Feelings of Believing: Psychology, History, Phenomenology 9781498577175, 9781498577182, 1498577172

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FE E LING S OF B EL IEVING

FE E LING S OF B EL IEVING

Psychology, History, Phenomenology Ryan Hickerson

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2020 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN: 978-1-4985-7717-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-4985-7718-2 (electronic) TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

For Debra Jean, con affetto.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

vii

Abbreviations

ix

Introduction: Recovering Sentimentalism

1

1 Feeling Disbelief : Hume’s Doxastic Sentimentalism

33

2 Feeling Certain and the Circle: A Sentimental Interpretation of Cartesian Clarity

61

3 The Psychology of Overconfidence

103

4 The Feeling of Self-Evidence: Husserlian Evidenz as Gefühlsindex

143

5 Doxasticity as Electricity: William James and the Live Hypothesis

189

6 Attention and Feeling Noticed: Phenomenology and Psychology

221

Beliefy Feelings, Whence and Whither

265

Bibliography

291

Index

309

About the Author

319

v

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the early readers of this book. Providing helpful suggestions and candid reactions were Kit Andrews, Allison Piñeros Glasscock, Debra Jean Harris, Karl Hickerson, Walter Hopp, P.D. Magnus, Allen McKiel, Trent Niarkos, Mike Tiboris, Rob Winningham; thank you for your aid! Jay Odenbaugh, Ivan Welty, and Anthony Coleman gave me pointers about chapter 5 at a key moment. I also owe thanks to my friends in the Willamette University Department of Philosophy for listening to the main argument of chapter 2 in the Fall of 2014, and to the Lewis & Clark Department of Philosophy, who gave me excellent criticisms in the Winter of 2019. Thank you to Jana Hodges-Kluck, and your professional staff at Lexington Books, for supporting this manuscript. The current version is particularly indebted to an anonymous referee for Lexington, who despite being ambivalent about the project provided many useful criticisms. But I would especially like to thank Wayne Martin and Allison Piñeros Glasscock, my archetypes for incisive and insightful readers. This book is indebted not merely to your lessons on finer points of philosophical argument or Latin grammar, or for procuring for me a copy of Twardowski’s dissertation I would otherwise never have gotten my hands on. My inspiration for writing remains your curiosity, your wit, and your friendship.

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ABBREVIATIONS

(T; SBN)

David Hume. A Treatise of Human Nature [1739/1740]. Edited by David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Cited by book, part, section, and paragraph numbers. Also included are the page numbers from the traditional Selby-Bigge edition, revised by Nidditch, and abbreviated SBN.

(AT; CSM)

René Descartes. Œuvres de Descartes [1897–1913]. Publiées par Charles Adam & Paul Tannery. 12 vols. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1964–1974, and its nowstandard English translation, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Volume ix

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3 is additionally edited by Anthony Kenny, and is instead abbreviated CSMK. (HUA I; CM)

Edmund Husserl. Husserliana. Gesammelte Werke, Bd. I: Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge. Herausgegeben und Eingeleitet von S. Strasser. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950. Translated by Dorion Cairns as Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Philosophy. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1960.

(HUA II; CW 8)

Edmund Husserl. Husserliana. Gesammelte Werke, Bd. II: Die Idee der Phänomenologie: Fünf Vorlesungen. Herausgegeben und Eingeleitet von Walter Biemel. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1958. Translated by Lee Hardy as Collected Works, Vol. 8: The Idea of Phenomenology. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1999.

(HUA III/1; CW 2)

Edmund Husserl. Husserliana. Gesammelte Werke, Bd. III/1: Ideen zu Einer Reinen Phänomenologie und Phänomenologischen Philosophie: Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die Reine Phänomenologie. Neu Herausgegeben von Karl Schuhmann. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976.

AB B RE V I AT I ON S

xi

Translated by F. Kersten as Collected Works, Vol. 2: Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book. General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1983. (HUA XVII; FTL)

Edmund Husserl. Husserliana. Gesammelte Werke, Bd. XVII: Formale und Transzendentale Logik: Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft. Herausgegeben von Paul Janssen. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974. Translated by Dorion Cairns as Formal and Transcendental Logic. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969.

(HUA XVIII/XIX; LI 1/2)

Edmund Husserl. Hussserliana. Gesammelte Werke, Bd. XVIII/ XIX: Logische Untersuchungen [1900-01]. Herausgegeben und Eingeleitet von Elmar Holenstein und Ursula Panzer. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975/1984. Translated by J. N. Findlay as Logical Investigations. 2 vols. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.

(HUA XXIV; CW 13)

Edmund Husserl. Husserliana. Gesammelte Werke, Bd. XXIV: Einleitung in die Logik und Erkenntnistheorie: Vorlesungen 1906/1907. Herausgegeben von Ullrich Melle. Den Haag:

xi i

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Martinus Nijhoff, 1985. Translated by Claire Ortiz Hill as Collected Works, Vol. 13: Introduction to Logic and Theory of Knowledge: Lectures 1906/1907. Dordrecht and London: Springer, 2008. (E&U; E&J)

Edmund Husserl. Erfahrung und Urteil: Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik. Redigiert und herausgegeben von Ludwig Landgrebe. Hamburg: Claassen & Goverts, 1948. Translated by James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks as Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic. London: Routledge, 1973.

(WTB)

William James. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. The Works of William James. Edited by Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979.

(POP 1/2)

William James. The Principles of Psychology. The Works of William James. Edited by Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981

INTRODUCTION Recovering Sentimentalism

DOXASTIC SENTIMENTALISM

This is a book about doxastic sentimentalism in the history of philosophy and psychology. Doxastic sentiments are belief-related feelings. So far as I can tell, the sole advantage of calling them “doxastic sentiments” as opposed to “beliefy feelings” is dignifying them. But they needn’t be dignified. And I’m confident that there are at least a few philosophers who would not want them dignified. 1 So I will be equally happy to call them “beliefy feelings,” in which case this is a book about beliefy-feelings. It is principally a book about beliefy-feelings in the history of philosophy, but it also concerns some claims and arguments about beliefy-feelings made by our contemporary philosophers of mind and psychologists. We can understand the basic thesis of doxastic sentimentalism by comparison to moral sentimentalism. Moral sentiments are feelings or emotions related to judgments of right and wrong, or more generally related to judgments about what is good or bad. A traditional moral sentimentalist, someone like Francis Hutcheson, endorsed the following thesis: “Every Action, which we apprehend as either morally good 1. “For worse or for better, the man who stands on particular feeling must remain outside of philosophy.” F. H. Bradley, as quoted by William James, in William James, “Bradley or Bergson?” [1910], reprinted in Essays in Philosophy, eds. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 153. 1

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or evil, is always suppos’d to flow from some Affection toward rational Agents ; and whatever we call Virtue or Vice, is either some such Affection, or some Action consequent upon it.” 2 A crude doxastic sentimentalist, by way of contrast, defends an analogous thesis regarding beliefs: “Believing simply is a feeling of being certain: certainty simply is a feeling that we have when we are believing.” There are many possible variants on this crude thesis, of course. 3 Perhaps a better theory would be that certainty is our feeling only when we are believing quite strongly. (It would then be incumbent upon us to explain what we mean by “believing quite strongly.”) The main sentimentalist doctrine occupying my attention below is only slightly more sophisticated than this crude thesis. An only slightly more sophisticated doxastic sentimentalist says something like this: “doxastic sentiments (feelings like doubt or certainty) always accompany beliefs about what exists, or about what is the case.” 4 The particular feelings the classical moral sentimentalists were concerned with (in the quotation above Hutcheson called them “Affections”) were typically feelings like Love or Hatred. In Hutcheson’s case, the former was distinguished from desire of pleasure, and then subdivided into the Love of Complacence (or Esteem), and the Love of Benevolence. Hutcheson also distinguished two kinds of Hatred: The Hatred of “Displicence” (i.e., displeasure) and the Hatred of Malice. 5

2. Francis Hutcheson. An Inquiry of the Original of our Ideals of Beauty and Virtue [1725]. Reprinted from a facsimile of the 2nd edition, 1726. (New York: Garland Publishing, 1971), 136. 3. There have been a wide range of moral sentimentalist theories, and there is a correlative range of possible doxastic sentimentalisms. Explanatory sentimentalists, who think beliefs are best explained by feelings or emotions; belief sentimentalists, who claim beliefs are composed of or comprised by emotional or non-cognitive responses; expressivists, who claim that what we do when we state beliefs is actually declare feelings; metaphysical sentimentalists, for whom beliefs must always be grounded in affective relations to environmental facts; and epistemological sentimentalists, who believe that justification is comprised by sentimental responses, e.g., in feelings of certainty or self-evidence. (This list is derived from Antti Kauppinen’s catalogue of moral sentimentalisms in the SEP, “Moral Sentimentalism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta, ed., Spring 2017 Edition, https:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/moral-sentimentalism/) Cf. the taxonomy of moral sentimentalisms in On Moral Sentimentalism, edited by Neil Roughley and Thomas Schramme (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2015) 1–3. 4. Cf. “Even More Modest Doxastic Sentimentalism” at the end of chapter 1. In the following pages the shortened expression ‘sentimentalism’ will refer to doxastic sentimentalism rather than moral sentimentalism. 5. Hutcheson, Ideals of Beauty and Virtue, 138–39.

