A Critical Introduction to the Epistemology of Memory 9781472526076, 9781472525598, 9781474203739, 9781472525130

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A Critical Introduction to the Epistemology of Memory

BLOOMSBURY CRITICAL INTRODUCTIONS TO CONTEMPORARY EPISTEMOLOGY Series Editor Stephen Hetherington, Professor of Philosophy, University of New South Wales, Australia Editorial Board Claudio de Almeida, Professor of Philosophy (Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil), Richard Fumerton, F. Wendell Miller Professor of Philosophy (The University of Iowa, USA), John Greco, Leonard and Elizabeth Eslick Chair in Philosophy (Saint Louis University, USA), Jonathan Kvanvig, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy (Baylor University, USA), Ram Neta, Associate Professor of Philosophy (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA), Duncan Pritchard, Professor of Philosophy (The University of Edinburgh, UK) Claudio de Almeida, Professor of Philosophy, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil Bloomsbury Critical Introductions to Contemporary Epistemology introduces and advances the central topics within one of the most dynamic areas of contemporary philosophy. Each critical introduction provides a comprehensive survey to an important epistemic subject, covering the historical, methodological, and practical contexts and exploring the major approaches, theories, and debates. By clearly illustrating the changes to the ways human knowledge is being studied, each volume places an emphasis on the historical background and makes important connections between contemporary issues and the wider history of modern philosophy. Designed for use on contemporary epistemology courses, the introductions are defined by a clarity of argument and equipped with easy-to-follow chapter summaries, annotated guides to reading, and glossaries to facilitate and encourage further study. This series is ideal for upper-level undergraduates and postgraduates wishing to stay informed of the thinkers, issues, and arguments shaping twenty-first-century epistemology. New titles in the series include: A Critical Introduction to the Epistemology of Perception, Ali Hasan A Critical Introduction to Formal Epistemology, Darren Bradley A Critical Introduction to Knowledge-How, J. Adam Carter and Ted Poston A Critical Introduction to Testimony, Axel Gelfert

A Critical Introduction to the Epistemology of Memory THOMAS D. SENOR

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Copyright © Thomas D. Senor, 2019 Thomas D. Senor has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design: Louise Dugdale Cover image © Philip Habib / Gallerystock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-2607-6 PB: 978-1-4725-2559-8 ePDF: 978-1-4725-2513-0 eBook: 978-1-4725-2938-1 Series: Bloomsbury Critical Introductions to Contemporary Epistemology Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Georgia

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Contents Preface  viii Acknowledgment  x

1 Introduction: Clarifying the issue and

laying the groundwork  1 2 Harman’s argument for epistemic conservatism  27 3 McGrath’s defense of conservatism  51 4 Evidentialism  75 5 Foundationalism  99 6 Preservationism and reliabilism  127 Notes  165 References  174 Index  179

Preface B

y my lights, the epistemology of memory is a scandalously overlooked subarea of the theory of knowledge. When one considers the fact that memory is psychologically relevant to everything we come to believe, it would seem that it should be front and center in epistemological debates. But that is not what one finds when looking at the literature. While there is reason to think that work on memory is on the rise, it remains an underexplored area of epistemology. My interest in memory as it relates to epistemic justification began in graduate school when I read John Pollock’s first edition of Contemporary Theories of Knowledge and Gilbert Harman’s Change in View. Each of these works dealt more with memory than did anything else I’d read up to that point. And while the positions they staked out were intriguing, I also thought that they were clearly wrong. I’ve now spent the better part of thirty years trying to figure out what is the correct theory of the justification of memory belief. There are many ways one could approach an introduction to the epistemology of memory. One natural strategy would be to focus on skepticism. The skeptical difficulties that are so well known for perceptual knowledge crop up also when memory knowledge is under discussion. Bertrand Russell famously considered the possibility that the universe was created five minutes ago, complete with adult humans with minds full of apparent memories. If our apparent memories could be misleading, one and all, then why should we suppose that we are justified in accepting them, let alone that they constitute knowledge? This approach would examine replies to skepticism and, in the event that there is no refutation of the skeptic, the implications of our not being able to rule it out. A different way of approaching the epistemology of memory would be phenomenological. That is, one could circumscribe the domain of inquiry to be what we seem to remember, and then ask to what extent such memory experiences are relevant to what one

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is justified in believing. This way of framing the issue would put memory experience front and center, rather than taking the history of the belief as of primary importance. For better or worse, I have not followed either of these paths. Rather, my focus is on memory belief—that is, beliefs that have been previously formed and that are stored in memory (whether or not they are being recalled). The primary question that I’m interested in is, under what conditions is a belief that was formed earlier justified at a later time? My main reason for choosing this goes back to the project that Harman was involved in in Change in View. He was concerned with belief revision—the conditions under which one was justified in surrendering or amending a belief that one had previously formed. While my project isn’t just the same as Harman’s, it is motivated by a desire to know the conditions that are necessary and sufficient for justifiably continuing to hold a previously formed and continually maintained belief. In the terminology that I adopt in what follows, I distinguish the requirements for justifiably coming to believe a proposition from what’s required to justifiably continue to believe a proposition. So, this book will be focused on the conditions under which an earlier formed belief—that is, a memory belief—is justified at a later time. The other aforementioned projects are not ignored in what follows. That is, the question of memory skepticism and the relevance of the phenomenology of memory seemings are discussed along the way. We will also take on the question of whether memory is capable of being epistemically generative—that is, the question of memory’s ability to produce prima facie justification.

Acknowledgments I

’ve had a lot of help along the way in writing this book. My earliest debt is owed to my doctoral dissertation committee of Alvin Goldman, John Pollock, and Keith Lehrer. As my advisor and mentor, Alvin Goldman is owed the primary debt. I was led to study with Goldman by my time in the doctoral program at Syracuse University. William P. Alston was my first teacher of epistemology and his influence in both my intellectual and personal life has been, and continues to be, profound. More recently, I’ve learned a great deal from my colleagues at Arkansas, particularly Jack Lyons. My writing has been funded by research leave provided by the University of Arkansas’s Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences and by a fellowship at the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame for the 2014– 15 academic year. I’ve had the good fortune to focus my thoughts on my work because my three (now adult) children have never given me reason to worry. Thanks Elisa, Katie, and Graham for being wonderful human beings.

1 Introduction: Clarifying the issue and laying the groundwork

Introduction

L

ooking to the west, I see the sun begin to sink into the Pacific Ocean, and I come to believe that the sun is setting. This is a standard, if lovely, situation. The belief I’ve just formed is surely justified. I am not under the influence of any judgment-affecting drugs, and I have no reason to think my belief is false or my senses unreliable. My new belief is typical of the kind that we assume to be both justified and true. It would take a fair amount of philosophical energy to convince us to the contrary. Now, strictly speaking, the report that I gave of the genesis of my belief is inaccurate—or at least incomplete. I did, in fact, look at the horizon and come to believe that the sun was setting. But that visual experience, by itself, is insufficient to justify that belief or even for me to form the belief at all. Even assuming that I have the concept of sunsets, and know what they look like, my experience together with this background wouldn’t justify me in believing that the sun was setting. Why not? Because had I been on the opposite coast of the United States, for example, and faced east early in the morning, I might have had a visual experience indistinguishable from the one I just had. In such a case, of course, I wouldn’t have been justified in believing that the sun was setting. So, my belief is based in part on

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my visual experience of seeing the sun over the water, and in part on background information that I’m facing west or that it is late in the day (or both). So, if this newly acquired belief is justified, and it is based in part on a background belief, then it must be either that this background belief is itself justified or that I have some independent justification for my new belief. But I don’t have any independent reason to think that the sun is now setting. Therefore, if my belief is justified it will have to be because the background belief on which it partially depends is justified too. For an unjustified belief can’t be the crucial epistemic basis of a justified belief. Thus, the conviction that my new belief is justified commits one to thinking that these other beliefs are justified too. To be clear, I’m not arguing that there are no epistemically basic beliefs—that is, beliefs that are justified independently of being positively supported by other beliefs. In the case in question, perhaps my belief that I’m seeing the sun is dependent only on my having a certain kind of intellectual skill—namely, that of being able to distinguish the sun from other objects. Be that as it may, the situation I’m in regarding my sunset belief is extremely common. We regularly form new beliefs that are justified only if earlier formed beliefs are now justified for us. In these ubiquitous cases, we are justified in coming to believe a proposition Ps only if every belief upon which P epistemically depends is justified.1 Suppose that I am justified in coming to believe that R and, at a later time, I come to believe that P which I base on my belief that R. Given what was said above, my belief that P can be justified only if R is justified. But what is necessary for that? That is, what justifies my previously formed belief that R? This might sound like a request for a general, sufficient condition for justified belief. But that is not what it is, or at least that is not what I am assuming to be the question’s significance. A distinction that will be of central importance for our purposes is between “coming to believe that P” and “continuing to believe that P. ” This dichotomy might well be unfamiliar even to one well-read in contemporary epistemology. Typically, theories of justification are presented as being simply what one needs to be justified in a belief—where there is no distinction between the conditions needed to justifiably form the belief and those needed to justifiably retain it.2 But it is unclear



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why we should think that the conditions necessary and sufficient for justifiably coming to believe a proposition are identical with those for justifiably continuing to believe it. And, in fact, we’ll see that there are some plausible reasons for thinking that the two sets of conditions are distinct. For now, let’s go back to our original question: in order for my newly acquired belief that the sun is now setting to be justified, the beliefs upon which it partially depends, that is, my background beliefs that it is morning or I’m facing west must be justified too. But what are the conditions under which that belief is justified? To get a clear understanding on what this question is asking, we’ll need to make a distinction between prima facie justification and ultima facie justification. To say that a belief is prima facie justified is to say that, as long as there are no reasons against it, it will be justified all things considered or ultima facie justified. Let’s take an example. You see a familiar looking car drive by and knowing that (i) your friend Bill has that model and same color car and (ii) that he lives down the street, you come to believe that Bill is heading home. In this case, as long as there is no good reason for doubting your evidence, you are prima facie justified in your belief and ultima facie justified too. You have a justified belief, plain and simple. But now suppose that Bill’s next-door neighbor Jill has a car of the same model and color, and that you are aware of this. In this case, while you still have reason for thinking that Bill has driven by—even reason that would make you ultima facie justified if you didn’t know about Jill—you aren’t in fact ultima justified since your evidence is faulty. Why? Because your reason for thinking that Bill passed your house is overridden or defeated by your belief that Jill owns an exactly similar car and lives nearby. You have no more reason for thinking that Bill has just headed home than you do for thinking that Jill has driven by. Put slightly differently, given your evidence and circumstance, you aren’t in a position to reliably believe that it was Bill rather than Jill in the car you saw. Therefore, your belief isn’t ultima facie justified.3 Given the distinction between prima facie justification and ultima facie justification, we can see that the initial question about what must be true for our previously held background beliefs to be justified is ambiguous. Are we asking what’s required for prima facie justification only or for ultima facie justification? The answer to this turns out to be

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tricky and will only be understood after we are much farther along our inquiry. But to foreshadow a bit, it turns out that when philosophers ask about whether a belief is “justified,” they are typically asking about ultima facie justification. However, most of the philosophical action concerns what is required for prima facie justification; so, it will be the latter that will be the protagonist of our epistemological drama. But unless the matter under discussion requires that I be particularly precise, I’ll use the unmodified “justified” (and the like) to make lexical matters cleaner. Let’s return to the question of the justification of our background beliefs. Broadly speaking, there are two fundamentally different possibilities: either their justification is (largely) a function of their earlier epistemic status or their justification is (largely) a function of what is true of the subject now. Put slightly differently, one type of position contends that what is required for the justification of continued beliefs is primarily a matter of diachronic factors, and the competing account takes it to be primarily a matter of synchronic matters.4 These different ways of approaching our topic will be spelled out in detail in later chapters. For now, I want only to clarify them just a bit. The first perspective emphasizes the epistemic history of the belief. The idea is, more or less, that if the belief was justified when it was first formed, and if it has been maintained in memory for the intermediate time, then (other things being equal) it will be justified at the later time. Similarly, if it was unjustified when it was originally formed and the subject has not acquired any new justification in the meantime, then it is unjustified when it is later recalled. Because this position emphasizes memory’s epistemically preservative effects, it is known as preservationism. In contrast with preservationism are views according to which what is important is not the belief’s past but its present. This perspective is that what matters for the epistemic evaluation of a belief are only its current, ahistorical properties. If a memory belief is now justified it must be because of what is true of the belief (and of the subject) at the present time. That a belief was justified (or unjustified) when it was first formed is beside the point. I said earlier that the distinction between what is needed for justifiably coming to believe a proposition as opposed to what is required for justifiably continuing to believe it is underappreciated



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and will play an important role in this book. In the next section, I will argue for the plausibility that this distinction is needed, and that an account of the justification of memory belief can only be understood in light of it.

Justifiably coming to believe versus justifiably continuing to believe Let’s begin by considering the evidentialist theory of justification. Championed in the current debate by Richard Feldman and Earl Conee, evidentialism claims that a proposition is justified if and only if (“iff” for short) the subject has good evidence for it. Put a bit more formally, they offer the following analysis of epistemic justification Doxastic attitude D toward proposition P is epistemically justified for S at t iff having D toward P fits the evidence S has at t.5 The details of their theory need not concern us at this point (we will discuss them in depth in Chapter 4). I assume that we have some intuitive notion of what constitutes evidence, as well as what evidential “fit” comes to. Their basic idea is initially appealing as an account of epistemic justification. Or it is, I shall argue, until one considers it in light of the “coming to believe”/“continuing to believe” distinction. As a theory of what is required for justifiably coming to believe a proposition, evidentialism is attractive. To see this, let’s put the theory in action. Suppose that Rasheed has just formed the belief that the nearest star, discounting the sun, is 4.3 light-years away. Is his belief justified? Evidentialism tells us that if the evidence for this proposition is suitably strong, then his belief is justified; if his evidence is weak, then it is not. For instance, suppose Rasheed believes it because a friend who he knows to be notoriously unreliable with respect to scientific facts has told him so. In that case, his belief is unjustified because his evidence is bad. On the other hand, if Rasheed is now taking a college astronomy course, and has both read this in the text and heard his instructor say it, then his evidence is very good and his belief is justified. So far, so good for evidentialism.

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Now let’s change the case a bit. Rasheed has a friend, Monique, who is an astronomy major. One day over lunch, Monique tells Rasheed that the earth is 4.3 light-years from the nearest star (besides the sun) and Rasheed comes to have this belief on the basis of this evidence. Since Rasheed has good reason to take Monique to be reliable and has no reason to think that Monique wants to deceive him, Rasheed has good testimonial evidence for his astronomical belief. And so he is justified. However, twenty years later, Rasheed has forgotten a lot of what he learned in college. Among the things that Rasheed has forgotten is that he had a friend in college who was a budding astronomer. He no longer remembers either his lunch with Monique or that Monique told him the distance of the earth to the nearest star. Rasheed does remember this astronomical belief, however, because he is something of a trivia buff. He has recalled it on a few occasions, and never had the slightest doubt about whether his memory on this was reliable. It’s just something that Rasheed knows. Yet it isn’t at all clear now what evidence he has for believing it. By hypothesis, he no longer remembers the testimony on which it was based, and we can make it part of the story that he hasn’t come to have any relevant new evidence in the meantime. It appears that the evidentialist will have to say that his belief is no longer justified. But I think that we can see with another example that this is an untenable result.6 Consider my belief that my first-grade teacher’s name was “Mrs. McDonald.” Undoubtedly, when I came to believe this and for a while thereafter, I had a great deal of evidence. I must have heard her refer to herself as “Mrs. McDonald,” or heard other people refer to her by this name, and she probably had her name on the door of her room or on a plaque on her desk. However, the first grade was quite some time ago, and I don’t now remember any of this evidence, nor do I remember that there even was this kind of evidence. I have a vague mental image of Mrs. McDonald’s face, but other than that I don’t have any recollections of, or about, her—or at least none that I can access just by reflection. Nevertheless, my belief that my first-grade teacher’s name was “Mrs. McDonald” is very firm, and I would be quite surprised to find out that I am wrong. I take it that this kind of case is very common. And we typically think that beliefs of this sort



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are justified and even count as knowledge. But, once again, it appears that the evidentialist will have to deny this. Therefore, evidentialism looks significantly less appealing as a theory of justifiably continuing to believe than it does as a theory of justifiably coming to believe (where it has a great deal of initial plausibility). At the very least, these cases (called cases of “forgotten evidence” in the literature), indicate something important: what it takes to be justified in continuing to hold a belief that one previously held seems to be rather different from what it takes to be justified in forming a belief in the first place. In this book, our focus will be on the latter of these; that is, we will be concerned solely on the epistemology of continued or sustained belief. In this introductory chapter, I shall say a few more words specifying our project, and I will undertake to lay some groundwork for the more substantive chapters that follow.

The relationship of ongoing justification and remembering Because it is laborious to continue to write out (and to read!) the phrase “the conditions of under which one is justified in continuing to believe,” I’m going to use the term “ongoing justification” to refer to the justification of an ongoing (i.e., continued, maintained, or even recalled) belief. Issues pertaining to the justification of newly formed beliefs, I will refer to as matters of “original justification.” While the philosophical literature discussing ongoing justification is rather sparse, there has been more written about what memory is and the conditions under which one can truly be said to remember a belief. There is a literature containing competing conceptual or linguistic analyses of “remembering,” but I don’t take it as particularly germane to the primary target here.7 To occurrently remember a proposition is to have a current conscious state that can be causally traced to an earlier event. But one might not believe that one’s current state is so causally related, and so not believe what one remembers. For example, you might be told to think of a large Douglas Fir tree and call to mind an image. You think that you’ve just creatively imagined the tree, when really the image came from a stored memory of a tree

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you saw many years ago. Here you are remembering a tree without realizing it. On the other hand, one might have a genuine memory and the accompanying belief but have good reason to think that the belief isn’t true. So, even when one does believe what one remembers, it doesn’t follow that one is justified in the continued belief. For example, you remember having chocolate cake with raspberry filling on your fifth birthday, but the rest of your family insists that you are thinking of your sixth birthday. You know that you sometimes misremember events from your childhood, and you take your family to be at least as reliable as you in these matters. Still, it really seems to you that it was your fifth birthday and so you continue to believe. Let’s suppose that you are correct: it was your fifth birthday. Nevertheless, it isn’t at all clear that you are justified since multiple people have memories of the event that are inconsistent with yours. There is, then, no reason to think that “remembering that P” tracks what one is justified in believing or even what one believes when one remembers.8 So while the topic of this book is the epistemology of memory, we will not be concerned with analyzing the use of the English words “remember” or “memory.” Philosophizing about memory goes back to Plato and his dialogue Theatetus. In that work, Plato considers and rejects the view that minds are like wax tablets which are imprinted with sense experience. On such a view, remembering consists in recalling the images that remain on the wax after the visual experience. Despite Plato’s arguments to the contrary, this theory became the conventional view with Aristotle and, mutatis mutandis, remained that way until work in cognitive science in the last few decades made it no longer tenable.9 Although we will consider a variation on this position in some detail in a later chapter, I will not be explicitly discussing philosophical accounts of the nature of memory. The main reason for this is that such a discussion would take us too far afield of our topic. Although often mistakenly run together, it is important to distinguish what we might call the metaphysics of memory from the epistemology of memory. The former concerns what, at bottom, memory is. And this is not, as one might be tempted to think, purely a matter for psychology and cognitive science. For the concept of memory is broad, and however exactly it is realized in human psychology and neurophysiology, we



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will not thereby come to understand what, in principle, memory is. For there are all kinds of other cognizers who have different memory systems than humans have. And who knows what other kinds of intelligent life the universe contains? And if there are other intelligent beings out there, two things are virtually certain: they have memory systems and they won’t be just like the memory systems realized in the human brain. Questions about the metaphysics of memory, then, concern what it is to have a memory, regardless of how it is physically realized. The epistemology of memory, on the other hand, focuses on how memory functions to provide us with justified beliefs. Of course, there might be, nevertheless, interesting connections between the metaphysics of memory and the epistemology of memory (and indeed, later in the book when we discuss preservationism, we will see that there are). But for the most part, what will concern us are the conditions under which memory can provide us with justified or rational beliefs.

Memory belief While I don’t think philosophical progress is typically made by analyzing ordinary language, it is important to be clear in our use of key words and phrases. “Memory belief” can be used to designate two rather different states. First, and most commonly, it sometimes just means “remembered belief”—that is, a belief that was originally formed at an earlier time and is now remembered. For example, I might form the belief that my car is to the east of my office building as I park my car, and when I leave for the evening recall that it is parked to the east. But calling a belief remembered is also ambiguous, albeit in a different way. One way a belief is remembered is when it is recalled—that is, it is brought to consciousness when one had not been conscious of it earlier, although one still believed it then. For example, I now recall that I once owned a Honda CRV. Five minutes ago, I was not consciously thinking about my old car—it was not what philosophers call “occurrent”—but now it is. Even so, five minutes ago I believed that I once owned a Honda CRV. Now that

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I’m thinking about it, it is a remembered belief that is occurrent. Yet five minutes ago, as I said, I believed it, and in a sense remembered it—after all, it wasn’t something I had just come to believe nor was it something I had forgotten. There are, then, two ways a belief can be remembered—(i) by being stored and recallable, and (ii) by being occurrent and recalled. So, let’s have the following as a working condition for what it is to have a remembered belief: P is a remembered belief of S’s at t iff (a) S believes that P at t (either occurrently or dispositionally) and there is a time before t, t- 1, at which S believed that P, S has not ceased believing that P between t- 1 and t, and S’s belief that P at t is appropriately causally related to S’s belief at t- 1. To believe a proposition dispositionally is to have formed the belief at an earlier time and to be able to have it become occurrent given appropriate cues. We won’t get into what counts as an appropriate cue, but the idea is that if you have a belief that is stored with no hope of retrieval, then it is not clear that you really have a belief anymore. If you can never use it to decide what to do or to infer new beliefs, you might yet have stored information but it is no longer a belief. This section began by noting a distinction between a pair of rather different states that can both be felicitously called “memory belief.” We’ve seen what one of these is and it is now time to describe the other, less common sort of memory belief. Suppose you witness a car accident and you are giving a statement to the police. You say that you saw the blue sedan T-bone the red pickup truck. You are asked to be more precise: did the sedan hit the truck at the front passenger seat or the rear seat opposite the driver. You close your eyes for a moment and recall the visual image that you had when you saw the wreck. Inspecting the image, you see the sedan striking the truck in the front passenger side rather than the rear. You immediately come to believe that the sedan struck in the front and you report to the police officer that it struck the front rather than the back of the pickup. Here is a plausible account of the psychology of what has just transpired. You had a vivid visual image of the accident. The image (or mental representation) of the incident contained more information than you immediately processed. What you immediately came to



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believe was that the sedan t-boned the pickup. When asked to be more specific, you recalled the image. Even if, as is surely plausible, the information in the image has degraded some in the meantime, it still contains more data than you have consciously available to you before you recall the image. You recall the image, inspect it, and see that it depicts the car striking the truck in the front (rather than the rear) passenger side. In this case, you’ve formed a belief on the basis of memory. Although the material for the belief was initially provided by perception, that material remained cognitively raw and was stored that way in memory. When asked to be more specific, the image was recalled and those raw materials were processed to produce the belief about precisely where the car struck the truck. So, while the belief wasn’t generated by memory alone, your recalled image was the proximate cause of the belief. There can be little doubt that memory can be doxastically productive—that is, it can produce new beliefs in addition to maintaining old ones. Two points are worth emphasizing here. First, as noted earlier, whether a recalled representation is an actual memory representation or is produced by some other psychological process (like, for example, imagination) can be impossible to detect by mere introspection. That is to say, not everything that feels like a memory image is a memory image. Now, of course, one might have a genuine memory image that has not only degraded to a certain extent but that has also been contaminated. Suppose in the car accident case, you have heard several witnesses say that the traffic light was red when the sedan struck the pickup. Although initially your representation contained no information of the color of the traffic light, after a time, when you recall the image of the collision, your picture now includes a red light under which the car passes. In this case, it’s fair to say that the image is still a memory image but other things that you believe have contaminated it. But a contaminated memory image is a memory image nevertheless because it traces back to an initial experience upon which it is based. Contrast contamination with cases of images that have no connection with an original experience. For example, suppose you have heard most of your life about the look of shock on your mother’s face when, at age five, you said your first curse words during a family

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dinner. It now seems to you that you can recall her wide eyes and mouth agape, when in fact the image that you associate with the event is entirely a product of your imagination’s drawing a picture of the scene you’ve heard described countless times. In this case, you are mistaken to think that you remember the event: your image (while perhaps accurate) is a product of your imagination. But in the traffic light version of the accident case, your representation counts as a memory because its causal history traces back in more or less the right way to an event that you witnessed; so it counts as a contaminated memory.10 It will be helpful for us to have a useful way to mark the distinction between beliefs that are in memory (or are being recalled) and beliefs that produced by memory from images or representations.11 So from here on, let’s refer only to beliefs that have been previously formed and are now either dispositional or occurrent as “memory beliefs.” When one comes to have a new belief by the process of recalling a memory representation and inspecting it one will have a “belief from memory.” As I am using the term, then, a “memory belief” is not a belief that originates with a memory impression, but rather is a belief that was previously formed.12 This, then is our canonical account of memory belief. S has P as a memory belief at t only if S believes that P at t and there is a time before t, t- 1, at which S believed that P, S has not ceased believing that P between t- 1 and t, and S believes that P at t because S believed it at t- 1.13 To have a memory belief that P at t, one must have come to believe that P at an earlier time, have believed that P from that earlier time until t, and one’s belief that P at t must be because (i.e., caused or explained by) the fact that one came to the belief at the earlier time. This last clause is necessary to avoid cases (admittedly fanciful but for all that not impossible) in which a person comes to believe that P and simultaneously forgets that P (i.e., no longer has the belief stored in memory) and comes to believe it anew. As I will be using the expression, “memory belief” denotes both activated and unactivated as well as occurrent and nonoccurrent belief



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states. I use “activated” and “unactivated” to mark the distinction between states which are inert in long-term memory (LTM) and those which have been accessed and are immediately available for processing.14 The occurrent/nonoccurrent distinction is more familiar but less clearly defined. I will stipulatively define them by saying that an occurrent belief is a belief that is conscious or of which one is currently aware; and a nonoccurrent belief is a belief that is not occurrent. Now we can see that these distinctions, as I have made them, are not equivalent. A belief may be active (in what psychologists refer to as “working memory”) but of which one is not consciously aware. In such a case, the belief is an activated nonoccurrent belief. However, I presume that at least as a matter of psychological (though I suspect not of conceptual) fact, there are no occurrent beliefs that are unactivated. By using “memory belief” to cover all combinations of these types of doxastic states, I do not mean to be minimizing the significance of these distinctions. By denoting activated and unactivated, and, occurrent and dispositional beliefs with a single term, I do intend that most of what I say will apply across the board. We do, after all, think that at any particular time, one knows or justifiably believes a great many things, far more than the seven or so items that can ever be activated simultaneously. Thus, a theory of ongoing justification should entail that unactivated, as well as activated, beliefs have an epistemic status. And the same goes for dispositional as well as occurrent beliefs. Hence, unless I explicitly note the contrary, I intend what I am saying to apply to all four kinds of doxastic states.

Justification, warrant, rationality, and blamelessness In addition to making clear the concept of memory belief that I’ll be working with, I need to discuss the various terms of epistemic appraisal I’ll be using in this book. When evaluating the status of a belief, the term most often used in the literature to indicate that a belief passes epistemic muster is “justified.” And a multitude of voices have had their say regarding the nature of epistemic justification.

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Indeed, the chorus is a cacophony. There are a great many theories of the nature of epistemic justification, theories that are radically at odds with each other. So, any particular position I adopt here will run the risk of making this book irrelevant to those who hold significantly different accounts. Therefore, I will proceed by laying out three rather different concepts all of which have been claimed by some to be what is at the root of epistemic justification. I will use the term “justified” as a generic positive term of appraisal so that it will apply to any belief that satisfies one of the three concepts I distinguish. These three concepts will be labeled “warrant,” “rationality,” and “blamelessness.”15

Epistemic warrant In what follows, I shall use the “warrant” to denote the primary epistemic condition of knowledge. Although I prefer to use “justification” for this condition, I want to reserve the latter term as a catch-all to cover all three varieties of epistemic appraisal that I will be delineating in the next few paragraphs.16 Since Edmund Gettier published “Is Knowledge Justified True Belief?” in 1963, epistemologists have generally granted that the answer to Gettier’s question is “No.”17 For a person can have a belief that is extremely well justified—that is, belief that is grounded in what is objectively very good reason, so good in fact, that in almost all cases beliefs justified in that way turn out to be knowledge—and yet fail to have knowledge nevertheless. Here’s a famous Gettiertype case: suppose you have really good reason to believe that your co-worker, Mr. Nogott, owns a Ford. He tells you all about the great deal he got on it, shows you what appears to be his title and registration, and you’ve see him driving to work every morning. You come to justifiably believe that Nogott owns a Ford. What you don’t know, and have no reason to suspect, is that Nogott just wants to fool you; he wants to seem patriotic and he thinks “buying American” will impress you (he’s actually just borrowing the car from his brother). As it turns out, though, another colleague of yours—someone you don’t know well and have never seen in a car—does own a Ford; his name is Mr. Havitt. Looking for a new car and interested in getting advice,



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your husband says to you, “I’m thinking about getting a Ford. Is there anyone at your office who owns one?” Thinking for a moment and recalling Nogott, you respond: “Yes, someone at my office owns a Ford.” Just prior to your assertion, you’ve come to have a new belief: “someone at my office owns a Ford” (you’ve arrived at this belief by inferring it from your belief that Nogott owns a Ford). Now, of course, your Nogott belief, while very well justified, isn’t knowledge because it isn’t true. But consider your new, less specific belief: someone at your office owns a Ford. Unlike the Nogott belief, this one is true (thanks to Havitt). And since there is no question that the Nogott belief is justified, and the latter belief is derived from the Nogott belief via a transparently valid inference, the latter belief must be justified too. So it is a justified, true belief. But it isn’t an instance of knowledge: if your only reason for thinking that someone at your office owns a Ford is because of your false belief that Nogott owns one, then you don’t know that someone at your office owns a Ford even if that belief is justified and true. What exactly goes wrong in Gettier-type cases is a matter of much controversy and, fortunately, needn’t delay us here. We’ve discussed such cases to point out the kind of epistemic success that being “justified” in Gettier’s sense amounts to. It’s an objectively strong epistemic position—when you are in it, you are close to knowledge. When you are in it and your belief is true, you almost always have knowledge. Although Getter introduces the term “justification” to pick out this concept, that word has come to be used much more widely in the epistemological literature. Therefore, I will use it in the broadest allowable sense: to be justified is for a belief to meet some suitable epistemic standard. It is for it to be, in some way, epistemically in the clear or beyond reproach. To put the point more specifically for our context, it is for a belief to satisfy (at least) one of the three terms of epistemic appraisal that I am hereby laying out. In contrast, for a belief to be warranted is for it to have satisfied Gettier’s criterion—it is for it to be based on an objectively good ground, that is, a ground of a sort that will generally lead to true belief. Because I want the concept of warrant to be as broad as I can have it and still be clear about the how this epistemic achievement differs from two others I shall discuss momentarily, I will not attempt

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anything like a specific definition. Obviously, those who accept reliabilist theories will find this sense of warrant to their liking. But one could have a kind of objective evidentialist theory that would be an instance of this quality too. To make what I’m calling “warrant” clearer, I will now introduce two other terms and associate them with distinct, if somewhat related, concepts.

Epistemic rationality Just as I am assigning the term “warranted” to indicate that a belief is objectively well-grounded, I will be stipulating the meaning of the word “rational.” There are a number of different concepts that can reasonably be designated by that term. Loosely, a person is rational in believing a proposition only if her belief is supported by the evidence that she has available to her. As I am thinking of epistemic rationality, it is what John Locke had in mind when he articulated the principle of evidence proportionalism: one’s belief—and level of confidence— should be proportional to the evidence one possesses (where evidence is understood as comprising one’s beliefs and experiences). In the Gettier-style case above, you were not only warranted but rational too. But not all rational beliefs are warranted. Here’s an example. Suppose you grow up in a community that predicts the weather by reading tea leaves. Although of course the process isn’t reliable, the fact is that it is long established, and people tend to remember the times that the predictions turn out to be right (and attribute that to the reliability of the process), and they either forget the myriad times when the process is incorrect or have mitigating reasons why the process failed in those cases. You grow up in this community and so as a young adult, mostly accept what it tells you about the world. Community experts assure you that predicting weather by reading tea leaves is a very reliable process, and you’ve never paid a whole lot of attention to forecasts. So, you believe that reading tea leaves is a good method for predicting the weather. Furthermore, you are told that the leaves predict warm sunny weather next week; in that basis, you come to believe that will indeed take place.



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In this case, your belief fits your evidence. Since you’ve not paid much attention to forecasts, you don’t have direct experience of the method’s unreliability; and since you’re told that it is reliable by people in your community, and your experience with them is that the great majority of what they tell you turns out to be true, your evidence supports your belief. And given that you have good reason to believe the process is reliable, you have good reason to believe the forecast for the next week. So, you are rational in believing as you do. And what’s more, you’d be irrational if you didn’t believe it given the evidence you have. You are rational to believe in the tea leaf method but you aren’t warranted in that belief. Why not? Because even though you are doing a good job of responding to the evidence you have, your belief is not grounded in evidence that will generally lead to truth, since your belief is ultimately grounded in your community’s unreliable practice of predicting the weather by reading tea leaves. In the Getter-style case above, it was only an odd twist (the combination that Nogott wanted to deceive and Havitt just happened to have a Ford) that stopped the belief from being knowledge. In the great majority of cases in which a belief is formed on such solid inductive evidence and turns out to be true, the belief will be knowledge. But the same cannot be said for beliefs about how the weather will turn out when they are grounded in the reading of tea leaves. Intuitively, these beliefs aren’t even close to being knowledge because their grounding isn’t sufficiently objectively good. To take one more case that has been much discussed in the recent literature. Suppose that, unbeknownst to you, you are in the Matrix. While everything seems normal, the fact is that all you experience through the five senses is being produced directly in your brain via an elaborate computer. What you experience is a thorough going, multisensory hallucination. Having no reason to think you are in the Matrix, your evidence strongly indicates that there is a tree directly before you and you hear birds singing. But, of course, there is nothing of the kind there. Your sensory experience is entirely unreliable. Yet for all of that, you do a fine job of following your evidence as you come to believe that there is a tree in front of you and birds singing nearby. In our terminology, your belief is perfectly rational although not warranted because it is not grounded in what is objectively good evidence for what you’ve come to believe.

