. That is because these views impose an objective condition on the subject’s relationship to the world, in order for her to have a reason at all—that she sees that something is the case. And seeing that something is red is undermined by wearing rose-colored glasses. But subjective defeat involves background beliefs that might (at least, when subjective defeat does not overlap with objective defeat) be false. Having a background belief that you are wearing rose-colored glasses does not prevent your vision from actually working properly. So, it does not prevent you from seeing that there is something red in front of you. So, whereas the doubly world-implicating views get an immediate explanation of why cases of objective defeat are cases in which the subject lacks reasons for her belief (and hence don’t know), they have no such obvious explanation for why cases of subjective defeat are cases in which agents lack reasons for their beliefs. ⁴ It is worth considering how this strategy might be extended to fake barn cases, which bear many similarities to paradigmatic cases of undercutting defeat but are slightly more contentious. Fake barn cases are more contentious because some hold that visual knowledge of a barn is possible even in fake barn country. But the strategy of doubly world-implicating views can be extended to fake barn cases so long as either fake barn country undermines both knowing that and seeing that, or it undermines neither. Fake barn country cases could be an obstacle to this strategy if fake barn country undermines knowing that without undermining seeing that—a possibility that is opened if we reject, as I do (Schroeder (Manuscript, ch. 4)), the claim that seeing that entails knowing that. But even if we deny that seeing that entails knowing that I still believe that we should either accept fake barn country cases as undermining both, or as undermining neither. The reasons that seeing that does not entail knowing that are that seeing that something is the case does not entail either belief or reasonable belief that it is the case, but knowledge does, and this cross-cuts considerations about fake barn cases. Compare Prichard (2012).

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278   However, defenders of doubly world-implicating views can say something derivative about cases of subjective defeat. They can say, for example, that although in cases of subjective defeat, the subject really does know, perhaps it is reasonable for her to believe that she does not know, or that she probably does not know. Or they can say, either in addition or as an alternative, that it is blameworthy for the subject to believe. Alternatively, they can defend the principle that knowledge is incompatible with reasonably believing yourself not to know. On this alternative view, since cases of objective defeat are incompatible with knowledge, and cases of subjective defeat involve reasonably believing yourself to be in a case of objective defeat, cases of subjective defeat will be derivatively incompatible with knowledge. Like the method by which classical theorists attempt to transfer their account of subjective defeat over to objective defeat, it is intelligible to doubt whether any of these accounts will quite work out, but it is very clear that there are a range of overlapping strategies available here. More worrisome is the way in which doubly world-relative accounts explain the defeat of knowledge in the objective case. They explain it by showing that the subject has no reason at all to believe, in those cases. But reasons seem to be more directly connected to reasonability than to knowledge. So doubly worldrelative accounts seem to predict not only that someone whose perceptual belief suffers from objective defeat does not know, but that in the absence of other evidence, her belief is not reasonable, either. They distinguish, that is, between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ cases of perceptual belief not only with respect to whether the subject knows, but also with respect to whether, and why, the subject’s belief is reasonable. Now, it is open to doubly world-relative accounts to give an alternative account of the evidence that is available to a subject who suffers from objective defeat, in order to explain why her belief is reasonable after all, even though she lacks the evidence that is possessed by someone in the good case. A theorist who goes this way is an epistemological disjunctivist—that is, she tells different stories about the reasonability of perceptual beliefs in the good and bad cases. Another way of being an epistemological disjunctivist is to deny that perceptual beliefs are reasonable in the bad case of objective defeat at all and explain why they seem reasonable by pointing out that the subject does not know that they are not reasonable. So doubly world-relative views of the defeasibility of perceptual evidence have twin vices—they have to explain why knowledge seems to be defeated in subjective defeat cases, and they have to explain why reasonability seems not to be defeated in objective defeat cases, and if they do try to explain why beliefs

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can be reasonable in objective defeat cases, they must do so without undermining their own explanation for why the subject doesn’t know, in such cases. These are clearly different costs and advantages from the classical theory.