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The feelings that moral sentimentalists nowadays are typically concerned with range from guilt, to indignation, to empathy. 6 But those are quite different from the feelings that will concern me in this book. By far the most famous doxastic sentiment is certainty. But besides certainty, several other doxastic sentiments have percolated through modern epistemology. Another, already mentioned, is doubt. But those are not the only two. This book will be concerned with conceptualizations of force and vivacity, clarity, confidence, Evidenz, and the “liveness” of the live hypothesis. The list of doxastic sentiments doesn’t end there. Its fuller expression would include feelings like: assurance, optimism, faith, wonder, conviction, aplomb, trust, curiosity, surprise, along with complementaries like incredulity, trepidation, despair, dismissiveness, worry, gloom, distrust, boredom, complacence. I cannot hope to canvass them all, not even in an entire book. I have instead chosen to focus on several technical treatments of certainty-like feelings, as conceived by several key figures from the history of modern philosophy. Philosophers have been worried about certainty since long before Descartes. But for our purposes Descartes is the progenitor. We have cared about certainty largely because, in a good Cartesian tradition, we have thought that certainty is important for knowing. In the extreme cases philosophers have even thought that certainty is itself a special kind of knowledge, viz. certain knowledge, and have tried very much to distinguish it from other sorts of knowing; some of us have attempted mightily (ahem, Descartes) to be in possession of it. 7 The topic of this book, therefore, is in one way quite traditional. More recently (i.e., in the past century) experimental psychology has gotten into the certainty game too. The psychologists have pursued certainty with a somewhat different agenda than traditional epistemologists. They have largely been concerned to reveal various ways in which being certain is not productive of knowledge. They have told us (amassing a good deal of evidence along the way) that we are certain of more 6. Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 126–50; Jesse J. Prinz, The Emotional Construction of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 50–86; and Michael Slote, Moral Sentimentalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 13–25, respectively. 7. An alternative approach has been to conceive certainty as a kind of second-order judgment, viz. a judgment of one’s confidence in one’s other judgments. For discussion of certainty as a judgment of confidence, see chapter 3 particularly.

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than we actually know. Yet despite this seemingly fundamental difference in orientation, doxastic sentiments continue to be conceptualized by both philosophers and psychologists in a fairly narrow, epistemic way. What I mean by that is the following: with notable exception, both philosophers and psychologists continue to pay insufficient attention to the nature of believing as a feeling. 8 And that is what the chapters below attempt to remedy. I do not mean to suggest that the myriad attempts to understand certainty epistemically have been fruitless. Quite the contrary! What I hope to suggest is that they have been missing something, insofar as they tend toward non-affective conceptualizations. I will try not to spill too much ink explaining why certain knowledge (ahem, Descartes) is an unobtainable goal. 9 Instead my strategy below will be to retrieve some alternative construals of certainty itself. Certain knowledge has been a will-o-the-wisp largely because of its conceptualization, e.g., as a kind of knowledge, in the first place. So, it is to conceptualizations, latent in otherwise diverse approaches, that we must return. I will combat the worst of them by retracing treatments of doxastic sentiments in several key modern philosophers (some of whom will be more friendly to this treatment than others), showing how each can be more profitably understood as talking about feeling. I will, of course, keep an eye on the relation of such sentiments to knowledge, if only because post-Cartesian philosophy is so monomaniacally epistemological. However, what really concerns me below is belief’s lived experience. I mean to take doxastic phenomenology seriously. 10 Just as certainty is not merely an epistemic credential (though it 8. One of the exceptions is Michael Slote. A Sentimentalist Theory of the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), especially 11–31. Slote’s approach is somewhat different from my own below. He claims that the epistemic virtue of open-mindedness requires “intellectual sympathy” (16–19), and that the phenomenology of believing includes “positive feelings/affect” (20). These “positive feelings” are not any of those I will showcase below from the history of philosophy. Still, Slote’s general approach is a precedent. 9. That may still be a controversial claim. There have been many proposals for certain knowledge. They have included propositions like A 2 +B 2 =C 2, I EXIST SO LONG AS I AM THINKING, HERE IS A HAND, etc. 10. One way to understand my program is as a kind of cognitive phenomenology, a nice statement of which can be found in Elijah Chudnoff. Cognitive Phenomenology (London and New York: Routledge, 2015). For a collection of critical essays see Cognitive Phenomenology. Edited by Tim Bayne and Michelle Montague (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). However, this fit is not perfect, as I treat the phenomenology of believing as affective rather than cognitive. My closest cousin is probably the theory articulated by Jesse J. Prinz, “The Sensory Basis of Cognitive Phenomenology,” in that same volume, see especially Cognitive Phenomenology, 190–91.

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may be that too), the absence of doubt is not merely a condition on knowing. To investigate such feelings as things themselves we must begin to see them, less as conditions on or obstacles to knowing, and more as epistemic virtues and vices, capable of cultivation through experience. In this context a return to “the things themselves” means a return to feelings. At least one notable philosopher, celebrated in the chapter immediately following this Introduction, was a card-carrying doxastic sentimentalist. David Hume is the paradigm case. It is less obvious that William James was also a doxastic sentimentalist, but that will be my contention in chapter 5. Neither René Descartes nor Edmund Husserl called themselves sentimentalists, about beliefy-feelings, or any other sorts of feelings. (Roughly, the Rationalists tended to be less “feelings” sorts of philosophers, while the Empiricists a bit more so.) But I will advance readings of even the arch-Rationalist and arch-Phenomenologist as sentimentalists too, in chapter 2 and chapter 4 respectively. I do not do so to be willfully perverse, but instead to test our best understandings of them, and to show that doxastic sentimentalism permeates modern philosophy quite a bit more deeply than has heretofore been acknowledged. So, the pages below contain highlights of an alternative (some might disparagingly call it a “revisionary”) history. 11 Regardless, the chapters must be understood as alternative/revisionary highlights. A complete revision of the history would be considerably more variegated and denser than I have been able to sketch here. 12 At this early stage I do not expect readers to be sympathetic to this announced plan of hunting for feelings in the history of epistemology. The sentimentalist, revisionaryhistorian has few friends, at least initially. I merely beg you reserve your final judgments until after I’ve had a chance to show you how things might look in some of their interesting details. It is customary for this traditional plea to the reader to be followed by a traditional apology by the author, for all the failings and falsehoods that will inevitably follow. 11. “Alternative” is better than “revisionary” here, because all histories are revisionary. See The Hermeneutics Reader. Edited by Kurt Mueller-Vollmer (New York: Continuum, 1985), particularly “On the Task of the Historian” by Wilhelm von Humboldt, 105–18. 12. Conspicuously absent from this book is a chapter on Bertrand Russell, who was not only a doxastic sentimentalist, but whose influence on twentieth-century philosophy cannot be overstated. See Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind (London: Routledge, 1997), 250–52. Russell’s chapter is only one of many that could have been added.

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Many of the claims below (perhaps some already made) could be wrong. In fact, all of them could be wrong. But in the tradition of the best philosophy, I’ve tried to claim only what I could warrant with argument. What I haven’t been able to prove I’ve tried to make explicit. And what I couldn’t ferret out I have tried to gesture at. I would lament each wild belief that still roams free, untethered by what my arguments have been able to tame, if only I knew which ones they were!

THE METHODOLOGY, RECOGNITION My first methodological axiom will be to pay careful attention to extant literatures. This means that while the details of any individual discussion might veer dangerously toward minutiae, that is a necessary risk for the broader aims. Into some scholarly minutiae we must go, because it is only there that we can prosecute an interpretive argument in dialogue with very real experts on each of the philosophers in question. I mean to do this in a way that will be accessible to anyone genuinely interested in their work, but I should issue a preliminary warning that explanations of this sort are inherently risky. Any attempt to popularize or gloss the enormous corpora, simplifying complex arguments, can lose a literature’s accumulated wisdom. In each case I will try to strike a balance between fastidious footnoting and breezy summarizing; my goal will be to put readers into a position to judge for themselves whether that balance has been correctly struck. But if I teeter into tedium or totter into glibness, those are my dangers.