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Epistemic blamelessness The final concept I’d like to sketch is epistemic blamelessness. In addition to (a) objective or truth-linked accounts and (b) broadly evidentialist accounts of justification, there is a tradition that takes epistemic responsibility to be at the core of justification. To be justified in a belief, is to be responsible in forming (and maintaining) it. What such responsibility amounts to is a matter of controversy. We’ve already discussed Locke’s thesis of evidence proportionalism. Locke thought that it was our intellectual duty to proportion our judgments (beliefs) to the evidence we possess. But as many have pointed out, such a conviction seems to bring with it a commitment to doxastic voluntarism—the thesis that we have relatively direct control over what we believe and how confidently we believe it. If a suitably strong version of doxastic voluntarism is true, then in some important sense, whether or not I have a given belief is up to me in the same way that my holding the elevator door for the person hurrying to catch it is up to me if I am standing at the door inside the elevator. But while a certain range of actions is pretty clearly directly in our control, the same cannot be said for beliefs. The easiest way to see this is to consider something that you know is false—like, for example, that summer directly follows winter. Could you, just by trying, come to believe that it is true? It seems not. And the problem isn’t just that you know that this particular belief is false. Consider this proposition: the number of the Galapagos Islands is even. It’s very likely that you have no idea how many islands compose the Galapagos, but you know that the number is either odd or even. Still, can you make yourself believe that the number is even just by deciding to? There is no doubt that you can decide to act as though you believe it. But that does not mean that you really believe it. (Incidentally, if you did come to believe the number is even, you’d be wrong! There are twenty-one islands in the Galapagos.) If doxastic voluntarism is false, then responsibilism (as the view is sometimes called) can’t be construed on Lockean lines. For if I don’t have direct control of my beliefs, then I might be thoroughly responsible regarding my search for evidence and my reflection upon it, and still not proportion my beliefs to my evidence. In such a case, even if I believe against the evidence, I’ll be responsible in believing



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as I do and so justified in my belief in the blamelessness sense of that term. What then can be required for responsible epistemic behavior? This is a good and difficult question. As suggested above, a responsible epistemic agent will make an effort to proportion her beliefs to her evidence, even if success isn’t guaranteed. One way that an agent can do this is to be scrupulous in her search for evidence and reflective on the evidence she finds. Because the aim of this book is not the development of a responsibilist theory of justification, we can be content with the very broad sketch above. Blamelessly believing something is to have satisfied one’s epistemic duties in believing as one does. Among the questions that we will be addressing, then, is what our epistemic duties require of us where our memory is concerned? If I have a belief for which I can’t remember my evidence, am I obligated to try to find evidence for it? Or is it permissible for me to go on believing anyway? And if I believe something and can’t immediately recall my evidence for it, do I have a duty to reflect carefully and maybe try to find something to cue my recall?

Memory Skepticism Before launching into our main project of examining the conditions under which memory belief is justified or counts as knowledge, we should take a moment to consider the worst-case scenario for such a project: memory skepticism. Until now, our discussion has taken for granted that some memory beliefs are justified and I’ve implied that many of them are even true (otherwise, there wouldn’t be such a thing as memory knowledge). Yet just as there is a long tradition in epistemology that is skeptical about perceptual knowledge, so there are those who argue for memory skepticism. To be a standard skeptic regarding a mode of belief formation or retention is to think that it produces very little, if any, knowledge. A more radical variety of skepticism would claim that beliefs of that variety are not even justified. Because our sense of justified is ecumenical and includes blamelessness and rationality, and the claim that all memory beliefs are culpable, or irrational, is on its face extremely implausible, I’m

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going to limit our discussion of memory skepticism to the thesis that there is no memory knowledge (or warranted memory belief). What motivates skeptical concerns about memory? One famous thought experiment comes from English philosopher Bertrand Russell early in the twentieth century.1 Imagine that the universe sprang into existence only five minutes ago. The thought isn’t that there was a big bang and the universe must begin to evolve, but that it comes into being fully formed as we find it now. Now you might think that we know that this didn’t happen because we have memories of events that occurred years ago. Russell’s point is that our having apparent memories of past events doesn’t entail that those events occurred because our memories might be only apparent. The idea is that the universe sprang into existence (or, perhaps, was created) five minutes ago just as we now find it—full of adults who have apparentbut-false memories of the past. How could you prove that Russell’s thought experiment was false? While Russell’s idea is interesting, it is unlikely to be taken seriously. And to be fair, Russell’s point wasn’t that we should take it as a genuine possibility but only that it demonstrates that our having apparent memories doesn’t logically entail that they are genuine memories. What other motivations might there be for denying memory knowledge? Here is a more compelling answer: if memory is generally unreliable, then it can’t preserve or produce knowledge. And what reason do we have for thinking that it is generally reliable? Maybe without such an argument, we shouldn’t trust our memories and so we shouldn’t take them to be sources or preservers of knowledge. If we could provide a good argument for memory’s reliability, then we would put to rest the primary reason for skepticism. It turns out, however, that producing a good argument for the general reliability of memory is more difficult that you might think. Let me demonstrate this with an example. Suppose I decide to test my memory in the following way: I write down a random list of numbers and proceed to memorize them. Having assured myself that I know the list, I go about my business for the next several hours, and then write out the list of numbers from memory. I take my new list and compare it to the original and find that they match perfectly. Is this good evidence for the general reliability of memory? Unfortunately, it is not. Let’s make the reasoning involved more explicit to see where the trouble lies.



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1 I memorized the original list of numbers. 2 A few hours later, I attempted to duplicate the list from

memory. 3 The earlier list and the later list match perfectly. 4 Therefore, my memory was reliable in this instance. 5 Therefore, I have at least a bit of good evidence that my

memory is reliable. This argument seems reasonable. It doesn’t claim to a solid argument for the reliability of memory but only that my little test is a bit of good evidence for the reliability of my memory. But once we think a little more about the premises we see that the argument has problems. For consider the first step: what’s my justification for thinking that I memorized the original list of numbers? The answer is as clear as it is problematic. I believe (1) because I remember memorizing the list. And the same thing goes with (2). Step three is fine because in that case my belief is directly grounded in perception. But two of the three premises in the argument are warranted only if memory is reliable. And that is just the question at issue. Philosophers call this kind of argument “epistemically circular reasoning” because the justification of the premises presupposes what is ultimately at issue.2 It’s beyond the scope of this discussion to argue that it isn’t possible to provide a good, noncircular argument for the reliability of memory, but one can see from this example that it isn’t going to be easy to show that memory in general is reliable without depending (one way or another) on memory.3 I want to avoid two potential misunderstandings here. First, the circularity of arguments of the above type arises because we were trying to generate evidence for the general reliability of memory. But if that isn’t the issue, if the question concerns only memory of a particular variety, then such arguments will not be circular. That is, if the question in the above example were the much more specific “Is my memory for lists of numbers reliable?” then the method described above produces noncircular evidence that it is. Why? Because assuming the reliability of my memory for experienced

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events of my immediate past is legitimate when the issue is the reliability of memory for lists of numbers. The second potential misunderstanding would be to think that our discussion so far provides reason to think that memory is unreliable. Even if true, the claim that there is no non-epistemically circular argument for the general reliability of memory is no reason at all for thinking that memory is unreliable. So, please don’t take my inclination to think there are no good arguments for the reliability of memory to suggest that memory is unreliable. Where does this leave us? The important question has to do with the burden of proof. Should we think that a cognitive process can produce knowledge only if we can give a noncircular argument for its reliability? If that is the case, then it might be that skepticism not only gets a foot in the door, but waltzes right in. On the other hand, we might hold that memory can sustain/produce knowledge even if we don’t have a good argument for its reliability just as long as it really is reliable. Let’s consider this question by thinking about memory’s epistemological big sibling: perception. Is it plausible that your perceptual beliefs count as knowledge only if you have a good, noncircular argument that perception is reliable? Here’s a reason for denying this: suppose that five-year-old Keya sees her dog Prisha eat from her bowl. If the burden of proof regarding perception is that knowledge can happen only when the subject has a good, noncircular argument for the reliability of her perceptual beliefs, then Keya doesn’t know that Prisha ate. Because even if there is a good, noncircular argument for the reliability of sense perception, that argument won’t be known by a young child. But does it seem right that Prisha lacks perceptual knowledge not only in this case but in every case? Isn’t it enough that perception really is reliable, and that Keya doesn’t have any reason to doubt it? If that’s the right thing to say about perception, then it should be the right thing to say about memory as well. Knowledge can be had when its source is reliable even if we lack a noncircular argument for its reliability. Obviously, there is much more to say about skeptical claims about memory. But for the purposes of this book, I want to make a common-sense assumption that we have no good reason to doubt: many sorts of memory are mostly reliable. That is consistent with



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memory being unreliable in certain situations and domains. So, I’m not assuming that in every instance, we should take as given that memory is trustworthy. Instead, my working hypothesis is that memory is reliable unless we have reason to think that, in certain contexts, it isn’t.4 There are many ways that one could approach the epistemology of memory. One reasonable method would be to focus on the question of memory’s reliability. But I’ve chosen a different path. As an epistemologist, I’m most concerned with what it takes for a belief to count as knowledge or to be justified. We have a great store of memory beliefs. Under what conditions, or in what circumstances, are we justified in holding them? That is, what does it take to be justified in a memory belief? So, rather than beating the bushes for a good argument for the general reliability of memory, our chief concern will be to discover the conditions or circumstances in which our memory beliefs are justified. While we’ll make no assumptions about the reliability of memory in specific contexts, we will assume that, unless there is good empirical reason to be suspicious, memory is generally reliable.

A recap and look ahead A brief recap is in order. In the contemporary literature on the topic of epistemic justification, one finds an unruly host of proposed analyses. Among the multitude are those that require that a belief to be objectively well-grounded (e.g., reliably formed), those that require a belief to be well-supported by one’s available evidence, and those that require a belief to be blamelessly held. By my lights, the fact that there are so many, and so varied, accounts of the ordinary understanding of justification indicates that there probably isn’t a single well-behaved concept. So rather than taking a stand on which account is right, I propose to stipulatively define four terms: warranted, rational, blameless, and justified. A belief is warranted only if it is objectively well-grounded. A belief is rational only if it is supported by the subject’s available evidence. And a belief is blameless only if the subject violates no epistemic duties in holding it. I will call a belief justified iff it is either warranted, rational, or blameless. Since

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it will be laborious to be continuously marking these distinctions, for the most part I’ll use “justified” and its cognates since it is the most ecumenical of the four. However, as we wrap up each of the epistemological chapters, we’ll consider how the view in question fairs regarding the other three categories. In what follows we’ll consider various possible accounts of the justification of memory belief. We’ll begin by looking at a couple versions of what is known as epistemic conservatism.The conservative claims that our beliefs are “innocent until proven guilty.” That is, all our memory beliefs are justified unless we have some special reason to doubt them. We’ll look at two very different explications and defenses of this perspective. The first position (discussed in Chapter 2), argued for by Gilbert Harman, is explicitly motivated by discoveries in cognitive science. Harman believes that taking any other view of the matter will result in psychologically unrealistic expectations of us. The work of Matthew McGrath is the second defense of conservatism that we’ll consider (in Chapter 3); his arguments come from a more straightforward philosophical approach to these issues. In Chapter 4, we’ll turn our attention to the evidentialist epistemology of Richard Feldman and Earl Conee. We’ve already seen a rough outline of their perspective but in Chapter 4, we will go into considerable more depth. The chapter concludes with suggestions of how to alter evidentialism that will make it less susceptible to the philosophical problems that dog it, while keeping intact the fundamental (and important) insight of the theory. Having discussed accounts according to which memory beliefs are prima facie justified even without any supporting evidence (Chapters 2 and 3), and theories that require that one’s evidence taken as a whole supports a given memory belief if it is to be justified (Chapter 4), we’ll look next at what might be thought to be a position between these two poles. The foundationalist claims that the experience one has when one recalls a belief from memory provides prima facie justification for the belief. So, it isn’t merely that the belief is held that justifies it; it’s the experience of recall. In this chapter, we’ll look at the work of John Pollock and Joseph Cruz as contemporary representatives of memory foundationalism. The chapter concludes by looking at a view that is in the same general ballpark as Pollock’s and Cruz’s foundationalism: phenomenal conservatism.



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We conclude by looking at a pair of theories that, while distinct, can be paired to provide an account of the justification of memory belief that is quite unlike anything we’ve looked at before. Chapter 6 discusses preservationism and its frequent epistemological partner, reliabilism. The combined theory emphasizes two items that are absent from standard versions of the previously discussed theories: the importance of the belief’s past and likelihood of truth. Throughout these chapters, I’ve sought to present the perspec­ tives, difficulties, and proposed solutions in a reasonably fair-minded way. But I have not shied away from taking a stand when it seems to me that the truth bends in a particular direction. Each position that is discussed in these pages has very able defenders. Anyone who is supremely confident of the superiority of her own view has not considered the best cases to be made for her competitors. I hope that in the chapters that follow, I have been fair to the positions that, in the end, are rejected in favor of those that I judge to be stronger.

Study questions 1 How is the justification of memory beliefs important for the justification of new beliefs? 2 Explain the significance of the distinction between what is required for justifiably coming to believe something and what is required for justifiably continuing to believe it? Provide an example that shows why the conditions for justification might well be different for each. 3 For the purposes of this book, what is the definition of a memory belief? And what is difference between something’s being a memory belief and its being a belief from memory? 4 Give an example of a belief that is prima facie justified but not ultima facie justified. 5 Distinguish the following three concepts of epistemic evaluation: warranted, rational, and blameless (responsible). In the context of this book what does “justified” mean?

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For further reading Alston, W. (1985), “Concepts of Epistemic Justification,” The Monist, 65: 57–89. (Alston distinguishes between two concepts of epistemic justification – one that is roughly reliabilist and the other is responsibilist – and argues that the former concept is more epistemically central.) Kornblith, H. (1983), “Justified Belief and Epistemically Responsible Action,” The Philosophical Review 92 (1): 33–48. (Kornblith argues justification should be construed along responsibilist lines.) Gettier, E. (1963), “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Analysis, 23 (6): 121–23. (In this very short paper, Gettier presents his famous counterexample to the justified true belief account of knowledge.) Plantinga, A. (1993a), Warrant: The Current Debate, New York: Oxford University Press, Chapter 1. (The first of Plantinga’s three main epistemology books, the first chapter gives a critical discussion of responsibilism (what he calls “deontological theories” as a theory of epistemic warrant.) Plantinga, A. (1993b), Warrant and Proper Function, New York: Oxford University Press, Chapter 1 (This chapter gives a overview of Plantinga’s theory of epistemic warrant.) Goldman, A.I. and McGrath, M. (2015), Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction, New York: Oxford University Press, Chapter 3. (This chapter provides a general overview of attempts to define knowledge.) Zagzebski, L. (1996), Virtues of Mind: An Inquiry into the Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge, New York: Oxford University Press, Part III. (The most detailed responsibilist account of the relationship between moral virtue and knowledge.)

2 Harman’s argument for epistemic conservatism

Introduction

I

n this chapter we will begin to consider the viability of the least demanding position regarding the justification of memory beliefs: epistemic conservatism.1 The conservative position is characterized by the conviction that cognitive stability is a virtue. Put another way, a belief system should undergo revision only if there is positive reason to do so. While virtually everyone will agree with this when it comes to adding new beliefs (i.e., when one comes to believe a proposition), it is more controversial that a positive reason is required for jettisoning continuing beliefs from our system, and that one is justified in making a change only if there is good reason to do so. To use a legal metaphor, a belief is thought to be epistemically innocent until proven guilty. Although conservatism hasn’t been a particularly popular position, it has had its able defenders. In this chapter, we focus on the work of Gilbert Harman. In his important book, Change in View,2 Harman presents an argument for conservatism based on empirical research in cognitive science and limitations of human memory. In Chapter 3, we will look at Matthew McGrath’s more straightforwardly philosophical argument for, and for development of, conservatism. But this present chapter will be focused on the work of Gilbert Harman.

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Harman on “foundations theory” Although he couches his discussion in terms of a theory of “belief revision,” Harman’s main concern is the condition under which memory belief is justified. So, it is legitimate to take him to be offering an account of what I am calling “ongoing justification”—that is, of what is required for one to be justified in continuing to hold a belief. Let’s begin by looking at the theory against which Harman argues, namely, what he labels “the foundations theory.” His use of the phrase “foundations theory” is rather idiosyncratic and unfortunate since it suggests that what he is discussing is the position that is typically called “foundationalism” in the epistemological literature. While this position is similar to foundationalism as a general theory of the structure of epistemic justification (more on this in Chapter 5), it is also in many ways importantly distinct. Keep in mind, then, that he means something different by “foundations theory” than we will mean by “foundationalism” later in the book. According to Harman, the foundations theory claims that to be justified in continuing to believe that P: it is required either that P be a foundational belief whose intrinsic justification is not defeated or that there be at least one undefeated justification of P from other beliefs one is justified in believing. If one believes P and it happens that all one’s justifications for believing P come to be defeated, one is no longer justified in continuing to believe P, and one should subtract P from one’s beliefs.3 The foundations theorist is thereby committed to the denial of the principle of conservatism, that is, loosely, that a belief is justified in the absence of special reasons to think the contrary. According to conservatism, a belief gains prima facie justification simply by being believed. The foundations theorist, on the other hand, asserts that a belief gets no justificatory support from merely being held; a doxastic state is prima facie justified only if it is intrinsically justified or soundly based on other justified beliefs. And such justification is, of course, defeasible. This is very important for the foundations theorist. For she claims that if S justifiably believes P and permissibly infers Q from



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P, and later comes to have her justification for P defeated, then her justification for Q and for any belief justificatory dependent on Q, is likewise defeated. Thus, new evidence can create a great stir in one’s doxastic pool. There is one other key claim that the foundations theorist makes: one ought always to keep track of the justification of one’s beliefs. If I believe that P, and infer from P that Q, I must continue to keep P in mind if my belief that Q is to remain justified. This point gives rise to what Harman calls the “Principle of Negative Undermining.” Principle of Negative Undermining: (PNU): One should stop believing P whenever one does not associate one’s belief in P with an adequate justification (either intrinsic or extrinsic).4 So, the foundations theorist claims that to be justified in continuing to believe a proposition, a belief must either be of a special kind that has an intrinsic justification or else one must both have a good reason for the belief and continue to associate the belief with that good reason.

Harman’s initial argument for conservatism As we shall see in due course, Harman rejects the PNU and accepts instead the Principle of Positive Undermining. Principle of Positive Undermining (PPU): One should stop believing P whenever one positively believes that one’s reasons for believing that P are no good.5 For a good deal of the book, Harman calls the theory he favors “coherentism.” If one understands his view as a variety of negative coherentism his description is apt. A negative coherentist is just a conservative: a belief is justified as long as it isn’t inconsistent with other beliefs. In contrast, positive coherentism requires that a belief cohere with doxastic system, typically by being evidentially supported

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by other beliefs.6 In addition to supporting the PPU and rejecting the PNU, Harman also endorses the Principle of Conservatism: Principle of Conservatism (PC): One is justified in continuing fully to accept something in the absence of a special reason not to.7 The PPU gives us a necessary condition for justifiably continuing to believe that P: one must not positively believe that her reasons for believing that P are not good. On the other hand, PC states a sufficient condition of justifiably continuing to believe: if you don’t have a special reason not to believe that P, then you are justified in believing that P. Finally, Harman explains that his position on the justification of ongoing belief is grounded in a twofold goal of belief revision: the maximizing of coherence and the minimizing of change.8 The PPU is grounded in the former and the PC in the latter. What is it for reasons to be “no good” or to have a “special reason” not to hold a belief? According to Harman, the justification of a belief is undermined if one comes to believe that it was grounded in a false belief or one comes to believe that the ground of the belief in question is not a reliable indication that the belief’s truth.9 After elucidating the competing positions, Harman argues that conservatism is superior both as a descriptive and as a normative theory of belief revision. Much of his case is made via an extended example. He asks us to consider a certain student, Karen, who recently received the results of an aptitude test. Her scores indicate that she has considerable aptitude for science and music, but little aptitude for history and philosophy. This is surprising to Karen, since she has done well in science and history, and not so well in music and philosophy. In light of her test scores, Karen comes to believe that her history course was easy and that she didn’t work hard enough in her music class. Sometime later and much to Karen’s chagrin, she finds out that the scores that she received were not her own but were rather those of another student. Furthermore, the results of her tests were lost or never to be found. The pertinent question is, how should Karen now go about revising her beliefs? Put differently, given her total evidence, which of her beliefs is Karen still justified in holding? To make things clearer, I will list Karen’s relevant beliefs prior to her learning of the test score foul-up. The report shows that



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1 The report shows that K has an aptitude in science and music. 2 The report shows that K has little aptitude for philosophy and

history. 3 K has an aptitude for science and music. 4 K has little aptitude for philosophy and history. 5 K has done well in science and history. 6 K has not done well in philosophy and music. 7 K’s history course was an easy one (and that explains K’s

doing well). 8 K didn’t work hard enough in music (and that explains K’s

doing poorly). The relations among these beliefs are as follows: Karen comes to believe (3) because she believes (1) and she comes to believe (4) because she believes (2). (5) and (6) are memory beliefs that are grounded in her experience in the relevant classes and beliefs about the grades she earned in them. And Karen comes to believe (7) because she believes (4) and (5); she comes to believe (8) because she believes (3) and (6). At the time before she receives word that the scores sent to her weren’t hers, Karen is justified in believing propositions (l)–(8). Because of the most recent letter from the testing service, Karen further believes that 9 The earlier report K received indicates nothing about her

aptitudes. Karen now has some incoherence in her belief system. It is instructive to see just how the foundations theory and conservatism differ in how they evaluate Karen’s situation. Let’s hear first from the former. The foundations theorist will claim that Karen needs to consider which of her prior beliefs are epistemically defeated by (9). She should then try to rid herself of those beliefs as well as any others that depend on them for their justification. It is clear that (9) defeats Karen’s justification for both (1) and (2); the earlier reports show nothing about her competence—it is the competence of an unknown person that they indicate. And since (3) and (4) are based on (1) and (2), respectively (i.e., what Karen believes about her own competence

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was based on her belief that the reports were indications of her competence), both of these should also be abandoned. Similarly, (7) and (8)—the beliefs about the difficulty of her history course and her lack of effort in music—have been defeated since their justification depends on an inductive argument in which (3) and (4) (along with (5) and (6)) figure as premises. According to the foundations theorist, then, Karen is now justified only in her beliefs (5), (6), and (9). The conservative has a different story to tell. Recall the twofold goal of belief revision according to conservatism: the maximizing of coherence and the minimizing of change. So, the conservative will recommend that Karen seek to regain coherence in her system while making the fewest number of changes needed to accomplish this. Now it is clear that if she continues to believe (l)–(9), Karen will have an incoherent system. What is the reason for this incoherence? Proposition (9) is inconsistent with (1) and (2); what (9) says, loosely, is that the report Karen received shows nothing about her aptitudes (since the scores reported weren’t Karen’s). On the other hand, (1) and (2) assert that the report indicates Karen’s aptitudes. So, Karen ought to give up either (9) or (1) and (2). Now surely Karen should realize that the reason she had for believing that the report is indicative of her aptitudes is no good and that she should quit believing (1) and (2). What of her beliefs (3)–(9)? If there is incoherence in believing them all, then the conservative will say that at least one of them is unjustified. Well, is there any conflict between, say, (9)—her belief that the earlier report was not about her test performance—and (3) or (4)—her beliefs about her competencies? There is not. Propositions (3) and (4) are statements about Karen’s aptitudes; such statements are consistent with a proposition about scores not reporting her aptitudes. So the conservative will claim that upon coming to believe (9), the justification for Karen’s memory beliefs (1) and (2) are defeated, but that the justification for (3)–(8) is not. Karen has no reason not to continue to believe them. Harman admits that at this stage conservatism is likely to seem implausible as a normative theory. Our intuitions tell us that since Karen’s belief about her aptitudes and her resulting beliefs about her history and music courses were justified by her belief about the accuracy of the scores she received, Karen’s justification for holding her aptitude beliefs



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has been defeated; she now has no reason whatsoever to think that they are true and so they are not justified. However, Harman argues, although we are initially tempted to think this, ultimately conservatism can be shown to be the better normative theory. The road to seeing this, Harman avers, begins with the recognition that it is likely that Karen would do just what conservatism endorses. The evidence for this comes in the form of the data compiled on the belief perseverance phenomenon. Harman quotes the following descriptions of experiments from a survey article by Lee Ross and Craig A. Anderson. (Because the detail of the experiments will be important in our discussion of Harman’s argument, I will quote the article at some length.)10 Subjects first received continuous false feedback as they performed a novel discrimination task (i.e., distinguishing authentic suicide notes from fictitious ones). . . . [Then each subject] received a standard debriefing session in which he learned that his putative outcome had been predetermined and that his feedback had been totally unrelated to actual performance. . . . [E]very subject was led to explicitly acknowledge his understanding of the nature and purpose of the experimented deception. Following this total discrediting of the original information, the subjects completed a dependent variable questionnaire dealing with [their] performance and abilities. The evidence for post debriefing impression perseverance was unmistakable. . . . On virtually every measure . . . the totally discredited initial outcome manipulation produced significant “residual” effects upon [subjects’] . . . assessments. Follow-up experiments have since shown that a variety of unfounded personal impressions, once induced by experimental procedures, can survive a variety of total discrediting procedures. For example, Jennings, Lepper, and Ross . . . have demonstrated that subjects’ impression of their ability at interpersonal persuasion (having them succeed or fail to convince a confederate to donate blood) can persist after they have learned that the initial outcome was totally inauthentic. Similarly, . . . two related experiments have shown that students’ erroneous impression of their “logical problem solving abilities” (and their academic choices in a follow-up

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measure two months later) persevered even after they had learned that good or poor teaching procedures provided a totally sufficient explanation for the successes or failures that were the basis for such impressions. In summary, it is clear that beliefs can survive . . . the total destruction of their original evidential bases.11 Briefly, the belief perseverance literature suggests that in very many cases, if a subject comes to believe that P and, on that basis, comes to believe that Q, and subsequently, has her justification for P thoroughly defeated, she will nevertheless persist in believing that Q. The relevance of this to Karen’s case is straightforward. Having had beliefs (1) and (2) completely discredited, Karen will probably continue to believe (3) and (4), as well as (7) and (8), even though these latter beliefs were formed (in part) because Karen came to believe (1) and (2). Conservatism appears to be the better descriptive theory—that is, theory describing what we do—while the foundations theory is the superior normative theory—that is, theory telling us what we should do. For intuitively, Karen is no longer justified in her beliefs about either her aptitudes or the relative difficulty of the courses and how hard she worked in them. So inasmuch as she can, she ought to rid herself of every belief that was formed in light of (1) and (2). Yet, if Karen acts as the subjects in the aforementioned experiments act, she will likely continue to hold all of her relevant beliefs with the exception of (1) and (2). So it looks as if we should say that Karen’s beliefs (3), (4), (7), and (8) are unjustified. Appearances, Harman argues, are in this instance deceiving. Harman states his case by offering an explanation of the belief perseverance phenomenon. Why would people fail to recognize when the justification of a belief is thoroughly discredited? Harman suggests that what the debriefing studies show is that people simply do not keep track of the justification relations among their beliefs. They continue to believe things after the evidence for them has been discredited because they do not realize what they are doing. They do not understand that the discredited evidence was the sole reason why they believe as they do. They do not see they would



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not have been justified in forming those beliefs in the absence of the now discredited evidence.12 Thus, Harman is claiming that Karen continues to believe as she does because she doesn’t remember that her reason for believing (3) was belief (1) and her reason for believing (4) was belief (2). And she doesn’t realize that beliefs (7) and (8) were originally formed in light of beliefs (3)–(6). It follows from Harman’s proposal that the foundations theorist will find fault with Karen because she has refused to keep track of the justification of her beliefs and has thus violated the PNU. Furthermore, the foundations theorist will be forced to conclude that most of what most of what we believe is not justified since we rarely do keep track of our reasons for our beliefs. Thus, Harman claims, “[foundations theory] implies that people are unjustified in almost all their beliefs. This is an absurd result!”13 So the foundations theory is not the intuitively plausible theory that it initially appeared to be. Still, isn’t Karen unjustified in believing as she does? No, Harman claims, she is not. We are inclined initially to think that she is because we naturally suppose that people keep track of the justification of their beliefs. Had Karen done this, and continued to believe the discredited beliefs, then she would believe unjustifiably, since she would be violating not only PNU but the PPU as well. However, when we think about her situation, bearing in mind that she hasn’t kept track of her justifications, it would appear that she doesn’t believe infelicitously. She doesn’t remember that (1) was her reason for believing (3) and so even if (1) is shown to be an unjustified belief, we can’t expect her to draw any conclusions regarding (3). Given what she has to work with, it isn’t epistemically negligent of her to continue to believe the propositions that were originally based on a now discredited belief.

The principle of clutter avoidance All right, one may think, given that Karen hasn’t kept track of her justification, we can’t expect that she should now see that there are

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other beliefs that she should surrender. So, there is a sense in which she is justified in believing as she does. However, there is another sense in which her failing to keep track of her justification doesn’t get her off the hook. Suppose that she ought to keep track of why she believes as she does. Our pleading ignorance for her now is no excuse; her ignorance is a culpable one. My honestly forgetting that I promised to repay the money today that you lent me is no excuse for my not doing what I ought. I ought to have remembered and my dereliction of this duty surely can’t justify my dereliction of the other. Why, then, can’t the foundations theorist reply to Harman and the coherentist by saying that Karen is after all unjustified in continuing to believe as she does because she ought to have kept track of her justifications? And had she done this, she would no longer hold these defeated beliefs. Harman has foreseen such a response and is ready with a reply. He appeals to a principle that he calls “Clutter Avoidance” (CAP). This principle simply states that one should not clutter one’s mind with trivialities.14 Writes Harman, There is a practical reason to avoid too much clutter in one’s beliefs. There is a limit to what one can remember, a limit to the number of things one can put into long-term storage, and a limit to what one can retrieve. It is important to save room for important things and not clutter one’s mind with a lot of unimportant matters. It is . . . efficient not to try to retain these justifications and the accompanying justifying beliefs. This leaves more room in memory for important matters.15 Harman’s view, then, is that it is perfectly appropriate and hence justifiable for Karen to lose track of the justification of her beliefs. Humans, after all, are finite beings with limited storage capacity, retrieval ability, and time. Remembering only beliefs, and not the relations between them, better uses one’s capacities. That is, if you believe that P and you see that P supports Q, and so you come to believe that Q, there is no reason for you to continue to believe that P supports Q. It is enough to just continue believing that P. Enough,



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Harman thinks, but often unnecessary and even a bad idea. Harman maintains that it isn’t always a good thing even to remember the beliefs upon which another belief is based. Once a conclusion is reached, it is normally appropriate not to remember the premises from which the target belief was derived. Such beliefs were had only as a means to an end; once they have accomplished their purpose, there is no longer any point in maintaining them. So if Q is the belief that matters, then not only does justification not require that I recall that P is my reason for believing Q, but it is also unnecessary that I continue to believe P at all. A very brief recap is in order. Harman has argued that conservatism is the correct theory of ongoing justification. He has done this by contending that the lesson afforded by the belief perseverance phenomenon is that people do not keep track of the justification of their beliefs. Thus, when a belief that serves as the evidential basis for another belief is defeated, one won’t—as a descriptive, psychological fact—generally stop believing the second belief since one won’t remember at that point that the second belief is justificatorily dependent on the first. Furthermore, our failing to keep track of the justification of our beliefs is not an epistemic liability; quite the contrary, it is a virtue. For if we did keep track, we would clutter our minds with trivialities that will only get in the way when we try to store more important information in memory. In the following section, I will present three problems with Harman’s argument for conservatism. In sum, I will argue that Harman has not made a good case for conservatism as a theory of the justification of memory belief.

Problems with Harman’s argument The case Harman has made for his position is vulnerable at multiple points. First, his explanation of the belief perseverance phenomenon is implausible. Second, he takes far too dim a view of the capacities of human memory. Third, there are substantial epistemic and practical reasons for keeping track of the justification of at least much of what one believes.

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An objection to Harman’s account of belief perseverance Let’s begin with the first objection. Recall that Harman’s explanation of the belief perseverance phenomenon is that “what the debriefing studies show is that people simply do not keep track of the justification relations among their beliefs.”16 It is important to know what Harman means when he says that people “fail to keep track” of the justification of their beliefs. One possibility is that to not keep track of P is merely to forget that P. While I don’t have any problem with this response, it fails to end our query since there are at least two different ways of interpreting “S forgets P.” It might mean simply that S no longer has P stored, or it might mean that either S no longer has P stored or that S cannot retrieve P. So is Harman’s claim that people forget the justification relations that hold between beliefs the claim that (i) people no longer have such information stored or that (ii) they either no longer have it stored or else they retained it but are unable to recall it when it is needed? Let’s call (ii) the “strong account” since it includes forgetting in the first sense. Clearly, Harman intends the strong account of “forgetting.” He claims that It stretches credulity to suppose people always keep track of the sources of their beliefs but often fail to notice when these sources are undermined. That is like supposing people always remember everything that has ever happened to them but cannot always retrieve the stored information from memory. To say that one remembers something is to say one has stored it in a way that normally allow it to be retrieved at will. Similarly, to say people keep track of the sources of their beliefs must be to say they can normally use this information when it is appropriate to do so.17 Harman therefore thinks that it is sufficient for forgetting that one often cannot recall the information when needed and that at least most of such forgotten material are not in long-term memory (LTM) at all. So, Harman claims that belief perseverance is caused by people’s failure to keep track of why they believe as they do. But a closer



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look at the original experiments performed by Lee Ross and his colleagues reveals that Harman’s account is most implausible.18 As they performed the suicide note task, subjects had been told whether their previous response was correct or incorrect. After twenty-five such trials, the subject was told that she had been right in so many cases and wrong in so many cases; and, in the first of the experiments, subjects had been told that “16 or so” correct answers was an average score while a score of 24 showed one a success and a score of 10 showed one a failure at distinguishing real from fictitious suicide notes. After this success-failure manipulation, the subjects were left alone for a short duration of five or twenty-five minutes. Following the delay manipulation, the subjects were debriefed, that is, it was revealed to them that the scores they received told them nothing about how they had in fact performed on the task. After the debriefing the subjects were given a questionnaire in which they were asked to evaluate how well they think they actually did in the task, how many answers they thought that the average student would have gotten correct, and how many answers they would get right if they were to do the same sort of task again. There is no indication in the description of the procedure offered by Ross, et al., that there was any significant delay between the debriefing and the administering of the questionnaire. I go through these details because they are relevant to Harman’s claim that the explanation of the perseverance phenomenon is people’s failure to keep track of the justifications of their beliefs. We can now see just how implausible this is. For the delay between the success-failure manipulation and the debriefing/questionnaire administration was five minutes for some subjects and twenty-five minutes for others. Furthermore, it is interesting to note that in none of these analyses was there a main effect for the length of delay variable or an interaction involving this variable that approached statistical significance; accordingly, the data were collapsed across the delay dimension for further analyses.19 Thus, the results of the experiment were unaffected by a delay variable of five minutes as opposed to twenty-five minutes. So, the results of the study were reported without distinguishing between

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the two sets of subjects. Any relevant forgetting that was done by the subjects must have occurred in five minutes time, or less. Harman must claim that a subject forgets in a matter of minutes that the reason she believes that, say, she is poor at genuine suicide note detection is that she was told that she had done poorly on a genuine suicide note detection task. But that’s not plausible. Consider what Harman’s position implies: a subject is told that she did poorly in a suicide note detection test, she immediately comes to believe that she is not good at making such suicide note distinctions, and is left alone for five minutes, and then told that the results were bogus. Harman claims that the aptitude belief survives because the subject no longer remembers that her belief in her aptitude is based on what she was told originally about her performance on the test. Harman’s assertion that the belief perseverance phenomenon is due to the failure of people to keep track of the justification of their beliefs is implausible (at least as a general account of the phenomenon). Of course, this doesn’t mean people always remember their reasons for a belief; obviously, we routinely forget them. For all I’ve argued so far it could be (though I’ll soon deny it) that people ought not to remember the grounds for their beliefs. All that I have argued is that the belief perseverance phenomenon as described in the psychological literature discussed by Harman can’t be explained in this way; it doesn’t show that people fail to keep track of the justificatory relations among their beliefs.