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12.4. Singly World-Implicating Views The classical theory and doubly world-implicating views disagree about two things. They disagree about whether the content of perceptual evidence can be world-implicating, and they disagree about whether the condition that a subject must satisfy, in order to have perceptual evidence, can be worldimplicating. But the features of their view that doubly world-implicating views cite as their advantage over the classical theory derive from their view about the content of perceptual evidence, and the features that cast their treatment of defeasibility into doubt derive from their view about the condition requires to possess that evidence. The idea behind singly world-implicating views is to split this difference by adopting the view that the contents of perceptual evidence are world-implicating but denying that the condition required in order to possess this evidence is world-implicating. Let’s take these points one at a time. To see that the advantages of the doubly world-implicating views turn on what they say about the content of perceptual evidence, it suffices to recall that the problem with the classical view was that it required the assumption that skeptical hypotheses can be compatible with the totality of your perceptual evidence. It is necessary and sufficient to face this problem that the content of perceptual evidence—the proposition such that your perceptual evidence can be accurately reported as being that p—entails something about the external world. In contrast, the problems for the doubly world-implicating views turn on what they say about the condition of having perceptual evidence. Since they say that this condition entails something about the external world, it follows that this condition cannot be shared across good and bad cases, and hence that the story about why belief is reasonable must be different across the good and bad cases, since the same evidence is not available to justify it. In contrast, if the condition under which a thinker counts as having a certain piece of evidence entails nothing about the external world, then it will cross-cut the good case/bad case distinction, and so we will be able to tell a non-disjunctive story about why thinkers are reasonable to believe in the way that they do. So that is what motivates singly world-implicating views. But there is one major reason why philosophers have not explored singly world-relative views. And that

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280   is that it is common to assume that evidence must be true. If evidence must be true, then singly world-implicating views are impossible. For, if evidence entails something about the external world, and having that evidence entails that it is true, then the condition of having the evidence must entail something about the external world as well. So, proponents of singly world-implicating views must reject the view that evidence (or for that matter, reasons) must be true. This can sound bizarre, but it is not such an unnatural view. We may distinguish between objective and subjective reasons, and correspondingly between objective and subjective evidence. Objective reasons count in favor of what it is advisable to believe, but subjective reasons count only in favor of what it is reasonable to believe. Objective reasons must be true, because what it is advisable to believe (or do) depends on what is true, but subjective reasons need only be believed (perhaps rationally), because what it is reasonable to believe (or do) depends only on what you (rationally) believe.

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12.4.2 Comparing Singly World-Implicating Views We can distinguish between two obvious varieties of singly world-implicating views of the defeasibility of perceptual evidence—one analogue of each of the doubly world-relative views considered in Section 12.3. Recall that according to the factive content view, your perceptual evidence when you see that there is something red in front of you is that there is something red in front of you, and the condition under which this is your evidence is that you see that there is something red in front of you. If we relax the condition that the perceptual condition for having this evidence must be a factive perceptual relation, we are led to the non-factive content view, according to which your perceptual evidence is the same—namely, that there is something red in front of you— but the condition under which this counts as your evidence is that you have a visual experience as of something red in front of you. Similarly, recall that according to the factive attitude view, your perceptual evidence when you see that there is something red in front of you is that you see that there is something red in front of you, and the condition under which this is your evidence is that it is true. Again, we can relax the world-implicating condition of truth that this view requires in order for this to be part of your evidence, and replace it with some other, more subjective condition, such as that it seems true to you. Let us call this the non-factive attitude view. Of all of the views that have been discussed here, the non-factive content view offers by far the least promising account of the defeasibility of perceptual