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There are, of course, a variety of methods of interpretation of the history of philosophy. 13 My own flies under this flag: “Truth, in the great practical concerns of life, is so much a question of the reconciling and combining of opposites, that very few have minds sufficiently capacious and impartial to make the adjustment with an approach to correctness, and it has to be made by the rough process of a struggle between combatants fighting under hostile banners.” 14 J. S. Mill made this claim about political truths, but it applies as neatly to the history of philosophy. The core chapters below, chapters 1–2 and chapters 4–5, are essays in the hotly contested history of philosophy, and they will deploy some of its traditional armament, i.e., I will advance “textual interpretations” of “primary texts” and battle “secondary scholars” who proffer various rival interpretations. Those chapters have been written in conjunction with a careful review (as careful as I could make it) of literatures now grown thick, like battlements and fortifications, around the long-dead philosophers’ ideas, not to mention a review and assessment of the claims and arguments of those long-dead philosophers themselves. Because they must be as comprehensive as possible; chapters of this sort will marshal a few footnotes. But anybody who studies the history of philosophy quickly realizes that every generation produces a crop who are deeply suspicious of this traditional method of literature review and disputation. In every generation a not-insignificant number of us believe, not only that philosophy until the present moment has been riddled with error and foolishness, but that the errors and foolishnesses have been caused by this deeply 13. One extreme is Frederick C. Beiser’s German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781–1801 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), a monument not only to compendiousness, but historical contextualization. (For a summary see the review by Wayne M. Martin in Mind 113, no. 449 (2004): 150–54.) Another extreme is Jerry Fodor’s Hume Variations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), a book that for all its virtues, has almost nothing to do with Hume. Instead it is about mental representations, as inspired by Hume. (See Tim Crane’s review in The Times Literary Supplement, May 7, 2004.) One way to think about these massive differences in approach has been articulated by Robert Brandom in Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 94–118. Brandom distinguishes de dicto textual interpretations from de re textual interpretations. On a continuum where the approaches of Beiser and Fodor represent extremes, Brandom locates his own interpretations of historical figures closer to the de re (i.e., Fodor) end, whereas my chapters below aspire to be closer to the de dicto (i.e., Beiser) end. However, there is significant variation amongst even my own individual chapters in this regard. Chapters 1 and 5 are considerably more de dicto, whereas chapter 2 and chapter 4 are significantly further up the scale toward de re. 14. More battlefield than “marketplace.” John Stuart Mill. On Liberty [1859]. Edited by Elizabeth Rapaport (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), 46.

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flawed, traditional method of literature review and disputation. Our own contemporaries are not special in this regard. The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have witnessed an unprecedented growth in cognitive sciences, i.e., the sciences of belief. But that is not the reason our twenty-first century’s hard-headed and science-minded philosophers of mind now believe that previous eras, if not “consigned to the dustbin of history,” should be taken only as a catalog of error. 15 Their attitude is significantly older than these circumstances. Should we now turn to the cognitive sciences exclusively for understanding certainty, or the other doxastic sentiments? The hardest-headed and the most science-minded among us think that we must. But I will not indulge them here. Ignoring the history of ideas would be an ignorance, not only of our own history, but also a startling display of overconfidence, something that will be discussed in some detail in chapter 3. It is especially unbecoming in a philosopher. So I will try to follow the now-famous methodological dictum of Wilfrid Sellars, who in allusion to Kant, began the Locke Lectures by saying: “The history of philosophy is the lingua franca which makes communication between philosophers, at least of different points of view, possible. Philosophy without the history of philosophy, if not empty or blind, is at least dumb.” 16 This is not to say that there is anything wrong with dreaming the dream of reforming philosophy to make it more scientific. That was, it might be mentioned in chapter 4, Husserl’s dream. But anyone who thinks that he is now the first to approach philosophy scientifically, that his own era is now the first to dream that dream, or that it is our very day and age that finally, ultimately, breaks through and sweeps away all traditional metaphysics, definitively answering all of philosophy’s oldest riddles, scientifically, is being entirely sophomoric.

15. Replying to Sosa regarding philosophical appeals to intuition: “then a great deal of what goes on in contemporary philosophy, and a great deal of what has gone on in the past, belongs in the rubbish bin.” Stephen Stich, “Replies,” in Stich and His Critics. Edited by Dominic Murphy and Michael Bishop (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 232. 16. Wilfrid Sellars. Science and Metaphysics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), 1. Cf. the practice of the history of philosophy as “creative redescription,” by Charles Taylor, “Philosophy and Its History,” in Philosophy in History. Edited by Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 17–30. Taylor is more radically historicist, claiming that the genetic method is indispensible (20) for philosophy generally, and that philosophy and the history of philosophy are one and the same. “You cannot do the first without also doing the second” (17). My claim is not nearly so bold, presuming merely some relationship along the Sellarsian lines.

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There can be, nevertheless, legitimate objections to our traditional method of searching the well-worn classics for new insights. One such objection has shaped the landscape in which I have myself grown up, and it is particularly relevant for my current subject matter. So it merits a word now, before beginning. A criticism of my traditional method goes like this: I advance psychological claims but I do so in ignorance of the results of experimental sciences bearing on those claims, therefore my philosophizing about belief is a kind of “armchair psychology.” This criticism, sometimes couched as a criticism of the legitimacy of philosophizing itself, fuels at least some debate in our contemporary epistemology. 17 We should consider it for a moment, in relation to the methods and practices of the history of philosophy, as broadly stated above, and as more narrowly applied to doxastic sentiments below. The issue, of course, is not with the type of chair a philosopher sits in. The gist of the objection is that philosophy, insofar as it does nothing but conceptual analysis, i.e., insofar as it involves bald appeal to a philosopher’s own intuitions, and particularly insofar as it neglects empirical research (what is usually meant here is a robustly statistical treatment of a broad sampling of individual cases), leaps headlong into illicit generalizations from parochial experience. The philosopher, in his or her armchair, does mere speculation. And the speculator, if he or she doesn’t bother to get up out of the blessed armchair to Google a few recent reports on actual scientific work, is deeply biased. His or her “method,” perhaps including the traditional method of literature review and disputation mentioned above, is (and ought only to be) entirely moribund. There is a component of this well-worn methodological criticism that ought to be taken seriously by anyone interested in the history of philosophy. The challenge that it poses for us can be formulated as a

17. See, for a sampling of this literature: Ernest Sosa, “Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Intuition,” Philosophical Studies 132, no. 1 (2007): 99–107; Ernest Sosa, “Can There Be a Discipline of Philosophy? And Can It Be Founded on Intuitions?” Mind & Language 26, no. 4 (2011): 453–67; Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, “Experimentalist Pressure Against Traditional Methodology,” Philosophical Psychology 25, no. 5 (2012): 743-65; Krist Vaesen, Martin Peterson, and Bart Van Bezooijen, “The Reliability of Armchair Intuitions,” Metaphilosophy 44, no. 5 (2013): 559–78.

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kind of dilemma. 18 On the one hand, the philosopher who practices a close study of her own history has a sort of rigor in her method: she must read lots of dusty books, canvass everything published on their subject, discover flaws in the claims and reasoning of highly intelligent people, and then report upon those flaws faithfully and fairly, only assimilate and synthesize the non-flawed bits, dutifully and diligently, all the while sharpening her own criticisms and conclusions. That philosopher must cut through quite a bit of clutter to say something genuinely new, something that can only rarely be done in any case, after learning from everyone else who ever wrote on her particular topic. It is not at all easy. There are more failures than successes. But we should expect such a difficult process would lead, if only in exceptionally wellprosecuted cases, to at least some insights of some sort, i.e., at least to a knowledge about what has been claimed by some long-dead philosophers, or what their arguments actually were, or what has been claimed about them by many subsequent admirers and commentators. The process may even discover whether some of those claims and arguments have been adulterated by falsity, at least within the bounds of a healthy logical and interpretive practice. This method is roughly historiographical, if not doxagraphical. But, on the other hand, the history of philosophy is not meant to be a mere cataloguing of ideas, or the mere history of philosophical claims and argumentation. Philosophers practicing the history of philosophy are interested not only in the correct account of some claims and arguments made long ago, but also in the content of those claims and arguments themselves, and particularly in whether those claims remain true,

18. This dilemma for the history of philosophy should not be confused for the false dichotomy described at the beginning of Richard Rorty’s “The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres,” published in the same collection as the Taylor essay noted above, viz. Philosophy in History. Edited by Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) 49–75. The dichotomy Rorty meant to explode was between the anachronism of making historical philosophers take sides in our contemporary disputes, or contextualizing them only by lights of their own “benighted times” (49) to try to make their claims sound less silly. Rorty proposes that we do both “rational reconstruction” and “historical reconstruction” (54), along with a method that he calls “Geistesgeschichte” (56–61); his general prescription is that the history of philosophy be treated analogously to the history of science. While I admire Rorty’s method, I cannot abide the relativism smuggled into rational reconstruction, and instead treat the appropriate measure of any philosophical theory, historical or otherwise, to be truth.