Objections to Harman’s portrayal of human memory My second objection to Harman concerns his view of our memorial capacities and abilities. Harman quite rightly wants to incorporate into his discussion the recognition that there are limits and shortcomings of human memory. Immediately following his initial explication of the CAP, Harman gives his rationale for accepting it. To suppose one’s mind could become cluttered with beliefs is to suppose such things as (1) that it takes time to add to one’s



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beliefs further propositions that are trivially implied by them, time that might be better spent on other things, and/or (2) that one has “limited storage capacity” for beliefs, so that there is a limit on the number of things one can believe, and/or (3) that there are limits on “information retrieval,” so the more one believes the more difficult it is to recall relevant beliefs when one needs them.20 I think that his first point is right. If the CAP suggested only that one should not routinely derive everything that one can from one’s beliefs, then it would be a very attractive normative principle. It is the second and third rationales for the CAP that I think are mistaken. There are two ways of understanding Harman’s second point. The trouble is that on one way of understanding it, the claim is true but not strong enough to motivate the CAP; and the alternative reading has the point sufficiently strong, but there is no reason to think that it is true. Suppose that we take Harman simply to be making the point that humans, being finite entities, cannot store an infinite number of beliefs. Here one needs to make the distinction between explicit and implicit beliefs. An explicit belief is a belief which “involves an explicit mental representation whose content is the content of that belief,”21 while an implicit belief is a non-explicit belief that is “easily inferable” from one’s explicit beliefs. So what is being claimed is that since the human mind has limited storage capacity, we can store only so many explicit beliefs. If this is all that is being asserted, there is nothing to disagree with. However, this fact about human memory doesn’t support the CAP at all; storage limitation is relevant to the CAP only if there is any real danger of one’s LTM being used up. The bare fact that the human brain has storage limitations is in itself no reason to accept the CAP. All right, then, suppose we take Harman to be making a stronger, more interesting point, namely, that not only is the human mind finite, but there is a real danger that storage space will eventually be exhausted. It is very reasonable to take Harman to be saying precisely this. I have previously noted that Harman claims: “It is important to save room [in memory] for important things and not clutter one’s mind with a lot of unimportant matters” and “It is . . . efficient not to try to retain these justifications and the accompanying justifying beliefs. This leaves more room in memory for important matters.”22

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One needs to “save room” and worry about leaving more room for important matters only if there is a danger of the room’s running out. The problem with adopting this reading of Harman’s second point is that there is no reason to think humans are in danger of filling up their hard drives. The LTM store is thought by psychologists to be an enormous receptacle, so large that there isn’t any real danger of it reaching its storage capacity. Traditional estimates of the number of bits of information that the brain is capable of storing range from 1013 to 1020. In an article in Cognitive Science Thomas K. Landauer estimates claims that if we assume synaptic storage and suppose that each synapse corresponds to from 2 to 10 bits of storage and the brain of from 1012 to 1014 relevant synapses, then it would seem that the underlying physical storage devices are capable of a thousand to a million times the capacity manifest in learned behavior. . . . An attractive speculation from these juxtaposed observations [i.e., brain v. computer comparisons] is that the brain uses an enormous amount of extra capacity to do things that we have not yet learned how to do with computers. . . . Possibly we should not be looking for models of mechanisms that produce storage economies . . . but rather ones in which marvels are produced by profligate use of capacity.23 If Landauer is right, there is so much extra space in memory that it gets used in ways that do not have to do primarily with simple storage. And if that is the case, then surely memory space is large enough to hold whatever we might want to put there. Furthermore, a hypothesis that has received significant attention among psychologists who do memory research is that what makes it into the LTM is stored permanently.24 Now, of course, to say that such information is permanently stored is not to say that it can be recalled, even if cued. It might not even be recognized. Nonetheless, it is argued, we forget because of interference and not because of decay in LTM. Whether or not this hypothesis is true needn’t concern us here. What is important is that even those who argue that decay occurs in LTM do not argue that storage limitations require this. Thus, they are apparently assuming that there is enough room in LTM



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to store everything that ever gets put there. And according to the traditional duplex model of memory, all that one remembers for more than a matter of seconds is remembered in LTM. Psychologists, therefore, do not seem to work under any assumption that there is any practical limit on the amount of information that can be stored in LTM. Indeed, a recent textbook on memory says that “long-term memory is seemingly unlimited in its capacity.”25 Harman further argues that the more beliefs one has the more difficult it is to retrieve a significant piece of information when it is needed. The picture he has in mind seems to resemble that of a typical attic. When there is something that needs to be stored, one places it in the attic in the first convenient space. Eventually, the pack rat will have filled his attic and when he needs to find something important, say the deed to his house, he will have to dig through mounds of junk before he happens upon it. Such a view of memory seems totally inadequate. And is very much at odds with the account of LTM that one finds in the psychological literature. When one stores a belief in memory one does not simply put it in the first convenient shelf. Rather, it is filed according to associations with other items that are stored; there is a system that determines where how a memory is related to other beliefs and experiences. Brief reflection on human memory is enough to convince one that something like this must be the case. How could we ever access all the relevant memories that we do at a moment’s notice if memory were not highly organized? It seems then that our remembering many trivial things would not cause the trouble that Harman suggests that it would. Harman has been overly pessimistic about the mnemonic powers of humans. His pessimism motivates him to claim that people ought to limit what they continue to believe. However, once one recognizes that there is no need to worry that we will use up our storage capacity and that having many beliefs will make it less likely that we will remember any particular belief, then one will not be inclined to follow Harman in thinking that people ought to lose track of the justificatory relations among beliefs. Having said all this, let me now suggest a line of response for Harman. While it is true that there aren’t any practical limitations on what we can store in LTM, and that the amount of items stored has no serious adverse effect on retrieval ability, nonetheless we have a

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limited amount of attention to be allocated at any given time. Perhaps the most widely accepted model of attention in current cognitive psychology is the Capacity Model.26 According to this view, attention is nothing more than central processing. There are limitations on the processing capacity of the human mind, and so some of the incoming stimuli must be ignored. Whether or not something gets processed depends on whether it is given sufficient attention. Certain kinds of input can be processed with very little attention; such processes are automatic (e.g., the processing of information that occurs when one drives a car). A piece of information will stay in LTM only if it has received attention. Thus, there is a very real connection between what one pays attention to and what one remembers. Arguing along Harmanian lines, one might suggest that due to our limitations, one ought to pay careful attention to that to which one pays careful attention. In other words, since only so much can be processed, we should try to have our central processor concerned with only matters of significance. For instance, we shouldn’t try to remember the justificatory relations between beliefs because that would be a poor and impractical use of our attentional resources. Thus, once I see that there is an evidential connection between A and B and, believing A, I come to believe B, I ought to not pay any more attention to that connection, and so not worry if both my belief that A, and my noticing of the evidential relation between A and B, fail to be properly stored in LTM.27 Of course there might be other reasons for attending to the first belief and so the advice of even the epistemic conservative shouldn’t be an across-the-board recommendation for ignoring it and its relations to other beliefs. While this argument has some merit, I think that it won’t do much for Harman’s cause. First, it should be recognized that we are considering this argument as a rationale for the CAP. But it is hard to see how this argument has anything to do with avoiding overcrowding in one’s memory banks. The conclusion of the argument has to do with what one ought to pay attention to and not with how much one should remember. To put the point slightly differently, the concern is not the overcrowding of memory but rather limitations to attentional capacities. This leads to a second reason for thinking that the attention argument is irrelevant to Harman’s argument for the CAP. Harman



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wants to establish the CAP in an effort to motivate conservatism as a theory of belief revision. But the attention argument has nothing to do, at least directly, with how one should revise one’s beliefs. It is an argument concerning what should go on when one forms them. When forming my belief that B on the basis of my belief that A, I ought not to pay much attention to the evidential connection once I have noticed it. Having formed the belief that B and moved on to the consideration of other things, the limitations of my attentional capacities are irrelevant to what I should continue believing. Notice that if attention were required to delete beliefs, then the attentional argument would work directly against the CAP.

Reasons to keep track of the justification of one’s beliefs I move now to a third argument against Harman’s theory of belief revision. Harman claims that one needn’t be concerned with the justificatory relations that hold between one’s beliefs; one should remember the target belief and not the reasons that one has for it. What does the claim that we shouldn’t remember the reasons for our beliefs come to? There are, I think, two main possibilities that are grounded in two senses of “reason to believe.” Consider again my coming to believe that B on the basis of A. My reason for believing B might be thought of as simply my belief that A. It might be that in such a case I don’t believe anything about the relationship between A and B; I simply believe A and this causes me to believe B without producing an explicit belief that A is good evidence for B. Another possibility requires not only having the basing belief but also a belief to the effect that the basing belief is a good reason to hold the second belief. That is, A is a reason to believe B requires both believing A and also believing that A is a good reason to believe B. To put the point more generally, for any nonfoundational belief, the reasons for holding that belief may be thought of as either just those beliefs upon which the nonfoundational belief is based or it might be also included as an epistemic belief to the effect that the grounding

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beliefs are, taken together, good evidence for the nonfoundational belief. Now when Harman claims that we should not normally keep track of the justification of our beliefs, does he mean that we shouldn’t keep track of our reasons in the first sense (i.e., just the grounding belief) or in the second sense (i.e., grounding belief plus the relevant epistemic belief)? Harman apparently intends the second sense. For while at times he writes of our failing to “keep track of the justification relations among our beliefs,”28 toward the end of the chapter he specifically states that when we have reasoned to a conclusion it is often appropriate not to remember the steps of the argument.29 So Harman’s point is really quite strong. He is not contending simply that we have no reason to remember the corresponding conditional as well as the premises of the argument; he seems to be saying that we positively ought not to continue holding the epistemic belief together with the belief we take to be the good reason.30 Against Harman, it seems clear that we have no obligation to forget the justification of our beliefs and that there are important reasons to keep track of them. First, from an epistemic point of view, the person who keeps track of her reasons for holding a belief will be in a much better position to justifiably revise her beliefs in light of new, conflicting information. Suppose that I believe that there are nine planets in our solar system and that I was initially led to believe this by a book I read as a child. Suppose I come to learn that although Pluto had been categorized as a planet for a long time it no longer is. I recall that I believed that there are nine planets in our solar system. Now if I have not remembered that I came by that belief by reading an astronomy book a long time ago, then how should I rationally go about revising my beliefs in light of this new evidence? If I don’t recall anything about why I believe there are nine planets, then for all I know, I learned the number of planets after Pluto had been downgraded, and my current belief that there are nine takes the downgrading into account. On the other hand, if I remember that I came to believe that there were nine planets because I read it in a book a long time ago, then I’ll know that I should revise my beliefs. It might be objected that Harman doesn’t say that one should never keep track of the justification of one’s beliefs; he only claims that generally we shouldn’t. So it doesn’t matter that there are cases where it would have been helpful to remember one’s reasons;



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Harman doesn’t claim that it is never helpful, only that we generally shouldn’t remember them. The problem with this objection to the argument is that one doesn’t know in advance which beliefs will be challenged by additional evidence. For most of us, the number of the planets in our solar system is not particularly important. But even in this case it would have been helpful to keep track of the justification for one’s belief so that one knows what to do with new evidence. Our goal as truthseeking/error-avoiding beings is hampered when we fail to remember why we believe what we do. There is, moreover, a practical concern as well. Our actions are the result of our beliefs and desires. Acting on false beliefs tends to be contrary to our achieving our goals, so we have a practical reason to want our beliefs to be true. Suppose I believe that route X to city Z is currently quicker than route Y because I’ve read an account in the paper of regular traffic jams on Y due to a recently begun construction project; prior to the start of the construction, Y had been the faster route. A week later, let’s suppose, I’ve forgotten about reading that article and I am left with only the belief that X is quicker than Y. I mention to you that I’m traveling to Z and you volunteer that you’ve made that drive many times and that Y has always been the fastest way to get there. I’m a little surprised because this conflicts with what I believe, but not remembering why I believe as I do and knowing you to be both an experienced Z-traveler and trustworthy, I change my belief. A few hours later, stuck in a gnarly traffic jam, I regret my choice to take Y instead of X. This case shows that there are two related but distinct reasons why it is good to keep track of our justifications. First, our epistemic goal involves coming to believe what’s true and avoiding belief in what’s false. But after hearing your testimony, I trade a true belief for a false one, and thus am less in line with what is desirable from an epistemic perspective. Second, I’ve also not accomplished my practical goal of getting to city Z by the quickest route. Each of these failures could have been avoided if I had remembered why I believed as I did. Your testimony, though grounded in experience and thoroughly sincere, would have been overridden by the report in the paper. Had I recalled the article, I would have continued in my justified and true belief that, at this time, X is the fastest way to Z, and I would have succeeded in

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arriving at Z via the quickest route. My epistemic and practical goals would have been met had I kept track of my reasons. Let’s take stock. I have been arguing that Harman’s argument for conservatism fails for a couple of reasons. First, it is grounded in an incorrect view of human memory. Although belief perseverance is a genuine phenomenon, the data do not support the claim that its general explanation is forgetting. And while LTM is finite, there are no practical limitations in what we can store there. Furthermore, the more a belief is connected with other beliefs, the more associations there with other memories, the more likely it is to be recalled. So keeping mnemonic connections increases, rather than decreases, the chance that a belief can be recalled when needed. The second main problem with Harman’s position is that, contrary to what he says, there is good reason to keep track of our beliefs. Our recalling why we believe allows us to better evaluate new evidence, and that makes it more likely that our resultant beliefs will be true which makes it more likely that we will accomplish our practical goals when we act upon them. On the other hand, it is important that I make clear what I have not argued for. I have not shown, by way of these examples, that keeping track of the justification of one’s beliefs is necessary for ongoing justification. Rather I have argued only that these cases show that we have a very real epistemic and practical interest in remembering why we believe as we do. Still, it might be that it is unreasonable to expect people to generally satisfy this interest. That is to say, perhaps we aren’t capable of remembering all that we have reason to remember. Epistemological theorizing on the justification of memory belief should not be done in ignorance of what we have reason to expect of the normal cognitive function of human beings.

Conclusion While Harman’s case for conservatism is interesting and very much worthy of serious consideration, I believe that it is not compelling. While psychological realism is a good feature for an epistemology of memory to have, Harman’s pessimism is unwarranted. But it is



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important to keep firmly in mind what we have, and have not, done in this chapter. If my arguments have been successful, they show that Harman has not given us good reason to accept conservatism. But demonstrating that a given argument fails is not to show that its conclusion is false. And I have given no such arguments in this chapter. In Chapter 3, we will continue our discussion of conservatism by looking at the position as it is been motivated and developed by Matthew McGrath. Whereas Harman’s goal was to provide positive arguments for conservatism, McGrath is more concerned with developing the theory and defending it against objections.

Study questions 1 What is epistemic conservatism? 2 Harman contrasts “the foundations theory” with conservatism (what he sometimes calls “coherence theory”). What is the foundations theory? 3 Explain the phenomenon of belief perseverance. Why does Harman think that perseverance makes trouble for the foundations theory? 4 What is the principle of clutter avoidance? Why should someone think it is true and what is its relevance to Harman’s argument? 5 The chapter argues that the belief perseverance literature doesn’t in fact support the conservative’s view. How does that argument go?

For further reading Harman, G. (1986), Change in View, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Bradford Books, Chapters 4 and 5. (These are the two main chapters that is the focus of this chapter of the book.)

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Vahid, H. (2004), “Varieties of Epistemic Conservatism,” Synthese 141 (1): 97–122. (This article distinguishes a number of different accounts of conservatism.) Baddeley, A., Eysenck, M. and Anderson, M. (2015), Memory, (2nd ed), London: Psychology Press/Taylor & Francis Group, Chapters 7 and 8. (This textbook on the psychology of memory is helpful for understanding issues of this chapter.)

3 McGrath’s defense of conservatism

Introduction

W

e saw in the last chapter that Harman’s argument for conservatism is not compelling. In this chapter, we’ll turn our sites to the work of Matthew McGrath. Claiming that conservatism should be adopted because it “makes a good epistemology of memory,”1 McGrath’s argument is twofold. First, he attempts to show that two of conservatism’s epistemological competitors— preservationism and evidentialism—face “insuperable problems.” We will see what problems those other views face when we discuss them in later chapters. For now, we’ll be interested in the positive part of this argument, that is, “that conservatism, properly honed, avoids those problems and incurs no unacceptable commitments.” McGrath proceeds primarily by discussing the primary objections to epistemic conservatism and arguing that the conservative has good answers to them. So, in this chapter, after getting through a few, brief preliminaries, we’ll have a look at what these objections are and how McGrath thinks that providing answers to them will build a positive case for conservatism as a theory of memory.

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Conservatism again So that we have a concise statement of epistemic conservatism to work with, let’s use a slightly altered version of McGrath’s primary locution: Epistemic Conservatism (EC): If one believes that P, then one is prima facie justified in retaining that belief.2 I take it that, on its face, conservatism is a puzzling doctrine. A common, and attractive, thought about justified belief is that it is belief that an agent has reason to think is true. Conservatism, however, significantly weakens this to “belief that one has no reason to think is false.” But shouldn’t the standard for justification be higher than that? It is time to remind ourselves of the fourfold distinction regarding our terms of epistemic appraisal that was made in the first chapter. As explained there, we are using the term “justification” as a kind of generic placeholder for positive epistemic status. But when we are being more careful, we need to distinguish warrant, rationality, and blamelessness. Recall that warrant was the strongest status requiring that a belief be supported in an objectively strong, truth-connected way (i.e., be reliably held or based on evidence in such a way that beliefs so based typically turn out to be true). On the other hand, a belief can be rational even if it is not so strongly grounded; rationality requires only that a belief be positively supported by the subject’s evidence. Finally, the weakest of our terms is blamelessness, and this means that an agent has not violated in any duties in believing as she does (and this is consistent with believing against her evidence since she might be doing her best and be—for whatever reason— incapable of believing as her evidence would have her believe). It is clear that whatever its virtues, conservatism is not a plausible theory of warrant for memory belief. And both Harman and McGrath will certainly agree. Although Harman uses the term “justification” and this term is often used to mean what we are meaning by “warrant,” it is clear that Harman means to pick out something considerably weaker. The book in which his defense of conservatism is imbedded concerns rational belief revision. Harman is not concerned with giving an account of memory knowledge; rather, he is interested



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in setting out principles that specify the conditions under which a rational person will revise their beliefs. While the nature of Harman’s project makes it clear that he is not concerned with warrant, McGrath is even more explicit on the matter. In this paper, I will defend a form of conservatism about rational belief retention. I focus on rationality mainly for two reasons. First, this notion is regularly employed in ordinary epistemic evaluations of belief (arguably unlike justification). Second, rational belief retention does not require that one’s belief be true, and so does not require knowledge, truth-tracking, safety, or other truth-entailing externalist statuses. Conservatism with respect to these statuses is a non-starter, at least under any reasonably narrow construal of the range of defeating conditions.3 We will follow McGrath’s good counsel and assume that conservatism is not intended as theory of warrant for memory belief but is instead a theory of rational, or perhaps blameless, ongoing belief. For the remainder of this chapter, then, when use the term “justified,” I will mean by “rational or blameless” and not “warranted.” As previously mentioned, McGrath’s argument for conservatism involves critical discussions of two competing theories of the justification of memory belief: evidentialism and preservationism. Because this book contains chapters on each of these accounts in which their philosophical problems are discussed, we won’t look here at McGrath’s presentation of them. The basic structure of McGrath’s case for conservatism is to argue that it is one of three primary competitors (with evidentialism and preservationism), that its competitors have debilitating objections, and that the standard difficulties opponents try to pin on conservatism can be overcome. In this chapter, our attention will primarily concern McGrath’s discussion of objections typically made against conservatism and his solutions for them. McGrath distinguishes three primary objections to conservatism. They are: a The Partiality Problem b The Conversion Problem

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c The Epistemic Boast Problem

To McGrath’s three, we will add a fourth: d The Parity Problem

We will examine these difficulties in the order they are listed.

a  The partiality problem According to conservatism, one is justified in believing a proposition in virtue of the fact that one believes it. David Christensen has argued that this violates a principle of epistemic impartiality that says, roughly, that the fact that I (rather than you) believe a proposition is not epistemically relevant. The idea is that the conservative thinks the fact that I believe a proposition provides me with justification for my belief, but the fact that you believe a proposition doesn’t provide me with justification for it. But the only relevant difference is which one of us has the belief. And that would not seem to be epistemically relevant.4 Of course, your telling me that you believe something might give me a testimonial justification for believing it—at least if I know you be generally reliable or knowledgeable about the topic in question. But the mere fact that you believe it, apart from appeals to testimony or inductive arguments about your reliability, is not taken by the conservative to provide me with justification for it. Yet the simple fact that I believe it does. McGrath’s response to Christensen’s objection is puzzling. He argues that the objection saddles the conservative with a commitment that she need not have, namely, that conservatism is a foundational epistemic principle. McGrath argues that conservatism might be grounded in more fundamental epistemic principles like that of common-sense realism or that epistemic principles are grounded in important concepts like content, belief, rationality, and truth.5 This he takes to indicate that the conservative is immune to the charge of epistemic partiality. Accepting conservatism is perfectly consistent with claiming that it is not the



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fact that a belief is mine which ultimately makes it worthy of my trust, but the fact that it is a belief.6 I find this puzzling as a reply to the Partiality Objection. For if it is merely belief (and not my belief) that confers justification, then it would seem that when you learn that someone else believes something, that should be sufficient for you to be justified in believing it too. As noted above, there is a strong argument to be made for the epistemic significance of testimony, but it is not part of the conservative’s view that the simple fact that you believe a proposition gives me justification in the way that I get justification just from the fact that I believe it. It is, on the conservative’s view, my belief that gives me justification and not the mere fact that the proposition is believed. Perhaps I’ve not understood McGrath correctly. There is another reply the conservative can give to the Partiality Problem that might be what McGrath has in mind. Recall that conservatism is the thesis that every belief is prima facie justified. Believing is sufficient for prima facie justification. The conservative, qua conservative, can be agnostic about other principles that specify conditions of justification. She can officially claim not to have a position on whether the fact that you believe something provides me with prima facie justification. And, when one keeps in mind the distinction that is fundamental to the epistemology of memory—that between justifiably coming to believe and justifiably continuing to believe—she can rightly say that the question now at hand is relevant to the former and not the latter. Conservatism is a theory about the justification of continued belief; whether your believing something I don’t yet believe provides me with a reason to form a new belief is a matter for original justification. While there is something to this reply, it doesn’t unequivocally lay the objection to rest. For while it is right as far as it goes (there is nothing essential to conservatism that requires admitting partiality), it doesn’t avoid the following dilemma: either the conservative will accept that my learning that you believe a proposition automatically gives me prima facie justification to form the relevant belief or she will not. If she accepts it, she’s adopted an even more permissive, less plausible epistemology: prima facie justification for coming to believe is had anytime one learns that anyone believes anything. On the other hand, if she does not agree (either because she positively

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disagrees or because she withholds) then (or so the objection goes) she’s got the Partiality Problem. For it looks as though the holder of the belief is the only relevant difference. Although the Partiality Problem is initially worrisome for the conservative, in the end I believe that she has an adequate response to the above dilemma. This reply begins, as noted above, by emphasizing the difference between coming and continuing to believe a proposition. The conservative can insist that having stronger standards for the former than one has for the latter is reasonable—and this has nothing to do with partiality. For the point of conservatism is that there needs to be a positive reason to change your belief system. So, if you don’t have a good reason to give up a belief, you’re rational to maintain it. Alternatively, if you don’t have a good reason to add a belief, then you are not rational to add it. And it is the same conservative spirit that motivates both the permissiveness regarding belief revision as it is and a more restrictive approach to believe addition.

b  The conversion problem The Conversion Problem is that a belief can go from being unjustified at one time to being justified at a later time even though the subject comes to have no better epistemic ground at the later time than she had at the earlier time.7 Indeed, in some cases the subject is clearly in a worse epistemic position because of the fact that she forgets relevant information. Yet it would seem that if the epistemic ground of the belief is just the same, then her belief cannot become justified simply because of the passage of time or because she’s forgetful. Let’s consider an example. As a child, Righty had been bullied by two kids, Aaron and Bob, both of whom happened to have been lefthanded. Because, at the time, Aaron and Bob were the only people that Righty knew to be left-handed, Righty inferred that all lefthanded males are bullies. In high school, Righty met Carl and noticed that Carl was a southpaw. Righty kept his distance from Carl, since, remembering his experience with Aaron and Bob, Righty figured that Carl was a bully as well. Shortly after meeting Carl, Righty told his friend Diane that Carl was a bully. Having known Carl all her life, Diane assured Righty that Carl was not a bully, but Righty remained unconvinced.



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As a result of his discussion with Diane, Righty’s belief that Carl is a bully is doubly flawed. It was initially problematic because it was based on hasty generalization, and in a fairly explicit way: Had he thought about it, Carl would have recognized that his reason for believing that lefties are bullies is only because of his experience with Aaron and Bob. Perhaps even the conservative will hold that Righty’s belief that Carl is a bully is ultima facie unjustified because the prima facie justification it has is overridden by the fact that Carl has good reason to believe that his evidence is (to use Harman’s phrase) “no good.” But suppose the conservative denies this and claims that as long as Carl doesn’t outright believe that his reasons are “no good,” then his belief about Carl remains justified. Still, Carl speaks with Diane, who (let us stipulate) he has reason to trust, and who claims that Carl is not a bully. At this point, Righty’s justification is surely defeated. To recap: Carl’s belief lacked original justification because he formed the belief on the basis of hasty generalization. But once he has the belief then, according to the conservative, it is prima facie justified. Yet after he talks with Diane, his justification for thinking that Carl is a bully is defeated. Time marches on for all of us, and Righty is no exception. More than three decades later, Righty sees Carl for the first time since high school at their 30th reunion. The first thing Righty thinks upon laying eyes on him is “Carl was a bully in high school.” At this point, Righty doesn’t remember why he thinks this (perhaps he no longer even believes that all lefties are bullies) and recalls neither ever knowing Aaron or Bob nor his later conversation with Diane. What the conservative must say about Righty’s belief at the reunion seems clear: it is prima facie justified, and since he no longer is in a position to know it was grounded on a hasty generalization, and he since doesn’t recall his speaking with Diane about Carl, it is undefeated. Righty is now ultima facie justified in believing that Carl was a bully. His initially unjustified belief has been converted into a justified belief even though his epistemic situation hasn’t improved. In fact, his situation has deteriorated since two items that are evidentially relevant to his belief (his potential recollection of how the belief was originally formed and his memory of his conversation with Diane) are no longer available. McGrath considers cases of this sort (i.e., where a belief is poorly formed and hence unjustified originally, but through the process of

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forgetting the subject no longer has the reasons that told against the belief) and is not troubled by them. He describes a case in which you come to believe that Hannibal fought in the Third Punic War on the say-so of an unreliable young child. So, you are unjustified shortly after you form the belief. But now you’ve forgotten why you have the belief but you have it nevertheless. To the claim that the belief is not justified, McGrath says the following: This is . . . counterintuitive. Recall that our focal epistemic concept is rational belief retention. Your Hannibal belief is not knowledge— it is false, for one thing, and unreliably formed for another—but you are rational to retain it. To deny you are rational to retain it commits one to claiming that you are rational to abandon it. But this seems clearly wrong. You were not rational when you formed the belief but you are now rational to retain it. In fact, it might be more plausibly argued that you would violate rational requirements by abandoning it.8 So, McGrath thinks that initially unjustified beliefs can become justified if one forgets that they were poorly grounded or forgets the defeaters one has for them (or both). Indeed, while McGrath sees the conversion of the Hannibal belief as unproblematic, he is concerned about a potentially worse problem of epistemic conversion. Suppose my favorite football team has lost the opening coin toss for five straight games, and that this leads me to believe that the chances are very high that they will win the next pre-game flip. I’ve just committed what is known as the gambler’s fallacy: the odds of winning any fair coin toss is always 50 percent, no matter how many consecutive tosses one has lost. So, my new belief is unjustified; and more than that, it is not even prima facie justified since it is so poorly grounded. But, nevertheless, I now believe it and according to the conservative, every belief is prima facie justified. So, in forming the belief, the epistemic status of the proposition has been converted. That is, a proposition that I am unjustified in coming to believe becomes a proposition that I am justified in continuing to believe simply by the fact that I came to believe it. And while I recall that the reason I believe as I do is the pitifully bad luck our team has had with recent coin tosses, I don’t recognize that this is irrelevant



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to the odds of our losing the next flip. That is, I don’t understand the gambler’s fallacy to be a fallacy. But if I have no good reason to think that my initial justification is bad, then it seems I don’t have a defeater for my belief. That is to say, I have a prima facie justified belief for which I have no defeater. In other words, the belief that was not even prima justified in forming, has been converted to an ultima facie justified belief. Even for McGrath, this is a bridge too far. What is McGrath’s solution to this more extreme version of the Conversion Problem? He makes a distinction between what it is to possess a defeater and what it is for there to be defeating conditions for a belief. In the case above, McGrath will say that I don’t possess a defeater since I don’t have a belief about the gambler’s fallacy, and I would need to have that belief, together with my memory of why I believe as I do to the defeater to be in my possession. But a defeater is constructible from the beliefs I do hold, together with the “simple exercise of properly functioning human cognitive capacities.”9 The solution, then, is that there are defeating conditions for my belief (even if I possess no defeater), and therefore my belief is not ultima facie justified. I don’t think this attempted solution adequately solves the problem. Indeed, I think it fails in two distinct ways. First, part of what makes the gambler’s fallacy so interesting to cognitive psychologists and philosophers is that it is both a very natural kind of inference (even those who know of it can fall victim to it), and yet so clearly fallacious once one reflects on it in the right way. There is no clear sense in which our psychological faculties are malfunctioning when we commit this fallacy; indeed, it is a very natural inference for even the most intelligent people to make. The fact that we must learn to avoid it is an indication that it is the kind of inference people make even when their faculties are functioning normally. So, the connection between the proper functioning of standard human faculties and their functioning in ways that are epistemically reputable is not nearly tight enough for McGrath’s solution to work. Yet to my mind, there is a deeper problem with this solution: it doesn’t address the most important conversion that happens. A belief that originally lacks prima facie justification when as it is formed is instantly converted to a prima facie justified belief. The conservative’s position is that as one is coming to believe a proposition, the soon-to-be

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belief has nothing to be said for it epistemically, but as soon as one begins to continue to believe it (i.e., as soon as it becomes a belief), it is now ultima facie justified if there are no defeating conditions. Justification, then, is generated by the act of coming to believe. We’ll have more to say about epistemic generation in Chapter 6, and so I won’t spend much more time on it here. But it is safe to say that the conservative’s commitment to belief formation by itself as a sufficient condition of prima facie justification is perhaps the biggest problem that the conservative faces. Let’s return to the first Conversion Problem. Recall that this was exemplified by the case of Righty. The belief that was not prima facie justified when formed, and for which he later came to have a strong rebutting defeater, becomes justified overtime as he forgets the bad reasons that originally grounded his belief and the defeater. One way of motivating the conservative position here is to take a synchronic perspective: given what the person has to go on at the present time, what is the rational thing to do? On this perspective, the history of the belief is irrelevant. What matters for justification, construed synchronically, is only what is currently within the cognitive perspective of the agent. Going back to the case of Righty, the fact that his belief was originally formed on the basis of hasty generalization is not relevant since he no longer recalls the ground of his current belief about Carl. And since he also doesn’t currently remember his conversation with Diane, the fact that he once believed that a friend he had good reason to trust had testified to Carl’s good character is also epistemically beside the point. Considered from what is now available to Righty, all he knows is that he believes that Carl was a bully. Even if he were to reflect on the matter, he’d find no reason to think that he was mistaken in this. How, one might ask, is this different from the earlier examples of confident memory beliefs that we can’t know or recall our justifications for? I seem to remember that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in the theater and my firstgrade teacher’s name was Mrs. McDonald. In these cases, we tend to think I’m justified in believing as I do. So, when Righty has the same sense of recalling that Carl is a bully, he is in the exact same position I am in when I think about Lincoln’s death or my first teacher. In all these cases, we have a confidently held belief and no apparent reason to doubt it.



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I’m not convinced by this reply to the Conversion Problem. That is, I grant that if the only items of epistemic relevance are what I am able to recall at the time of epistemic evaluation, then there is no reason to treat, say, my Lincoln belief and Righty’s Carl belief differently. But I think there is good reason not to accept the synchronic restriction on justifiers and defeaters. The main reason the synchronic perspective should be abandoned is that, generally speaking, we don’t adopt it in our normative contexts—that is, contexts in which we evaluate the appropriateness or correctness of behavior. Let’s start with a moral example. I borrow $100 from you and promise to repay you in a week. Seven days later, I have your money and set off to walk to your house to pay you back. But along the way, I see a store selling a pair of shoes that I decide I have to have, and I buy them with the $100 I was going to give back to you. When I get to your house, I tell you that I won’t be able to pay you today after all and show you my new shoes. You express your displeasure that I won’t be repaying as I had promised. Truthfully, I tell you that I wish I could pay you, but I just don’t have the money. You point out that while that’s true—I don’t now have the money—that doesn’t matter. Even if I genuinely feel bad about my inability to pay you, what matters is not my current inability, but the fact that I made a bad decision earlier. In other words, the evaluation of my action that you will surely insist is relevant is the diachronic and not what the synchronic perspective would propose. It is not just in the realm of morality that diachronic considerations are more weighty than their diachronic cousins. Suppose a baseball player takes too big a lead off first base, and the pitcher throws to first base behind him. Unable to get back to first, he breaks for second base hoping to beat the throw from the first baseman. After he is tagged out, he returns to an unhappy manager in the dugout who reprimands him. Would the manager’s judgment be swayed by the player appealing to the fact that once the pitcher threw the ball to first, the smartest thing for him to do was to run to second rather than to dive back to first where he surely would have been out. Again, the manager will insist that the fact that there was then nothing better for him to do at the moment he took off for second doesn’t mean that his running to second wasn’t bad baserunning. The manager’s anger for his being thrown out is based on a diachronic evaluation of the player’s baserunning.

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In evaluations of the exercise of a skill and in moral evaluations, we often think that an inability to do anything other than what one does is not an excuse for what one does if that inability is one’s own fault. We should judge that the same is true in the epistemic domain. In the case of Righty, the fact on the night of his high school reunion he has no reason to doubt his belief that Carl was a bully, doesn’t mean that his belief is epistemically in the clear. If he came to his belief originally because of hasty generalization, and he later had direct evidence that it was false (via Diane’s testimony), then his currently believing that Carl was a bully should, I submit, be thought to be epistemically problematic. And that is true even if Righty presently has no reason to suspect the pedigree of his belief.

c  The epistemic boost problem The Epistemic Boost Problem10 is that if conservatism were true, a proposition or a belief in a proposition would get an immediate epistemic boost simply by being believed. There are two apparently unwelcomed consequences of such a boost. The first consequence will sound familiar given that we’ve already discussed the Conversion Problem and it bears a resemblance to it. Whereas the Conversion Problem was that conservatism implies that the epistemic status of a belief can go from unjustified at an earlier time to justified at a later time by simply forgetting, or that a proposition for which one has no justification at all can become justified given the passage of time, the Epistemic Boost Problem is that a proposition that you are considering but don’t yet believe and which you wouldn’t be justified in coming to believe will become justified for you the moment you believe it even though nothing relevant changes other than that you have come to believe the proposition. That is, conservatism entails that the mere act of believing a proposition gives it an epistemic boost. And enough of an epistemic boost that a proposition can go from not being prima facie justified for you to being ultima facie justified for you just by the fact that you come to believe it. But, the objector states, the mere fact that a proposition is believed isn’t by itself a reason to think it is true, and hence not only should a belief not go from being fully unjustified to justified, it shouldn’t receive an epistemic boost at all.