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evidence. Let us take the case of objective defeat first. In this case, you have a visual experience as of something red in front of you, but unbeknownst to you, you are wearing rose-colored glasses. According to the non-factive content view, you have available as evidence the proposition that there is something red in front of you. But this evidence is both available to you, and true. So, it is hard to see why it can’t ground knowledge that there is something red in front of you, especially because you have no contrary evidence. But it shouldn’t be possible to know, on the basis of visual evidence, that there is something red in front of you, if you are wearing rose-colored glasses. The non-factive content view has no obvious answer to this problem. It loses the elegant answer that the doubly world-relative views gave to this problem, because it relaxes the constraint on having evidence too far. The non-factive content view also fails to adequately treat cases of subjective defeat. In this case, you have a visual experience as of something red in front of you, but you also realize that you are wearing rose-colored glasses. According to the non-factive content view, as with the doubly world-implicating views, this latter belief does not interfere in any way with your satisfying the condition required to have world-implicating evidence—in this case, your evidence being that there is something red in front of you. The doubly world-implicating views, as we saw, might attempt to try to explain why it is nevertheless not rational to believe that there is something red in front of you in a way that was derivative from their treatment of objective defeasibility. But as we’ve just seen, the non-factive content view does not have a successful treatment of objective defeasibility. And so, it can’t borrow this strategy either. In contrast, the non-factive attitude view offers elegant, parallel, treatments of both objective defeasibilty and subjective defeasibility. It is able to do this, in effect, because it borrows more from the doubly world-implicating views—it takes on board their idea that factive perceptual relationships to the environment play an important role in basic perceptual evidence. The fact that you are wearing rose-colored glasses defeats your visual evidence that there is something red in front of you, on this view, because it cannot be true that you see that there is something red in front of you if you are wearing rose-colored glasses. This suffices to defeat your knowledge, because knowledge cannot be based on false lemmas. But it doesn’t defeat the reasonability of your belief, because reasonability of belief is not defeated by false lemmas. So, this is exactly the right kind of explanation of the objective defeat to avoid leading to epistemological disjunctivism. The non-factive attitude view also offers an elegant treatment of subjective defeat. In this case, you believe that you are wearing rose-colored glasses, but

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282  

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part of your evidence about the world is that you see that there is something red in front of you. But as we’ve been reminded again and again throughout this paper, these claims cannot both be true. So, either you should give up your belief that you are wearing rose-colored glasses, or you shouldn’t infer anything from the proposition that you see that there is something red in front of you. So either your belief that you are wearing rose-colored glasses is not rational, or, if it is, it is not reasonable to infer anything from this particular piece of perceptual evidence, and hence it is defeated as a sort of reasonable belief about the world. The non-factive attitude view carries other, substantive, commitments, however. Of the views that I have surveyed, here, it is the only view which is committed to the possibility that creatures who can have perceptual evidence about their environments must also be able to represent themselves as seeing that something is the case. This can seem like a particularly stringent kind of cognitive demand. But perhaps it is not so implausible. Imagine seeming to see your friend Bob in front of you, and then learning that what you are in fact seeing is a hologram of Bob that is triggered by Bob standing in front of you. If this sounds like a case of an illusion, then we must say what about your experience makes it illusory. What makes it illusory, a proponent of the non-factive attitude view may claim, is that it represents itself as a factive relation to your environment.⁵

12.5. Summing-Up We’ve now explored four accounts of the defeasibility of perceptual evidence: the classical account, the two doubly world-implicating views, and the nonfactive attitude view. (The non-factive content view, though it occupies a place in the logical space occupied by the other views, can hardly be described as an account of the defeasibility of perceptual evidence, since its problem is precisely that it has no such account.) Classical views have the advantage of fitting seamlessly into general accounts of non-monotonic inference but carry with them a commitment to a restricted space of possible options in general epistemology. Their challenge is to extract an adequate treatment of objective defeat from their elegant treatment of subjective defeat. Both doubly worldimplicating views lead to commitments about the differences in what explains reasonable belief in good and bad cases. Their challenge is to extract an ⁵ This argument extends an argument from Searle (1983).