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and whether those arguments remain sound. 19 We care about what the philosophizing was about. And that is well and good. But insofar as claims and arguments of long-dead philosophers have any empirical import, i.e., insofar as they begin or end by saying something interesting about actual human psychology, or human language, or human biology, or the natural or cultural worlds, etc., then aren’t they the very sorts of claims appropriately investigated (some would say only appropriately investigated) by empirical sciences? So here is my dilemma. If I practice the history of philosophy in the traditional style, then I can only be assured of knowledge regarding the claims and arguments of long-dead philosophers. At the outside perhaps I can also know about the validity of their arguments, i.e., a merely logical sort of knowledge. But for all of the rigors of the historiography, that method guarantees nothing regarding the truth of the original historical claims, at least not if those claims were in the slightest bit empirical. To assess whether an original historical claim was true, i.e., what I will take to be the sine qua non of any philosophical as opposed to merely antiquarian interest in the history of ideas, I must at some point in the chain of interpretation appeal to a judgment that is itself empirical. And if that judgment, either historical or contemporary, rests upon mere intuitions of some particular philosopher or another, i.e., either long-dead or now very much alive and kicking, then that judgment is made from the proverbial “armchair.” My reply to this methodological dilemma, unfortunately, is not particularly snappy. I begin it simply by suggesting, gently, that you check for yourself whether I have fallen victim in any particular case, i.e., that you actually read each chapter. However, the problem also merits a slightly more theoretical response: the dilemma depends crucially, and perhaps surprisingly and erroneously, on assumptions about the relationship between concepts and intuitions. I will not allow us to be bogged down here before we begin, but presume for a moment that our judgments must have some empirical component, at least in cases where they are about interesting bits of the external world. And set 19. This is controversial, of course. Cf. Robert Brandom, “Why Truth Is Not Important in Philosophy,” in Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 156–76. A similarly scandalous conclusion about truth, from the opposite end of the philosophical universe is Sephen P. Stich, “Do We Really Care Whether Our Beliefs Are True?,” in The Fragmentation of Reason: Preface to a Pragmatic Theory of Cognitive Evaluation (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990), 101–27.

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aside, for the moment, that famed Kantian question about whether there are any completely pure judgments, let alone a priori ones. 20 Please also set aside, just for the moment, an only slightly less interesting question about whether judgments regarding the claims and arguments of long-dead philosophers might themselves count as “empirical” in some roundabout sense. (For purposes at hand, let’s simply presume that they don’t, or that they can be adequately distinguished from a class of more “normal” empirical judgments, viz. those that are more directly about the external world. Still, at least some judgments, viz. the “normal” empirical ones, would have an empirical component, right?) So what is the problem with that empirical component being somebody’s intuition, perhaps even this author’s? We will all agree, I hope, that generalizing from a sample of one would be hasty. But wouldn’t the fault there lie with the generalization rather than the intuition? (The fault is certainly not with the first nonzero natural number.) Wouldn’t it depend upon whether the intuition was offered as evidence supporting a conclusion, or was itself taken to be law-like, universal, or necessary? What’s so bad about intuitions, after all? Who’s afraid of them? In our own time, this word ‘intuition’ has gotten a little bit dirty. It functions like a totem, like ‘communism’ during the Cold War: identifying enemies, excusing oneself from argument, scaring little children. There is a sense in which any claim about human psychology, insofar as it is dignified by the classification “psychological,” is meant to be a part of a science. But would there be a problem with judgments founded on intuitions, if those judgments were not proffered as scientific? What if they were proffered as philosophical? Must all claims on psychological topics (e.g., belief) be scientific? I will not defend my general answers to those questions. Instead I simply confess to you another basic assumption for the book: the quality of one’s intuitions (not to mention one’s arguments) depends upon a deep and broad knowledge of what other people have said upon their subject. That is no less the case if one’s subjects are the claims or arguments of history’s great philosophers. And it applies no less when those “other people” are one’s own contemporary cognitive scientists. Indeed, it might apply quite a bit more if the others were scientists. 20. The distinction between a pure judgment and an a priori one is made by Kant at B3. Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason [1787]. Translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 137.

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Neglecting the researches of others, i.e., not actively studying them and not doing (often painful) diligence of reading things one does not initially understand or agree with, and maybe occasionally citing and getting oneself convinced of something, i.e., learning, is to abandon the sole criterion of rigor in the traditional method of the history of philosophy. It is a method still practiced in the literature reviews conducted by all good scientists up to this present day. So any appeal to an “empirical literature” in the pages below should not be construed as concession to new-fangled philosophical methods, e.g., to the method of “experimental philosophy.” We needn’t concede a thing to the Young Turks, because paying the closest possible attention to the sciences is part of the traditional method of philosophy itself. Even new-fangled Experimental Philosophers admit (some of them) that the problem is not with intuitions tout court, 21 but instead with the quality of one’s intuitions and the conclusions drawn from them. But that is a problem, I will now venture to say, merely with untutored or uncultivated intuitions, i.e., those that are (as I will argue at the conclusion of this book) fueled by un-attended-to feelings. The quality of one’s intuitions must be shaped by a process of reflection, something that always begins with attention to what others have said, and what is being said now, and what was said before, and their broadly logical relationships to one another and to the parts of one’s own experience that were previously invisible. And there can be no education, not even a sentimental education, without science. I will also take for granted that progress in the sciences and philosophy drives, and is driven by, conceptual change. I have no shame in helping myself to this premise too. But it then follows (with only a few other minor commitments not presently pursued) that we must pay close attention to concepts as they are employed and operationalized in our contemporary sciences. This is a requirement, I think, even for those of us primarily interested in quite different conceptualizations developed long ago. Are those older concepts the same as those being 21. I borrow this claim from Jonathan M. Weinberg, “Going Positive by Going Negative: On Keeping X-Phil Relevant and Dangerous,” A Companion to Experimental Philosophy. Edited by Justin Sytsma and Wesley Buckwalter (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2016) 71–86, especially 72. For a more detailed discussion of the notions of intuition necessary (and not necessary) for criticisms of armchair psychology, see the paper immediately preceding that one in the same volume: Kaija Mortensen and Jennifer Nagel, “Armchair-Friendly Experimental Philosophy,” 53–70.

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deployed today? Concepts, after all, can be inherited. But might they still be developing? Who is keeping track of all the conceptual bequests and transformations, if not us? The alternative, even for those of us attempting to speak about the ideas of yesteryears, is to risk falling mute. Sellars was not merely talking to that crop of philosophers who attempt to make philosophy more scientific. We historically-minded philosophers too, risk saying nothing if we confine ourselves to claims about the past, i.e., if we confine ourselves to claims supposed to be merely about the past, not because the concepts we investigate have somehow been superseded by supposedly more “modern” and “scientific” ones, but because we would then lose any urgency in translating the older idiom into the living one today. My main methodological defense, against the accusation of the armchair, is simply to look to the psychology that is most relevant to the sentiments that I discuss in the more historically-oriented chapters. Chapter 3 is a review of some of the empirical psychology on overconfidence. An important part of chapter 6 is a review of some of psychology’s literature on attention. Would anyone deny that the best philosophical method would involve using both analyses of broadly inferential (i.e., including diachronic conceptual) relations and an appeal to empirical research? In that case, any appeal to “data” (or worse to “science”) without careful attention to the history of its conceptualization is blind. And any attempt to judge about the world, willfully ignorant of empirical literatures bearing on its subject, is empty.

THREE SKEPTICAL CHALLENGES: IS SENTIMENTALISM DOOMED? There are several reasons to think that the entire enterprise undertaken here might be doomed from the start. Without being too pessimistic before we begin, let me mention at least three of them. I will name these the “Three Skeptical Challenges,” in order to try to keep track of them as we proceed, but also in order to distinguish and respond to at least the second of them in this book’s conclusion. We should have the courage of our convictions, but we should also begin with a healthy dose of skepticism.