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The second part of the Epistemic Boost Problem is this: even if you are prima facie justified in coming to believe a proposition, conservatism seems to imply that once you believe it, your justification increases merely because you now believe it. Suppose I am considering whether the Cubs will be a substantially improved team next year, but I’ve yet to come to a conclusion. I read up on their off-season personnel moves, the reasons for thinking their younger players will improve and that their divisional competition won’t be as strong, and so on. Considering all my evidence, I come to believe that the Cubs will be substantially improved and (let’s suppose) my doing so is justified by my evidence. The question is this: Am I now better justified simply by virtue of forming the belief? On the one hand, it seems silly to think so. On the other hand, if I had no justification in forming the belief and formed it anyway, conservatism would imply that I thereby gain prima facie justification. So, if I get that epistemic boost in the absence of any good reason to form the belief, why shouldn’t I get in when I do have good reason? It will be good to get a possible misunderstanding out of the way at the start. The Epistemic Boost Problem is not the charge that the fact that someone believes a proposition can’t be part of a larger reason for thinking that that proposition is true, and if one has that larger reason, being part of a justification for the belief itself. What I have in mind is this. Suppose you believe that Albany is the capital of New York, but you don’t recall why you believe it (i.e., you neither remember where you first learned it nor do you recall a time when it was confirmed for you). If pressed for a justification, you might reasonably say this: “Although I don’t have any direct evidence that Albany is the capital of New York, I do know that I’m pretty good at geography, and in the past when I’ve been this sure about these kinds of beliefs, and have checked up on them, I’ve been right. So, the fact that I believe it is reason to think it is true.” This response is plausible and seems to be a decent justification for the belief. And we will give this kind of justification of memory belief serious consideration when we talk about evidentialism in the next chapter. What is important to see here is that this defense isn’t available to the conservative. For her claim is that the mere having of the belief bestows prima facie justification; she does not insist that justification depends upon the belief fitting into a larger justifying argument, and that it is the argument and not the mere belief that provides the justification.

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So, what’s a conscientious conservative to do about the Epistemic Boost problem? McGrath has defended conservatism from each type of problematic case. Consider the first case in which one is unjustified in forming a belief and forms the belief anyway. As we’ve seen, McGrath has argued that in many cases the subject will have (or at very least have the makings of) a defeater for the belief. That is, she’ll have reason to think that when she formed the belief, she did so unjustifiably, and lacked sufficient for it. One who recalls this has an undermining defeater (or at least defeating conditions)—that is, she has reason to believe that she had no good ground for her belief, since in this case there is no ground at all. While McGrath doesn’t add this, his reply can be strengthened by considering an (admittedly bizarre!) case in which one forms a belief on what one recognizes is insufficient reason, and then a moment later forgets how she came by her belief. She recalls it, but she has no idea when or how she came by it. In this case, the conservative will say the same thing she said about the Conversion Problem cases: she is not unjustified to continue holding a belief in the absence of a good reason to give it up. What of the problem that coming to believe a proposition adds to the justification one already has (e.g., the Cubs improvement belief case)? McGrath begins his response by noting that there are other puzzling cases of epistemic overdetermination. We generally think that if someone tells you, for example, what time it is when you ask, you are justified by hearing and understanding that person’s testimony. Now what if I ask you what time it is and as you answer, you point to the clock that is the source of your belief that it is now 10:30 a.m. In this case, does the fact that you’ve told me that it is 10:30 a.m. add to the justification I have by seeing the clock which is the source of both of our beliefs? It wouldn’t seem that it does. Yet in the absence of my seeing the clock, your testimony would give me significant justification for my belief. So, what happens to that justification when I also see the clock myself? Shouldn’t it add to the justification I have when I also have the confirmation of what you’ve told me? One might have thought that, but it seems not to be so in this case. Once you’ve given me the entirety of your reason for



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believing it is 10:30 a.m., your added testimony adds nothing further. Or so claims McGrath. McGrath argues that something similar holds in the case of memory belief when you maintain your original justificationconferring reasons. If my belief that the Cubs will be improved is justified by evidence that remains available to me (i.e., if I have “special information” about the grounds of my belief), then the fact that I believe it does not provide my belief with an epistemic boost. On the other hand, if I don’t have any memory of why I hold the belief (and I have no defeaters/defeating circumstances), then the fact that I do believe it is sufficient for both prima and ultima facie justification. McGrath doesn’t want to depend on this overdetermination response, however, and he thinks that conservatism might have to be modified in one of a couple different ways in light of this consideration. He writes: One is to modify the claim about what confers [justification], and the other is to further expand the range of potential defeating conditions. Taking the first approach, one should, strictly speaking, abandon conservatism in favor of a close cousin. Mere belief isn’t epistemically efficacious, but belief in the absence of special information about past evidence is. Taking the second approach, one would flesh out the prima facie rider in something like the following way: if S believes that p, then S is rational in retaining the belief that p provided and only provided that, (i) S lacks defeaters for her belief; (ii) S lacks the materials for constructing such a defeater, and (iii) S lacks special information about her past evidence.11 In the end, McGrath thinks that there are reasons to prefer the second approach. Either way, the suggested alteration of conservatism necessitated by the Epistemic Boost Problem involves ruling out that the subject has “special information about her past evidence.” But what does “special information” come to? Apparently, beliefs (or, perhaps, less restrictively, “memories”) about one’s reasons for forming a belief in the first place. Or maybe the relevant information is just the reasons themselves. Whichever the case may be, the idea is that memory provides a prima facie reason to believe only when

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it is not accompanied by memories of the evidential history of the belief. The thought behind McGrath’s suggestion is clear enough: when you recall a belief without recalling anything about its evidential history, the belief is prima facie justified. On the other hand, if you remember its history, then either the mere fact that you believe fails to provide you with prima facie justification or else its justification is overridden by your “special information.” Now, I suppose that if the evidential history is particularly good, then even if the prima facie justification the belief gets just by being a memory belief is defeated, it may yet be prima facie (and even ultima facie) justified by the remembered original reasons for the belief. While the motivation for this proposal is apparent (it’s an effort to circumvent the Epistemic Boost objection), it has some odd consequences. First, if believing in the absence of memories about the evidential history of a belief produces prima facie justification, what explains why that justification isn’t produced when some special information is present? Or if the claim is that simply having information about the evidential history of the belief defeats its justification, why should that be so if the evidence recalled is positive? Consider the following kind of case. Suppose that I have a memory belief that P, and I recall a reason I had for believing it is R. Suppose further that while R is some reason to think that P is true, it isn’t by itself sufficient for my being prima facie justified in coming to believe that P. In remembering R, though, let’s stipulate that I don’t also remember whether R was my only reason for believing P. For example, consider a variation of the aforementioned Cubs improvement case. Although my belief was initially grounded in many considerations, later when I’m pressed on why I think the Cubs will be substantially better, all I can remember is that they have added one very good pitcher in the off season. Naturally, while this is some reason for thinking that the Cubs will be significantly improved, by itself it is not sufficient justification for adopting the belief in the first place. In this case, the conservative who takes McGrath’s advice will have to say that my belief is not prima facie justified because it is neither a memory belief without special information nor is the reason I have for it sufficient for prima facie justification. Yet if I had the memory belief that P, and no memory of my evidence for it at all,



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I would be prima facie justified. So, the fact that I can recollect some of my evidence (but not all of it) puts my belief in an epistemically worse condition than it would be in if I were not to remember any of it. But surely that can’t be right. What needs to be explained by the conservative is why belief is epistemically generative (i.e., it can produce prima facie justification) when there is no information about its source but if there is any information about the conditions under which it was formed and maintained, then it loses this power. And it is very hard to see what a plausible explanation would look like.

d  The parity problem The Parity Problem consists in the recognition that according to conservatism, all beliefs are prima facie justified. As we’ve seen, that is just another way of saying that, for every belief B, if there are no defeaters for B, then the belief is justified all things considered (or ultima facie). This suggests that all beliefs have fundamentally the same epistemic status. While, of course, some beliefs will have their prima facie justification defeated and some won’t, the positive epistemic status of every belief is the same and derives from the same source. Let’s consider each of these implications. Is it plausible to think that every belief has the same fundamental epistemic status? Well, it certainly goes against the way we often talk about the justification of our beliefs. We don’t only distinguish between beliefs with defeated justification from beliefs with undefeated justification, but we commonly make epistemic evaluations based on what positively grounds a belief. For example, beliefs that are grounded in visual experience when the conditions of observation are good are taken to be strongly justified. Beliefs that are gross generalizations based on experience of a single instance are thought to be unjustified. As an intermediate example between belief formed by vision and belief formed by hasty generalization, consider belief based on testimony from unknown sources. We typically think that when a person on the street tells you that the entrance to the museum is five blocks down J Street, you are justified in believing her. Of course, once you traverse those five blocks and

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find the museum where it was said to be, your justification greatly improves. It is important to see that the epistemic evaluations just made (that beliefs formed by vision are highly justified, those formed by testimony are justified but not to the same degree, and those on generalization from a single instance aren’t) concern prima facie justification. Quite apart of considerations of defeat, we think visual beliefs have something going for them epistemically that, say, hasty generalizations lack. Yet if the conservative is right, each sort of belief has the same status apart from considerations of defeat: each is prima facie justified. Not only do we typically think there are distinctions to be made among the strength of the prima facie justification of our beliefs, but we also sometimes take the sources of the justification to be different in those cases. Now the conservative can rightly point out that he or she has no trouble recognizing that our beliefs come from different sources (e.g., from perception or introspection or induction). Yet that is not the point at issue here. The problem we are now considering for the conservative is that she recognizes only a single source of justification and that source is simply “belief” or the having of a belief. Yet this seems to sell us short epistemically. It isn’t just that the causes of beliefs vary but that from which they get their positive epistemic status would seem to vary too. My belief, formed a few moments ago, that there is a sea gull flying over the lake is not only caused by vision but is justified by my visual experience; my belief that the Cubs are going to be much improved this year is not only caused by my belief that they have made key personnel moves during the off season that have significantly strengthened them, but it is also justified by belief (inasmuch as I am justified in my belief about what they’ve been up to in the off season). So, the justification of my ongoing belief that there is a seagull flying over the lake, and of my belief that the Cubs are going to be much improved, while perhaps equally strong, are from different sources. But it would seem that the conservative will be committed to denying this. To these objections, the conservative has the following response. Both parts of the Parity Problem depend on reading more into the conservative thesis than is actually there. First, the conservative isn’t committed to saying that all beliefs are equally prima facie justified. She is committed only to the claim that all memory beliefs are at



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least prima facie justified. This doesn’t rule out the possibility that some beliefs have stronger justification than others. Suppose Jane believes that Hannibal Hamlin was vice president during Abraham Lincoln’s first term as president, but she doesn’t remember learning it or doesn’t have any other evidence she can recall for its truth. Joan has the same belief about Hamlin, but knows very well how she learned it: she recently read Doris Goodwin Kearns’ book Team of Rivals, a work that goes into great detail about Lincoln’s first term as president. The conservative’s commitment is only to this: both Joan and Jane are prima facie justified in believing that Hamlin was Lincoln’s first VP. She can grant that Joan’s belief is better justified because it has not only the justification it gets from simply being a memory belief, but it also has the evidential justification it gets from the beliefs Joan has about having read the book and what the book said. Or if we are going to make the alteration to conservatism that McGrath suggests, we can say that the justification derived from recalling that she read about Hamlin gives Joan stronger justification (which doesn’t include any boost from her having the belief) than Jane has, whose justification is limited to that which automatically comes from belief. What of the “same-source” objection? A first reply can be much the same. For the original conservative position, it can be said that Joan and Jane do share a common source of justification: memory of the belief. But in addition to the justification produced by merely holding the belief, Joan has inferential justification that she gets from her belief that she read the book, that Kearns is a reliable source, and that the book makes clear on numerous occasions that Hamlin was Lincoln’s first VP. To the modified view, the source of justification is not the same: Jane’s justification is generated by her belief while Joan’s justification is generated by her recollection of the belief’s original source. Before we finish our discussion of the Parity Problem, I want to note that even with McGrath’s amended conservatism, it will still follow that the source of all beliefs for which we don’t have information about our past evidence will be the same: namely, those generated from our holding the belief. So, beliefs for which I once had great evidence and beliefs that were generated from ill-advised hunches will have the same epistemic standing. As noted earlier, the conservative, given her synchronic commitment, will point out that

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from our current perspective, that is as it should be. We have the beliefs, but we know not how or why (to paraphrase William James). Yet it is strongly tempting to think that the epistemic standing of a belief is at least in part a function of how one comes to believe it. And we’ve seen (repeatedly!) that this is flatly rejected by the conservative.

Rationality and blamelessness It is time to bring the discussion of epistemic conservatism to a close. While the arguments that Harman gives for accepting conservatism are inadequate, the thesis might nevertheless be true. That is, our discussion of Harman might have indicated that his arguments for conservatism were not compelling, but it didn’t provide us with reasons to positively reject the position. McGrath advocates conservatism because he thinks it offers a plausible account of the epistemology of memory. A part of the case he makes is negative, and not yet discussed here. In subsequent chapters, we’ll look at the two other initially plausible accounts of the epistemology of memory (evidentialism and preservationism) and what problems they might have. Early on, we noted that conservatism should not be understood as a theory of epistemic warrant for memory belief, but instead as an account of rationality or blamelessness. Let’s now consider these two in reverse order. There is reason to think that conservatism is on the right track regarding blamelessness. For suppose I believe that P. That means that I believe that P is true. If I believe that and have no reason to believe that P is false or that my belief wasn’t originally justified, then can I be blamed for continuing to believe as I do? Am I supposed to attempt to jettison every belief I have for which I can’t recall my original evidence? Do I have an epistemic duty to believe only that for which I can remember my justification? Particularly when you remember our earlier discussion of doxastic voluntarism that indicated we have rather limited control over our beliefs (we can’t just quit believing something because we choose to), it would seem we are clearly not in violation of any epistemic duty if we continue to believe what seems true to us. I think, then, that conservatism is somewhat plausible as a theory of blameless belief. I note, however, that this is the case only if



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I am not responsible for having the belief in the first place. In Chapter 6 during our discussion of preservationism, we’ll see reason to think that earlier culpability is potentially relevant here. Alternatively, justification might be a matter of rationality. And this is the way that McGrath wants us to think about conservatism. In the end, then, what shall we conclude about conservatism as an account of the rationality of memory belief? One advantage it has that we’ve not yet commented on is that it is a theory that can be used to say something about the epistemic status of all memory beliefs—both those that are occurrent and those that remain stored in LTM and are had only dispositionally. According to the conservative, it is believing that generates prima facie rationality. It is not that a belief is recalled nor is it the experience of having the belief in consciousness that grounds its rationality. So, the conservative has something to say about the epistemic status of all memory beliefs and that is a significant virtue of the theory. If rationality is determined by the degree to which a belief reflects an appropriate doxastic response to what one has to go on, that is, to one’s evidence, then it would seem conservatism is not what we want. Why not? Because it allows beliefs to be justified even when there is nothing but the belief itself that the subject has as evidence for the belief. Plausibly, rationally believing that P requires that one has some reason to believe that P. Yet the conservative will countenance some beliefs as being rational even though the subject has no reason at all to believe the proposition, but only no reason not to believe it. The belief itself isn’t itself a reason to believe the proposition. Furthermore, we’ve seen that the Conversion Problem and the Epistemic Boost Problem offer particular reasons to think that conservatism is not, contrary to McGrath’s claim, a good theory of the epistemology of memory. As mentioned briefly earlier, it might be that you can use the fact that you believe that P as a premise in the construction of a good argument for P. I stand by that. The consideration of the last paragraph is restricted to the claim that a belief that P can by itself be a reason to believe that P; that is consistent with the possibility that the belief can be combined with other things to construct a reason to believe. We will consider just this kind of reason when we look at evidentialist theories in the next chapter. Let’s begin doing that now.

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Study questions 1 What is epistemic conservatism? Does it imply that every belief is ultima facie justified? Why or why not? 2 This chapter examines four objections to conservatism and the replies that conservatives can make to them. Which objection do you think is the biggest difficulty for the conservative. Why? 3 McGrath thinks that if you have no memory of how you came to hold a belief and you have no reason for thinking the belief is false or unreliably formed, then you are rational to continue to believe as you do. Is his view an example of a synchronic or diachronic perspective on justification? Explain. 4 What alteration to conservatism does McGrath suggest in light of the Epistemic Boost Problem? Do you think it solves the difficulty? Why or why not? 5 McGrath argues that conservatism is good at least as a theory of blameless belief but it is also a good theory of rational belief. What’s the difference between the two? Do you think it is either? Why or why not?

For further reading McGrath, M. (2007), “Memory and Epistemic Conservatism,” Synthese, 157 (1): 1–24. (The article that is the primary focus of this chapter.) Frise, M. (2017b), “Internalism and the Problem of Stored Beliefs,” Erkenntnis 82 (2): 285–304. (Frise first considers—and eventually rejects—the conservative response to the question of how beliefs that are stored can be justified before defending a dispositional account.) Huemer, M. (1999), “The Problem of Memory Knowledge,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 80 (4): 346–57. (Huemer argues against the conservative position and defends a version of foundationalism which we’ll discuss in Chapter 5.)



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Christensen, D. (2000), “Diachronic Coherence Versus Epistemic Impartiality,” The Philosophical Review 109 (3): 349–71. (Christensen argues that conservatism fails because it violates the principle of epistemic impartiality.)

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4 Evidentialism

Introduction

I

n Chapters 2 and 3, we discussed the epistemic conservative theory of the justification of memory belief. The hallmark of that view is that all memory beliefs are prima facie justified simply in virtue of being beliefs. In contrast to this, evidentialism insists that only beliefs that satisfy a certain further condition attain this positive epistemic status. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the evidentialist account of the justification of memory belief.

Evidentialism explained Richard Feldman and Earl Conee are the primary proponents of evidentialism, although its roots go back in the history of philosophy at least to seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke. As noted earlier, according to Locke, in matters of judgment or opinion (what we would call “belief”), we have a duty to guide only by the evidence we possess. Belief that is grounded in anything else is illegitimate and signals a failure of epistemic due diligence. On Locke’s view, a belief is justified only when it is based on good evidence. Furthermore, the strength of one’s belief (how confident one feels about it or the tenacity with which one holds it) should be a function of the strength of one’s reasons for thinking the belief is true. So, if you report to me that I’ve left my car headlights on (and you are someone I have good reason to trust), then I have good evidence that my headlights are on.

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I will be justified in believing that it is so. However, if I see that I’ve left my headlights on instead of believing on the basis of your testimony, my belief is also justified and my level of confidence in the belief should be greater than it was in the former case. Especially for Locke, seeing is not only believing, it is also knowing. Perceptual evidence is the best evidence.1 In Locke, we get an intuitively attractive idea explained, and two very general principles to follow: believe something only if you have good evidence for it and have the strength of your belief be in proportion to the strength of your evidence. In the work of contemporary evidentialists Richard Feldman and Earl Conee (hereafter “F&C”), we get this idea worked out in considerably more detail. Although we will see that they offer multiple formulations of their position, we can begin with a simple expression of our own. [A]: A proposition is justified for one if and only if it fits one’s evidence. While [A] is an acceptable first pass at an evidentialist account of justification, it lacks sufficient detail, and it does not do justice to the idea that the strength of belief should be proportional to the evidence one has. Let’s consider, then, the following thesis explicitly endorsed by F&C. [B]: Doxastic attitude D toward proposition P is epistemically justified for S at t if and only if having D toward P fits the evidence S has at t.2 One decidedly attractive aspect of evidentialism is its universal applicability. It provides a recipe for determining the epistemic status of everything for everyone. Take any proposition at all and any person whatsoever, given that person’s evidence, there is precisely one doxastic attitude (i.e., believe, disbelieve, or withhold) that it is epistemically permissible for that person to take. And if we include variations on those attitudes for strength of confidence, we get an even more robust theory.3 Somewhat more recently, F&C have written that their “bedrock view” can be expressed this way:

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[C]: The epistemic justification of anyone’s doxastic attitude toward any proposition at any time strongly supervenes on the evidence that the person has at the time.4 The concept of supervenience plays a prominent role in the discussion of many philosophical issues. To say that one’s justification “strongly supervenes” on the evidence one has is to say that the evidence one has fixes or determines the degree to which a proposition is justified in such a way that it is not possible to have a different degree of justification given that very same evidence. That is, if a given body of evidence E justifies proposition P for S, then everything else about S’s situation is irrelevant with respect to her justification for P. As long as E is unchanged, P will be justified for S. We have seen that F&C claim that their bedrock commitment is to a supervenience thesis: the epistemic supervenes on evidence. In the recent epistemological literature, a similar, and perhaps even more bedrock, thesis has been discussed and is also accepted by F&C. “Mentalism,” as it has come to be called, is also a supervenience thesis. Rather than the claim that the epistemic supervenes on “evidence,” mentalism is the thesis that justification supervenes on mental states. [D]: If any two possible individuals are exactly alike mentally, then they are alike justificationally, e.g., the same beliefs are justified for them to the same extent.5 Clearly mentalism is more fundamental than evidentialism, at least provided that one makes standard assumptions about evidence and mental states. On the way of thinking about evidence that F&C clearly adopt, nothing is evidence for a person that is not among her mental contents. So, since nothing can be relevant to justification that is not evidence and since nothing can be evidence that is not a mental state, then nothing can be relevant to justification that is not a mental state. The mental states that are most commonly cited as evidentially significant are beliefs and experiential states. For example, my belief that my spouse is home might be justified by the visual state of seeing an older model tan Honda Accord in the driveway together

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with my belief that she owns a car that looks just like the one I’m seeing. Typically, experiential states that are evidentially significant are those associated with the five senses. But in principle, other kinds of experiences can be relevant for justification too. That I feel a tickle in the back of my throat can be evidence that I have a cold coming on and that I feel agitated for no obvious reason can be reason for thinking that I’m in a bad mood. It can’t be denied that there is something initially plausible about evidentialism. Here’s one way to see this: we often speak as though a reasonable (or rational or justified) belief is a belief for which one has reasons. But “having reasons” in this context can be construed as “having evidence.” While it might be that a variety of evidentialism that recognizes only beliefs as evidence has insufficient resources to provide a general account of justification, a more ecumenical evidentialism of the sort that F&C champion does not have that liability. As we just noted, experiential states produced by the senses, for example, are evidentially robust and are plausibly construed as “reasons.” For example, suppose that whenever I go to your house, you give me a glass of ale. Arriving at your doorstep, I recall this and come to believe that you’ll provide me with a beer. This belief is justified by an inductive inference: I believe that I’ve been to your house a number of times and that each time I visit, you’ve given me a glass of ale, so I infer that this will happen tonight. However, by the time I actually get the glass in my hand, I have even more evidence. My seeing you pour me a golden, frothy beverage from a bottle reading “Bell’s Two-Hearted Ale,” my hearing the sound of the drink being poured, and my smelling the beverage’s hoppy goodness all together provide me with very good additional reason to believe that there is ale in the glass before me. As we’ve been considering it thus far, evidentialism is construed as a general theory of epistemic justification. Yet our topic is narrower in focus. Given the distinction between the conditions under which one is justified in coming to believe a proposition and the conditions under which one is justified in continuing to believe it, we can set to one side the question of whether evidentialism is an adequate theory of the former. What interests us here is the question of whether evidentialism is a promising theory for the justification of memory belief—of continuing to believe.6

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Let’s pare down the evidentialist theses so that it is an account of the sort we are exploring. Doing this to the first statement we get from F&C, we get: [B]*: Doxastic attitude D toward memory belief P is epistemically justified for S at t if and only if having D toward P fits the evidence S has at t. We can add this F&C’s commitment to an epistemic supervenience thesis and that gives us: [C]*: The epistemic justification of anyone’s memory belief at any time strongly supervenes on the evidence that the person has at the time.7 The evidentialist theory of the justification of memory belief, then, is the thesis that a memory belief is justified at t if and only if it fits the evidence one has at t; and given evidentialism’s commitment to mentalism, one’s evidence is strictly determined by one’s mental states at t. Like epistemic conservatism, it is a synchronic theory. One’s past beliefs and experiences are relevant to the justification of one’s current continued beliefs only inasmuch as one still possesses those beliefs or remembers those experiences. Recall that I’m here using “justification” as a general term, and that any belief that is warranted, rational, or blamelessly believed counts as “justified” for our purposes. It should be noted that while evidentialism is certainly on the right track regarding what I’ve called “rational belief,” it is just as certainly irrelevant to one’s believing responsibly. For it is clear that one can do the best one can and still not believe in accordance with one’s evidence. One might not have the intellectual capacity to appreciate one’s evidence, and so not see what it implies. Or one might call into question a belief that one holds, think hard and earnestly about whether the belief is true, come up with what seem to be good reasons for it while blamelessly failing to recall a crucial piece of information that indicates the memory belief is false. Whether evidentialism is a plausible account of warrant is much less clear and hence much more controversial. In any event, evidentialism is relevant for our consideration because it is such a

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plausible candidate for a general theory of rational belief, and because of it, it is an initially attractive theory of the justification of memory belief, given the sense of “justification” that concerns us. You may recall that evidentialism was discussed briefly in Chapter 1. The point there was to distinguish the question of the conditions for being justified in coming to believe a proposition as opposed to the conditions for being justified in continuing to believe it. Although very little detail was given then, I claimed that evidentialism is both initially quite plausible as a theory of the former but has rather less surface appeal as an account of the latter. The plausibility of evidentialism as a theory of initial justification was appealed to in the first section of this chapter. I am justified in coming to believe that there is ale in the glass because that proposition fits my evidence. Not only did I have good inductive reason to think I would have a glass of ale, but what I saw, smelled, heard, and felt combine to give me overwhelming evidence of my having a glass of ale. So, it is very plausible to think that having good evidence that P is sufficient for being justified in coming to believe that P. But we can also see the attractiveness of the thought that having good evidence is necessary for coming to believe something. Consider again the ale case. Would I be justified in coming to believe that I have (or would have) a glass of ale if we took away all of the evidence I have for it. Suppose I had no past experience of your giving me ale at your house; suppose also that I neither saw, smelled, heard, nor felt anything that is evidence of ale. In the complete absence of evidence, my coming to believe that I have (or will have) a glass of ale in my hand would seem to be quite unjustified. Notice that if I have only a little evidence for the proposition, my coming to believe will likely be unjustified as well. Maybe I’ve been to your house a dozen times and you’ve offered me ale twice. As I ring your doorbell, I might reasonably hope that you’ll provide me with such a drink and I know that it would not be completely unexpected for you to do so, but if I come to believe that you will provide me with such a drink, solely on my past experience, my new belief will be unjustified. Evidentialism shows great promise as a theory of justification for forming new beliefs. But, of course, our concern is elsewhere. How does it do regarding the justification of memory belief?

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The problem of forgotten evidence The most immediate problem that F&C evidentialism faces is what the literature calls, “the problem of forgotten evidence.” Here’s the issue: suppose that in your junior high history course, you do a report on the American Civil War. You learn quite a bit about the Battle of Fort Sumter and come to justifiably believe (and even know) that this was the first military conflict of the war. But the years pass, and at the age of 30, you no longer remember writing the report. And you have not kept up a significant interest in American history. Still, you’ve never forgotten that the Battle of Fort Sumter was the first conflict in the Civil War. In such a case, it seems that you are justified in continuing to believe as you do even though your original evidence is no longer available to you. Indeed, your prior reasons might not even remain in LTM; you might have completely forgotten them. So it seems that, contrary to evidentialism, we have memory beliefs that are justified even though we lack evidence for them. But do we lack evidence for them? Here it is helpful to distinguish particular evidence from general evidence. While it is not easy to give a good definition of “particular evidence” and “general evidence,” the distinction can be drawn clearly enough with examples. Suppose you believe that curry is a mixture of spices rather than being itself a spice (unlike, say, turmeric and ginger). Here are two different ways you might have come by this belief. On the one hand, you might enjoy cooking Indian food and know a fair bit about what spices go into making specific dishes. In this case, you’ll know that curry is a mixture of spices because you’ve read about the different combinations that are used in making different kinds of curry. You came to believe that curry is a mixture early on in your time cooking Indian food and you have many specific reasons for believing as you do. On the other hand, you might know nothing about the food of India and other cultures that make curries. But one day a foodie friend is raving about the Indian dish he had last night and you ask, “What is curry anyway? Is it a root or a seed or something else?” Your friend then informs you that it is neither root nor seed but is instead a mixture of spices that includes both roots and seeds. Because you know your friend has serious culinary knowledge, you come to believe that curry is a mixture of spices.

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In the first case, your evidence is particular. That is, you have evidence specific to your belief—you need not invoke some very general principle in order to be justified in believing that curry is a mixture of spices. In the second case, your evidence crucially depends on the general principle that whatever your friend says about food is probably true, since you have good reason to think that he is knowledgeable in that domain. This distinction between particular and general evidence is relevant to the question of what evidential support you have for your belief about the Battle of Fort Sumter. When the original belief about the first battle of the Civil War occurred, you had evidence that directly pertained to the belief itself: you read about the battle and heard your teacher talk about it. You had a general knowledge base that supported your belief because you had many other particular beliefs and experiences that provided justification for it. But in your current epistemic situation, you don’t have any memories (episodic or semantic) that directly bear on the first battle of Civil War or the Battle of Fort Sumter. So if the only kind of evidence is particular, then you’ll not be justified. Fortunately for the evidentialist, general evidence is available in this case. To see this, first suppose that you had recalled being told about the battle by your teacher. Even if you had forgotten everything else that is relevant, you could have inferred that the Battle of Fort Sumter was the first battle of the Civil War along these lines: “My teacher is generally reliable about American history, and she said that Fort Sumter was the first battle, so it is likely that it was the first battle.” Put in the vocabulary above, this is general evidence; and arguably, reasoning of this kind lies behind much of what we come to believe by what we are told by other people.8 Now let’s get back to the original case in which you have a memory belief that the first battle of the Civil War was at Fort Sumter. You have no idea when you formed the belief, yet you feel confident in it. And you also think that, for the most part, when you have a confident memory belief (and have no reason to doubt it), it generally turns out to be true. That is to say, you have an argument that is parallel to the argument you had about your curry belief in the second case. But in this instance, the credible source isn’t another person but rather your own memory. So you have a general-evidence argument for the truth of your belief about the first battle of the Civil War.

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So perhaps the problem of forgotten evidence isn’t such a problem after all. It may seem initially odd that your justification has changed from the time you first formed the belief, but maybe this isn’t uncommon. After all, the Fort Sumter belief is of an easily recognizable sort: we often have beliefs that we aren’t in a position to give a particular-evidence justification for but that we nevertheless think are justified because we’ve long believed them and we reasonably believe that our memories are reliable in such cases.

A difficulty for the solution to the problem of forgotten evidence Is this an adequate solution to the problem of forgotten evidence? The answer will depend upon another important epistemological issue: What restrictions are there on the relationship that a justification has to the belief it justifies? It will take a little space to unpack this, so please bear with me. One objection to evidentialism that isn’t specific to memory belief points to the importance of the relationship between the evidence one possesses and the belief that it justifies. Suppose I am a regular reader of a very reliable news site. I am interested in the upcoming gubernatorial race, and I favor candidate X. The articles I read from my credible source give me very good reason to believe that X will win. But I tend to be a pessimist and so I don’t yet believe that X will win. One day, I’m talking politics with Crazy Uncle Leo. I know that Leo is usually wrong in his political predictions, but he’s a great salesman. The fact is that for nearly any topic at all, if Crazy Uncle Leo undertakes to convince me of something, he will succeed. By the end of our conversation, I have no new information about the gubernatorial race but I’ve become convinced that X will win. In this case, it is plausible to say that my belief that X will win is not justified. Why? Because the source of my belief is someone I know to have a bad track record when it comes to political matters. I’ve been convinced not because of any new information I’ve learned, but only because Crazy Uncle Leo is a terrific salesman. We can add to the case that even if I had no reason to think that X would win prior

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to my talking to Leo, I would have still come to believe that X would win. As mentioned above, Crazy Uncle Leo just has that effect on me. So, to recap: I have good evidence that X will win but because of my pessimistic nature, that evidence did not lead me to believe that she would. Then I talked to Leo who gave bad arguments that altered my total evidence not a whit, but who nevertheless convinced me (i.e., brought it about that I came to believe) that X would win the election. Now recall that evidentialism claims that a proposition is justified for a person iff it fits the evidence that she possesses at that time. Now, in the above case, I do have good evidence that X will win: the reliable website that I regularly read has made it clear that X is the heavy favorite in the election. Therefore, my evidence fits my belief and thus the evidentialist will have to say that my belief is justified. But that’s apparently the wrong conclusion to draw. If the reason I believe that X will win is only that I’ve been convinced of this by Crazy Uncle Leo’s salesmanship (particularly when I know he’s usually wrong about politics), then I’m not justified. The general point is that for a belief to be justified, it is not enough that a person merely possesses good evidence for it; rather, the evidence has to be her reason for holding the belief. Put another way, the evidence must be the psychological ground (or maybe even “cause”) of her belief. To justify a belief, the evidence one has for the belief must explain why the person believes as she does. So evidentialism gives the wrong result for this case. Is there a good reply? You can be the judge of whether the response is good, but evidentialists do have something to say. F&C make a distinction between a proposition’s being justified for a person and a belief’s being “well-founded” for her. In the case of my belief that X will win, they will say that my evidence justifies my belief (since my belief fits my evidence) but my belief is not well-founded because it is not based on, or held in light of, my evidence. So they stick to their claim that the belief is justified, but they attempt to soften its counterintutiveness by saying that the belief lacks the different-butrelated epistemic quality of being well-founded.9 You may now be wondering how all of this relates to the problem of forgotten evidence. Recall that even if the particular evidence a person has for a belief has been forgotten, she may yet have general evidence for it (she can appeal to the belief’s being a memory belief

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and to the general reliability of memory). But it seems that even if this is true, it isn’t plausible to say that her belief is grounded in, or produced (or causally sustained) by, that evidence. This is particularly true when we think of the stored beliefs that we have that we haven’t recalled for a while. To go back to your belief about Fort Sumter, when you had that belief stored in memory and hadn’t thought about it in years, it surely was not then based on your thinking that it was a memory belief, and that memory is generally reliable. And yet it was nevertheless justified. And even once you recall it, are challenged to defend it, and come up with the general-evidence justification, you do not believe it because of those reasons. This is clear from the fact that you already had the belief before you came up with the justifying evidence for it. Let’s take stock. Evidentialism maintains that a belief is justified only if it fits the evidence one has for it. The problem of forgotten evidence arises because there are many ordinary cases in which we think that long-held beliefs are justified even though the person no longer recalls the evidence that originally supported the belief (and maybe even cannot possibly recall the evidence because it is no longer in LTM). The evidentialist attempts to respond to this challenge by claiming that the person will have available to her general evidence that memory is typically reliable (and that this is a memory belief). So, she does have evidence, it’s just that it isn’t the same evidence that she had originally. The objection to this reply that we’ve been considering is that evidence can only justify a belief when that evidence is the person’s reason (or ground) for holding it; it isn’t enough that the evidence is possessed by the person (e.g., in the Crazy Uncle Leo case, I have good evidence that X will win but my belief isn’t justified because the evidence isn’t the basis for my belief).