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adequate treatment of subjective defeat from their elegant treatment of objective defeat. The non-factive content view shares neither of these commitments, and it offers parallel elegant treatments of both objective and subjective defeat. Are those sufficient reasons to think that it is true? Sufficient, I think, to wonder, at least in the absence of defeating evidence.⁶

References Ackerman, Terrence. (1974). Defeasibility modified. Philosophical Studies, 26 (5–6): 431–5. Annis, David. (1973). Knowledge and defeasibility. Philosophical Studies, 24(3): 199–203. Armstrong, David. (1973). Belief, Truth, and Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barker, John A. (1976). What you don’t know won’t hurt you? American Philosophical Quarterly, 13(4): 303–8. Comesaña, Juan, and Matthew McGrath. (2015). Perceptual reasons. Philosophical Studies, 173(4): 991–1006. Johnsen, Bredo. (1974). Knowledge. Philosophical Studies, 25(4): 273–82.

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Klein, Peter. (1971). A proposed definition of propositional knowledge. Journal of Philosophy, 68(16): 471–82. Lehrer, Keith, and Thomas Paxson. (1969). Knowledge: Undefeated justified true belief. Journal of Philosophy, 66: 225–37. Levy, Stephen. (1977). Defeasibility theories of knowledge. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 7(1): 115–23. Olin, Doris. (1976). Knowledge and defeasible justification. Philosophical Studies, 30(2): 129–36. Prichard, Duncan. (2012). Epistemological Disjunctivism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schroeder, Mark. (2015). Knowledge is belief for sufficient (objective and subjective) reason. Oxford Studies in Epistemology, 5: 226–52. Schroeder, Mark. (2021). Reasons First. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Searle, John. (1983). Intentionality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williamson, Timothy. (2000). Knowledge and Its Limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

⁶ Special thanks to Jessica Brown, Mona Simion, and Shyam Nair.

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Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages.

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Ackerman 272–3 action 3, 13–14, 20–1, 51, 95–7, 102, 105, 130–1, 177–97, 247n.2, 249n.5, 253–4, 256, 258–9, 259n.28 intentional 13–14, Chapter 8 passim Aikhenvald 76–7, 81–2 akrasia 7, 116–20, 122–3 Alston 9–11, 18n.3, 58n.36 alternative reliable process theory (ARP) – see defeat reliabilist account of Annis 272–3 Anscombe 225n.5 Armstrong 274 assertion 8, 20nn.6,8, 82 Audi 188, 209n.12 Austin 186–7 Bacon 236n.25 Bader 261n.30 Baker-Hytch and Benton 5, 19n.4, 23n.12, 26n.16, 94nn.1,3, 239n.30 Balcerak Jackson 213n.17, 214n.18 Basu and Schroeder 230n.17 Beddor 4–5, 13, 59n.39, 60–1, 60nn.41,42, 62n.43, 63n.44, 65n.45, 87–8, 94n.2, 146, 149n.7, 153–4, 169n.28 Beddor and Pavese 181, 181nn.7,8, 186n.17 Bedke 149n.9, 259nn.25,26, 264n.38 Bergmann 10–11, 50n.29, 152n.11, 177, 223n.2, 233, 233n.21 Berker 112n.31, 141, 261n.29 blameless 97–8 blameworthy 97n.15, 278 Boghossian 212, 214–15 BonJour 54n.33, 56n.34, 89–90, 149n.8, 169n.26 BonJour and Sosa 89–90 Bratman 188