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The First Skeptical Challenge is that there might not be any such things as beliefs. What we have been calling “beliefs” may not be real, or at least not picked out by a natural kind. This is an objection that only a philosopher will really countenance, let alone love. The concept BELIEF, at present, is so deeply and cross-culturally embedded in our everyday ways of thinking about ourselves, not to mention explaining each other’s behaviors, that it takes not an insignificant imagination to entertain the hypothesis that they are unreal. 22 Let alone believe that hypothesis. If there were no BELIEF, how would we explain human actions and moral responsibility?, e.g., if we could not issue explanations of the following sort: “He shot that man in Reno, (i) because he wanted to watch him die, and (ii) because he believed shooting him would kill him.” The conceptual transformation that would be required would be massive, and unlike any we have ever seen. Whatever the successor concept(s) to BELIEF might be, it/they would require complete restructuring of our normative thinking and discourse, not least of which is our thinking and discourse about moral responsibility. Nevertheless, some philosophers are sympathetic with Eliminativism with respect to BELIEFS. 23 The origin of this startling thesis is their conviction that beliefs are part of an empirical theory used to explain behavior, a theory now commonly called “folk psychology.” The folkpsychological theory supposedly posits beliefs and other psychological states (such as desires) in order to predict and explain behaviors. What supposedly makes this “folk psychology” unique as a theory is not its predictive power or explanatory success, so much as its wide acceptance. We teach it to our children (the young “folk”) from birth, and everyone (including all us old “folk”) supposedly accepts the theory. Nevertheless, it is still a theory, and its theoretical posits are still susceptible to empirical disconfirmation by the developing cognitive sciences. 22. I will follow a convention in the philosophy of mind of using small caps when mentioning CONCEPTS (and not using small caps when merely using concepts.) 23. Eliminativists believe that BELIEF will fail to find a home in a smooth inter-theoretic reduction of psychology to the other special sciences, and will eventually be eliminated, not merely from the discourse of future psychology, but even from everyday discourse. Famous formulations and arguments are Paul Churchland’s “Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes,” The Journal of Philosophy 78, no. 2 (1981): 67–90; and Stephen Stich. From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case Against Belief (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1983), especially chapter 11. Though it should be noted: Stich has since expressed greater doubt about Eliminativism’s prospects, e.g., “Do True Believers Exist?” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 65 (1991): 229–44. In The Fragmentation of Reason,103, he instead appeals to a token-identity theory.

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And that means its basic concepts, i.e., concepts like BELIEF, are susceptible to elimination, just like the abandoned concepts PHLOGISTON, CALORIC FLUID, or LUMINIFEROUS ETHER. 24 One of the attractions of providing interpretations of historical philosophers as doxastic sentimentalists is that it provides an understanding of their theorizing that is naturalizable, if not Eliminativist. Here there is an important distinction to be drawn between theories that are naturalizable, as opposed to those that are fully naturalist. Naturalizable theories, as I understand them, are capable of being integrated with our own contemporary scientific theories, i.e., theories that are themselves fully naturalist. 25 I can offer a few examples to illustrate the difference that I have in mind, in lieu of proper definitions. Consider the theory of Damasio and Carvalho (2013). 26 Theirs is a fully naturalist account of feeling, which analyzes feelings as interoceptive access to homeostatic imbalances, and deploys a variety of results from recent neuroscience in order to make that case. Compare it to the theory of sentiments appealed to by David Hume in his Treatise on Human Nature (1739–40). 27 I would call Hume’s theory naturalizable, if not naturalist, if only because it has not (yet!) been fully moored in our own contemporary cognitive sciences. But it could be. An enterprising young Hume scholar, with interests in Hume and our contemporary neuroscience, might do that important theoretical work. (Nota bene, this person is not 24. The list here is from William Ramsey, Stephen Stich, and Joseph Garon, “Connectionism, Eliminativism and the Future of Folk Psychology,” in Philosophical Perspectives, 4: Action Theory and Philosophy of Mind, 1990. Edited by James E. Tomberlin (Atascadero: Ridgeview Publishing Co., 1990), 499–533, particularly 500–503. Ramsey, Stich, and Garon compare BELIEF to WITCHES, a case highlighting the difference between elimination from a scientific explanation and elimination from everyday discourse. Churchland’s classic example is alchemical SPIRITS. 25. “Integration” here could mean a variety of things, but need not mean a smooth intertheoretic reduction. I will simply wave my hands now at that variety, other than to say that at the outside it is logical consistency, and particularly consistency with respect to the confirmed findings of developing sciences. What makes a theory naturalist, and puts it into even closer relationship with those sciences, has been understood in a dizzying variety of ways too, something that I can (again happily) leave unspecified, other than to say that what I roughly mean is a methodological naturalism, as opposed to a thesis about ontology. Readers interested in the naturalization of phenomenology, or its broader context should consult the nowclassic, Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Edited by Jean Petitot, Francisco J. Varela, Bernard Pachoud, and Jean-Michel Roy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 26. Antonio Damasio and Gil B. Carvalho, “The Nature of Feelings: Evolutionary and Neurobiological Origins,” Nature Reviews: Neuroscience 14 (2013): 143–52. 27. David Hume. A Treatise of Human Nature [1739/1740]. Edited by David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Especially T 2.2.

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me.) Compare either of those theories of sentiments to Euclidean geometry. Whether Euclidean geometry is naturalizable, and what that would mean, is an interesting question for metaphysics and the philosophy of mathematics. But Euclid’s Elements by itself should not strike us as a naturalist theory of shapes, I hope. Here I simply appeal to your intuitions. My task below is providing readings of the historical philosophers that will make their claims about believing naturalizable, though my interpretations below will not themselves be naturalist. The reason for this is because I take naturalizability to be an important constraint on the truth of psychological claims, particularly including philosophical claims made about belief, whether recently articulated or proclaimed long ago. So interpreting psychological claims as naturalizable is a constraint on my making so-called “charitable” interpretations. Put in a different way: I should be concerned with whether such claims are naturalizable to precisely the degree that I am concerned about whether they are true. So the history of philosophy and contemporary psychology must come together, as that was exactly my historico-philosophico agenda, floated above. 28 Having said this, I should also emphasize that my project below is quite different from providing any explanation of how the historical claims could be integrated with any of our contemporary scientific accounts of the nature or development of feeling, i.e., the social and biological construction of feelings. I will not attend to affect’s underlying causal mechanisms, except for a few paragraphs in chapter 6, though of course I presume that there must be some, and that the details of those underlying mechanisms will themselves harbor many interesting surprises and riddles. This is again to say that my interpretations below are not themselves naturalist, and that my project here is not naturalization, despite the prevalence and popularity of that program these days. The interpretations below are merely “naturalizabilitizing,” if such an ugly description were allowed. The risk for naturalizable theories is always that they might fail, ultimately, to be naturalized. Insofar as they advance empirical claims 28. It should be noted that not all claims made in the history of philosophy require this scruple about naturalizability. There is an important difference between psychological claims made by philosophers of the past and their claims of other sorts, e.g., social claims, logical claims, etc. Interpretive constraints on those other sorts of claims might be equally stringent, if quite different.

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future scientific discoveries might refute or otherwise discredit them, either in part or completely. And that outcome is, of course, the prediction of the Eliminativists for our particular case. The cornerstone concepts for doxastic sentimentalism are BELIEF and FEELING. So if either of them fails to survive, then any theory based on them will fail likewise. Perhaps a better way of thinking about this hypothetical scenario, predicted by the Eliminativists, rather than saying that my own project would in that case be “doomed from the start,” would be to say that my theory would be “doomed by future scientific progress.” A happy doom, the dustbin of history. A Second Skeptical Challenge is that there may be no feelings characteristic of believing. Maybe there are beliefs, let us say, but there simply isn’t anything that it is like to believe them. For example, consider the following: I currently believe that the roof of the building I am occupying is not about to collapse upon me. You could tell simply by watching my behavior for a little while: I am not abandoning my armchair in a panic; I’m not pulling my dogs outside with me. But what does it feel like to believe something like that? The most obvious answer, and this is the answer that should strike us all initially, is that it feels like nothing. There simply isn’t any distinctive character or quality of experience when possessing a belief. In fact, I have been believing this very belief (about the roof not collapsing) for quite some time now, through a variety of shifting other feelings and attentions to a great many other things. Therefore, says this second sort of skeptic, none of those other feelings was about believing either. Philosophers have traditionally understood believing to be taking something to be true. And I shall understand believing that way too. To say that I believe that the roof is not about to collapse is equivalent to saying that I take it to be true that the roof is not about to collapse. Beliefs are in this way intentional, i.e., each has a content, and that belief’s content is typically expressed propositionally. Typically, independent of the question about whether some proposition is true or false is the question whether some individual takes it to be true, i.e., believes it. This much of the traditional account I will take on board in the analyses that follow: (1) beliefs are takings-to-be-true, (2) beliefs have intentional contents, and (3) the intentional content of belief is often expressed propositionally. But amongst those facts quite a lot of metaphysics is sometimes smuggled, at least in the analytic tradition follow-