The parity problem In our discussion of epistemic conservatism, we considered a difficulty for the view that we dubbed “The Parity Problem.” Recall that this was the alleged difficulty that since conservatism is that view that a belief is prima facie justified simply in virtue of its being

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a belief, then all beliefs would have the same justification. And that would seem to mean that all beliefs are equally justified. But that goes against the common-sense idea that even among beliefs that are justified, some are better justified than others. We saw that the conservative had a pretty good answer to this objection: her claim is only that all beliefs are prima facie justified and not being a belief is the only source of justification. So, a belief for which one has no evidence will be justified (if there are no defeaters) but a belief for which one has on balance very good evidence will be even better justified. Problem solved. Now of course the evidentialist is not committed to thinking that all beliefs have the same degree of justification; quite the contrary. Her view is that the justification of a belief is a function of the amount of evidence a person has. The more evidence, the greater the justification. Yet, there is still a potential problem regarding parity. Recall the evidentialist’s reply to the problem of forgotten evidence: even though the subject no longer has particular evidence for the belief in question, she does have general evidence. She believes both that this is a memory belief and that, for the most part, her memory beliefs are accurate. The difficulty is that there are presumably a great many beliefs for which one has only general evidence; that is, cases of beliefs with forgotten evidence with continued belief are common. And if the justification that we have for each of them is precisely the same, then all of these beliefs are equally justified. Yet, that doesn’t seem correct. For example, as I’ve mentioned before, I believe that my first-grade teacher was Mrs. McDonald; I also believe that Richard Nixon resigned as president of the United States in August of 1974. Both of these are beliefs for which I don’t have direct evidence. That means that if evidentialism is true and they are justified, it is via the same inference. But then my evidence for them is the same, and since the bedrock commitment of the evidentialist is that justification supervenes on evidence, she must conclude that they are equally justified. Yet this doesn’t seem right. My belief about my first-grade teacher is a belief I’ve had since I was six years old, and it is surely a belief for which I once possessed great evidence. But I don’t know when I came to my belief about Nixon’s resignation. I assume it was around the time it happened (I was then 14) but I also doubt that my current belief would be what it is without its being reinforced

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occasionally from what I’ve read and seen on television. In short, although I do believe that Nixon resigned in August of 1974, I don’t take myself to be nearly as well justified in that belief as I am in my belief about Mrs. McDonald. So if evidentialism entails that I am, there is a problem. There’s another, similar difficulty too. My belief that Nixon resigned in August of 1974 entails that I have these beliefs: Nixon resigned in August, Nixon resigned in 1974, and Nixon resigned. As far as I can tell, not only don’t I have direct evidence for the compound belief, I also lack direct evidence for any of the beliefs that compose it. But it seems to me that my belief that Nixon resigned is considerably more justified than I am in my belief that he resigned in August of 1974. And I’m more justified in believing that he resigned in 1974 than I am in believing that he resigned in August. But if each of these beliefs is backed only by the general argument about the reliability of memory, then they should all be equally justified. A case can be made, therefore, that evidentialist accounts of the justification of memory belief have a more serious parity problem than conservative theories do. What resources does the evidentialist have for replying to this objection? I believe her best bet is to appeal to both the strength or felt confidence of the belief together with a principle that the stronger/ greater one’s confidence in a memory belief, the more likely it is that it is true. There is certainly something to be said for this principle. My epistemic conviction that my Mrs. McDonald belief is better justified than is my compound belief about Nixon’s resignation is no doubt grounded in the fact that I’d be shocked to find out I was wrong about the former and surprised, but not shocked to find out I was wrong about the latter. I would be more surprised to find out that Nixon didn’t resign in 1974 than I would be to find out that he didn’t resign in August. And I would be sent into a skeptical spiral if I were to learn that Nixon had not in fact resigned from the presidency. This seems to me a plausible retort to the Parity Problem for the evidentialist. There are, I think, two issues it raises that are worth noting. First, let’s say the principle that is being appealed to is something along the lines of “Generally speaking (for cognitive normal adult human beings), there is a correlation between the felt confidence a person has in a belief and the likelihood of that belief’s being true.” This is clearly an empirical claim that could be tested by psychologists.

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And even if this principle does seem plausible to us, it could well turn out that there is no such correlation between confidence and reliability. Were that to be shown empirically, this reply to the Parity Problem would have to be abandoned by the evidentialist. The second point I want to make is related to the first, and perhaps an improvement on the response to the Parity Problem. As we’ll see in the next section of this chapter, the evidentialist tends to be committed to a strong brand of internalism. This entails that even if we were subjects of some extreme skeptical scenario (like, for example, we are deceived by Descartes’ Evil Genius), the beliefs that we have that are grounded in good evidence would still be justified (although of course they’d be false). That is, visual beliefs like my current conviction that my cell phone is on the desk in front of me will be taken by the evidentialist to be justified even if my perceptual processes are absolutely unreliable. So, perhaps the better principle for the evidentialist in light of the Parity Problem is not one that claims a correlation between confidence and the likelihood of truth, but rather between confidence and the likelihood that the belief was justified when originally formed (or was evidentially wellsupported originally). This does seem more in keeping with the spirit of evidentialism. And it is perhaps an even more plausible principle than its reliability cousin. The feeling of confidence could be seen as a function of the evidence that we had when the belief originated. When we have a lot of evidence that we eventually forget, perhaps it leaves a trace that is detectible by felt confidence.

Evidentialism extended At this point, one might be excused for thinking that we’ve done a disservice to the important idea behind evidentialism. After all, in the Fort Sumter example, it was stipulated that the belief was the product of good evidence: it was formed by a combination of what was read in textbooks and heard in the teacher’s lectures on the beginning of the American Civil War. While it is true that as the case was extended, the memories that originally produced the belief were lost, that doesn’t change the fact that the belief was originally formed

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in accordance with good evidence. So, isn’t there a plausible way of construing evidentialism that allows that evidence that one no longer possesses can justify a belief as long as the belief was originally formed on the basis of good evidence? Indeed, I believe that evidentialism has the wherewithal to construct a much better solution to the problem of forgotten evidence than was explained above. However, in order for that to be possible, evidentialism will have to change one of its fundamental commitments, at least as the theory has been developed in the epistemological literature. Earlier, I noted that evidentialism is a synchronic theory; that is, it is a theory of justification that entails that only current mental states are relevant to the justification of a belief. Furthermore, the only properties of current mental states that are relevant are nonhistorical properties. Take for example my belief that the team colors of the Chicago Cubs are red, white, and blue. I have no idea how or when I first formed this belief. But suppose that my earliest exposure to the Cubs was seeing them on TV and noting the color of their uniforms. My current belief that their colors are red, white, and blue then traces back to my visual experience; furthermore, my belief was justified when it was formed since it is a standard visual belief (formed with the knowledge that a team’s colors are those that are on its uniforms). So while the belief I now have has these historical properties, the standard evidentialist will not think them to be relevant. The only aspects of my mental life that are relevant according to the evidentialist are those that are available to me now. It is this insistence that only current, non-historical properties of mental states can be relevant for justification that makes the Problem of Forgotten Evidence a serious issue for the evidentialist. Consider the epistemic status of my Cubs’ team colors belief if this synchronic requirement were dropped. The evidentialist could then argue that even if I no longer remember anything about how my belief about the Cubs’ team colors was formed, it is nevertheless true that my belief is justified by my original evidence. It—this very same belief—has the historical property of having been formed on the basis of good evidence that I possessed at the time. Accepting the relevance of the history of a belief is consistent with claiming that the evidence one currently possesses is epistemically superior to evidence that

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is no longer available. So granting that my Cubs’ team colors belief would be justified by evidence I can’t now recall is consistent with my belief’s being better justified were my evidence now available. It is better to not only come to believe on the basis of good evidence but also to continue to believe on the basis of evidence that is available. There is nothing epistemically dubious in the thought that not all justified beliefs are equally justified; indeed, as we’ve seen, it is a common place that this happens regularly. Why might an evidentialist object to this broadening of her view? The main reason will be that it is a softening of her commitment to epistemological internalism. There are many different ways to define internalism in epistemology, but the basic motivation is relatively clear: the internalist thinks that what is justified for a person depends on what is cognitively available to her. This is why evidentialism restricts what can justify a belief for a person to that person’s current mental states. If I see that a sawed log contains fifty interior rings, but I don’t know that each ring represents a year of growth, then I won’t be justified in believing that the tree is fifty years old by counting its rings. For while the number of rings is in my cognitive perspective, their significance isn’t. However, once I learn from an arborist that you can reliably tell a tree’s age by counting its interior rings, then I’ll be justified in believing that the tree is fifty years old when I’ve counted its rings. To put it in a more explicitly evidentialist way, evidence that I fail to possess is not relevant for the justification of my belief. Even if everyone else in my family knew about the connection between tree rings and tree age, if I don’t know it or justifiably believe it, then it can’t be my evidence. The belief that a tree trunk contains fifty interior branches isn’t by itself good evidence that it is fifty years old; to have good evidence for that, one needs to also know about the connection between rings and age. Evidence can justify a belief for me only if it is cognitively available. And if, try as I might, I am unable to recall the original reasons I had for a belief, it is plausible to think that those reasons are no longer cognitively available to me. They are no longer part of my perspective on the world. And thus, as evidence I no longer possess, they cannot be a part of the justification of my belief now, even if they were part of the belief’s justification earlier.

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There is, then, little question that giving up the synchronic constraint on her theory of justification will make the evidentialist’s position less internalistic. But it should be recognized that the evidentialist need not say that all historical properties of a belief are relevant to its current epistemic evaluation. While I am not going to state explicit necessary and sufficient conditions for diachronic evidentialism, one way that it could be developed that would be largely in keeping with the spirit of internalism is to allow historical properties to be relevant to justification if those properties were once internally accessible and relevant to justification in the past. So, for example, the property of having been originally formed in light of good evidence would be a historical property of my current belief about the Cubs’ colors that would be taken to be relevant by the diachronic evidentialist; on the other hand, for example, the property of having been formed by a reliable cognitive process would not be (since according to the evidentialist, objective facts about reliability are not themselves evidence).

Evaluating evidentialist accounts of the justification of memory belief I mentioned early in this chapter that evidentialist theories are pretty clearly not cut out to be good theories of blameless belief. One way to see this is as follows. Whether a given set of mental states provides good evidence for a proposition is an objective matter. My thinking that the evidence I have is good evidence does not make that evidence good. Another point to note here is that evidential relations can be very complicated. To take an example discussed earlier in the chapter, consider a person’s belief that a favored political candidate will win an upcoming election (call this person “Maddy”). Maddy is politically educated and so has read a great many relevant and credible stories that evaluate the potential outcomes of the election. Suppose that the election is thought to be quite close, although some experts take candidate X to be the likely winner and others take Y to be the favorite. Maddy has not only read a lot but has also listened to many

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experts on NPR and cable news. Maddy, in light of all this information and a lot of thought on the matter, comes to believe that X will win. The evidentialist thinks that there is a fact of the matter as to whether Maddy’s evidence supports her belief that X will win; Maddy is either right or wrong in her evaluation of her evidence. And if she is wrong, then her belief is not justified. But notice that Maddy has a lot of evidence! Even if she is a smart and careful reasoner, she might well be wrong about what her total evidence supports. Furthermore, suppose Maddy has a brother, Marky, who is also very much interested in politics. Marky is very careful in gathering evidence and thinks long and hard about who will win the election. But unlike Maddy, Marky isn’t very good at evaluating evidence. Poor Marky just isn’t so bright, yet he tries so hard! Marky is not only being responsible in how he gathers evidence and how hard he considers matters, he is going over and above his epistemic duty. So his belief that X will win is clearly blameless. But if you can have a blameless belief that your evidence doesn’t support, then evidentialism doesn’t provide a good account of blamelessness. That evidentialism is not a good account of epistemic blamelessness is not a serious objection to it since it was never intended to be a theory of that. But if it is to be good theory of the justification of memory belief then it must be construed as a theory of rational or warranted belief. Let’s start with the latter: Is evidentialism a good account of warranted memory belief? Recall that to call a belief B “warranted” (as I’m stipulatively using the term) is to say that if B is true and there are no unusual Gettiertype circumstances, then B will be an instance of knowledge. One important feature that distinguishes a belief that is warranted from a belief that is “rational” (again, as I’m stipulatively using that word) is that warranted beliefs are, by definition, very likely to be true. Recall the Gettier case we discussed in Chapter 1. You believe that your colleague Mr. Nogott owns a Ford, and thus that someone in your office owns a Ford, because you’ve seen the car Nogott always drives to work, he’s told you that he owns the car, you have no reason to suspect that he’s lying, and so on. In a normal, non-Gettier case, where your colleague is not a bizarre deceiver, he’s telling you that he owns the car because he does own the car. And you therefore know someone in your office owns a Ford. But in the Gettier case,

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even though your belief turns out to be true because, completely unbeknownst to you, another co-worker, Havitt, happens to own a Ford, you fail to know that someone in your office owns a Ford (since you only believe the latter because you warrantedly believe that Nogott has a Ford). In a typical case, if you believe that someone owns a Ford because you’ve seen the car they drive, know how to recognize a Ford, and are told by the person that he owns the car, then you know that the person owns a Ford. In the terminology of this book, then, you are warranted in both cases because believing as you do will typically result in knowledge. So, in one case you have a warranted true belief that fails to be knowledge (because you are in a Gettier case) but in the non-Gettier situations, your warranted true belief is knowledge. The discussion above is very amenable to the evidentialist’s perspective. That is, what provides warrant in both cases is a set of evidence. And if it is evidence that is doing the warranting, then doesn’t that indicate the good evidence is what is necessary and sufficient for warrant? As tempting as that conclusion is, it does not follow. The key to seeing why evidentialism (even diachronic evidentialism) is not a plausible theory of warrant is to consider the relationship between evidence and truth. The evidentialist position implies that if evidence set E is good evidence for a proposition P, then E is good reason to believe that P is true. So far, so good. But the evidentialist does not claim that E’s being good reason to believe that P is true makes it objectively likely or probable that P is in fact true. That is, the evidentialist position as it has been developed in the literature is consistent with good evidence not leading to truth as a general rule. The best example of this comes from what has been called the “New Devil Demon Problem.”10 Famously, Descartes used the idea that we are incapable of ruling out the possibility that all of our experience is caused by a deceiving evil genius to argue that perhaps our perceptual beliefs don’t count as genuine knowledge. For consider this: you think that the device you are reading from is being held in your hands because that is clearly the way things look to you. But it is consistent with the experience that you are having that instead of you holding a device, you are either lying in bed dreaming or you are being deceived by a very powerful and cunning demon (or

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neurosurgeon!) who causes you to have hallucinations that lead you to believe that you are holding the device in your hands. Evidentialists of the standard stripe are thoroughgoing internalists who believe that only what one currently has in her perspective is evidence. Furthermore, whether a given set of evidence E is good evidence for P is determined solely by its internally accessible properties. The evidentialist thinks that normal cases of sense perception provide good evidence in the real world and the people in the New Demon World cases have just the same evidence for their seemingly perceptual beliefs that we have in the real world. But if the evidence is the same, then the justificatory status must be the same. So the dreamers/demon world dwellers are equally justified in their perceptual beliefs as we are in ours. An implication of the above is that the evidentialist thinks that evidential relations are necessary relations. That is, if E is good evidence for P in the real world, then E is good evidence for P at every possible world. So, it is not logically possible that, say, having a visual experience of seeing what appears to be a dog in the yard is good evidence for the belief that there is a dog in the yard in one possible world but not in another. Of course, you might end up with a defeater for that justification. For example, maybe you know that your neighbor’s yard contains a life-like dog statue. Then even though seeing what looks like a dog does give you evidence that there is a dog in the yard, your total evidence gives you no such reason. In fact, even if you were to learn that all dogs had been turned into statues by Narnia’s White Witch, when you saw what looks like a dog, you’d still have evidence that what you are seeing is a dog and not a statue. But you wouldn’t be justified in your dog belief because, again, your total evidence rules out that possibility. Let’s dub this thesis that evidential relations are logically necessary relations “evidence essentialism.” Just as evidentialists have favored synchronic theories of justification, so have they signed on for evidence essentialism.11 Now we’ve already seen that the bare idea behind evidentialism doesn’t entail that the theory be synchronic. Similarly, there isn’t anything in the basic notion of evidentialism that requires that it includes evidence essentialism. Consider again the fact that the internal rings of a tree stump are good evidence of the tree’s age. Plausibly, what makes the rings such strong evidence of age is that the rings are a

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reliable indication of how old the tree is. Similarly, in the real world, your experience of seeing and feeling the book or device from which you are currently reading is a reliable indication that you are in fact holding a book or device in your hands. Another way of thinking of evidence that will be rejected by internalists but which isn’t at odds with a broader understanding of evidentialism is the idea that E is evidence for P only if E raises the objective probability of P. So, for example, if I drive by your house and notice that your car is not parked in the driveway—where you generally park it when you are home—that is evidence that you are not there. There are, of course, many other possible explanations for your missing car: it might be in the shop or in the garage or you might have lent it to a friend. Still, your car’s not being in your driveway raises the probability that you are not home, even if it fails to make it more probable than not. The naturalness of both the evidence-as-reliable-indication and evide​nce-a​s-obj​ectiv​e-pro​babil​ity-r​aisin​g understandings of evidence can be seen when we think about what counts as evidence in a court of law. That the accused’s fingerprints were found at the scene of the murder, that the gun used in the killing was purchased by the accused the week before, and that security cameras caught the defendant fleeing the scene of the crime constitute good evidence that the accused is guilty. Why? Because generally, when all of those factors are as they are in this case, the accused is guilty of the crime. And each of these pieces of evidence serves to raise the probability of the accused. Armed with these understandings of the nature of evidence, we can see that a version of evidentialism could be constructed that would make it a serious candidate for warranted belief. The idea that knowledge requires “having a reason” (or in the case of memory belief, “having had a reason”) is initially quite plausible and something that fits well with all varieties of evidentialism. The problem for internalist versions of warrant is that “having reasons” has no essential connection to a proposition’s being likely to be true. But externalist evidentialism is able to provide such a connection. Since our interest has to do with warranted memory belief, let’s think of what would have to be true in order for such a belief to be warranted. We can go back to the Fort Sumter example we discussed

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earlier. Externalist, diachronic evidentialism would claim that your belief that the Battle of Fort Sumter was the first battle of the American Civil War is prima facie warranted provided that it was based on good evidence when formed. For the version of evidentialism that we are now considering, there are both internalistic and externalistic constraints on what counts as “good evidence.” Internalistically, the evidence has to be something that the subject is in a position to appreciate. So, in this case, the fact that I have good reason to trust both the textbook I read and the teacher I heard, means that from my perspective the evidence is good. Externalistically, the evidence must be a reliable indicator of the truth of what is being claimed or at least raise its probability. This test is also passed in this case: what textbooks and school teachers report about the Civil War are reliable indications of what actually happened and raise the probability for those that know about them. So a diachronic externalist evidentialism can be constructed to develop an account of justification that takes internal evidential relations to be necessary for justification and that entails that beliefs that are justified according to its standards stand a high likelihood of being true. In other words, this extended evidentialism should be taken as a serious candidate for a theory of warranted memory belief. Finally, suppose the evidentialist rejects the advice I’ve just given and remains a synchronic internalist, what shall we say about it as a theory of rational memory belief? That will depend on what one makes of the problem regarding epistemic basing and the problem of forgotten evidence. For my money, both of these problems run deep. That a belief that was originally irrational will become rational if one no longer recalls her original reason for believing is serious problem. Two wrongs don’t make a right in morality and they don’t make a right in epistemology either. The fact that one is now in the position to do nothing other than believe something that one ought not (epistemically speaking) to have believed in the first place does not make believing it now epistemically in the clear. So, the search continues for a good theory of the justification of memory belief. Our next candidate will be foundationalism and it is to that perspective that we will now turn.

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Study questions 1 What is the core idea of evidentialism? How does it differ from conservatism? 2 Explain how “mentalism” and “internalism” are related to Feldman and Conee’s version of evidentialism. 3 What is the “problem of forgotten evidence”? What is the evidentialist’s best reply to it? 4 This chapter suggests that the evidentialist need not be a synchronist. Why is this suggestion made? 5 Do you think evidentialism is best construed as a theory of blamelessness, rationality, or warrant? Why?

For further study Conee, E. and Feldman, R. (2004), Evidentialism: Essays in Epistemology, New York: Oxford University Press, Chapters 3 and 4). (These are the two most important essays by Feldman and Conee for understanding their epistemology.) McCain, K. (2014), Evidentialism and Epistemic Justification, London: Routledge. (McCain provides the best worked out version of evidentialism available.) Frise, M. (2018), “Metacognition as Evidence for Evidentialism,” in McCain, K. (ed.), Believing in Accordance with the Evidence: New Essays on Evidentialism, New York: Springer Publishing. (Frise argues that current work in cognitive science provides reason to accept evidentialism in epistemology.) Goldman, A. I. (1999), “Internalism Exposed,” Journal of Philosophy 96 (6): 271–93. (An argument against internalism in general and evidentialism in particular by the most prominent externalist.)

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Alston, W. (1986b), “Internalism and Externalism in Epistemology,” Philosophical Topics 14: 179–22. (An exploration of how the strength and weaknesses of internalism and of externalism.) Alston, W. (1988), “An Internalist Externalism,” Synthese 74: 265–83. (Alston presents and defends a theory of justification that has both internalist and externalist elements.)

5 Foundationalism

Introduction

T

he two theories we’ve considered so far are, in a way, at opposite ends of an epistemic spectrum. The conservative thinks that one need look no further than the memory belief itself to find the source of its justification. On the other hand, the evidentialist thinks that all of one’s belief system must support a proposition if it is to be justified for a person. In this chapter, we’ll have a look at a position that is intermediate in that it requires more than bare belief for justification, but it allows that what is needed for positive support is much more restrictive than the evidentialist view entails. The position that we’ll be exploring is known as “foundationalism.” The chapter will begin by motivating foundationalism as a general theory of justification before we narrow our focus to foundationalism for memory belief.

What is foundationalism? The best way to see both what foundationalism is and what motivates it as a theory of the structure of justification is to consider a couple examples. Here’s the first: I am about to leave for work and I wonder if I should take an umbrella. I look out the window at the sky and see that the sky is cloudless. So, I leave my umbrella at home. My belief that the sky is cloudless is the result of my visual experience. A great

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many of our perceptual beliefs are just like this: we have experiences and we directly form beliefs on the basis of them.1 Contrast that example with this: I plan to buy a car and this leads me to do some research. I know I want a hybrid sedan with four doors. So, I look to Consumer Reports, Edmunds.com, and other reputable publications and websites to see what they recommend. Being a cautious consumer, I take the matter seriously and do my due diligence. As the result of my research, I come to believe that the Honda Accord is my best option. This belief is based on many other things that I now think: for example, that the Accord is more reliable, has a higher resale value, and scored higher on road tests than its competitors. In contrast to the first case, in which I formed a belief directly on the basis of perceptual experience, my belief about the Accord is produced by an inference I make from these many other beliefs. Following the vernacular of contemporary epistemology, we’ll call beliefs of the former type “basic,” and beliefs of the latter type “nonbasic.” A basic belief is a belief that is not based on other beliefs; a nonbasic belief is a belief that is based on other beliefs. The next thing to notice is that there are justified and unjustified beliefs of both varieties. Suppose I suffer from ailurophobia—the irrational fear of cats. I walk into your house, see Ms. Whiskers, and immediately believe that she is going to attack me. Like my “cloudless sky” belief, this is based directly on perceptual experience (together with my irrational fear); but unlike that earlier example, this belief is not justified. So it is a basic, unjustified belief. Here is an example of an unjustified nonbasic belief: I’m a pessimist prone to jump to conclusions that I wish weren’t true. Next week is my birthday and I want to have a party at the park, but then I remember that it rained on my birthday last year. So, I infer that it will likely rain on my birthday this year. I’ve not looked at any forecasts; the only reason I have for this pessimistic conclusion is my belief that it rained on my birthday last year. Since my belief in this case is based on my memory belief about the weather conditions last year, it is a nonbasic belief. But because the fact that it rained on my birthday last year is not good reason to think it will probably rain on my birthday this year, my belief is unjustified. The main support for foundationalism is that it turns out that it is not possible for all our justified beliefs to be nonbasic. If I believe that

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P because I have inferred it from Q, my belief that P is justified only if my belief that Q is justified. But then the issue arises of what justifies my belief that Q? Perhaps my belief that R is what justifies my belief that Q. But the same point can now be raised about R—it can justify my belief Q only if it is justified. It is not hard to see that there are only four possible ways such a chain of justification can play out. 1 Either it is infinitely long, in which case every belief has a

prior belief upon which it is based and the chain has no end. But it is safe to say that no human has infinitely many beliefs, so this option can be eliminated. 2 Another possibility is that the chain of justification is finite

but circular. In that case every belief has a belief that is its justification but eventually a belief will play a part in its own justification. For example, suppose A justifies B, B justifies C, C justifies D, and D justifies A. Belief A then has itself as part of its chain of justification. But circular reasoning is not justification conferring. So, this alternative is dubious. 3 A third possibility is that the chains of justification end in

beliefs that have no justification. Yet we’ve already noted that a belief A can’t get its justification via inference from belief B unless B itself is justified. So if justificatory chains end in beliefs that have no justification, then no belief that is part of such a chain is justified. So this third possibility doesn’t result in any justified beliefs. 4 That leaves us with one last option: the chain ends in a belief

that is justified but the justification of which doesn’t depend upon the justification of any other beliefs. That is, if chains of justification are really going to result in a series of justified beliefs, they must begin with a belief that is a justified, basic belief. The argument just sketched is known as “the regress argument” for foundationalism. As with all arguments for epistemological theories, it has not generated universal assent. In particular, positive coherentism denies the argument’s assumption that justification is linear rather than holistic. That is, the coherentist thinks that what

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justifies a belief is how it coheres with the entire belief system; justification doesn’t get transferred from belief to belief but from the entire doxastic corpus to a given belief. Another potential response is that my claim that we don’t have infinitely many beliefs is incorrect; as long as belief is construed dispositionally, then we might well have infinitely many beliefs. Consider: you now believe that 2 is greater than 1, that 3 is greater than 2, that 4 is greater than 3, and so on; but if this is true for all positive integers, then you have an infinitely many beliefs about numbers. Now this is only the first step in showing how the infinitist position can provide an adequate solution to the regress, and we don’t have time to consider the matter here. It is enough to see why someone might be led to think that there must be justified basic beliefs if any beliefs are justified at all. Another thing foundationalism has going for it is the intuitive plausibility that some beliefs (like the “cloudless sky” example above) are justified by experience rather than by inference from beliefs. Notice that foundationalism is primarily a theory of the structure of justified belief rather than an explanation of what makes a belief justified. That is, it doesn’t tell us what is necessary or sufficient for justification but only that some beliefs have other beliefs as justifiers and some beliefs don’t. For the sake of clarity, let’s define foundationalism as the combination of these two claims: F1: Some justified beliefs are basic, that is, they are prima facie justified without the help of positive support from other beliefs. F2: All justified nonbasic beliefs are justified by other beliefs, and ultimately the justification for all nonbasic beliefs traces back to justified basic beliefs.

Memory belief foundationalism To see how to apply our discussion of foundationalism to memory belief, let’s take a slight detour into another area of epistemology: testimony. We come by a great deal of what we believe by accepting the word of other people. We not only listen to newscasts and read books by

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authoritative authors, but we mostly accept what our family, friends, and acquaintances tell us about the goings-on in their lives, families, towns, politics, sports, the entertainment industry, and so on. Of course, there are some folks that we’ve learned not to trust, and some topics that we know are rife with controversy. But, by and large, we believe what people tell us. Thinking as epistemologists, we wonder what justifies us in accepting the word (or as the literature calls it, the “testimony”) of other people. Broadly speaking, there are two main ideas of how the justification of testimony works: reductionism and nonreductionism. According to reductionism, testimonial beliefs are justified by an implicit inference. When I heard on NPR that the president spent the day golfing, I’m justified in believing what I hear because I am justified in believing that NPR is a reputable source and that the great majority of what they report (or more specifically, the great majority of what they report about the activities of the president) is correct. The same pattern is said to hold for all justified testimony belief. When I ask my wife if there is milk in the fridge and she tells me there is, I’m justified because I know her to be a truth-teller. The label “reductionism” is used for this theory because it claims that the justification of testimony reduces to the justification of inductive inference. Nonreductionism, on the other hand, is the thesis that the justification of testimonial belief doesn’t reduce to any other variety of justification. In the same way that perception justifies basic perceptual beliefs, and introspection justifies basic beliefs about what is going on in our minds, testimony justifies the hearer in believing what she is told. To put the matter in a way particularly amenable to the foundationalist, nonreductionism claims that testimony is itself a source of justified basic belief. When my wife tells me that there is milk in the fridge, I immediately form the relevant belief—I don’t need to even implicitly go through an inferential process or even have one available to me. Of course, like other sources of basic belief, my justification can be overridden if I have good reason to think either that the particular proposition is false or that testimony is unreliable in this context (for instance, if I know the person to be untrustworthy on the subject matter about which she is speaking). But in normal contexts regarding uncontroversial topics, when a speaker asserts that P, the hearer will form a justified basic belief that P.

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If reductionism about testimony sounds familiar to you, that is probably because it is very much like what the evidentialist typically says in response to the problem of forgotten evidence. My belief that the Battle of Fort Sumter was the first battle of the Civil War is justified, it is claimed, because I recognize it as a memory belief and I’m justified in thinking that most memory beliefs that I have (or that I have with this level of confidence) turn out to be true. The foundationalist theory of the justification of memory belief is exactly parallel to nonreductionism regarding testimony. The foundationalist thinks that just as perceptual and introspective beliefs are basic and prima facie justified, memory beliefs are also basic and prima facie justified.2 So, for example, if I am at my office and a colleague asks me where I parked my car, I give the matter half a moment’s thought and have a memory of parking my car on Louise Street, then I’m prima facie justified in believing that I parked my car there. So foundationalism regarding memory belief (hereafter, I will shorten this phrase to simply “foundationalism”) implies that memory is a source of justification. Foundationalism has been endorsed by a number of philosophers, such as Bertrand Russell and C. D. Broad, George Pappas, and John Pollock (sometimes writing with Joseph Cruz). All of them hold that memory beliefs are basic and justified.3 It is important to keep in mind, however, that to call a belief “basic” is not to say that it is base-less, but only that its base doesn’t include any doxastic states. In what follows, I will consider the Pollock and Cruz version of foundationalism, and argue that the problems their view faces are general enough that any similar version of foundationalism cannot fail to have them.4

Pollock and Cruz’s foundationalism5 It is crucial to begin by noting a distinction that Pollock makes in his early work, namely, “remembering that P” versus “recalling that P.” That “Roberto remembers that he had eggs for breakfast” entails Roberto had eggs for breakfast.” That is, “to remember” is a factive verb, or a success term; that P is true is entailed by the proposition S

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remembers P. However, there is also a need for a word to describe the state of seeming to remember, of having an experience just like remembering, but without the implication of truth. It is this role that “recalling” plays for Pollock and Cruz (hereafter often “P&C”). Loosely, to say “S recalls that P” is to say that S is in a state that is phenomenologically indistinguishable from what she would be in if she remembered that P. Thus, “S recalls that P” is entailed by “S remembers that P” but not vice versa.6 It is Pollock’s view that a memory belief is justified by the state of recollection that comes with it. That is, [A]: “S recalls that P” is a prima facie reason for S to believe that it was true that P.7 Being only a prima facie reason, of course, it might be that all things considered, S isn’t justified in her belief. She might, for example, have reason to believe that her memory is unreliable. This would undermine her justification because it would give her reason to deny that unless it were true that P, she wouldn’t recall that P. Notice that this sort of justification is open to virtually any memory belief, regardless of content. Therefore, just as Roberto’s belief that he had eggs for breakfast would be justified by the fact that he recalls he had eggs for breakfast, so would his belief in the truth of a set theoretic theorem that he had proved the night before if he recalled it. In fact, while one might still have other justifications for certain memory beliefs, such auxiliary reasons are not necessary as long as one possesses no defeaters for the target belief. Every undefeated memory belief qualifies as basic provided only that one recalls it! As Pappas has noted in another discussion of foundationalism, this is likely to strike some as so counterintuitive as to be a reductio of the view.8 It has usually been thought that if there were any justified basic beliefs, they would be limited to either beliefs about one’s own present conscious states or, more liberally, perceptual beliefs about medium-sized physical objects in one’s immediate environment. That a belief in the truth of a theorem of set theory could be epistemologically basic is at the very least surprising. It is interesting to note how much Pollock and Cruz’s position sounds like Gilbert Harman’s view that we discussed in Chapter 2.

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Remember that Harman contrasted his (negative) coherentism with what he called “the foundations theory,” which made a necessary condition of ongoing justification that one ought to continue to associate any given belief with an adequate justification. As opposed to this, Harman claimed that one ought to give up a continued belief only when one realized that one’s original reasons for that belief were no good (this was called the “Principle of Positive Undermining”); one needn’t keep track of one’s original justification. Compare this position with that of Pollock, who writes: This is not to say that my original warrant is totally irrelevant to the justification of my present claim to remember. Although I need not first ascertain that I originally had a good reason for believing-that-P before I can justifiably claim to remember- that-P, nevertheless, if I discover somehow that I did not have a good reason, this entails that I do not remember, and hence defeats the justification of my claim to remember. Thus, my original warrant is relevant, but only negatively, as a defeater.9 Despite the striking similarity of their positions, there is one important difference. Harman does not so much as mention the phenomenology of memory, while Pollock makes it central to his theory of justified memory belief. On Pollock’s view, what makes Roberto’s belief that he had eggs for breakfast justified is not the mere fact that it is held; rather it is his state of recalling that he had eggs for breakfast that is justificatorily crucial. And “recalling” is defined as that phenomenological state which accompanies remembering. Hence, one should not see Pollock as endorsing the principle of conservatism; memory beliefs are justified in virtue of their relation to an experiential state, and not simply because one has them. In order to properly evaluate P&C’s theory, one needs to know more about what this phenomenological state of recalling is. However, I think that we should realize that in principle such a state is extremely hard to properly characterize and so we shouldn’t set our sights too high. Nevertheless, given the importance of this notion in P&C’s work, I think it fair that we be offered some kind of characterization of these enigmatic states. In his initial description of recollection, Pollock simply defines it as the “phenomenological state which is involved in that kind of

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knowledge [i.e., the kind that is involved in remembering].”10 He does, however, say more when confronting the potential objection that there is no such psychological state. The objector claims that recalling that P is just the same thing as believing that P. In response to this challenge, Pollock describes three possible cases which lend credence to the recollection/belief distinction. Because understanding what he has in mind by the phenomenologically defined state of “recalling,” is crucial to what follows, I will quote him at length. In his earlier work, Pollock offers three examples. Here is the first example: Consider a physicist who has spent years working on a certain project. He has proposed an intricate theory to explain some previously puzzling observations, and both he and the scientific community at large have performed a truly vast number of diverse experiments all of which confirm the theory. The result is that the theory has become a well-entrenched part of physics. However, when the physicist was a young research assistant, he performed a single, at the time inconsequential, experiment whose results contradict his later theory. Now, on the eve of receiving a Nobel Prize, the physicist thinks back over his long career, and suddenly he recalls that early experiment. Because that experiment, as he recalls it, conflicts with such a huge body of subsequent evidence, he might reasonably and with complete justification mistrust his memory and be absolutely convinced that his recollection is in error. This illustrates that one can recall-that-P without believingthat-P, and hence the two states are distinct.11 Pollock’s second example: I recall that pi is approximately 3.141592653589793. . . . My having the recollection tags the source of belief as being memory rather than present calculation or the result of reading the value off of a table presently before me or simply pulling the number out of the air at random. For example, suppose I have the bad habit, when asked for the value of various mathematical and physical constants, of confidently spieling off numbers at random without at all trying to remember their correct values, and furthermore, I believe each time that I have got them right. I am invariably wrong, but I remain unrepentant. Then some unsuspecting soul asks me the value of pi

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and I reply at random “3.141592653589793.” Phenomenologically, picking a number out of the air like this and believing that it is the right number “feels” very different from recalling that that is the desired number. Thus once again, recollection is to be distinguished from belief.12 Finally, Pollock describes a kind of case familiar to us all (third example). There is a clear phenomenological difference . . . between remembering and simply accepting what you are told. For example, upon meeting someone, you may be told that you met him once before at a convention in Philadelphia. You may simply take your informant’s word for this and on this basis know that you met the man in Philadelphia. But it may also happen that your memory is jogged by your being told you met the man in Philadelphia, and you now remember that you did. The difference between these two cases is a purely phenomenological one. In the latter case, you are led to recall that you met the man in Philadelphia, and you then believe this on the basis of your recollection. This difference would be inexplicable if there were no such phenomenological state as recollection.13 So far, then, Pollock’s view amounts to this: [B]: S’s memory belief that P is justified at t iff at t, S recalls that P and possesses no defeater for her belief that P. There is, however, one more wrinkle. The problem with [B] as it is currently stated is that one could recall that P, and have no defeater for it, and yet still base the belief that P on something else that doesn’t confer justification—like, for example, wishful thinking. In such a case, S’s belief that P would not be justified even though she recalls it. So we should make a basing requirement explicit in the account. Thus, [B] yields: [C]: S’s memory belief that P is justified at t iff at t, S recalls that P, bases her belief that P on her recollection, and S possesses no defeater for her belief that P.