Brentano 179 Broome 51n.30, 120, 212n.16, 215, 250n.8 Brown 1–2, 6–7, 20nn.5,6, 21n.10, 23n.11, 26nn.14,15, 32n.19, 80–3, 191n.21, 228n.12, 236nn.25,27 Burge 168n.24, 220 Carruthers 88–9 Carter 39n.1, 65n.45 Carter and Navarro 39n.1, 177, 191–3, 196–7 Casullo 205n.5, 206n.8, 208–9, 221n.23 Cath 180n.5, 183–6 Chandler 3, 226n.8 Chisholm 41n.8, 56n.34, 149n.6, 177 Christensen 6–7, 26–7, 26nn.14,15, 88–9, 94n.3, 119–20, 121n.6, 124, 124n.12, 127n.18, 128n.20, 133–4, 140, 157n.17 closure 2, 106, 162 Coates 7, 120 Coffman 186n.15 Cohen 121n.6, 151n.10 coherence 18–19, 49–51, 56, 117 Comesaña 58n.36, 148n.5, 169nn.26,27, 170n.29, 208–9, 221n.23 Comesaña and McGrath 276 constitutivism 118 Dancy 248n.3, 251n.12, 261n.30 Dasti and Phillips 72 Davidson 182–3, 188–9, 194 debunking 1–2 defeat doxastic 1–2, 9–12, 43n.11, 204–5, 223n.2 evidentialist Chapter 3, 168

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286  defeat (cont.) higher-order chapter 1, 26–7, 57n.35, 94n.7, 103, 107, 113–14, 125–6, 138–9, 142, 157n.17, 208–9, 217–18, 220–1, 224, 230–2, 234–5, 238 normative 1, 4, 8–12, 30–1, 35–6, 39–40, 43–5, 47n.22, 52, 54–7, 60–1, 237 objective versus subjective 14–15, 220, chapter 12 passim of reasons 3–4, 40, 57–9, 168, 171, 173, 204–5, 207, 225n.5, 228 partial versus full 9, 42, 225–6, 229, 236–7, 237n.28 psychological – see defeat doxastic rebutting 8–9, 13, 41–4, 48–9, 53–4, 59, 59n.37, 157, 166–7, 177, 202n.2, 203–4, 208–9, 224–5, 248n.3, 249, 251–2, 255, 260 reliabilist account of 4–5, 13, 39–40, 42, 57–64, chapter 7 passim responsibilist account of 39–40, 42, 50, 56n.34, 57–8, 64 scepticism about 5–7, 13 undercutting 1–3, 8–9, 13, 41–4, 46, 48–9, 59n.37, 94n.4, 124, 132n.27, 157n.17, 158, 166–7, 171, chapter 9 passim, 223, 228n.12, 230–1, 234n.23, 237n.28, 248nn.3,4, 251n.12, 271, 277n.4 Dehaene 63–4 Di Paolo 223n.1, 232n.19, 237n.28 disagreement conciliatory view of 2, 122, 128, 133, 135 equal weight view of 121–2 steadfast view of 2, 5, 121, 122n.7, 128, 132–5, 139–40 dispositions to believe 12, 111–12 Dorst 223n.1, 225n.7, 226n.10, 231n.18, 233n.20 Dorst, Fitelson, and Husic 231n.18 Dutant and Fitelson 109n.28, 110n.29, 236n.25 Dutant and LittleJohn 223, 229n.15 Drayson 96n.13 Driver 259n.24 Easwaran 225n.7 Easwaran and Fitelson 226n.10, 229n.15 Elga 7, 121n.6, 127n.19 epistemic good 14, 226, 236–7