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ing Bertrand Russell, e.g., that beliefs are “attitudes” relating to propositions, the latter possessive of sufficient independent reality that there could be such a thing as a relation to them. Since Russell at least, philosophers have additionally conceived believing as a “propositional attitude.” 29 That believing is an “attitude toward” (or has some other suspicious relation to) a proposition is a bit of post-Russellian metaphysics that we should find dubious, and that I will resist below. Here’s why: Imagine that I was hiking and believed that there was a bear on the trail ahead of me. Imagine I’d seen his sign. Imagine he was close enough that I could smell him, and therefore close enough to know that he could smell me! It should go without saying (but it will not go without saying in this book) that a belief like that one comes coupled with quite a lot of feelings, the most salient of them being fear and anxiety. The fear and the anxiety are one kind of doxastic sentiment. But here I must make a very important distinction between sentiments that are doxastic by dint of their being affiliated with believing, as opposed to a special class of sentiments (like certainty and doubt, mentioned already above) that will preoccupy this book. The latter are doxastic in a stricter sense, i.e., insofar as they are themselves about believing. 30 I will frequently refer to them below as feelings characteristic of believing. As I will use the terminology of this distinction, a feeling characteristic of believing is about believing and is supposedly possessed (according to many, if not all, sentimentalists) by all beliefs. Feelings like fear and anxiety, on the other hand, are not characteristic of all believing. They are merely sentiments affiliated with some particular belief, in some particular case. Let us say, for the sake of the illustration, that they are affiliated in this particular case with my belief about the presence of a particular bear. The phenomenological point is that the fear and anxiety in regard to the bear would not be fear or anxiousness of the proposition THERE IS A BEAR, not even when I take such a proposition to be true. Propositions, 29. See Bertrand Russell, “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism” [1918], reprinted in Logic and Knowledge: Essays 1901–1950. Edited by Robert Charles Marsh (London and New York: Routledge, 1956), 227. 30. On my official view, feelings affiliated with believing are about the things believed about, while feelings characteristic of believing are about the beliefs themselves. All but the weakest forms of sentimentalism claim that the latter are necessary for all beliefs. But the weakest forms of sentimentalism merely affiliate feelings with some beliefs, and not all.

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even those specifying dire contents, and even when those dire contents are taken to be true, are themselves toothless and anodyne. It is a bear that I fear and that I am anxious about, and not the concept BEAR or anything predicated of the term ‘bear.’ It is his very real proximity and teeth, and claws, and all of his ferocious physical possibilities that are feared. Whatever the bear’s properties and potentialities, they should not be confused with predicates of ‘the bear,’ no matter how well those predicates track those properties. This is a simple point, but the metaphysical sloshing of properties into predicates is commonplace, and can mar the work of otherwise careful philosophy. It is a place that we must be extra careful, and highly skeptical. To say that beliefs are “attitudes” is perhaps fine, but to say that they are toward propositions, rather than feelings for the things themselves, would not be phenomenologically respectable. 31 The bear-type examples are the easier ones for sentimentalists. The structural-integrity-of-the-roof-type examples are significantly more difficult. The reason is because, even if those latter cases of belief were to possess some un-attended-to feeling characteristic of believing (let us humor the sentimentalist for a moment), they might still lack those sentiments more obviously affiliated with some of our most powerful beliefs. The worry of the Second Skeptical Challenge is that this latter type of case will prove impossible for a sentimentalist theory to incorporate. Affiliated feelings? Fine, according to this second sort of skeptic. But feelings characteristic? . . . of all believing? No way! The difference between the two types of cases is related to a distinction that philosophers traditionally draw between occurrent beliefs and tacit beliefs. Occurrent beliefs are supposed to be those beliefs that are at some moment occurring. For example, my belief that there is a bear on the trail, at exactly the moment when I am filled with fear and anxiety. When I am no longer on the trail, i.e., when I no longer possess that fear and anxiety, then I no longer possess the belief. That is to say, the belief is no longer occurrent. But what about my belief about the structural integrity of my roof? This presents the more interesting sort of case, theoretically, because I seem to possess that belief despite the absence of any feelings affiliated with it, and because I seem to have possessed it for quite some time longer than I was even aware that I was 31. Cf. Martin Heidegger. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology [1975]. Translated by Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982) 49–76.

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possessing it. When did it begin? When will it end? It is for these sorts of cases philosophers have invoked the concept TACIT BELIEF. 32 This concept is supposed to categorize those beliefs we hold implicitly, i.e., hold despite the fact that they have not been made explicit to consciousness, perhaps neither ours nor anybody else’s. Recall, above, that we were able to identify that I possessed such a belief, even before I knew about it myself, simply by reading the patterns of my behavior: we attributed that belief to me (in this case a tacit belief) not on the basis of any experience I’d been having, but instead based solely on what I had (and more importantly had not) been doing. I myself subsequently endorsed that attribution, once it was made explicit. Supposedly, we each possess a great quantity of these so-called tacit beliefs. 33 A further bit of metaphysical analysis, advanced in order to explain this distinction between occurrent belief and tacit belief, has been to treat it as an instance of the difference between an occurrent property and a dispositional property. That is to say, the difference is supposed to be a species of the more general difference exemplified by the property of salt when it is dissolved in water, as opposed to salt’s property of being soluble in water. Or it is a species of the difference between the property of glass as it is smashing, as opposed to that glass’s property of being fragile. But that kind of analysis, i.e., the analysis of tacit belief as a dispositional property, is deeply flawed. To be a tacit belief is not merely to be a disposition to behavior, or so I will argue in conclusion below. Tacit believing, while perfectly attributable on the basis of behavior alone, is substantially more than mere behavioral disposition. That will be one of the lessons from the historical and psychological investigations of this book. One thing that we can learn from closer scrutiny of the history and psychology of believing is that we have heretofore unattended-to feelings of believing. Nevertheless, a principal challenge for any sentimentalist theory, historical or otherwise, will be explaining the relation

32. A good discussion, including some philosophical difficulties with the concept, is Lycan’s “Tacit Belief” [1986], reprinted in William G. Lycan. Judgement and Justification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 54–71. 33. But how many? One is tempted to say that we each possess, at any given moment, an infinite number of tacit beliefs. But that must be an exaggeration. Because even if we followed the traditional analysis and individuated them as dispositions to behaviors, I certainly do not possess an infinite number of behavioral dispositions. So we must instead say, rather embarrassingly, indefinitely many.

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of doxastic sentiments to tacit beliefs, i.e., particularly to those beliefs that do not at first appear to be associated with feelings. A nice expression of the Second Skeptical Challenge can be derived from an argument against feeling mounted by Gilbert Ryle in The Concept of Mind (1949). Take another example. A man is interested in Symbolic Logic. He regularly reads books and articles on the subject, discusses it, works out problems in it and neglects lectures on other subjects. According to the view which is here contested, he must therefore constantly experience impulses of a peculiar kind, namely feelings of interest in Symbolic Logic, and if his interest is very strong these feelings must be very acute and very frequent. He must therefore be able to tell us whether these feelings are sudden, like twinges, or lasting, like aches; whether they succeed one another several times a minute or only a few times an hour; and whether he feels them in the small of his back or in his forehead. But clearly his only reply to such specific questions would be that he catches himself experiencing no peculiar throbs or qualms while he is attending to his hobby. He may report a feeling of vexation, when his studies are interrupted, and the feeling of a load off his chest, when distractions are removed; but there are no peculiar feelings of interest in Symbolic Logic for him to report. While undisturbedly pursing his hobby, he feels no perturbations at all. 34

If we were to replace every instance of “is interested in” and “interest in” in the preceding paragraph with “believes to be interesting” and “belief in the interest of” we would here have a snappy argument against doxastic sentimentalism. 35 But in this passage Ryle was actually arguing specifically against the understanding of feelings as motives. We can connect several important dots for our own purposes. One is about the polysemy of the term ‘feeling’ and its vexed relation to the term ‘emotion.’ Unlike Ryle, I will not treat feelings as one type of emotion, 34. Gilbert Ryle. The Concept of Mind [1949] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 87. 35. This modification to Ryle’s argument might make it seem as if he were entirely hostile to doxastic sentimentalism, but that would give the wrong impression. Ryle could have been a sentimentalist too, of at least a more modest sort. Cf. Ryle’s discussion of the belief that “the ice is dangerously thin,” which he calls “a propensity not only to make certain theoretical moves but also to make certain executive and imaginative moves, as well as to have certain feelings.” Ryle, Concept of Mind, 135, emphasis added. I will discuss Ryle’s view further in the Conclusion.