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The virtues of this account are clear. One will recall that Harman’s theory had the advantage of avoiding skepticism; since one isn’t required to keep track of one’s justification for P, many beliefs which our intuitions claim are justified turn out to be justified even though we currently have no evidence for them. The down-side of the Harmanian approach, however, is that to adopt it, one must accept conservatism. Pollock and Cruz’s theory manages to take from Harman’s account its primary virtue, while leaving its vices. For the former view requires that for any belief to be justified it must be properly based on something that justifies it; but that which is doing the justifying will be available, it appears, in each case of intuitively justified belief. Thus, the foundationalist accepts the plausible idea that one has to have a reason for holding a belief if it is to be justified; and every time one has a memory belief that P, one will have a reason for thinking that P is true.

Objections to foundationalism Despite its initial appeal, the Pollock and Cruz version of foundationalism has a number of difficulties. In this section, I will discuss five objections.

Objection 1: Memory beliefs without “recalling” Let’s grant in the three passages quoted above show what they are intended to establish: that “recalling that P” is a different mental state from “believing that P.” In fact, however, I think that the examples that Pollock chooses might very well show too much. I will now argue that because of the distinction between believing that P and recalling that P, there will be cases of justified memory belief which do not have any phenomenological state as a ground for their justification. While the examples show that there is a difference between belief and recollection, they certainly haven’t indicated that every justified memory belief carries with it a distinct phenomenological state. And it is precisely this claim that I maintain to be both essential for any theory like Pollock and Cruz’s to work, and yet quite implausible.

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Consider the following kind of example. You and I are working in our shared office. I am trying to plan our next committee meeting, so I ask you, “Do you teach at noon on Wednesdays?” You take your nose out of your book just long enough to respond, “No, I don’t.” In such a case you have a memory belief with the content “I don’t teach at noon on Wednesdays.” But your attention has not been focused entirely on my question. Instead, you have paid me just enough attention to answer me properly, and spent the rest of you attentional capacity thinking about what you are reading. Because of the limited attention that you give my question, while you attend to your memory belief, but there is a significant sense in which you aren’t really aware of it. This, I take it, is an example in which one’s memory belief fails to have the kind of phenomenological properties experienced by the people in cases above. Consider his first example. The physicist is recalling an experience that he had as a scientific neophyte just before receiving the Nobel Prize. The picture that this description conjures up is that of a person at the pinnacle of his career, looking down on the rest of it. He is recollecting in the common sense of the term. In the third case, we are to imagine someone asking us if we remember so-and-so, and then giving us a perfect prompt which opens the floodgates of our memory. Surely in these two cases, memory exhibits a real and distinct phenomenology. The problem is that not all memory is like that. Finally, recall Pollock’s second example, involving the decimal expansion of pi. This case is one in which the phenomenology of memory is highlighted by contrasting it with the state of a person who forms beliefs for no reason at all. As I previously quoted, Pollock claims that, phenomenologically, picking a number out of the air like this and believing that it is the right number “feels” very different from recalling that that is the desired number. It is difficult to know whether this statement is true or false. I’m quite sure I’ve never “picked a number out of the air and believed it,” so I can’t be sure what it feels like. I suspect that inasmuch as we are willing to go along with Pollock on this example, it is because there is a phenomenological difference between guessing and believing. If I

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make myself really trying to think about what it would be like to believe in this aberrant way, I’m not sure that there is any phenomenological distinction between my simply having the belief and my having quickly, and rather thoughtlessly, retrieved it from memory. That one can have a conscious (or “occurrent”) memory without having an accompanying feeling of recalling is brought out nicely in a well-known example by C. B. Martin and Max Deutscher in their article “Remembering.”14 They describe a case in which a painter images a scene and paints it. It turns out that the scene is a very good representation of an area in which the painter lived as a child. However, when this is pointed out to him, the painter responds by denying that he was remembering and asserting that he was instead imagining. Now one may surely stipulate that this is a case in which the painter is indeed remembering the scene but not recalling it, in the Pollock and Cruz sense. For as long as the image the painter used as a model is causally related in the relevant way to his memory of the childhood scene, the image is the product of memory and not imagination. Such a stipulation would not violate either conceptual or psychological possibility. While this isn’t a case in which one believes that P, but doesn’t recall it,15 nevertheless, it does effectively show that one can have an occurrent memory which one doesn’t recognize as memory. Let’s get back to your belief about when you teach. I am claiming that this is a case in which you have a bona fide memory belief, but without any experience of recollecting. It is certainly true that the phenomenology involved in Pollock’s first two examples is altogether unlike that of this case. One might note, however, that the belief in question is one for which I probably have other good reasons. So, we will be able to say that it is justified, even if it were to fail to be an instance of genuine recollection. But surely other examples can be generated that will do the trick. If a young girl asks her father the name of the father’s first-grade teacher, the father might answer quickly all the while focusing his attention on the work he is doing when his daughter asks. The father might have no real reason for believing the name of his first-grade teacher other than that he remembers it. That is, he has no particular evidence but neither has he any particular phenomenological state that can justify his belief. Yet it’s plausible to think he is justified in his belief about his teacher’s name.

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So, the first objection to foundationalism as a theory of the justification of memory belief is that there a whole host of memories will not come with the sort of distinct state of “recalling” that is key to the Pollock and Cruz proposal. And there is no reason to think that all those beliefs will lack justification.

Objection 2: Recalling and the basing relation A second objection to Pollock and Cruz’s view has to do with its compatibility with the basing-relation requirement. Recall that in our discussion of evidentialism, we distinguished between a proposition’s being justified and a belief’s being justified. You might have very good reason to believe a proposition (in which case the proposition is justified for you), but if you base your belief on a different reason that is not very good, then your belief won’t be justified.16 In their book Contemporary Theories of Knowledge, Pollock and Cruz commit themselves to the thesis that good reasons only justify beliefs if the beliefs are based on those reasons.17 Yet, surprisingly, what they go on to say about the justification for memory belief is, it would seem, not consistent with requiring basing for justification. Consider a case in which a memory belief has an unquestionable phenomenological feel. Is it right to say that the belief is based on the state of recalling it that accompanies it? Let’s think of a couple different cases. I ask you if you drove or walked to work today. You immediately recall walking on the streets between your home and office, and you tell me that you walked. So, the relevant belief “I walked to work today” is accompanied by an episodic memory—you recall the act of walking to work (or at least some part of it). If your state of recalling is to justify your belief that you walked, then your belief must be based upon it. Is it plausible to think that it is? One way of approaching this question is to ask another question: before I made my inquiry, did you believe that you walked to work today? It is hard to imagine answering “no” to this latter question. But if your belief that you walked to work preceded your recalling it, then it is hard to see how your belief could be based on your memory experience.

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At this point, the defender of foundationalism might remind us of the distinction mentioned in the first chapter between stored, dispositional memory beliefs and conscious, occurrent memory beliefs. She might then argue that while the stored belief is earlier than the occurrent belief, it is the occurrent belief that is relevant for epistemology. And it is plausible to think that my question prompted your episodic memory of walking to school, and your occurrent belief is based on your experience. This is an interesting reply to the objection that recalling fails to be the basis of memory belief. We’ll come back shortly to the matter of what the target of epistemology is. In the case above, what is recalled is an episodic memory—that is, the memory of the event of walking to work. This is, I think, the best case for the foundationalist theory. Why? Because there is a significant phenomenological similarity to perceptual states and recalling in P&C’s sense of the term, there is unquestionably experientially rich experiential content when one recalls an event—particularly when that event is recent. And just as perceptual experiences would seem to be epistemically rich sources of justification, so might it seem that memory experiences are themselves epistemically significant. Many cases of occurrent memory belief, however, do not come with such robust episodic memories. Suppose you ask me if I have renewed my driver’s license in the last three years. I immediately recall that I have. Here, I do have some kind of vague memory of going to the Department of Motor Vehicles but it is nothing like your memory of walking to work this morning. In fact, it might not even be that I have a distinct episodic memory attached to the experience at all. It might just seem to me that I renewed my license in the last year or two, in which case I believe that it has been fewer than three years since I’ve done it. In such a case, we can still draw the distinction between my recalling and my believing, and the distinction between stored and occurrent beliefs, but the inclination to say that my belief is based on a phenomenally rich state of recalling is much less strong than it was in the earlier case. Note that there are also instances of memory beliefs that don’t come with any associated episodic memory. Recall our previous discussion of the problem of forgotten evidence. When I remember that Fort Sumter was the first battle of the Civil War, I fail to associate that with any episodic memory at all. I can imagine reading it in a book or hearing about it from my high school Advanced Placement

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History teacher, or watching commentary on it in Ken Burns’ film series The Civil War, but that is the work of my imagination (as far as I can tell, anyway) rather than my memory. Even if there is some phenomenology involved in my remembering that fact, it hardly seems that my memory—even my occurrent, conscious memory— is based on this very thin, non-episodic state of recalling. Finally, consider the following possibility. Suppose that the feel of recollection is generated by a belief’s being activated from working memory. The “feel” accompanies the belief’s becoming occurrent, but plays no causal role in activating it. In such a case the phenomenological characteristics of the belief might nevertheless act as a sign which signifies the working of the mnemonic, as opposed to say the perceptual, process. Would the foundationalist be willing to argue that creatures with that kind of cognitive makeup do not have justified memorial beliefs because in such a case the experience is not the basis of the belief? Would she come to the same conclusion if it turned out, it might, that humans are such creatures?

Objection 3: Circularity A third objection to P&C’s foundationalism is that it is in danger of exhibiting a rather severe form of circularity. Let’s consider again, for example, my Fort Sumter belief. I’ve believed it for a long time and it is has been only dispositional—that is, not occurrent—the vast majority of the time I’ve believed it (I don’t spend much time thinking about the Civil War). Now suppose I’m queried about how the Civil War started, and I think for a moment and the belief becomes conscious with the attendant experience of recalling that is key to the P&C account. By hypothesis, I’ve believed this proposition for a long time; so, I had the belief prior to my now being asked about the Civil War. If the conjecture made above is true, then it is the process of the belief’s becoming activated that produces the experience of recall. But if the state of recalling a belief has as part of its cause the belief itself, then how can the former be the reason for the latter? The belief would ultimately have itself as its cause and, besides being epistemologically embarrassing, that is impossible.

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Objection 4: The problem of stored beliefs A distinction that has been made in a few places in this book is between memory beliefs that are occurrent and those that are stored. And, again as we’ve noted, human working memory is a pretty limited space (i.e., it is impossible for us to be conscious of more than a few beliefs at once). The point here is neither subtle nor insignificant. Even if foundationalism were an adequate theory of the justification of occurrent memory beliefs, it could not be a good overall theory of the justification of memory belief if it does not explain how the dispositional or stored beliefs get their epistemic status. So what does it have to say about beliefs that are not occurrent? The first point to make is that although the foundationalist thinks that recalling is a source of prima facie justification, memory beliefs can have other justifications as well. For example, I believe that I parked my car on Louise Street and the foundationalist will say that this is justified because I am recalling it. However, my belief might well have other sources of justification too. Suppose I have a stored belief that unless the Cubs sign a first-rate starting pitcher this winter, they will not be as good next year as they were last season. This belief is based on, and justified by, beliefs about the quality of the pitchers currently on their roster and the quality of pitchers on the roster last year but won’t be in the next season. So the foundationalist can say that my dispositional belief about the Cubs’ prospects for the coming year is justified by those other dispositional beliefs. Therefore, the justification of stored beliefs that are justified by other beliefs I have is not a problem for foundationalism. Even so, we all have a great number of beliefs that we take to be justified, but for which we no longer have good evidence. And, at any given time, we are able to recall (if what cognitive psychologists tell us is right) about seven items. So that would mean that, at most, we could only have a few beliefs that are justified via recollection. But it seems clear that we then have a far larger number of justified dispositional beliefs for which we have no evidence. One can glean from Pollock’s earlier work the lines of a response to the above objection. For example, consider the following quotation

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(a terminological note: a nonoccurrent memory is what we’ve been calling “stored” or “dispositional”): The knowledge constituted by nonoccurrent remembering is nonoccurrent in the sense that one is not explicitly thinking about what it is that is known. When one consciously thinks about what it is that he knows, the memory, by definition, becomes occurrent. When philosophers have talked about knowledge, they have, as a general rule only been thinking about occurrent knowledge. It is arguable that most of what we know at any given time we know nonoccurrently, but somehow this does not seem epistemologically important. It seems that what we want to know, as epistemologists, is how it is possible for us to have occurrent knowledge. The reason for this seems to be that nonoccurrent knowledge is parasitic on occurrent knowledge. Nonoccurrent knowledge introduces no new sources of knowledge. We cannot have nonoccurrent knowledge-that-P unless we can also have occurrent knowledge-that-P. . . .The point is that epistemologists are interested in knowledge at a conscious rational level. Nonoccurrent knowledge consists merely of a certain kind of disposition to have occurrent knowledge, and does not add anything to what it is possible for us to know or how it is possible for us to come to know it. . . . The analysis of nonoccurrent memory is an interesting problem for the philosophy of mind, but it does nothing further to elucidate the structure of historical knowledge.18 So Pollock would apparently be unconcerned with his theory’s inability to account for justified dispositional (i.e., nonoccurrent) memory beliefs. What Pollock means by “S believes that P” and “S has the memory belief that P” is “S occurrently believes that P” and “S has an occurrent memory belief that P,” respectively. These, and these alone, are the domain of the epistemological enterprise with respect to ongoing beliefs. It is hard to see much of an argument in the above quoted passage. If there is one, it seems to be that since nonoccurrently knowing that P is “parasitic” on occurrently knowing that P, it is only the latter that needs concern epistemologists. I do not find this argument very persuasive. It appears to rely on a principle similar to this: If A is

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necessary for B, then B is parasitic on A, and so A, and A alone, is worthy of philosophical consideration. But obviously, this principle has little to recommend it. A necessary condition for knowledge is truth, but that doesn’t mean that knowledge is importantly “parasitic” on truth and so isn’t a worthy object of philosophical inquiry. Furthermore, the primary reason that nonoccurrent knowledge might be thought parasitic on occurrent knowledge is because nonoccurrent belief is parasitic on occurrent belief. But the condition of knowledge that has intrigued philosophers most is not the belief condition, but the justification condition. I think that Pollock is right that most epistemologists have been thinking only of occurrent knowledge or belief when giving their accounts of epistemic justification. And I think the reason for this is that epistemologists have mostly focused on the necessary and sufficient conditions of justifiably coming to believe at the expense of continuing to believe. But since what we currently come to believe is in many ways justificatorily dependent on beliefs that we already hold, it is of upmost importance that a part of our epistemological theorizing focuses on just these sorts of beliefs. We won’t have a completed theory of justification until we have an account of the justificatory status of our ongoing beliefs.19

Objection 5: Missing diachronic element The fifth and final objection is one that was raised against both the conservative and the evidentialist, and so it can be presented quickly. The problem is that the account of justification explicated here is purely synchronic. On Pollock and Cruz’s view it is sufficient for being justified that one has an undefeated recollection that P. Suppose that Ashely has a bad experience with the only Arkansan she’s ever met. On this basis, she rashly comes to believe that all Southerners are dishonest. Later, a friend learns of her prejudice and challenges her on it. She realizes that her belief is based on her experience with a single person, that she’s committed a fallacy, and that she resolves to revise her opinion of Southerners. But Ashely is forgetful and sometime later, when meeting someone else from the South, she believes that the person is dishonest because she continues to believe that

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Southerners are just that way. On the foundtionalist’s view, Ashely’s recalling her belief gives her prima facie justification and since she’s forgotten both how she came by it in the first place and the subsequent conversation with her friend, she has no defeaters for it. Hence, her belief that Southerners are dishonest is justified.

Phenomenal conservatism Before concluding this chapter, I want to consider a position that might be thought to cover the ground between conservatism and P&C’s foundationalism. Recall that conservatism is the thesis that any already held belief is prima facie justified. The only requirement for initial justification is belief. The foundationalist, on the other hand, holds that believing isn’t by itself a source of justification. For a belief to be justified, it must either be supported by other beliefs or be a certain kind of basic belief. Now just what is necessary for a basic to be justified varies in different foundational theories but the version we’ve been looking at claims that experience justifies basic beliefs. In particular, we’ve seen that P&C’s foundationalism holds that the phenomenal state of recalling is a justifying ground of memory belief. We looked at length at what Pollock has to say about what such experience is like. Whether or not what he has in mind is crystal clear, it’s obvious enough that there is a kind of experience (or range of experiences) that fit the bill. The phenomenal conservative agrees with the conservative that memory beliefs are prima facie justified. But she doesn’t think that mere belief is what confers that status. Instead, she thinks that a proposition is so justified on the basis of its seeming to the person to be true. So, unlike the conservative, she thinks that an experiential state is required for prima facie justification. In that regard, the conservative has something in common with P&C’s foundationalism. But whereas the latter implies that memory beliefs are basic and justified only when there is the particular experiential state of recalling, the phenomenal conservative requires only a very general state of seeming. When I consider a given proposition, and it seems to me to be true, I have a reason to think it is true. And a reason that

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can justify. According to Michael Huemer, an original advocate of the position, phenomenal conservatism is committed to the following principle: PC: If it seems to S as if P, then S thereby has at least prima facie justification for believing that P.20 The phenomenal conservative can claim that anytime one has a conscious belief that P, it will seem to the person that P, since part of what it is to consciously believe P is for P to seem true to one. So even if there is no particular phenomenologically rich memory seeming that accompanies every occurrent memory belief, the proposition that one believes will still seem to the subject to be true. Phenomenal conservatism is a form of foundationalism because it sees memory as a source of justification; memory beliefs are justified in virtue of their seeming to be true, and not at all in virtue of their relations to other beliefs. So many of the objections that were leveled against P&C’s foundationalism will be difficulties for phenomenal conservatism as well. The problem with basing would be a problem since it isn’t at all clear that memory beliefs are based on the seeming state. The problem of circularity is also an issue because the seeming is plausibly causally related to the stored memory belief in which case the justification for the occurrent memory belief is simply the nonoccurrent belief with the same content that preceded it. Furthermore, it would seem that, as with P&C’s foundationalism, this theory can at most account for the justification of occurrent memory beliefs; the problem of the justification of stored memory belief remains. Whether phenomenal conservatism is a diachronic theory will depend on the details of the particular view. As we will discuss in the next chapter Huemer, arguably the father of phenomenal conservatism, takes a diachronic approach and so his theory would not face the final objection we discussed. Other reasons have also been given for being dubious of phenomenal conservatism as a general account of epistemic justification. To my mind, the most compelling of these is that while some seemings are epistemicially relevant, others aren’t. For example, in searching for my phone, I look at my desk and see it there. I have a visual seeming that the phone is on the desk. Nearly

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every epistemologist will grant that seemings of this variety are epistemically robust—that is, they provide good reason to believe that the phone is on the desk. But suppose I am an optimistic person and that any time I apply for a job, it seems to me that I’m going to get it. Many would argue that such a seeming provides you with no justification at all. Perhaps that example strikes you as overly fanciful and unlikely to ever be realized. Even if it is, the literature on implicit bias has shown that sometimes how things sincerely and genuinely seem to us is the result of unconscious biases. For example, it has been shown that two resumes that are otherwise identical will get very different results from potential employers if one bears a standard “white” name and the other has a typically African American name on it.21 One possible explanation is that employers tend to be explicitly racist and although the resumes seem equally good, they tend to prefer the candidate who they believe is white. But the more likely explanation is that employers have an implicit bias: the resume with the “white” name genuinely seems better to them than does the identical resume with the African American name. And they likely won’t even consciously think about the likely race of the applicants. That’s what it means to call such biases “implicit.” An important part of what it is to become a good critical thinker is to learn what kinds of inclinations to believe, what kinds of seemings, have epistemic merit. Those that do are plausibly good reasons to believe; but those that aren’t provide no reason at all.

Warrant, rationality, and blamelessness As with the other chapters, we’ve been using the term “justification” as the primary term of evaluation in our discussion of foundationalism. We will conclude the chapter by looking at the prospects for foundationalism as a theory of blamelessness, rationality, and warrant regarding memory belief. We’ll take these in reverse order. Foundationalism of either sort that we’ve considered cannot be a plausible candidate for warrant. As we’ve noted, a warranted belief will be knowledge if it is true and there are no special, Gettier

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circumstances. But foundationalism regarding memory belief will not have this entailment. For all that is required is either a phenomenally rich state of recalling in the P&C sense or a thinner kind of seeming (as the phenomenal conservative understands it). Yet it is obvious that a person can recall a belief, have the proposition seem to him or her to be true, and yet be very far from having knowledge. Suppose that Lyin’ Ted tells me that Richard Nixon was first elected president in 1968. I know that Ted is a liar and so I don’t believe him. Nevertheless, his telling me left a faint memory impression. Two years later my daughter asks me when Nixon was first elected. I think about it and seem to recall that it was 1968 but I don’t know how I came by the belief (and I have that belief now only because of what Ted told me earlier). Here we have a true belief that passes the foundationalists’ tests; there are no Gettier twists, but I don’t know that Nixon was elected in 1968. The problem with the foundationalist account taken as a theory of warrant is that there are no reliability constraints on what counts as a justified belief. No matter how unreliable memory is, the bare fact that it seems to us that we remember something implies that we are prima facie justified in believing it. Furthermore, F&C’s foundationalism, and some varieties of phenomenal conservatism, place no constraints on the epistemic history of the belief either (this is what the Lyin’ Ted case exploits). So even if memory is reliable in a conditional sense (if you put true beliefs in, you get true beliefs out), if the beliefs that are stored are unjustified to begin with, there will be no good correlation between a belief’s being recalled and its being true. Of course, no theory of warrant should entail that every warranted belief is true. Yet what distinguishes warrant as we’ve been talking about it from the other terms of epistemic appraisal is that warranted beliefs are highly likely to be true. And synchronic foundationalist accounts of memory belief will not have that implication. Foundationalism looks like a better fit for rationality. After all, if you recall a belief, if a proposition seems to you to be true, then isn’t that some reason to think it is true? And if you have no counterbalancing reason to think it is false, then aren’t you rational in maintaining it? While there is some inclination to answer these questions in the affirmative, there is also some reason to resist. As we’ve seen, it isn’t by any means obvious that all seemings are epistemically significant. But let’s suppose for the moment that they are. Anyone who is even a

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little informed about the prevalence of biases in the human cognitive system, will recognize that not all seemings are reliable, and that in fact some are very much unreliable. So even if we suppose that if it seems to S that P, then S is prima facie justified in believing that P, if S is informed about biases, then S can be thought to have an undercutting defeater for her belief if, for all she knows, it seems to her that P only because of an implicit bias. Therefore, even if one accepts the epistemic force of seemings, they can be defeated by information about the unreliability of particular classes of seemings. In response to this, the P&C foundationalist can argue that the problem just noted has phenomenal conservatism as its natural target. For the P&C foundationalist requires more than generic seemings for prima facie justification. She requires only the more robust state of recalling, and that will mean that the subject will have reason to believe that it is memory that is active. And if that is right, and if we have some reason to generally trust our memories, then the objection that the state of recalling will have an undercutting defeater will lose its force. It is important make sure that the difference between the P&C foundationalist and the evidentialist is clear at this stage of the discussion. Evidentialism of the form we’ve been discussing will say that an experiential state alone is insufficient for justification; what’s needed in many cases of memory is the mnemonic experience together with a background belief to the effect that memory is reliable. Those two things in conjunction provide prima facie justification. The foundationalist, on the other hand, requires only that the subject recalls the proposition. So while the evidentialist has the prima facie justification of standard memory belief as coming from a combination of the experiential state and background beliefs, the foundationalist claims that only the experiential state is necessary. So, if you recall that P, you are thereby prima facie justified. We saw that this justification was potentially undermined for the phenomenal conservative by the recognition that many varieties of seemings are unreliable, and so without information about what the source of a particular seeming is, there is reason to think the belief isn’t reliably formed. But the P&C foundationalist will say that what provides prima facie justification is the state of recalling, and this is apparently the product of memory. But we don’t have particularly

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good reason for thinking that memory (by and large) is unreliable, so the belief isn’t undermined. Perhaps the conclusion to draw from all of this is that P&C’s foundationalism is a more promising theory of the rationality of memory belief than is phenomenal conservatism, at least for someone who has learned about human cognitive biases. Finally, what about foundationalist theories, understood as accounts of epistemic blamelessness? Looked at from a purely synchronic perspective, this seems plausible. If you seem to recall that P, and you have no reason to think that P is false, then how can you be blamed for believing that P? Clearly, believing that P is false would be irresponsible. But what about withholding P (i.e., neither believing that it is true nor believing that it is false)? Even this seems inconsistent with your current overall situation. And if you do believe P and are unable to simply stop believing it (as we discussed in Chapter 2, doxastic voluntarism is false), how could you be culpable? Given the current position that you find yourself in (recalling that P, believing that P, and having no defeaters for P), surely you aren’t to be blamed for believing as you do. While this is plausible enough considered purely in your situation at the moment, there is still significant reason to think you might be blameworthy after all. Suppose that your memory belief that P has the following background. You formed P on the basis of a cognitive bias. At several points, this bias became apparent when the question of the truth of P came up, you were made aware of the bias and its unreliability, but you ignored it. Had you taken the matter seriously and tried to adjust to the new information, you would have quit believing that P. But you couldn’t be bothered. So, you continued to believe it and now you recall that P but forget all that annoying business about cognitive bias. Here is a plausible evaluation of your situation: as things are at the moment, there is nothing you can do except believe P. And from your current perspective, P seems true. But if you had reacted as you should have to the earlier information about your bias, you would now neither recall or believe it. Therefore, you are diachronically culpable for your current state. You may have noticed a pattern here. Conservatives, evidentialists, foundationalists, and phenomenal conservatives are all committed to synchronic theories. As such, they ignore the epistemic relevance of

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the history of a belief, and one’s evidence for it, considered across time. In the next chapter, we will consider a pair of theories that drop the synchronic commitment and allow that how a belief is formed and maintained is crucial to its epistemic status.

Study questions 1 Explain the distinction between basic and nonbasic beliefs. Give examples of justified beliefs of both kinds and explain what justifies those beliefs according to the foundationalist. 2 What is the regress argument? Explain how the foundationalist uses the argument to support her position. 3 What is the general thesis of foundationalism? What is foundationalism for memory justification? 4 According to Pollock and Cruz, what justifies memory beliefs? How is their theory similar to and different from conservatism? 5 Five objections to foundationalism were discussed. What do you think are the best two? Why? Do you think that the foundationalist has a good response? 6 What is phenomenal conservatism? How does it differ from foundationalism and conservatism?

For further study Pollock, J. and Cruz, J. (1999), Contemporary Theories of Knowledge, (2nd Ed), Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Co, Chapters 1 and 7. (These are the chapters that are particularly pertinent to the discussion of their views in this chapter.) Huemer, M. (2001), Skepticism and the Veil of Perception, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Co., Chapter 5. (Huemer presents here the first, most explicit version of phenomenal conservatism.)

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Brogaard, B. (2017), “Foundationalism” in S. Bernecker and K. Michaelian (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Memory, 296–309, London: Routledge. (Brogaard offers a defense of phenomenal conservatism for memory.) Reid, T. (1785, 1969), Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Essay III, Chapters 1 and 2. (This is the classic presentation of foundationalism for memory.)

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6 Preservationism and reliabilism

Introduction

I

n previous chapters, we’ve explored many accounts of the justification of memory belief. While each has something to be said for it, all face serious challenges. But this is par for the course in philosophy. Some theories (such as conservatism) entail that many beliefs are justified that we might not typically think are in good epistemic shape (e.g., beliefs that were unjustified prior to being believed and become justified once believed). Other theories (such as Feldman and Conee evidentialism) have problems accounting for the justification of beliefs we typically take to be justified (e.g., long-held beliefs for which we no longer had our original evidence). Now, the fact that a given theory has implications that don’t match the judgment we originally make about cases doesn’t imply that the theory is wrong. For it is possible that every theory has implications that are counterintuitive. Maybe we will need to adjust what we think about which memory beliefs are justified and which aren’t. Therefore, I don’t take the fact that there are problem cases for each of the positions we discussed to rule them out as adequate accounts of the justification of memory belief. Indeed, when it comes to being philosophically judgmental, let the theory to which there are no objections cast the first stone. One feature that all of the accounts we’ve discussed have in common is that they are synchronic. They all hold that only what is current at the time of evaluation is relevant for justification.1 As already

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discussed in both Chapter 1 and Chapter 4, there are theories that deny this. Diachronic theories allow that the history of a belief is (or at least can be) pertinent to its current epistemic appraisal. In this chapter, we’ll have a look at such a theory and see if it does a better job of covering all the relevant cases than its competitors do.

Introducing preservationism As a first approximation, preservationism is the view that, other things being equal, the justificatory status of a memory belief is at least in part determined by the status of the belief when it was first formed.2 So, if I form a justified belief that, say, “The Battle of Fort Sumter was the first battle of the Civil War,” (I both read it in my textbook and heard my teacher say it in class), then years later when I recall that belief but no longer remember reading the text or hearing the lecture, my belief will typically be justified; the explanation of the justification (or so says the preservationist) is the original justification the belief had when it was formed. Now, of course, various things can happen to affect, for good or for ill, the belief’s status. Maybe I take a keen interest in the Civil War and become something of an amateur expert. To my original justification is now added many other sources of evidence, and my epistemic position will then be a lot stronger than it was when I first learned it. Or maybe I read something from what I take to be a reliable source that claims that there was a smaller, lesser known battle between the North and the South that preceded Fort Sumter. In that case, my belief becomes unjustified or at least loses a great deal of what it had going for it. The preservationist should be understood, then, as claiming that when nothing is added that further supports a belief and nothing is added that undermines it, the belief continues to be have its original status. Compared with other epistemologies of memory, the position of the preservationist is a bit of a mix. Unlike the conservative or foundationalist, the preservationist will claim that simply having the memory belief or even recalling it doesn’t provide one with justification. Memory doesn’t generate justification but only preserves



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it.3 In some ways then, justification will be more difficult to come by if the preservationist is right since nothing is gained by simply believing or recalling. On the other hand, since the preservationist believes that justification can remain even when the original justifications are no longer remembered, she will grant that there is justification in cases of forgotten evidence. In that way, then, justification might be somewhat easier to come by for memory beliefs on preservationism than it is on standard, synchronic evidentialism. It is important to see that preservationism is more an assertion of memory’s general inability to convey justification than it is a genuine theory of what it takes to be justified. In this way, it is much like conservatism. Conservatism doesn’t offer an account of what the nature of justification is; it merely asserts that all beliefs are prima facie justified. So, in this regard, preservationism is more like conservatism than it is like evidentialism. The evidentialist, as we have seen, gives a general theory of what’s essential to justification; to wit, evidential fit. To call preservationism an assertion rather than a theory is not to say that there is no reason to believe it. In this chapter, we’ll have a look not only at what reasons there are to think that preservationism is true, but we’ll also find it helpful to pare it with the theory of justification with which it generally travels, namely, reliabilism.

Preservationism in detail As was explained in the last section, preservationism is at bottom a claim that, other things being equal, the justification of a memory belief is a function of the justification the belief had when it was originally formed. There are at least two different ways that such a claim could be spelled out. First, it might be thought that a memory belief is justified precisely to the same degree that the belief had in the beginning. On this view, memory is completely epistemically neutral: it neither adds to justification nor diminishes it. But this position is surely too strong. When I first learned that the Battle of Fort Sumter started the Civil War, I had positive reasons for it. It’s likely that I both read it in a text and heard it in a lecture. Having heard

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it from two independent reliable sources (let’s suppose the teacher knew it prior to reading the text!) provided me with a very strong justification. Surely, the fact that I cannot recall where I first heard it nor have any independent justification means that I’m in less good epistemic shape now than I was then. Even if we want to insist that there are cases of justified memory belief in the face of forgotten evidence, we must certainly grant that justification can be diminished when one forgets one’s original reasons. We can get clearer on the heart of the preservationist claim if we consider its motivation. Why would someone think that the justification of a memory belief is a function of the justification the belief had when it was first formed? I think that there are two main points behind preservationism. I’ll call these the “belief continuation thesis” and the “no epistemic lift thesis.” We’ll take these in order. The belief continuation thesis is the claim that recalled memory beliefs are continuations of the very same token belief (albeit in a different form) that was originally produced. Consider any belief that you’ve held for a while: take for example your belief that Barack Obama was the first African American president. If you are old enough and were at all attentive to American politics at the time, you formed this belief on January 20, 2009—the day he was inaugurated. From time to time, you’ve had reason to recall it. Now the belief continuation thesis is the claim that the belief you recall is the same individual, token belief that you formed in January of 2009. This belief has changed forms (gone from initially occurrent to stored and dispositional, to being occurrent once again) but it is the same particular state. Notice that this is different from what we might think about pains, for instance. If I stub my toe and feel that familiar, awful stab of pain, the token (or instance) of pain that I experience is a different token from the last time I stubbed the same toe in precisely the same way. The pain might be just the same in intensity and duration, but it isn’t literally, numerically the same pain. You might wonder why conscious pains and conscious beliefs are different in this regard. And if you think for a minute, you’ll answer your own question. When you form a belief consciously, what happens when you quit thinking about it? It becomes a stored, dispositional belief. But what happens to the pain in your toe when you quit feeling it? It just stops existing. It’s not that the pain gets stored only to



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return the next time you stub your toe. In between toe-stubbings, you don’t have a stored, dispositional pain. But in between consciously thinking that Obama was the first African American president, you continue to believe it, only in a different way. Because your recalled belief that Obama was the first African American president is the very same belief that you formed originally, the epistemic status of the belief at the later time should be a function of the status at the earlier time, or as the preservationist thinks. That in standard cases the later belief is the same token state as the original belief can also be seen by contrast with instances of reacquired belief. Suppose that you had a course on English history in high school and, cramming for an exam, you learned that Amy Johnson was the first female pilot to fly from England to Australia. But it didn’t take long for you to forget that fact. Ten years later, say, you have no memory of this; neither do you even remember that you once knew who the first English female pilot was who flew from Great Britain to Australia. As fate would have it, you watch a PBS documentary on the history of aviation and learn that Amy Johnson was the first female pilot to fly from England to Australia. In this case, your high school belief is causally irrelevant to your current belief. You’ve simply learned the fact anew. The conscious belief you have is not the same token belief as the conscious belief you had when you were studying in high school. These are two different beliefs with the very same content. The preservationist will be quick to point out that the epistemology of the two Amy Johnson beliefs is very different from the epistemology of memory belief. Since the two Johnson beliefs are causally independent, the justificatory status of the high school belief is irrelevant to that of the later belief. But when one’s later state just is a continuation of the very same belief, then its justificatory condition will be a function of the epistemic state the belief had when originally formed. The second motivation for preservationism is the “no epistemic lift” thesis. This is the claim that a proposition doesn’t get an epistemic lift from being believed; in other words, a belief can’t go from being unjustified when first acquired to be justified (or even more justified than it was before) because a person believes it or seems to recall it. We’ve talked about this point quite a bit as an objection to conservatism and foundationalism, so we won’t tarry over it here. As

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our discussion of the conservatism of Matthew McGrath indicated, even conservatives recognize the pull of this objection (even if, in the end, they think they have adequate responses to it). Now that we’ve seen what motivates preservationism, let’s be a little more careful in defining it. Preservationism is the thesis that, in the absence of newly acquired evidence for or against a belief, the justification of a memory belief is largely a function of its justificatory status when it was first formed; it can be no more justified than it was originally. Another way of thinking about preservation is made explicit in the no epistemic lift thesis: a belief gets no epistemic support by being held in memory or recalled. To put the matter is slightly different terms, for the most part, memory does not generate justification but only preserves it. In the next section of this chapter, we’ll explore this claim more fully.