epistemic norm 1, 18, 93–4, 227, 234–7 Evans 77–8 evidence first-order 26, 116–17, 121, 124n.11, 127–8, 132, 138, 231 higher-order 2, 6–7, 12–13, 19n.4, 26n.15, 93, 94nn.3,7, 100–1, 103, 105–10, 113–14, chapter 6 passim, 231 evidentialism 3–5, 11–12, chapter 3 passim, 118–19, 124, 126–9, 128n.21, 133–4, 148, 168–73 excuse 97–8, 236n.27 externalism 1, 3–5, 9–11, 74n.3, 79–80, 84, 89–90, 97–8, 163, 174, 208–9, 229n.15, 274–6 fallibilism 70, 72, 73n.2, 74n.3, 76–7, 80 Fantl and McGrath 229n.16, 17 Feldman 6–7, 63–4 Feldman and Conee 59n.38 Finlay 259n.27, 264n.36 von Fintel and Iatridou 264n.36, 265n.39 Flores and Woodard 113n.34 Frances 50n.29 Frances and Matheson 2 Friedman 130n.25, 26 Fumerton 150–2, 166n.23 Gerken 21n.8 Gert 255–60 Ghijsen, Kelp, and Simion 236n.26 Gibbons 34n.20, 139n.33, 179, 180nn.4,5 183n.12, 185–6, 237n.28 Ginet 181, 188 gnosticism 105, 109–10, 113–14, 236n.24, 237 Goldberg 10–11, 18, 18n.2, 20n.7, 27, 31n.18, 39n.1, 45n.15, 17, 223n.2 Goldberg and Matheson 34n.21, 39n.1 Goldman 4, 48n.25, 57n.35, 60n.40, 63, 74n.3, 89–90, 146nn.1,2,3, 148n.5, 149nn.8,9, 151, 152n.11, 161n.20, 168, 168n.24, 174n.36, 177, 181n.6, 188–9, 194, 226n.9 Goldman and Beddor 146n.3 Gonzalez de Prado Salas 124n.11 Goodman 240n.31 Graham 220, 236n.26 Graham and Lyons 164n.22, 174n.36

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 Greco, Daniel 5 Greco, John 5 Green 2, 39n.1 Greenspan 253–5 Gregory 263n.34 Grundmann 39n.1, 45n.15, 149n.9, 224

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Hampshire 185 Harman 10, 123n.9, 188–9, 233 Hawley 184, 190, 193 Hawthorne and Srinivasan 5–6 Henderson, Horgan, and Potrč 148n.5 Hlöbil 212 Hornsby 190 Horowitz 7, 26nn.14,15, 112n.32 Horowitz and Sliwa 7, 26n.14 Horty 249n.4 Horty and Nair 249n.4 Humberstone 178 Hurka 97n.15 Hyman 236n.24 ignorance 14, 34, chapter 10 passim infallibilism 12, 70, 74n.3, 80, 85 inference 12, 14–15, 26, 51, 70–2, 76–9, 81–3, 88–9, 123, 155–9, 160n.18, 162–5, 166n.23, 211–13, 211nn.14,15, 213n.17, 214n.18, 219–20, 272–9, 282–3 inquiry 35, 112–13, 133n.28, 136n.29, 137–9, 141 instrumentalism 110–13 intention 13–14, chapter 8 passim, 215, 274 internalism 1, 9–11, 56, 58, 74n.3, 78–9, 89–90, 94–5, 162–3, 173, 208 James 138 Johnson, Hashtroudi, and Lindsay 76–7 Joyce 154n.13 justification doxastic 42, 59n.38, 61–2, 64, 203 inferential versus noninferential 13, 202, 210–21 perceptual 204–5, 214n.18, 218–20 propositional 42, 51, 53, 58, 59n.38, 61–4 testimonial 13, 202, 217, 220–1 Kelly 5–7, 121n.6, 122n.7 Kelp and Simion 1