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and emotions as inclinations. But like Ryle I will think of feelings as episodic, and like Ryle I think it is quite important to distinguish a narrower sense of ‘feeling,’ which refers only to bodily sensations, from those broader senses that also capture emotion. There is at least one broad sense of ‘feeling,’ and particularly the one that I favor throughout this book, in which emotions should be classified as feelings too. It is in this broad sense that dread and vindicated count as feelings, just as much as itchy and drunk in the narrower sense. In the pages that follow I will typically use the term ‘feeling’ in its broader sense, but I’ll distinguish it from emotion when necessary. I take it to be an interesting (and open) question whether any given doxastic sentiment (like certainty) is better analyzed as an emotional state or a sensory one. This brings us to a Third Skeptical Challenge: Maybe there are such things as beliefs, and maybe there are such things as “doxastic sentiments,” at least if we open the concept wide enough to cover affiliated feelings like fear or anxiety. But there is no distinctive relation, says a third kind of skeptic, between such feelings and such believings. An argument for this conclusion can also be derived, with minor modification, from the remarks made above by Ryle. Let us say that we were granted that someone believed “Formal Logic” was interesting (either tacitly or occurrently) but also that this person had a sentiment while believing that formal logic is interesting. Perhaps when she is believing that formal logic is interesting, she also has a warm fuzzy feeling, akin to love, but mixed with a little bit of frustration and curiosity. You know the one! Still, that sentiment would be no reliable guide to her belief, because it would have no real relationship to her believing, because her belief could have been present in the absence of that sentiment, or might end up lasting for significantly longer than any momentary twinge or ache. 36 This point followed, according to Ryle, because motives (like beliefs) were supposed to be dispositional properties rather than episodic states. But from Ryle’s analysis we can draw out an even more general point, i.e., the Third Skeptical Challenge for sentimentalism: there is an important difference in the temporal profile of believing and feeling. Even if there are such things as beliefs, and even if there are such things as beliefy feelings (here we might be allowed to think of the characteristi-

36. Cf. Russell, The Analysis of Mind, 251.

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cally doxastic feelings, e.g., certainty or doubt, or we might be invited to think merely of some affiliated feeling, like that warm fuzzy one mixed with the frustration and curiosity, but in either case still) their timing is way off. They cannot figure into reliable relations with one another because the one state begins considerably earlier and lasts for considerably longer than the other. Beliefs are temporal events too; they can be gained and lost. But they are not episodic in the way that feelings are episodic, i.e., they do not have the same quick temporal profile as feelings. 37 Feelings’ periods are shorter and their production is more mercurial. Obviously, I do not myself believe that sentimentalism is doomed from the start. I will not be in a position to respond to these skeptical challenges until the Conclusion, but even there my responses may not be fully satisfying. My strategy, in conclusion, will be to out-maneuver the First Skeptical Challenge. I have some confidence that once you have reached the end of the book you will find it less plausible that doxastic sentiments are part of a “folk theory,” if not due to their development in the history of philosophy, then perhaps because of their eminent naturalizability, and their affinity to treatments of feeling in contemporary psychology. But the ontology of believing is not really where my argument aims. Because the quarrel with the Eliminativists cannot be won in our lifetime, its victory postponed so far into the future, it’s really better not to fight it. My ultimate conclusion will instead be that there have been a variety (some prominently showcased below) of ways of conceiving doxastic sentiments. And even if the “beliefs” they are about are posits of “folk psychology,” they still end up related to something belief-like, in ways unique to their particular treatments. This means that my approach to the Third Skeptical Challenge, like the first, will also be concessive: even if there were not a single feeling possessed in an unchanging and univocal relation to each belief, despite the most famous modern philosophers (discussed below) had to say to the contrary, and even were BELIEVING a folk concept, the relations of feelings to a most basic kind of post-belief truth-taking (however 37. One contemporary expression of this same point: “beliefs, unlike actions, are not datable events. Rather, they are enduring states of people.” Christopher Hookway, “Epistemic Akrasia and Epistemic Virtue,” in Virtue Epistemology. Edited by Abrol Fairweather and Linda Zagzebski (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 184–85. Hookway is here contrasting beliefs with actions rather than feelings. But the point about temporal profile is much the same.

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conceived by the future psychologists and their significantly better educated “folk”) may instead be complex and dynamic. Ultimately, I will analyze tacit belief as a phenomenon of attention rather than behavioral disposition. So it is really only the Second Skeptical Challenge that I will tackle, eventually, head on. My final quarrel will be with reductive dispositionalists.

AFFECTIVE VS. COGNITIVE: BELIEF VS. JUDGMENT One legacy of modern philosophy is a crisp distinction of THINKING from FEELING, i.e., the divorce of our conceptualizations of thinking from our conceptualizations of feeling. A consequence of that divorce is some damage to feelings’ reputations. ‘Feeling’ and ‘sentiment’ are now sometimes used as pejoratives, synonyms for ‘un-thinking’ or ‘without evidence.’ And because feelings have that reputation, tending toward the tawdry, this book might superficially appear sympathetic to them. You might think that I am a sentimentalist in multiple senses. And it is true that in associating feelings with belief (which philosophers respect a bit more as a threat to, and the foundation for, knowledge) a part of what I am seeking is rehabilitation of their tarnished reputation. But it is worth mentioning that restoring a proper place in our esteem for the one also elevates the other. Our thinking about thinking, too, suffers from the divorce, if in less visible ways. Too long neglected, THINKING grows wild and tangled, filled with strange patterns and neglected possibilities. Feelings suffer disparagement, but THINKING suffers neglect. In the preface to his Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820) Hegel introduced his project as “the endeavor to apprehend and present the state as something inherently rational.” 38 He believed that the task of political philosophy was not imaging society as it ought to be, something in any case impossible (according to Hegel) except from a perspective within one’s own political state and its ideals, but instead showing how one’s own political state is rational as it actually exists. His claim is that the project of political theory is the reconciliation of one’s

38. G. W. F. Hegel. Outlines of the Philosophy of Right [1820]. Translated by T. M. Knox, edited by Stephen Houlgate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 14–15.

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own ideals with their embodiment in one’s own concrete social institutions. Our abstract conceptualizations of the affective (i.e., of “feelings”) and our concrete practices of knowing (i.e., our “thinking”), cry out for a similar sort of reconciliation. 39 We are first and foremost feeling creatures. But we are thinkers too. (To varying degrees.) Our thinking is in every case thoroughly grounded in our feelings. Thinking is always staged against the backdrop of feelings, out of which it grows. 40 One step forward in this project of reconciliation would be a better grasp of the complex relationship between BELIEVING and JUDGING. Some of the philosophers discussed below appealed to one of these concepts, and some to the other. A rough characterization is that the Empiricists treated basic truth-takings and their contents as beliefs, and the Rationalists treated basic truth-takings and their contents as judgments. 41 But since at least Descartes’ time these terms ‘belief’ and ‘judgment’ (or terms that they have translated) have also been used synonymously. They are often treated synonymously today. 42 So a smaller, yet crucial, step forward is simply to distinguish these two doxastic attitudes from one another. Even if they are always practically interwoven, and in fact because they are so deeply intertwined, we must distinguish them conceptually in order to begin deciphering their complex and dynamic relationship.

39. The present work does not directly concern the post-Kantian Idealist tradition, but it was inspired by a methodologically similar attempt to bridge its history with our contemporary understandings of affect: Paul Redding’s The Logic of Affect (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999). 40. This conviction is not unique to me, of course. It is a conviction of our current intellectual era, inherited from William James, among others. An influential exemplar has been Antonio R. Damasio’s Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994). Though my own diagnosis of Descartes’ error, in chapter 2, will of course be somewhat different. 41. Readers will find Hume and James preferring ‘belief,’ for example, while Descartes and Husserl had recourse to ‘judgment.’ This point can be made only roughly, of course, as each philosopher was quite capable of using his less-preferred term. A rare appearance of ‘belief’ in the Logical Investigations, for example, finds Husserl deploying the term in English, as part of his criticism of Hume. “Doxic positing,” on the other hand, takes center stage in Ideas I, §127 where Husserl warns us against conflating it with judging. (HUA III, 264; CW II, 302.) 42. An example, in a book to which this work is in all other respects indebted, is Wayne M. Martin. Theories of Judgment: Psychology, Logic, Phenomenology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 169. The germination of my own thinking about these issues was in a graduate seminar given by Professor Martin, “The Judgment Problem,” in the Fall of 1999. It has taken me only twenty years to grow this reply.