Generation versus preservation We’ve been saying that the preservationist sees memory as primarily preservative rather than generative. To understand what’s entailed by that, we’ll have to get clearer on what it is for a belief-forming process to be generative. We’ll start by looking at an argument that Jennifer Lackey makes for thinking that memory is epistemically generative.4 After discussing Lackey’s cases, we’ll explore the crucial issue of what it is that makes a process epistemically generative. Lackey wants to show that memory is epistemically generative and, because of this, that preservationism is false (since the preservationist claims that, all things being equal, a belief can’t have a higher epistemic state simply in virtue of being remembered). To accomplish these goals, she presents cases in which a subject has a true belief that is sufficiently well justified that, in the absence of defeat, it would count as knowledge (in our terminology, her belief is warranted). But, alas, defeat is not absent, and the subject does not know. For instance, Arthur has excellent reason from an inside source to believe that the mayor has been taking bribes; and indeed, the



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mayor is on the take. However, there are widely circulated (although false) reports that the accusations against the mayor are mistaken. If Arthur were paying attention to any news sources, he would have seen these reports. So, he has a normative defeater (i.e., there is a defeater that he should possess but doesn’t) that prevents him from knowing that the mayor is taking bribes. Eventually, it comes out that these defensives of the mayor are wrong, and that the mayor is guilty. Arthur is oblivious to these reports and rebuttals, and has never quit believing the accurate claims that his inside source told him. According to Lackey, although Arthur didn’t know that the mayor was taking bribes when he first learned it (because of his normative defeater), he does know later when it is widely reported that the claims of the mayor’s innocence were false (because these reports remove the normative defeater). On Lackey’s view, memory has been epistemically generative in this case. For at the earlier time, Arthur had a true belief that didn’t count as knowledge (because there was a normative defeater), and at the later time, this true belief is knowledge (because he no longer has the defeater). Since he has acquired no new evidence for the belief, memory has generated knowledge. But neither of the lessons that Lackey takes the case to show is clearly right. First, it’s not obvious that Arthur knows at the later time. Lackey thinks that because there is no longer a defeater, Arthur’s knowledge isn’t then defeated. A preservationist might well claim, however, that just as evidence can continue to justify after it is forgotten, a defeater can defeat at a later time even if it is no longer available. But, second and more importantly, even if we grant that Arthur knows at the later time and didn’t at the earlier time, that is not an indication that memory is epistemically generative in any substantial sense. This will, I hope, become apparent as this chapter progresses.

Varieties of justification and belief-forming processes To become clearer on what’s required for epistemic generation, let’s begin by reminding ourselves of the distinction between original justification, ongoing justification, and transmitted justification. To use

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the terminology introduced in the introduction, let’s call newly minted justifications derived from generational sources original justification. This contrasts with the justification a belief maintains over time; call this ongoing justification. Furthermore, when I justifiably believe P, justifiably believe Q, and reasonably infer R from them, my newly formed belief has neither original justification (because the process of inference doesn’t generate new justification) nor ongoing justification (since the justification is new for R). So, we need a third category. Let’s say that a belief has transmitted justification when it is properly epistemically grounded in at least one justified belief, the content of the grounding belief is distinct from the belief it grounds, and the latter belief is justified (at least in part) because of the justification of the earlier belief.5 So much for the threefold distinction of flavors of justification. Let’s now consider belief formation. Some of our cognitive processes are aimed at acquiring information. That is, their role in our cognitive economy is to give us true beliefs. The most obvious process of this kind is perception. In standard circumstances, my seeing the dog on the sofa has the result of introducing a new belief into my cognitive system; not only that, but the newly formed belief is prima facie justified. Perception, then, is both a belief-generating process and a source of original justification, which is to say it produces not only beliefs but justification that comes neither via transmission from other beliefs nor is it ongoing from the belief’s formation. Introspection is another process that provides us with new beliefs that are not derived inferentially from other beliefs, and hence with original justification. Unlike perception, however, introspection is aimed at representing the consciously available mental life of the subject. Even if the objects of introspection are already part of the subject’s mental inventory, the goal of the process is to represent the objects of introspection as items in the subject’s mind. Rational intuition is another means by which beliefs are formed and original justification is generated. My “seeing” the validity of modus ponens is my ground for forming the belief that there are no possible cases in which arguments with that logical structure have true premises and a false conclusion; rational intuition is both the producer of the belief and the generator of original justification.



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When these processes function as they typically do, new beliefs are formed and are prima facie justified. The justification is generated rather than transmitted in these cases because it is not beholden to the epistemic status of other beliefs. That is, their epistemic grounds are not themselves justified. In the case of perception and rational intuition, the epistemic ground of the belief will be either the associated experience (the literal percept for perception and the “seeing” of rational intuition) or a virtue of the process that produced it (e.g., being reliable or functioning properly). Introspection is a bit different because in some cases what is introspected is a belief; however, the justification of the introspective belief is still original because it is not a function of the justification of the belief being introspected. When beliefs are formed by inference, their prima facie justification is not generated but transmitted. Transmission of justification occurs when a belief becomes prima facie justified in virtue of its relationship to other justified beliefs. Unlike perception, introspection, and rational intuition, inferential belief-forming processes are doxastically but not epistemically generative. That is, while they produce beliefs, they don’t generate justification. For consider: if S infers Q from her beliefs P and (if P, then Q), the justification for Q is a function of her justification for P and (if P, then Q); the justification for Q cannot be any greater than that of the least justified premise. That is, inference, when done well, can fully transmit justification, but it can neither produce justification where there is none nor increase the justification had by the basing beliefs. Memory, as we have noted, is importantly different from perception, introspection, and rational intuition in that its primary function in the cognitive system is preservative. When things go optimally, the inputs to a mnemonic process and the outputs are just the same; the best we can possibly hope for concerning a memory belief is that no content is lost or added. Memory seeks to preserve belief; often, when a new doxastic state is produced by memory, it is unreliably formed.6 If I seem to remember seeing Mary at the office party last Christmas when in fact I neither saw nor thought I saw her there, my memory is playing tricks on me, and any belief formed by this apparent memory is the result of mnemonic malfunction—or of an overactive

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imagination. Or consider a case in which I’ve been told of an event in my childhood so often that now I seem to remember witnessing it even though the belief that I witnessed it is purely a product of what I’ve been told. This is what is known as “false memory.” In such cases, memory produces belief in an unreliable way. Because of its role as a doxastic preservative, memory might be thought incapable of generating justification, or of producing original justification; for as we have seen, original justification is a product of belief-producing rather than belief-sustaining processes. If preservationism is equivalent to the thesis that memory is never epistemically generative, then preservationism itself will entail that memory never produces prima facie justification. If this were true it would explain why, ceteris paribus, no memory belief can have more justification than it had originally. We would then have a reason to think preservationism is theoretically preferable since if memory never produces prima facie justification, then the epistemic status of the belief would presumably never be strengthened by memory. Natural as this thought is, we will come to see that it isn’t right. Indeed, we’ll see that memory turns out to be epistemically generative in pretty much the same way as perception, introspection, and rational intuition. All of this, I shall argue, is not only consistent with preservationism, but when understood aright, is a reason to think that preservation is true.

More on epistemic generation What is it, then, for a process to be epistemically generative? The obvious thing to say is this: EG1: A process is epistemically generative iff it produces beliefs that have original justification. The problem with this simple answer is that it conflates (or maybe compounds) epistemic and doxastic generation. Since the cognitive process in question produces beliefs, it will of course also be doxastically generative. But an account of epistemic generation need



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not include any reference to belief production. So, let’s cut that from (EG1), which gives us: EG2: A process is epistemically generative iff it can confer original justification. As we’ve noted, an originally justified belief is a belief that is justified but which has not had its justification transmitted from other justified beliefs.7 This is all right as far as it goes but it doesn’t go very far. To be more exact, we need to be explicit that what is crucial for epistemic generation is the ability to produce original prima facie justification. As we noted in Chapter 1 and elsewhere, a belief is prima facie justified if, in the absence of defeat, it is ultima facie justified, or justified simpliciter. A justification-generating process must be able to confer prima facie justification on a belief, but it is not necessary that it be able to guarantee that any of its beliefs be ultima facie justified. This is because the ultima facie justification of a belief can depend crucially on what other beliefs a subject has, what sorts of evidence gathering the subject has done (or failed to do), and on the various vagaries of the epistemic social environment in which the subject happens to find herself. For example, if I see what looks to me like a small dog on your sofa, I’ll be prima facie justified in believing there is a dog on the couch. But if you’ve told me that people often mistake your stuffed animal for a real dog, then the prima facie justification that perception has generated in this case will be defeated. Yet the fact that my prima facie justification is defeated does not suggest that it was absent in this case. Perception, after all, can’t be held accountable for my every background belief. As long as perception (in the right circumstances) provides me with what it takes for me to be ultima facie justified provided that there are no defeaters then it has done all the epistemic work that can be asked of it. It is enough that it can produce original prima facie justification. That is, EG3: A process is epistemically generative iff it is capable of conferring original prima facie justification. Any process that is incapable of producing original prima facie justification is thereby not an epistemically generative process.8

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Is memory generative? We’ve seen that to be epistemically generative, a process must be capable of producing prima facie justification. And if preservationism is right, then it would seem that memory doesn’t produce prima facie justification, and hence memory isn’t generative. For if a recalled belief can have no more justification than it had when it was first formed, then memory adds nothing of epistemic significance. But that is just to say that it isn’t generative. So, from the account of epistemic generation presented earlier, we can get a pretty direct argument to the claim that memory is not epistemically generative. Although this line of reasoning is initially plausible, it turns out to be mistaken. If beliefs were the only contents of memory, then memory would not be generative. But memory contains other items too. For example, suppose after an episode of freezing rain, I walk gingerly out to my driveway to pick up my newspaper. After coming back into the house, my wife asks if the whole driveway is covered in ice. I think for a minute, and reflect on the visual experience I had when picking up my paper. I realize that I had seen the entire driveway and that there was an area under a tree that was not ice covered. So, I then come to believe “The area of the driveway under the tree is not icy.” My new belief is prima facie justified and it has derived this justification from memory. Therefore, memory can be epistemically generative after all.9 By making a couple observations, we can begin to see that the recognition that memory can be generative in such circumstances does not undermine preservationism. First, the icy-driveway case does not involve a belief that formerly lacked prima facie justification coming to have it solely in virtue of memory. Rather, the belief is formed for the first time on the basis of memory. That is to say, in this example, memory is both epistemically and doxastically generative. In this way, memory does resemble perception. Yet this is not an instance of a preexistent belief’s becoming justified through the working of memory; it’s a matter of memory producing both a belief and its justification. So, this kind of case fails to be a counterexample to preservationism because the latter claims only that no belief gains justification merely by being held or recalled.



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Allowing that memory is epistemically generative in cases when it is also doxastically generative doesn’t weaken the connection between memory’s epistemically generative capacities and preservationism. But the fact that even when memory is both epistemically and doxastistically generative, it is only so because of the generative powers of another source (i.e., perception) just serves to reinforce memory’s epistemically derivative nature. Let’s grant that the icy-driveway case shows that there are circumstances in which memory and perception are similar in that both produce justification when they also produce belief. On the face of it, this would seem to work against the preservationist view that memory is importantly different from perception in not being epistemically generative. Inasmuch as memory and perception are epistemically alike, there would seem to be good motivation for thinking that memory is generative too. However, the preservationist might insist that there is still a relevant epistemic difference between the two. Perception can be epistemically generative even when it is doxastically dormant. That is, one can have a belief that is unjustified that later becomes justified because of further perceptual experience. So, suppose I believe that the cat is on the mat because I always believe what my friend Lyin’ Ted says. I know Ted lies but I’m an incurable optimist who believes that this time he’s telling the truth. My belief that the cat is on the mat is unjustified. But then I look at the mat and, unmistakably, see the cat. So, my formerly unjustified belief has become justified because of my perceptual experience. Perception is able to convert a previously unjustified belief into a justified belief. In short, it has the power of epistemic generation even in cases where it is not doxastically generative. Therefore, might the preservationist say that we’ve found a way that perception is generative and memory is not, because memory is only epistemically generative when it is also doxastically generative? Unfortunately, no. We can generate parallel cases in which an originally unjustified belief gains epistemic support from memory. Now of course it will be possible for a previously unjustified belief to have inferential support among other beliefs the person has in memory. But that will be more or less a standard case of epistemic transmission. In order for a memory case to parallel perception in the relevant respect, it will need to be a case of original justification

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provided by memory. But cases like this are easy to generate. Suppose that my friend Lyin’ Ted comes to my door and tells me that my driveway is only partly iced over. Ever gullible, I believe him. I relay this belief to my wife who reminds me that Ted is not to be trusted. I then reflect on my experience of seeing my driveway just before he arrived, and I realize that I had seen my driveway only partially iced over. Assuming that my visual memory is generally reliable, my previously unjustified belief that my driveway is only partially iced over (produced by my foolishly believing Ted’s testimony) is now justified. So, memory, like perception, has the power to convert unjustified belief into justified belief. That is, memory can be epistemically generative even when it is not doxastically productive. Let’s take stock. The preservationist understands memory to be, typically, not epistemically generative. Memory has been contrasted with other processes, like perception, that clearly do generate prima facie justification. The first thought was that what makes memory not epistemically generative is that it is not doxastically generative—it is instead merely preservative; in contrast, perception is clearly both. But then the initial icy-driveway case was presented, and memory was shown to be capable of both doxastic and epistemic generation. A second thought was that whereas memory is only epistemically generative when it is doxastically generative, perception can generate justification for already acquired beliefs. But then it turns out that memory can do the same. So, it seems that every relevant distinction we’ve suggested between perception and memory has, in the end, collapsed, and we are left with the (perhaps surprising) conclusion that perception and memory are epistemically generative in pretty much the same way. What is the upshot of this? In particular, does this show not what I had initially claimed—that considerations of epistemic generation support preservationism—but rather that preservationism is wrong? Here’s why someone might think that: If memory is epistemically generative, then it produces prima facie justification. And if it produces prima facie justification, then the epistemic status of a given memory belief is not determined by the original justification that the belief had when it was formed. Put slightly differently, memory not only preserves (assuming it does preserve) but it adds to the justification



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of a belief. And that is pretty clearly just another way of saying that preservationism is false. Is the result of our inquiry the demise of the position I set out to argue for? I’m happy to say that it is not. What we’ve discovered is this: like perception, memory can be epistemically generative both when it is and when it isn’t being doxastically generative. That is, both produce prima facie justification in both kinds of cases. So memory and perception are generative in much the same way.10 However, that is not a problem for preservationism since it is a theory about the relationship between the epistemic status of a belief at one time and the epistemic of the same belief at later time. Preservationism has nothing to say about the epistemic status of either a belief that is newly formed on the basis of memory or a previously unjustified belief that becomes justified because of a recalled perception. So what do preservationism and the generative powers of memory have to do with each other? Preservationism requires that a belief does not get an epistemic boost just by being maintained. If memory were epistemically generative in the sense that it produces prima facie justification for a belief by sustaining it over time, then preservationism would be false. But the kinds of cases in which memory is generative are not of this type. Not only that, they are also exceedingly rare. Far and away, the main doxastic function of memory is preservative. How well it lives up to its role is, of course, a matter of debate. But it cannot be seriously doubted that, for the most part, memory’s job in our cognitive economy is to allow us to, in some way or another, make available to us what we’ve learned from perception, rational intuition, introspection, inference, and so on.11

A psychological objection At this point, one might object as follows: thinking of memory as preservative is akin to thinking of it as a storehouse. The picture is a natural one. When you experience something or come to learn a new fact, you store it away until it is needed later. Recollection is then a matter of pulling out the right item from storage. Of course, we all recognize that we are fallible in what we recall, but that can be easily

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explained on the storehouse model: sometimes we can’t find what we are looking for and we come up empty. Alternatively, sometimes we misidentify items and retrieve the wrong thing (e.g., I’m asked where I went on vacation last year and recall being in Jackson, WY; the problem is that I was there two years ago and not last year). But as natural as it is, the storehouse model of memory has been pretty well discredited in the psychology of memory. Memory is constructive at the time of learning in that what gets put into LTM is a matter of the features of the episode that get processed and how they are encoded; it is not a passive process of storing away an image or video/audio clip. Memory is also reconstructive in that one recalls at the later time is, as it were, put back together (or maybe put together for the first time) when the remembered event is activated. So, instead of being a passive storage receptacle that houses items that one later removes without the item being changed (much as one opens a jpeg from one’s hard drive), memory is a complicated process, both constructing the item initially at encoding and reconstructing it later at retrieval.12 If memory is both constructive and reconstructive then one might wonder why it isn’t epistemically generative as well. In the same way that, say, perceptual processes produce beliefs from percepts (and previous learning or background beliefs), memories produce beliefs via a combination of storied items and background knowledge. So why not think that perception and memory are equally doxastically and epistemically generative? This is an important issue and one that I do not have the space to thoroughly explore. As this chapter progresses, we will see the ways that memory is, and isn’t, generative. For now, though, let me say that I am not convinced that the constructive nature of memory entails that perception and memory are equally generative or that there is even a strong parallel. First, cases in which memory is clearly reconstructive are cases of episodic memory. The phenomenon of “false memory,” in which one seems to remember being witness to something that one wasn’t witness to, concerns the apparent recollection of past experiences. And while, of course, a great deal of our autobiographical memory is episodic, much of what we remember is what psychologists call “semantic memory.” Semantic memory is not just memory of concepts and word meanings but



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includes general information about both the world at large and one’s life. And it is much less clear that construction and reconstruction are prevalent in this domain. There isn’t reconstruction going on when one simply recalls that Lincoln was assassinated in 1865 or that Wrigley Field is on Chicago’s north side. Second, while constructive/reconstructive models of memory alter the way we might be initially inclined to think about how memory works, those models are consistent with the idea that we have beliefs (and lots of them!) stored in LTM. If we have stored beliefs, then presumably each has a justificatory status. So even if episodic memory is shot through with construction and reconstruction, we’ll still need an epistemology that accounts for the epistemic status of stored beliefs. And preservationism will be an attractive thesis because all we can expect from memory with respect to a belief that we form is that it be retained in one form or another. Whether my belief that Lincoln was assassinated in 1865 is somehow stored “whole” or whether the concepts that, when combined correctly, form the content of the belief are stored independently makes no epistemic difference. Even if the belief must be reconstructed each time it is recalled, as long as it can be reliably put back together when needed, it will count as a stored, dispositional memory belief. And its epistemic status will be largely a function of its history.

Preservationism and original justification If what I’ve been arguing in this chapter is right, then we have good reason to think that memory isn’t typically a source of original justification and that the justification of a memory belief is in part a function of that original justification. We noted earlier that preservationism isn’t really a theory of justification: by itself, it makes no claims about what is necessary for coming to believe something (i.e., for original justification) or about the nature of justification. Preservationism would seem to be compatible with several different theories of justified belief.

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For starters, let’s consider evidentialism. As we discussed in Chapter 4, the standard evidentialist rejects preservationism because she thinks that only current mental states and their nonhistorical properties are relevant to the justificatory status of a belief. But as we saw in that earlier discussion, the evidentialist could give up the synchronic aspect of her theory. If she makes the important distinction between that what is necessary for justifiably coming to believe a proposition and what is necessary for continuing to believe a proposition, she can say that having good evidence is necessary for the former but not the latter. To my mind, this should satisfy the main evidentialist idea that all epistemic justification is a matter of evidential fit. No belief is justified by anything other than solid evidential grounding. It’s just that for continued (i.e., memory) belief, the evidential grounding need not be available at the time of recall (or while the belief is stored). A diachronic evidentialism, then, would accept the preservationist’s position: in standard cases, a belief is justified by the evidence possessed when the belief was formed. While preservationism is clearly not consistent with the foundationalist theories we discussed in the last chapter, it is interesting to note that there can be a viable preservationist/foundationalism hybrid theory. Michael Huemer has argued that just such a theory is required in order to account for our intuitions about various possible cases.13 First of all, Huemer argues for preservationism, primarily on the grounds that unjustified beliefs cannot become justified simply by being either in memory or by being recalled. He thereby rejects the synchronic, internalist theories that claim that justification supervenes on the current mental states of the subject. However, he asks us to consider the logically possible (albeit very fanciful!) case that has been called “Swampman” in the literature.14 A bolt of lightning strikes a swamp, and quite at random a large bunch of disrupted molecules glom together to form a living, breathing, full-grown, human being (or human-beinglike thing). Swampman’s brain comes into being filled with apparent memories; of course, these memories are only apparent, because Swampman has no history. He’s just come into existence. Suppose that, upon finding himself in the swamp, Swampman wonders how he got here (naturally, because he has a bunch of apparent memories, it doesn’t occur to him that he has just come into existence; he thinks he must have been unconscious and just come to). The last thing he



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“remembers” is that he parked his car on Main Street, intending to meet a friend for lunch. So, he believes that he recently parked on Main Street. Huemer thinks that Swampman’s belief is justified, and it is justified by his state of recalling. The question, then, is how we can allow this if we accept preservationism? Because in a standard normal case, the preservationist will insist beliefs aren’t justified by being recalled. Yet Swampman’s belief is justified without having a history of having been justified. In the terminology that we’ve adopted, Huemer marks the coming to believe and continuing to believe distinction and says Swampman’s belief is an instance of the former rather than the latter. Since Swampman has no history, he didn’t believe that he parked on Main Street until he had the apparent recollection; his state of recalling is the psychological and epistemic ground of his belief. As we noted earlier in this chapter, the preservationist need not claim that memory can never be epistemically generative; she can allow that it is epistemically generative when it is doxastically generative. Therefore, a version of memory foundationalism is consistent with preservationism. Next, let’s consider what someone who believes blameless is at the core of justification might say about preservationism. One might naturally think that if you recall that P, and you have no good reason to think either that P is false or that your memory is misleading, then you surely can’t be blamed for believing P. As we’ve said before, one might reasonably ask what you are supposed to do if something seems true to you and you have no defeaters for it? However, a good case can be made for preservationism even regarding evaluations of epistemic responsibility. Recall an earlier case that exploits an analogy with ethics. Suppose I borrow $100 from you and promise to repay you after the first of the month. The first of the month arrives and I get my paycheck. On my way to give you your money, I impulsively spend it instead. When I arrive at your door, I tell you that I’m sorry, but I can’t repay you today. Then I admit that I left my apartment with plenty of money to repay you, but I made an unplanned, unnecessary purchase along the way. You get angry (because you were counting on me to do as I promised) and demand payment. I reply, truly, that I simply don’t have the $100 to give you. In this case, two things are clear: I really can’t repay you but that doesn’t mean I’m not responsible for my inability to pay. Because my

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current pitiful financial situation is my fault, I’m to be blamed even though there’s nothing I can do now but fail to keep my promise. (Notice the case would be much different if I had been mugged on my way to repay you; since I wouldn’t be blamed for being mugged, I wouldn’t be blamed for my failure to keep my promise). The relevance of this case to our consideration of preservationism and epistemic responsibility is straightforward. Suppose I’m intellectually lazy and am quick to jump to conclusions for which I don’t have good evidence. If I were to search harder for evidence and take more time to think things through, I wouldn’t form nearly so many unjustified beliefs. Consider, then, one of these beliefs that are the result of my irresponsibility. On the blamelessness concept of justification, my belief is unjustified when I form it. A few weeks later, I recall the belief but don’t know what my evidence was for it. It seems true to me, and I don’t have any reason to doubt it. Am I blameless for believing as I do? Well, I might not be doing anything epistemically blameworthy at the moment, but I only recall it because of my earlier intellectual sloth. Just as I’m to be blamed for not being able to repay you because I had been irresponsible earlier (by making an impulsive, unnecessary purchase) that left me with no money, so I am blameworthy for recalling a belief that I wouldn’t have formed if I had been epistemically responsible earlier. There is, then, good reason for the advocate of the blamelessness concept of epistemic justification to adopt preservationism. In matters of responsibility and blamelessness, what happened in the past is important in evaluations of the present. We can see, then, that preservationism can be paired with at least some of the theories that we’ve been exploring in other chapters. Finally, in the last part of this chapter, we’ll look at a theory of justification that we haven’t yet addressed: reliabilism. As was mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, this is reason to think that preservationism is particularly at home with this theory of justification.

Reliabilism The various positions that we’ve discussed thus far have all been varieties of internalism. That is, they restrict what is relevant for justification to states and properties to which the subject has



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cognitive access. Even when we’ve considered expanded versions of evidentialism and foundationalism so that they avoid mentalism (the idea that what is relevant for justification is limited to current, nonhistorical states and properties of the subject), they still assumed that only things that the subject had access to either while continuing to believe or when coming to believe are relevant to justification. It is time to finally consider an externalist theory of the justification of memory. In particular, the view that we will focus on is what is known as process reliabilism (or reliabilism for short).15 The reliabilist thinks that to say that a belief is justified is to imply that it is likely that the belief is true. Support for this idea can be had if we think for a minute about the kinds of beliefs that we typically take to be justified. We have little doubt, for example, that our perceptual beliefs (when formed in favorable conditions) are justified. If I say that you were at the party last night and someone asks me why I think that, my saying that I saw you there puts the matter to rest. When I come into the house and smell bread baking, my belief that someone is or has recently been baking bread is clearly justified. Why do we think that beliefs that are grounded in perceptual experiences are on solid epistemic ground? Plausibly, because we think that those beliefs are almost certainly true; that is, our perceptual processes in these kinds of circumstances are highly reliable. When we discussed foundationalism, we noted that many of our justified beliefs get their epistemic support from other beliefs we have. So, for example, if I believe that my neighbors’ lawn care crew will be working today because I know that today is Friday and that is the day their grass is usually mowed, the former belief is justified by the two latter beliefs. Why do those latter beliefs provide justification for the former belief? Because they make it likely that the belief is true. While good inductive inferences don’t guarantee the truth of their conclusion, the reason they provide justification is plausibly taken to be because they make the conclusion probable. Even better justification comes from good deductive arguments. If I believe that Juan is 70 years old and is a US citizen, and I also believe that all US citizens over the age of 65 are eligible for Medicare, then I have great justification for believing that Juan is eligible for Medicare. Why? Because if the basing beliefs are true, my belief that Juan is Medicare-eligible must be true.

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Considerations like these provide support for the reliabilist’s position that the likelihood of truth is fundamental for justification. Even restricting ourselves to process reliabilism, there are multiple ways it can be formulated. We are going to keep things relatively simple, however, and consider the view inspired by Alvin Goldman’s landmark article “What is Justified Belief?”16 Put in its most simple form, it is the claim that R1: S’s belief that P is prima facie justified iff it is produced by a reliable cognitive process. R1 is a general claim about the justification of belief; it isn’t specific to the topic of this book, that is, continued belief or memory belief. In fact, we might think where the latter is concerned, the issue isn’t so much belief production but rather belief maintenance. This would give us the following simple account of the justification of continued belief: R2: S’s memory belief that P is prima facie justified iff it is maintained by a reliable process While R2 has a kind of simple elegance, it is open to an objection we’ve considered in other chapters of this book. Suppose that I come to have a belief that is not justified—maybe it is based on wishful thinking or hasty generalization; I’m unjustified in coming to believe it. But if my memory is reliable, then R2 will imply that my continued belief is prima facie justified and so ultima facie justified if I have no defeaters. But on the plausible assumption that I can’t become justified in believing a proposition merely by believing it, then R2 must be wrong. The solution to this problem is not hard to find. The reliabilist should require not only the reliability of the maintaining processes, but also that the belief be previously justified (typically when the belief is formed). That is, the reliabilist should adopt preservationism. If altered in the simplest way, the account will become: R3: S’s memory belief that P is prima facie justified iff it was justified when it was originally formed (or at some time prior



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to the present), and it has been maintained by a reliable cognitive process(es). A couple quick points of clarification: the parenthetical clause is to account for cases where one is originally unjustified in coming to a belief and later becomes justified (by getting good evidence, say). At a time still later, it will be justified even though it wasn’t justified when it was originally formed. The other clarification concerns the other parentheses. Whether it is right to talk of a belief’s being maintained by a single process or multiple processes makes no difference. What is significant is that whatever it is that maintains the belief is reliable. It isn’t necessary for our purposes to get too far into the weeds here, but a few issues will need to be addressed. First, while R3 is a reliabilist account of memory belief justification, it is consistent with several theories of justifiably coming to believe. In principle, one could pair an evidentialist account (for example) of original justification with this reliabilist account of ongoing justification. However, the most natural partner for R3 would be along reliabilist lines. Roughly, one could require that the belief-forming processes be reliable for original justification and that the maintaining processes be reliable for the justification of memory belief.17 A second matter that needs some discussion concerns the nature of reliability. First, what does it mean to call a cognitive process “reliable”? That’s straightforward: a process is reliable if it produces a high ratio of true to false beliefs. How high a ratio? That’s much less clear. It needn’t be 100 percent reliable, but it should be much higher than 50 percent. Second, are we to understand reliability as referring only to the actual track record of the process, so that if a process has produced twenty beliefs, fifteen of which are true, then it is 75 percent reliable? Or is reliability understood as the truth ratio that the process would produce in standard environments? Reliabilists have typically understood it in the latter way. Here’s why, illustrated by an analogy: a good thermometer is reliable the first time it’s used even though it has no track record. What makes it reliable is that it has a strong tendency to give accurate readings of the temperature in standard usage. Even if it has no track record it can have such a tendency, and if it does, it is reliable. The same is true for cognitive processes; even a seldom used process can be either very reliable or not reliable at all.

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Finally, it is important to make a distinction between unconditional and conditional reliability. Let’s take these in reverse order and begin with a non-cognitive example. Valid deductive arguments are conditionally reliable: if all the premises are true, then the conclusion is guaranteed. Provided that you put truth in, you get truth out. However, if not all premises are true, the conclusion might be false. In such cases, the problem with the argument is in the premises themselves and not in its logical structure. Now, let’s apply this basic idea to psychological processes. Some of our belief-forming processes take other beliefs as inputs. That is, sometimes when we have a belief of the form “If P, then Q,” we come to believe P, and then infer Q from the first two beliefs. Now if we have a particular process that takes beliefs of the first two types as inputs, and regularly produces beliefs of the third type, then we have a process that is conditionally reliable. For whenever the input beliefs “If P, then Q” and P are true, the output belief Q will be true too. Note that reliability requires more from a process than to always produce Q from beliefs P and “If P, then Q.” For there might be a defective process that always produces Q from any two input beliefs at all. To be reliable, then, such a process must be sensitive to the inputs and only output beliefs that bear the right relation to them. So nonbasic beliefs (beliefs formed on the basis of other beliefs) will be the product of processes that are at best conditionally reliable. In contrast to this, basic beliefs are the product of processes that do not take other beliefs as inputs. Typically, such processes operate on experiences (like perceptual or introspective states). When I see a cardinal on my deck and form the relevant belief, I don’t make an inference from other beliefs; I just have a visual experience and (assuming I’ve previously learned to recognize a cardinal) directly believe that there’s a cardinal on my deck. Suppose that I have a bird-detection belief-forming process: anytime I see a bird that process is engaged. If I recognize the particular species, I form the relevant belief; if I don’t recognize birds of that type, I might form a more general belief (“that’s a bird”) but I won’t form a belief about a specific species. Assuming that I have learned how to identify a variety of birds, this aviary belief-forming process will be reliable. And its reliability will be unconditional. As experiential states, the inputs to the process are not beliefs; so, they aren’t the kind of items that can be true or false.



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With this understanding of the claims of reliabilism in our pocket, we are now able to apply it to memory belief. When I recall that the first battle of the Civil War was fought at Fort Sumter, my belief will be prima facie justified according to the reliabilist if it was reliably formed in the first place, and if my memory (or maybe my memory for this type of item) is reliable. Memory is a belief-dependent process (at least belief memory is); therefore, it will be reliable if when we put true beliefs into it, you get true beliefs out of it. In cases where memory is doxastically productive, the beliefs it produces will be justified only if my memory is unconditionally reliable. Suppose my wife asks me if she left her glasses in the cup holder in the car, and having just returned from the store, I think about what I saw as I was getting out. I call to mind an image of the console where the cup holder is which I take to be what I saw as I exited. The image represents the cup holder as empty, and so I believe that her glasses aren’t there. This belief will be justified if the process that went from my attempting to call to mind an image, to having the image, to having the belief is a reliable process. If anytime I’m asked to recall a recent visual experience, an image comes to mind but only occasionally is that image accurate, and I’m unable to know when the image is genuinely from memory or merely from imagination, then the process is unreliable and my belief unjustified. On the other hand, if in such cases an image comes to mind only if it is an accurate representation of what I saw, then my process is reliable, and my belief is justified. In our discussion of epistemic generation, I noted in passing the phenomenon of false memory. This happens when one seems to recall an event (i.e., when one has an episodic memory) but in fact one didn’t experience the event at all. These kinds of cases are relatively common regarding family history. Suppose I’ve heard a story about how I was scared of dogs as a young child and on one occasion, I unexpectedly came face-to-face with a St. Bernard and I screamed and ran in the opposite direction. Having heard the story told consistently and repeatedly, I come to picture it in my mind. Eventually, my mental picture becomes so familiar that it begins to feel like the product of episodic memory rather than something that has been constructed by my imagination. In the future, when this event is discussed, I will seem to be able to recall seeing the large dog and running away, but that will be an illusion.

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As I also noted earlier, there is reason to think that there is a good deal of reconstruction that occurs in episodic memory. Rather than having a stored memory of the event that is the mental equivalent of a video clip, our minds will often piece the event together from much smaller memory bits. The question is to what extent these issues are potential problems for a reliabilist theory of the justification of memory belief. There are a couple ways that this could go. First, consider the above example of the false memory of being frightened by the St. Bernard. My memory is not accurately reporting my past experience and so it is plausible to take this case to involve an unreliable psychological process type. But then I’m not even prima facie justified in my belief that I am recalling the event (i.e., having an episodic memory of the event). Yet if I am unaware of the phenomenon of false memory, I’ll have no reason to be suspicious in this case since my experience is just what it would be if my memory were veridical. So, I’ll have an apparent memory of the event and no reason to doubt it. Whereas the reliabilist will say that my belief fails to be prima facie justified, the objector will say that the correct reading of this case is that I am ultima facie justified. Therefore, reliabilism is a mistaken theory of memory justification. The reliabilist should take a two-pronged response to this objection. First, I think standing her ground and insisting that the belief is not justified is the appropriate opening volley. As we will see near the end of this chapter, reliabilism as a theory of justification is best construed as a theory of warrant, and not blameless or rational belief. And even the belief in question is blameless and rational, if it is based on an error-prone cognitive process, then it isn’t going to be even prima facie warranted. The second part of the reliabilist’s reply is to make sure that we have clearly in focus exactly which belief it is that is being called unjustified. That belief is that I’m now remembering having been scared by the St. Bernard. In the words of the psychologist, this is an apparent episodic memory. And if this is a genuine episodic memory, it is the product of the traumatic experience of having been scared by a large dog. Naturally, my belief can have this content without my thinking precisely those thoughts. But when I say “I remember when that happened” I’m not simply reporting that I recall hearing about it; I’m saying I remember experiencing the event in question. And it is



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this belief that the reliabilist is saying which is unjustified. Yet there are a lot of other beliefs involving this incident that I am justified in holding. Even though I’m mistaken about having an episodic memory, I nevertheless have a belief with the content “I was scared badly by a St. Bernard when I was a young child.” Although I’m mistaken about the causal history of the belief, it was nevertheless likely formed and sustained by reliable processes. Although I can’t be said to remember the event as it happened, my belief is the product of my being told the story repeatedly by members of my family; and my hearing it repeatedly and having it stored in memory means the belief has been well maintained. So even though I’m unjustified in my belief that I have an episodic memory of the event, I’m justified by the other beliefs that I have about the incident—that it was a St. Bernard, that I ran away from it, that it made me cry, and so on. The key point here is that what matters for the reliabilist are the facts about how the belief was formed and the reliability of the processes. A person’s having a false belief about those facts doesn’t necessarily undermine his or her justification. That said, once one comes to know about the false memory phenomenon, one now has a potential defeater for long-held beliefs about episodic memories. It’s not clear just how serious a defeater this is, but it is enough to reduce the justification of some of those kinds of beliefs. Yet, again, that’s not going to transfer to many of the surrounding beliefs, however, since even if one’s beliefs about one’s past experiences are false and unreliably formed, that doesn’t imply the same for the non-episodic memories that report much of the content of the false memories. There is one more issue about reliability that I’d like to clarify before we look at the more serious difficulties that the reliabilist faces. Sometimes when people talk about memory being unreliable, they don’t mean that its outputs are mostly false but are instead speaking of its having trouble with recalling. So I might intend to buy almond milk when I’m at the grocery store but fail to make a written list, go to the store, buy a number of other items, and leave with no almond milk because I didn’t recall it. But these sorts of problems are not a difficulty for the reliabilist theory of the justification of memory belief. For one thing, what I’m trying to recall is an intention rather than a belief. When I decide to get almond milk the next time I’m

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at the store, it’s not clear that I form any new belief at all. Forming the intention to get almond milk isn’t the same thing as forming the belief that I will get it next time I’m at the store. After all, I know that I’m forgetful. Even though we all get frustrated by our forgetfulness and we might sensibly say that we just aren’t reliable when it comes to recalling what we want to recall, this is a very different type of reliability than that which is at the heart of reliabilism. Reliabilism has its virtues. First, it has an answer the problem of forgotten evidence. The reliabilist doesn’t require that the believer be able to recall the original grounds for her belief. If it was reliably acquired and maintained (and there are no defeaters), it will be justified. On the other hand, reliabilism denies that a belief gains justificatory support by its mere existence. So, if I am unjustified when I come to believe a proposition, I’ll remain unjustified unless something significant changes in my epistemic situation. We saw that evidentialism runs into problems with the requirement that a belief be based on its justification, since the inferential argument that will be the justification in cases of forgotten evidence will not be what the belief is based on. But reliabilism will hold that if a belief is originally produced reliably, and if it is maintained reliably, then its ground will continue to be what produced it in the first place. That basis might be indirect in that the most immediate ground of the belief (if, for example, it gets reconstructed at recall) will be the mnemonic processes, but the originating process just hands the belief off to them. Despite these attractive features of reliabilism, it is not without its critics. It is time to turn to objections to reliabilism as a theory of the justification of memory belief.