287

Kim 146n.2 knowledge-first 18, chapter 8 passim know-how 13–14, chapter 8 passim intellectualist view of 13–14, chapter 8 passim Kolodny 121 Kornblith 3–4, 59n.38, 65n.45, 146n.1 Kotzen 226n.8 Lackey 9–12, 21n.8, chapter 3 passim, 104n.24, 121n.6, 152n.11, 223n.2 Lasonen-Aarnio 5–7, 12, 23n.12, 26nn.14,16, 51n.30, 86–7, 90n.10, 93, 94nn.1,5–10, 100n.20, 103nn.23,25, 111n.30, 124n.12, 149nn.6,7, 160n.19, 174n.34, 192n.22, 223n.1, 225n.6, 239n.30 Lassiter 83n.7 Lazar 227n.11 Lehrer and Paxson 272–3 Leitgeb 229n.14 level-splitting 7, 231–2 Levy, Stephen 272–3 Levy, Y 180n.4 Lewis 96, 178 LittleJohn 139n.33, 177n.1, 181nn.7,9, 187n.19, 225n.5, 227n.11, 236n.24, 236nn.25,27 Lord 116, 117n.2, 121n.6, 122n.8, 123n.10, 223n.1, 225n.5, 237n.28, 247n.1, 250n.11 Lord and Maguire 247n.1 Lord and Sylvan 118, 125n.16 Lynch 226n.9 Lyons 3–4, 11–12, 39, 45n.15, 57n.35, 60n.40, 62, 146n.1, 149n.9, 150, 151n.10, 174n.36 Macnamara 259n.24 Maguire 261n.30 Maguire and Snedegar 261n.30 Makinson 229n.15 Markovits 118 Matheson 39n.1, 48n.26 Matilal 72, 89–90 McNamara 259n.25, 265n.39 McGinn 225n.5 McGrath 201, 220n.22 McKinnon 21n.8 Mele and Moser 179, 186, 188

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288  Mellis 206n.8, 217 Mercier 77–8 Mercier and Sperber 77–8 Miller, Emelia 58n.36, 148n.5, 169, 169n.27, 172n.32 Miller, George 63–4 Miracchi 113n.34 Monti and Osherson 88–9 Morton and Paul 131n.26 Moss 154n.13, 182–3, 190, 230n.17 Murray 82 Nagel Jennifer 69, 76–7, 183n.12, 186 Nagel Thomas 186, 252n.13, 253–4 Nair 250n.9, 261n.30 naturalism 5, 13, 36, 61–2, 64, 118, 146, 150, 164 norm of assertion 21n.8 norm of belief 14, chapter 10 passim normativity 3, 11, chapter 2 passim, 117–18, 125, chapter 11 passim

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Olsen 227n.11 Owens 229n.16, 17 Palermos 39n.1 Papafragou, Li, Choi, and Han 76–7 Pappas 1 Parfit 250n.11 Pavese 177, 180n.5, 181–2, 183nn.11,12, 184, 185n.14, 189–90, 189n.20, 193 Peacocke 230 Pendlebury 252n.14 perception 12, 14–15, 24, 58, 70–2, 76–82, 86–8, 90, 99, 104, 161, 162n.21, 164–5, 185, 218, 240, chapter 12 passim perceptual evidence 14–15, 79n.4, chapter 12 passim Pettigrew 148n.5, 154n.13 Plantinga 9–11 Pollock 3–4, 8–13, chapter 3 passim, 147, 147n.4, 149n.6, 155–9, 160n.18, 162–5, 171, chapter 9 passim, 224, 224n.3, 225n.6, 229n.14, 248 Pollock and Cruz 40n.4, 41, 41nn.7,9,10, 177, 201n.1, 202–4, 204n.3, 210 Pomerantz 76–7 Portner 265n.39 practical reasoning 1–3, 5, 7, 247 Prakken and Horty 147n.4

Pritchard 39n.1, 45n.15, 65n.45, 181n.7, 186n.15, 187, 277n.4 Pryor 2, 5, 8–9, 124n.12, 127n.18, 218, 221n.23 Railton 137n.32 Raleigh 242 rationality 9–11, 14, 18, 46–7, 49–51, 54–6, 69–70, 94–5, 97–8, 116–19, 121, 126, 133–4, 223–6, 225n.5, 231–9, 236nn.25–27, 242–3, 256, 258–9 Raz 249nn.4,5 reasons exclusionary 249nn.4–6 for versus against 1, 3–4, 14, 20–2, 41–3, 58, 117–19, 122–4, 124nn.13,14, 129, 132, 132n.27, 134–5, 138–9, 141, 147–8, 157n.16, 160–3, 160n.18, 162n.21, 166, 168–9, 187, 203–4, 207, 224–5, 228, chapter 11 passim, 277 rebutting 8–9, 13, 41–3, 157, 203–4, 208n.10, 224–5, 248–9, 251–2, 255, 260 undercutting 8, 41–3, 157–8, 202n.2, 203–4, 207n.9, 208nn.10,11, 211n.14, 219–21, 234–5, 248n.3, 4 Reed 20n.6, 72, 73n.2, 82–3 reliabilism 3–4, 11–13, 57–61, 59n.38, 64, 74n.3, 94n.2, chapter 7 passim responsibilism 57–8 Rosenkranz 131n.26 Ross 247n.1, 250n.7 Ryan 229n.14 Ryle 190, 193 Scanlon 121 Schaffer 96n.12 Schiffer 78–9 Schoenfield 23n.12, 26nn.14,16, 94n.3, 112n.33, 117n.3, 122, 127nn.18,19 Schroeder 124–6, 124n.13, 229nn.16,17, 248n.3, 250n.11, 252n.13, 253–4, 263n.34, 269, 269n.1, 273n.3, 277n.4 Searle 282n.5 Setiya 183n.11, 184, 190, 193 Shah 125n.16 Sher, George 97nn.14–16 Sher, I 261nn.30,31 Silva 1–2, 232n.19 Silverstein 263n.34

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

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Simion 1, 9–10 Simion, Kelp, and Ghijsen 98n.17 Simons 82 Singer 137n.32 Skipper 26n.14 Sloman 259n.27, 264n.36 Smith 229n.14, 234n.22, 235–7 Smithies 74n.3 Snedegar 124n.13, 128n.21, 136n.29, 247, 249, 253n.15, 259nn.25,26, 263n.34, 264nn.38,39 Sosa 121n.6, 125n.16, 141–2, 181, 181n.7, 187 Spohn 224n.3 Stalnaker 172n.30, 178 Stanley 184n.13, 189–91 Stanley and Williamson 184n.13, 189–91 Stich 178n.2 Sturgeon 9, 130n.22, chapter 9 passim, 225n.7 Sudduth 1, 10 suspension 12–13, 69–70, 108–10, 117–19, 121, 125–6, 128–35, 138–9, 154, 242 Swinburne 10 Sylvan 116, 117n.3, 123n.10, 124n.13, 139n.33, 141n.35, 226n.9, 239n.30 Sylvan and Sosa 173n.33 Tang 58n.36, 148n.5, 169n.27, 170 testimony anti-reductionism 2, 20 reductionism 2, 20

289

Titelbaum 120, 135 transmission 2, 73–4, 82–3, 179, 254n.16 Unger 236n.24 Van Wietmarschen 85, 232n.19 Velleman 125n.16, 188 veritism 105, 234–5 Von Fintel and Gillies 82–3 warrant 2, 9–12, 20nn.6,8, 26n.15, 58–65, 164n.22, 232–3 Way 117n.2, 262n.32, 263n.34 Way and Whiting 120 Weatherson 5, 121–2, 230n.17, 234n.22 Wedgwood 125n.16 Weiner 21n.8 Weisberg 5, 182–3 Wertheimer 265n.39 Whiting 21n.8, 249nn.4,5 Williams, Bernard 186, 224n.4 Williams, Michael 54, 56n.34 Williamson 6, 18n.1, 21n.9, 23n.12, 79n.4, 178n.3, 180n.4, 181–2, 183n.12, 187, 191, 231n.18, 233n.20, 236nn.24,27, 240–1, 243, 275–6 Worsnip 51n.30, 121–3, 134–5, 229n.15 Ye 26nn.14,15, 85n.8

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