The problem of generality and mnemonic processes A common objection to reliabilism is known as “The Problem of Generality.”18 The fundamental charge here is that there is no way to individuate cognitive processes that is not arbitrary. Let’s consider again the bird example: suppose I see a cardinal on my deck in the bright sunshine. What is the correct description of the process that



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produces my belief? On the broadest description, we can say that this belief is formed by sensory perception. If that’s right, then my belief will be justified provided that all modes of sensory perception operating in all (i.e., both good and poor) conditions of observation. On the other hand, we might become extremely specific and say that the relevant cognitive mechanism is a visual process that takes cardinal experiences and outputs cardinal beliefs, operating in my particular location in these exact circumstances on this particular day. If one individuates processes broadly, then two beliefs that intuitively should differ in justificatory status will have the same status since each is formed by the same process. For example, John and Joe both have beliefs that the book they are seeing is red. Both beliefs are formed on the basis of vision and so, on one way of individuating processes, they are formed by the same cognitive process. However, suppose that John is looking at a nearby book that is well illuminated whereas the book that Joe is seeing is on the other side of a large, dark room. In John’s case, the percept is clear and vision reliable while in Joe’s case the percept is murky and vision unreliable. To make things work out right, the reliabilist will either have to claim that what is significant for justification is the reliability of a process relativized to a certain set of conditions (e.g., vision regarding medium-sized physical objects in close proximity under normal conditions of observation) or else more narrowly circumscribe the process itself (e.g., red-object color vision when the inputs have a certain phenomenal quality). I think that the reliabilist should opt for the former strategy. Here’s why. The intuitive appeal of reliabilism comes from what we ordinarily take to be the case about the way we form beliefs. Our beliefs are formed by psychological processes; when the process responsible for our believing that P is one which we take to be reliable, we believe that the belief is justified. The reason that we think we are justified in believing what our eyes ‘tell’ us when we look at a medium-sized physical object in good light is that such beliefs are almost always true. Similarly, the reason that we think that beliefs based on the process of wishful thinking are unjustified is because we know that, by and large, beliefs formed this way are false. In these sorts of cases, we individuate processes rather widely. In the aforementioned landmark article, Goldman recognizes this and offers as examples of relevant

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belief-forming process types: standard perceptual processes, remembering, good reasoning, wishful thinking, hasty generalization, mere hunch or guesswork.19 As one refines and narrows the process types relevant to the reliabilist’s program, reliabilism seems to lose much of its intuitive appeal. Consider for example my belief that there is a clock on the wall, which I have because I now see one there. If the mechanism responsible for that belief is simply the visual belief-forming process, the claim that my belief is justified only if that process is reliable has significant intuitive appeal. However, it is much less clear how the epistemic status of my belief can be a partial function of a very narrowly construed process like that of forming beliefs about round objects that are twenty to twenty-five feet in front and slightly to the left of me, when the lighting is produced by fluorescent tubes. Why? I think that the answer is obvious. I don’t believe that I have a distinct psychological process that is sensitive to objects that are twenty-five feet in front of me and to my left and insensitive to objects that are twenty-six feet in front of me and to my left. I take it that the same visual processes would have been at work had the object been a rectangular picture twelve feet in front and to the right of me, and illumined by standard white light. Inasmuch as the reliabilist must gerrymander process types in order to make his account have the right results, his theory becomes less plausible. Better, I think, for reliabilism to leave the job of individuating processes to the cognitive psychologist or neuropsychologist. What matters isn’t so much that the process type can be specified in a matter that makes processes generally reliable; it is enough if a process together with a suitably narrow description of the circumstances of its operation can do the job. I do not mean to suggest that the above discussion solves the problem of generality for reliabilism. What I’ve said is programmatic at best. But I do think that it provides some reason for thinking that the problem is, in principle, solvable.20

The new demon world objection The second main objection to reliabilist theories of justification is what has become known as “The New Demon World Objection.” (I



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briefly introduced this idea in an earlier chapter when discussing the motivation behind internalism; we’ll go into a bit more detail here.) The old demon world problem takes us back to Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy.21 Descartes was engaged in a search to figure out what he genuinely knew, as opposed to merely believed that he knew. He introduced the idea of an evil demon who was powerful and cunning enough to make you think you are physically embodied on planet Earth with many other humans when actually you are only an immaterial spirit being systematically deceived by the demon; all of your experience is hallucinatory, produced by the demon to fool you. Descartes was concerned that if you weren’t in a position to rule out the possibility of such a demon, then maybe you couldn’t really know much of anything (because the demon could give you experiential evidence of just about everything). The New Demon World Objection asks us to imagine the same general scenario. But instead of being used to suggest that we might have scant knowledge, it is used as a counterexample to reliabilist accounts of epistemic justification. By stipulation, inhabitants of demon worlds have just the same experience as we do; and, like us, they have no reason to doubt the general reliability of their belief-forming processes. When I had the visual experience of seeing the cardinal on my deck and came to believe that there was a cardinal there, my belief was surely justified. The reliabilist maintains that what accounts for this is the reliability of my visual process operating in this context. Yet that means that were I in a demon world, my belief would not be justified (because beliefs formed on the basis of what I seem to see are all false). But, it is claimed, this is counterintuitive. For the demon world inhabitant has exactly the same thing to go on as I do; and she even forms her beliefs as I do (i.e., both of us ground our beliefs in the identical visual experiences we have). While our different circumstances surely indicate that I have knowledge that the demon world inhabitant lacks (because her beliefs are false), it is wrong to conclude that my beliefs are justified and hers are not. Since our experiences, the beliefs we form on the basis of them, and even our whole systems of background beliefs are identical, the justificatory status of our beliefs must be the same as well. Or so says the reliabilist’s opponent. This objection to reliabilism had been taken very seriously. Indeed, many reliabilists (and externalists of other stripes) have

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gone to great lengths to accommodate the intuition that beliefs at demon worlds are justified.22 There is no doubt that the intuition behind the New Demon World Objection is strong. Surely, it seems, two people who have exactly the same evidence to go on and process that evidence in exactly the same way deserve the same epistemic evaluation. Short of altering her view in some way to accommodate (and thereby to some extent undermining the rationale for her theory) is there anything the reliabilist can say to blunt this charge? I believe that there is. Recall that in the first chapter, I made a stipulative definition: “justification” would be a generic, positive term of epistemic appraisal. Any belief that was either warranted, rational, or blameless would count as justified. With respect to each theory we have examined, we’ve asked which of the three types of justification it was best suited for. And a plausible reply to the New Demon World Objection will depend on getting clear what reliabilism is a theory of. It is easy to see that reliabilism is not a theory of blameless belief. To be blameless with respect to a given proposition is for you to have done your epistemic duty regarding it. Could one have a duty to use only reliable belief-forming processes? No, one cannot and for two reasons. First, while we might have some indirect control over what belief-forming processes we use, many of them (if not the great majority) are not subject to our direct voluntary control. When I see the cardinal on the deck, I don’t decide whether to form a belief or which process to use in forming the belief. My cognitive system does the deciding for me.23 Second, even if I were to somehow have control over which process I use, whether a given process is reliable will be something I’ll often have no idea about. I might have a duty to try to use only processes that I take to be reliable, but that is as much as duty as I can have in this area. And that duty is obviously not the same thing as the duty to use only reliable cognitive processes. In short, I can have a belief that is reliably formed even if I have been derelict in my epistemic duties (maybe I should have done more looking for evidence than I did but I got lucky and hit upon a reliable method anyway). And I can be blameless for a belief that is unreliably formed (maybe I honestly can’t help believing things that I wish were true; in such a case I’m not to blame for basing a belief on wishful



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thinking—since I can’t help myself—and yet my belief is unreliably formed. Reliabilism is also a nonstarter as a theory of rational belief. As described in the first chapter, rational belief is belief that fits the evidence one has (or maybe had). It accords to Locke’s dictum of proportioning the strength of one’s belief to the strength of one’s evidence. Now it may be that in typical circumstances when we do that well, we will tend to form mostly true beliefs. But as the New Demon World Problem indicates, we might do a great job of letting our evidence guide us to our beliefs and form beliefs on the basis of completely unreliable processes. And there are problems in the other direction too: if the simple version of reliabilism that I’ve sketched is true, then we can be at least prima facie justified in beliefs for which we have no internally available evidence. Suppose, for example, we were to have an innate disposition to believe that animals of a certain species S are dangerous. Even if we’ve never seen an S before, once one comes into view, we immediately form the belief “That animal is dangerous.” As long as our natural beliefforming process was reliable (i.e., such animals are dangerous and the disposition to believe only gets triggered when we actually see an S), then the reliabilist is committed to that belief’s being prima facie justified. But if we have no background beliefs that support this belief, and the only clearly visible properties of the animal do not indicate its danger, then this belief will not be supported by our evidence. So it will not be prima facie rational. Reliabilism, then, will not be attractive if the target of our epistemic investigation is rationality. We are left with what we have been calling “warrant.” Warrant is the property that, when Gettier conditions are not present, will make a true belief knowledge. That is, a warranted belief is a belief that in the great majority of circumstances will be true. And it is here that reliabilism finds its home. Because of its tight connection to truth, it is ill-suited for the other two categories (since having blameless or rational belief is consistent with the great unlikelihood of the belief’s being true). This is also why the New Demon World Objection is not a powerful objection to reliabilism. For at demon worlds, believers have entirely false beliefs about the world. But if that is right, then none of their beliefs are warranted since even if one were to just happen

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to be true, it wouldn’t count as knowledge. Nor are demon worlds Gettier circumstances because Gettier examples are those that take cases in which beliefs of the sort described typically are knowledge, and by a twist undermine the warrant, even while the belief is true. But in demon world cases, no empirical beliefs are knowledge; so, there aren’t cases in which a belief that would typically be knowledge is subtly undermined. In the end, then, the reliabilist can plausibly be thought to say precisely the right thing about demon worlds: beliefs can certainly be rational, but they can’t warranted.

Conclusion What, then, is the correct theory of the justification of memory belief? As I argued in the first chapter, that turns out not to be a well-formulated question since it assumes that there is a unique correct theory. If what I claimed early on is right, then we should be looking for three theories and not one. That is, we should be looking for a different account for each of our terms of epistemic appraisal: blamelessness, rationality, and warrant. By my lights, the one theory that is not plausible as an account of any of these concepts is conservatism. Obviously, it is not a good theory of warranted memory belief—and no one has ever claimed that it is. But as we’ve seen, Matthew McGrath argues that it is at least the right theory of blameless belief and has a good claim to be the correct theory of rational memory belief. But to think this, one must adopt a strict synchronic condition on what is relevant to blameless and rational belief, and we’ve seen good reason to be dubious of that restriction. And surprisingly perhaps, this is particularly true where blamelessness is concerned. Rationality seems the best possibility for conservatism. But why should the mere fact that one has a belief provide her with justification for that belief? Granted, the conservative isn’t saying that her position holds for justified belief generally—that is, she’s not saying that one is justified in coming to believe if she has no reason not to. But she is claiming that belief is sufficient for a proposition’s becoming prima facie justified and that is overly permissive. Or so I have argued.



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Evidentialism of the sort with which we ended Chapter 4 seems to me to be a decent prospect for either rationality or warrant. Recall that the amended version of evidentialism that was laid out there was diachronic (and thus allowed the fact that a belief had been evidentially justified earlier to be epistemically relevant later even if the original evidence is lost) and verific (it was suggested that A is evidence for B only if A is either a reliable indication of the truth of B or at least raises the objective probability of B). For those who have internalist leanings, diachronic and verific evidentialism should be an intriguing account of the warranted memory belief. And if the truthrelated aspect is dropped, one might have a good account of rational memory belief. For there is surely some important epistemic virtue that is internalistic and which those who inhabit demon worlds can obtain. Because foundationalism is an irredeemably synchronic theory, it isn’t a plausible theory of blamelessness for reasons that we’ve seen repeatedly. If my current reason to believe is based on past epistemically culpable behavior, then my present reason doesn’t absolve me (even if there is now nothing I can do about my situation). Because foundationalism counts as justified beliefs that have no likelihood of being true, it is not a candidate for a theory of warrant. As a theory of rationality, it has more to suggest than conservatism does because it insists that belief itself is insufficient for justification. But if every memory belief is prima facie justified because of an accompanying memory seeming, then (arguably) that is a distinction without a difference. Also, foundationalism’s inability to account for the justification of stored beliefs is a major strike against it. It will come as no surprise that the conclusion I draw is that preservationism and reliabilism combine to make the most satisfying theory of warranted memory belief. Rationality is probably best understood along one or another of the varieties of evidentialism that we’ve discussed. I don’t think any of the positions we’ve discovered is appropriate as an account of blamelessness. Perhaps blamelessness is simply its own category: to have a blameless belief is to not have violated an epistemic duty in believing as one does. To try to understand it by reducing it to another theory might be to mistake a fundamental theory for a nonfundamental theory.

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Study questions 1 Rehearse the distinction between synchronic and diachronic theories of justification. Explain a case in which a synchronic theorist would say a belief is justified but a diachronic theorist is unjustified. 2 What is preservationism? Is it a theory of the nature of justification? Why or why not? 3 How could one be both an evidentialist and a preservationist? Explain with an example. 4 According to reliabilism, what is required for a newly formed belief to be prima facie justified? What is required for a memory belief to be prima facie justified? 5 What is the New Evil Demon objection to reliabilism? According to the defense of reliabilism in this chapter, how should the reliabilist respond? 6 Of all the competing theories of the justification of memory belief that we have examined in this book, which do you take to be the best? Or do you think that there is more than one (perhaps one for two or more of the fundamental concepts of epistemic evaluation that we’ve discussed)? Explain what you take to be the main objection to your favored theory and how you’d respond to it.

For further reading Goldman, A. I. (1979) “What is Justified Belief?” in G. Pappas (ed.), Justification and Knowledge: New Studies in Epistemology, Dordrecht: Reidel Publishing Company, 1–19. (The classic, original explication of process reliabilism.) Conee, E. and Feldman, R. (2004), Evidentialism: Essays in Epistemology, New York: Oxford University Press, Chapter 6. (This essay presses the “problem of generality” for reliabilism.)



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Bernecker, S. (2010), Memory: A Philosophical Study, New York: Oxford University Press, Chapters 3, 6, and 7. (Bernecker defends what he calls “moderate generativism” and externalism for memory.) Michaelian, K. (2011), “Generative Memory,” Philosophical Psychology 24 (3): 323–42. (Another important defense of the generative aspect of memory.)

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Notes Chapter 1 1 Unless I note otherwise, from here on if I say that a belief “depends on,” “is based on,” “is grounded on,” and so on, I have in mind an epistemic relation rather than a strictly causal-psychological relation. So, I will drop the modifier “epistemically” since it is presumed. There are, I think, very good reasons for thinking that there is a causal (or at least counterfactual) condition on epistemic dependence but I will not be assuming that. 2 The same distinction can be made regarding beliefs construed as states as opposed to events: there is an initial belief that is a state one comes to be in when a belief is newly formed and an ongoing state one is in when one has had the belief for a time. 3 For more on the prima facie/ultima facie distinction and its importance in epistemology, see Senor 1996. 4 Of course, one might also opt for a mixed view. We’ll discuss that in due time. For now, I’m attempting only to distinguish fundamentally different perspectives. 5 Feldman and Conee 2004, P. 83. 6 Please keep in mind that all I’m attempting to do here is motivate the importance of the coming/continuing belief distinction. Evidentialism will get a fair hearing later in the book and we’ll see then what resources the evidentialist has for dealing with this kind of problem. 7 For discussions about what “remembering” amounts to, see Martin and Deustcher 1966, Malcolm 1977, Bernecker 2010 Chapter 3, and Frise 2015. 8 This paragraph is admittedly quick and contentious. There is a tradition that holds that remembering is a species of knowledge so that if S remembers that P then S knows that P. Although I think that Bernecker, following Martin and Deustcher, does a fine job of showing that the remembering-is-knowing thesis to be false, it is certainly not uncontroversial. But, again, my target is the epistemic credential of memory belief—that is, propositions that one is justified in continuing to believe—and so whether or not all instances of ordinary attributions of the form “S remembers that P” imply “S knows that P” is neither here nor there as far as the current project is concerned.

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9 The conventional view was held by the British Empiricists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as well as by rationalist Rene Descartes (see, for example, Locke 1689 and Descartes 1641). In the twentieth century, Bertrand Russell (Russell 1921) and C. D. Broad (Broad 1925) also held something very much like it. Thomas Reid and Norman Malcolm are notable opponents to the traditional view. Reid’s objections can be found in Reid (1785) and Malcolm’s in Malcolm (1977). 10 Cases like the curse word case are called “false memory.” I suspect that there is no sharp cut-off line between memory and imagination images. That is, were a given image to be a through mixing of remembered and imaged aspects, I can’t see that too much would be riding on whether it should count as a memory image, an imagination image, or as simply a combination of the two. 11 I take “images” to be essentially connected to the visual system, so I’ve added “representation” to indicate that one might form a new belief from a remembered experience using other sensory modes. For example, one might recall a sound, scent, taste, or tactile feel, and form a new belief on the basis of the recalled experience. 12 So a belief might have originated from memory at t1 and not then count as a memory belief as I am defining it, but when it is recalled at some later time t2 it will then satisfy my definition. 13 From now on, anything that I say about the expression “memory belief” is intended to also be true of the expressions “mnemonic belief,” and “memorial belief.” 14 I follow Alvin Goldman in marking this distinction as I do. Cf. Goldman 1986, chapter 10. 15 Although I am content to claim that I’m defining my terms purely by stipulation, my use of rationality and blamelessness corresponds nicely with the use of these terms in McGrath 2007. And his use of “justification” in that paper is akin to my use of “warrant” here. 16 For my preferred understanding of “justification” in most epistemic contexts, see Senor 2013. 17 Gettier 1963.

Chapter 2 1 The position that will occupy us in this chapter is what we might think of as “conservatism neat.” In a later chapter we will discuss a similar, but importantly distinct, position that has come to be called “phenomenal conservatism.”



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2 Harman 1986, Chapter 4. 3 Ibid., p. 31. 4 Ibid., p. 39. 5 Ibid. 6 While there are hints in the book that Harman has in mind something more robust than negative coherentism, by the time he discusses conservatism in Chapter 5, it is clear that the negative coherentist/conservative position is the one he favors. 7 Harman 1986, p. 46. Although Harman uses the term “accept” rather than “believe” he explains on the same page that the principle “applies to what one fully accepts, what one fully believes or fully intends.” 8 Harman 1986, p. 32. 9 Ibid., pp. 43–45. 10 Ross and Anderson 1982, pp. 147–49. 11 Ibid., pp. 36 and 37. Harman is quoting from Ross and Anderson 1982. 12 Ibid., p. 39. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., p. 112. 15 Ibid., pp. 41 and 42. 16 Ibid., p. 38. 17 Ibid., p. 41. 18 See Ross, Lepper, and Hubbard 1975. 19 Ibid., p. 833. 20 Harman 1986, p. 12. 21 Ibid., p. 13. 22 Ibid., pp. 41 and 42. 23 Landauer 1986, p. 492. 24 Cf., in particular, Penfield 1959, Shiffrin and Atkinson 1969, and Tulving 1974. 25 Squire and Kandel 2009, p. 77. 26 Cf., Ellis and Hunt (1983), chapter 3, and Kahneman (1973). 27 As mentioned earlier, there is a position that every belief we ever hold is permanently encoded in LTM. I don’t wish to take a stand on that here. So if one is attracted to that model, one can read this point as instead that one ought not pay undue attention to the evidential relation and not worry if one cannot recall it at a future time.

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28 Harman 1986, p. 38. 29 Ibid., p. 42. 30 Harman claims on p. 42 that “one should not try to remember those intermediate steps [i.e., the steps of the justificatory argument]; one should try to avoid too much clutter in one’s mind.”

Chapter 3 1 McGrath 2007, p. 2. The other two short quotations in this paragraph are from the same page in McGrath’s paper. 2 McGrath 2007, p. 14. The slight alteration is that I have substituted “justified” for McGrath’s term “rational.” The reason for this will soon become apparent. 3 McGrath 2007, p. 2. 4 See Christensen 2000. 5 Ibid., p. 16. 6 Ibid., pp. 16–17. 7 What I am calling the “Conversion Problem” is similar to but not exactly the same as what McGrath has in mind when he uses that label. On his view, the Conversion Problem is only the second, stronger version of it that I discuss. But I am using the label for both (i) the objection that conservatism implies that a belief can go from being originally unjustified to justified simply by the agent’s forgetting defeaters (or that her belief was poorly formed) and (ii) the objection that conservatism implies that a belief one is unjustified in forming can become justified simply by the fact that it is now believed. 8 McGrath 2007, p. 4. 9 McGrath 2007, p. 18. 10 Versions of this objection can be found in Foley 1983 and Huemer 1999. 11 McGrath 2007, p. 20. As discussed earlier, McGrath uses the term “rationality” instead of justification.

Chapter 4 1 Locke 1689, Book IV. 2 Feldman and Conee 2004, p. 83.



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3 F&C develop their theory in light of the threefold believe-disbelievewithhold distinction. Other epistemologists prefer a finer-grained understanding of cognitive states called “credences,” which are measurements of degrees of belief. So, for example, to something about which you feel very sure but not certain, you might assign a credence of .9; for something you have no real opinion about, you might assign .5 and for something you’re pretty sure is false you might assign .1 While evidentialism can be developed this way, we won’t consider it for two reasons. First, it would complicate our discussion greatly. Second, the main strengths and weaknesses of the evidentialist position are largely the same either way it is developed. 4 Ibid, p. 101. 5 Feldman and Conee 2004, p. 56. 6 In the first chapter, I offered an account of memory belief that requires that the belief be previously held, and that one’s belief at the current time is appropriately causally related to that earlier belief. One problem with defining memory belief as I do is that any belief that seems to be a memory belief, but which is actually not causally related to a past belief will not count as a memory belief. Yet for the evidentialist’s purposes (as well as the conservative’s) it doesn’t matter if the belief really is a memory belief or is only apparently so. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll continue to talk just about “memory belief,” but the evidentialist theory I’ll be exploring should be taken to be an account of any belief that seems to the subject to be a memory belief. (Thanks to an anonymous referee for bringing this point to my attention.) 7 Besides narrowing the scope to memory in these principles, I also made them explicitly about memory belief whereas they were originally claims about the justification of propositions. Since our topic here is about the epistemic status of beliefs in memory, this change was required. 8 The epistemology of testimony—like everything else in philosophy—is a contested field. See Gelfert 2014 for explanations of the competing perspectives. 9 See Feldman and Conee 2004, pp. 92–93. 10 Early discussions of this objection to accounts of justification that wed it to truth can be found in Cohen 1984 and Foley 1985. 11 Evidence essentialism is entailed by what F&C claim about the relationship of evidence and justification, but it is explicitly defended in Conee and Feldman 2004, pp. 103–04.

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Chapter 5 1 There are other varieties of foundationalism than the sort that I’m laying out here. That is, more traditional theories claim that basic beliefs are about our experiences rather than about external objects. Such a foundationalist would say that in our example, the basic belief is something like “It looks to me as though the sky is cloudless” or “The sky visually appears to be cloudless.” Against these traditional theories is the claim that, in the normal course of events, we typically form beliefs about external objects and not our experience of them. Also, the history of epistemology strongly suggests that if one begins with foundational beliefs that are only about experiences, it will be very difficult to give plausible theory on which our beliefs about the external world turn out to count as knowledge. 2 I want to reiterate a lexical point made in the previous chapter. While in order to be a genuine memory belief, the belief must have been formed earlier; brand new beliefs don’t count as memory beliefs. But we sometimes think we remember things we don’t genuinely remember. I might seem to recall that I attended an event that I never attended. When we talk about “memory beliefs” in the context of foundationalism, we should keep in my that we are talking not only about genuine memory beliefs but also apparent memory beliefs. 3 Russell (1921), Broad (1925), Pappas (1980), Pollock (1974), and Pollock and Cruz (1999). This is not to say that all of these philosophers give the same account of what it takes for a mnemonic belief to be justified. On the contrary, Russell thinks that an image and a certain feeling of familiarity are necessary, while Pollock speaks more loosely of the “phenomenal character” as being significant; Pappas, on the other hand, doesn’t make any claims about what it is in virtue of which a memory belief is justified. 4 In constructing Pollock and Cruz’s theory, I will draw from both Chapter 7 of Pollock 1974, and Chapter 2 of Pollock and Cruz 1999. 5 One important terminological note: Pollock and Cruz (1999) do not classify their theory as a version of foundationalism. That is because they place the idiosyncratic restriction they call “the doxastic assumption” on such theories. This is the claim that only beliefs can be relevant to the justification of other beliefs—mere experiences do not justify. The view they eventually defend denies this assumption and allows that, for example in cases of recalling



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that P, having the experience of recalling gives one a prima facie justification for P, and if such beliefs are undefeated, they are justified. Memory beliefs, then, are justified not by other beliefs but by the experience of recalling. But that is just what foudationalist theories, typically construed, imply. So I’m going to go against the terminology of Pollock and Cruz and classify their account as foundationalist. 6 Pollock 1974, p. 178. Pollock is explicitly not interested in the way that these terms normally operate; thus, his distinction is made for theoretical purposes and not as a report of actual usage. 7 Pollock 1974, p. 193. In Pollock and Cruz 1999, the relevant principle is “‘S seems to remember P’ is a defeasible reason for S to believe that P” (p. 48). 8 Pappas 1980, p. 133. 9 Pollock 1974, p. 193. 10 Pollock 1974, p. 178. 11 Ibid., p. 189. 12 Ibid., pp. 189–90. 13 Ibid., p. 190. 14 Martin and Deutscher 1966. 15 In fact, the point of this example in the original essay was to demonstrate that “S remembers that P” does not entail “S believes that P.” 16 To put the matter as Feldman and Conee prefer, the proposition is justified but your belief is not well-founded. 17 See Pollock and Cruz 1999, pp. 35–36. 18 Pollock 1974, p. 195. 19 At a minimum, nonoccurrent beliefs can serve as defeaters. Furthermore, as suggested above, it seems to me that epistemic status of activated, nonoccurrent beliefs which serve as part of the causal basis for a new belief are relevant to the epistemic status of their product. 20 Huemer 2001, p. 99. In an earlier work (Huemer 1999), Huemer argues that memory seemings are not sufficient for the justification of memory belief; a further requirement is that the belief have been originally justified. However, he does allow that if one did not previously hold the belief but nevertheless had a memory seeming, that would be sufficient for forming a new belief. 21 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/upshot/the-measuring-sticksof-racial-bias-.html?_r=0

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Chapter 6 1 Our discussion of evidentialism led to a version of a diachronic theory but that is not the form that evidentialism takes in the literature—what we’ve been calling F&C evidentialism. 2 Among those who have advocated preservationist theories, see Burge 1993, Goldman 1999, Huemer 1999, Plantinga 1993b, Senor 1993, and 2007. 3 We’ll see later that this isn’t strictly speaking true—that is the preservationist can allow that memory can generate justification, but it only does so, she avers, when it produces new beliefs. 4 See Lackey 2005 and Lackey 2007. 5 This is described as such to allow for the possibility of a mixed process that takes both beliefs and experiences and produces new beliefs from them. More standardly, I suppose, is the case where S justifiably infers that R from justified beliefs P and Q, and S’s belief that R has its justification transmitted from beliefs P and Q. 6 As we will soon see, this turns not to be quite right. 7 Technically, for the sake of defining original justification, what is required is that the justification not be transmitted from anything. That is, if there are other states that have justification and are capable of transmitting it, then a belief will have original justification only if its justification has not been transmitted from one or more of those states. 8 My insistence that a process be able to produce prima facie justification (rather than merely take one from prima facie to ultima facie justification) distinguishes my account of epistemic generation from Sven Berneker’s “moderate generativism” and also from Lackey’s view. See Bernecker 2010, pp. 96–103, Lackey 2005, and Lackey 2007. 9 Cases of this kind can also be found in Lackey 2005. 10 Although the previous discussion of the propositional/ex ante justification had by propositions prior to the formation of the relevant beliefs from memory, and the dependence of such on perception should be noted as a non-trivial difference between the two. 11 For arguments against preservationism, see Frise 2017a. 12 From Lampinen and Beike 2015: “Despite the appeal of the storehouse metaphor, modern-day memory psychologists put very little stock in the idea” (p. 56). See also Alba and Hasher 1983.



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13 Huemer 1999. 14 Swampman makes his debut in Davidson 1987. It should be noted that there are philosophers who think that, when he first comes into existence, Swampman doesn’t have any beliefs about the external world since whatever mental states he has have (at that time) no causal connections with the physical world. For the sake of our discussion, we’re going to assume that the content of Swampman’s beliefs is the same as that of yours or mine. 15 There are other forms that externalism can take other than process reliabilism; indeed, there are other forms that reliabilism can take. Versions of non-reliabilist externalism tend to be theories of knowledge rather than justification (e.g., see Dretske 1981 and Nozick 1981). 16 Goldman 1979. 17 This isn’t quite right because of the possibility we mentioned earlier: a belief can be unjustified when originally formed and then become justified later with additional evidence. 18 The generality problem has initially formulated in Feldman 1985. 19 Goldman 1979 pp. 99–100. 20 For other attempted solutions to the generality problem, see Alston 1995 and Lyons 2009. 21 Descartes 1641. 22 See, for example, Goldman 1988, Lyons 2013, and Bergman 2006. 23 See Kahneman 2011 for a discussion of the degree to which what are known as System 1 processes operate involuntarily.

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Index Alston, William P.  x, 26, 98, 173 n.20 Anderson, Lee  33, 39, 167 nn.10–11 belief activated vs. unactivated  12–13 occurrent vs. dispositional  7, 10 belief perseverance  33–40 Bernecker, Sven  125, 163, 165 nn.7, 8, 172 n.8 blamelessness (epistemic) characterized  18–19 Broad, C. D.  104, 166 n.9, 170 n.3 Brogaard, Berit  125 Chicago Cubs  63–8, 89–91, 115 Christensen, David  54, 73, 168 n.4 Clutter Avoidance Principle (CAP)  35–37, 40–45, 49 coming to believe vs. continuing to believe  ix, 2–7, 55, 58–60, 80, 117, 143–5 Conee, Earl  5, 24, 75–9, 97 conservatism  24, 27–71 and the conversion problem  56–62 and the epistemic boost problem  62–67 main theses  27, 52 and the parity problem  67–70 and the partiality problem  54–56

Cruz, Joseph  24, 104–18, 124, 170 nn.3, 4, 5, 171 nn.7, 17 Deutscher, Max  111, 171 n.14 diachronic vs. synchronic theories  4, 61, 72, 91, 96, 117, 119, 144, 161 doxastic voluntarism  18, 70, 123 epistemic circularity  21, 114, 119 epistemic transmission  134–5, 139 evidence proportionalism  16, 18 evidentialism diachronic  89–91 main theses  76–7, 79 and parity problem  85–8 and problem of forgotten evidence  7, 81–9, 104, 113, 129–30, 154 verific  95–6 false memory  136, 142, 151–3 Feldman, Richard  5, 24, 75–9, 97 foundationalism and basing objection  112–14 and circularity objection  114 main theses  102, 108 and missing diachronic element  117 and recalling  104–14 and recalling objection  109–12

180 INDEX

and the regress argument  100–2 and stored belief objection  115–17 foundations theory  28–9, 31–2, 34–6 Frise, Matthew  82, 97, 165 n.7, 172 n.11 generation (doxastic and epistemic)  ix, 67, 132–45 Gettier counterexamples  14–16 Goldman, Alvin I.  x, 26, 97, 148, 155, 162, 166 n.14, 172 n.2, 173 nn.16, 19 Harman, Gilbert  viii–ix, 24, 27–50, 52–3, 57, 70, 105–6, 109, 167 nn.2–8, 168 nn.28–30 Huemer, Michael  72, 119, 124 internalism  72, 88, 90–1, 97–8, 146, 157 introspection  11, 68, 103, 134–6, 141 justification coming to believe vs. continuing to believe  2, 5–6 as focus of book  viii–ix original vs. ongoing  7, 13 prima facie v. ultima facie explained  3–4 stipulatively defined  14 synchronic v. diachronic theories  4 Lackey, Jennifer  132–3, 172 nn.4, 8–9 Lyons, Jack  x, 173 nn.20, 21 limitations of human memory  40–45

Martin, C. B.  111 McCain, Kevin  97 McGrath, Matthew  24, 26–7, 49, 51–72 memory constructive and reconstructive  142–3 false memory  136, 142, 151–3, 166 n.10 memory belief  viii–ix vs. belief from memory  12 defined  9–13 memory images, degraded vs. contaminated  11 mentalism  77, 79, 97, 147 Michaelian, Kourken  125, 163 Pappas, George  104–5, 162, 170 n.3, 171 n.8 perception  11, 21–2, 68, 94, 103, 134–42, 155, 172 n.10 phenomenal conservatism  118–20 Plato  8 Pollock, John  viii, x, 24, 104–18, 124, 170 nn.3–5, 171 nn.6–7, 9–13, 17, 18 preservationism  4, 9, 25, 51, 70, 127–46, 148, 161 main thesis  132 principle of conservatism  28, 30 principle of positive undermining  29, 106 principle of negative undermining  29 rational/rationality stipulatively defined  13, 16 recalling  104–23, 129, 145–6, 152–4, 170 n.5 remembered belief  9–10 Reid, Thomas  125, 166 n.9 reliabilism  25, 127, 146–61 main thesis  148–9

INDEX

and New Demon World Problem  94, 156–9 and problem of generality  154–6 unconditional vs. conditional reliability  150 remembering  7–8 remembering vs. recalling  104–8, 111 Ross, Craig  33, 39, 167 n.10–11 Russell, Bertrand  viii, 20, 104, 166 n.9, 170 n.3

181

skepticism, memory  viii, 19–22, 109 supervenience/supervenes (epistemic)  77, 79, 86, 144 Swampman  144–5, 173 n.14 testimony, epistemology of  102–4 warrant stipulatively defined  13–16

182