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In the pages that follow I will reserve the term ‘belief’ for the more fundamental of those two doxastic states. Beliefs are (or are always accompanied by) affect. In the informal lingo of this book, they are “doxastic states” that are (or are accompanied by) “feelings,” where ‘feeling’ is used in the broad sense that encompasses not only interoceptive and exteroceptive sensation, but also emotion. I will reserve my term ‘judgment’ for doxastic states that result from, or have undergone a process of refinement in, deliberation. Judgments, unlike beliefs, are cognitively mediated. Not all deliberative processes result in judgments, of course. Nevertheless, a judgment, whether theoretical or practical, is the telos of that deliberative activity. On my usage below, all judgments result from deliberation, i.e., some cognitive activity, and snap judgments merely result from truncated deliberation, whereas beliefs are commonly held without any deliberation whatsoever. We always find ourselves already believing. This means that so-called tacit believing, mentioned above, is not a special kind of belief, but the characteristic quality of all believing. A so-called “tacit belief,” is better understood simply as a belief, in the way that beliefs are. I will use the phrase ‘doxastic state’ to refer to the broader category of takings-to-be-true that encompasses both the believings and the judgings. This book does not aim to produce a worked-out theory of deliberation, or an account of whatever metacognitive feelings may accompany it. That is to say, this book is about beliefs rather than judgments. But I presume, if nothing else, that deliberation involves intelligent reflection upon and consideration of evidence. 43 I will additionally presume that deliberation itself is something requiring greater consciousness, memory, and attention than mere believing. This is because deliberation requires at least the ability to abstract and identify inferential relationships, i.e., the rudimentary cognitive skills necessary for identifying distinctively logical implications or entailments. As a consequence, genu43. Discussion of reflection in this context has of course had significant precedent in epistemology. See, for example, Ernest Sosa, “Knowledge and Intellectual Virtue” [1985], reprinted in Ernest Sosa. Knowledge in Perspective: Selected Essays in Epistemology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 225–44, especially 240; or see Sydney Shoemaker, “On Knowing One’s Own Mind,” Philosophical Perspectives 2 (1988): 183–209. For a criticism of this reflective approach see Hilary Kornblith, “What Reflective Endorsement Cannot Do,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 80, no. 1 (2010): 1–19. Though I will not defend the claim below, my opinion is that judging is more or less voluntary, because the deliberative activity upon which it is based is at least partially voluntary, whereas believing is mostly involuntary.

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ine deliberation (be it theoretical or practical) is something requiring, if not a distinctively human kind of sapience (there is no need for us to get speciesist here) then at least the rational powers and discursive capacities characteristic of language users, i.e., powers and capacities characteristic of creatures fairly high up the phylogenetic tree. Believing, on the other hand, is simpler. It is a doxastic state shared with a greater number of our mammalian brethren. While I believe there are distinct feelings associated with deliberative activity too, i.e., feelings associated with judging that are quite different from those affiliated with, or characteristic of, mere believing, those more sophisticated deliberative feelings of judgment are not the topic. The topic of this book is feelings of, and related to, the most basic kind of truth-taking. Like generations before ours, we are not fully enlightened, but we are in a process of enlightening; 44 we find ourselves at a moment when we are losing faith in an idol. A symptom of this loss, nowadays, is that we find it increasingly difficult to understand ourselves as purely rational beings. What that means, in the present context, is that any conceptualization of thinking that is too refined, i.e., too thoroughly abstracted from our affective nature, no longer strikes us as psychologically or biologically plausible. 45 It is no longer believable by us. The wind could know anger, the moon jealousy, the river generosity, the sea fury, and so forth. These were not metaphors. Sacrifices were made and auguries undertaken to placate or divine the changing passions of the gods. Despite its sterility, this animistic approach to nature has dominated our history, and it is only in the last two or three thousand years that we have restricted FP’s literal application to the domain of the higher animals. 46

Churchland believes that “folk psychology” (FP) is not only an empirical theory, and one with dim prospects for success, but also that it is a relic of that older animism that pre-dated our modern, scientific age.

44. Kant said ours is not an enlightened age, but an age of enlightenment. See Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment? [1784],” in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays. Translated by Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 44. 45. This point stretches all the way down into the neuroscience. For a paper critical of the strict division of affective from cognitive functional specializations of brain areas see Luiz Pessoa, “On the Relationship Between Emotion and Cognition,” Nature Reviews: Neuroscience 9 (2008): 148–58. 46. Churchland, “Propositional Attitudes,” 74.

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Just as CONSCIOUSNESS has been the final refuge for SOUL from the “ravages of science,” the philosophy of mind is now a final refuge for BELIEF. Ultimately, according to Churchland, BELIEF will be hounded out of our psychological literatures and our everyday talk, which at present remain their final redoubt. Whether we agree with Churchland’s prognostication about BELIEF’S prospects, we cannot help but feel the tremors in the tectonics of its conceptualization. Who is the idol here? Which of our gods is losing its power over us? I propose below that it is a somewhat lesser god, i.e., that the idol is not BELIEF itself, but that it is instead our conceptualization of believing as unfelt. I do not mean to suggest that the Owl of Minerva has finally taken flight. What I mean to say, following Hegel (but perhaps somewhat surprisingly, also Churchland) is that we must recognize as theoretical what has long seemed simply natural to us. We can only understand retrospectively theories to which we have ourselves been beholden. As my teacher admonished me, “only now do you realize that you have been in the grip of a theory!” This is part of the reason why our conceptual history is important. Rationality, if it is to be real in our own times, must be uncovered within ourselves, i.e., rediscovered in our own everyday practices of thinking. What that means, applied to this particular case, is that our certainties and doubts, which for so long have concealed their rootedness in our feelings, must be dug up there. What it does not mean is that every feeling should be indulged, doxastic sentiments like certainty least of all. I hope that what I have said above, by way of introduction, will not be misconstrued as a callow call to wallow in sentiments. What I am talking about instead is the way we have been, and ought to be, thinking about them. And what I hope to have suggested is that the concept FEELING, fixed squarely in the domain of the subjective, or worse, a “purely subjective” domain of socalled “personal experience,” in thrall to the idea that whenever we objectively cognize we must do so only through the suppression or denial of feeling, is outmoded, and that it has long been outmoded, and that it is now finally beginning to seem downright absurd. As I will show below, it is out of step not only with our contemporary psychology, but it must finally come unglued from our best understandings of the traditions of epistemology. It has become so old now that it can no longer even be found in our past.

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THE THESIS The thesis of this book is that doxastic sentimentalism plays a central role in the history of modern epistemology. The demonstration of the significance of such sentiments’ role, i.e., the role beliefy feelings have had across disparate traditions in epistemology, is interesting if only because it is so little appreciated. Do a quick survey of philosophers’ opinions about whether doxastic sentiments are prevalent, and nine of ten will say, “what?” Look for the entry on “Doxastic Sentimentalism” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and discover that the topic is not deemed important enough to merit one. Check now-standard anthologies of epistemology and notice that they fail to mention feelings of believing, every one. 47 But this is quite enough caviling about feelings’ reputation: I will focus below on the positive cases. To emphasize the role doxastic sentiment played for Early Modern Empiricism is easiest: David Hume’s force and vivacity is the paradigm case. My task in chapter 1 will be defending Hume’s feeling from arguments marshalled against it, both by other early modern Empiricists and by representatives in our present day. The case that Descartes treated clarity as a feeling is prosecuted, somewhat less easily, in chapter 2, but once understood makes for a profound reorientation in the meaning of the Clarity and Distinctness Principle and in Descartes’ infamous Problem of the Circle. An interlude assessing the psychology of overconfidence in chapter 3 not only keeps me methodologically honest (in the ways discussed above), and not only hardens suspicions that there will ever be empirical support for something like a Clarity and Distinctness Principle (as if they needed hardening), it also reveals the current state of the art so far as beliefy feelings are concerned. The most difficult moment for this book is chapter 4, which takes up the case of Husserlian phenomenology and argues that it too is indebted to a sentiment. Though Husserl is best remembered for having treated Evidenz epistemically, i.e., as the givenness of intentional objects, I will push as far as I am able the explanation of that givenness as a feeling characteristic of believing. After the phenomenology comes the pragmatism of William James in chapter 5, and James’ celebrated argument 47. If this were a footnote listing all the works of epistemology that neglect the construal of belief as feeling it would instead have been very long and tedious, as it would have cited every book and paper published since Hume.

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against Evidentialism. James’ live hypothesis too, I will argue, depended upon a feeling characteristic of believing, what James called “the sentiment of rationality.” In each case I will argue that a great philosopher conceptualized a feeling not merely affiliated with believing (as defined above) but characteristic of believing. If that case can be made for each, coming as they do from opposite corners of our tradition, influential as they have been for subsequent philosophizing about knowledge, then I will consider my thesis sufficiently shown.

1 FEELING DISBELIEF Hume’s Doxastic Sentimentalism

HUME’S LEAST POPULAR THESIS

I will begin with a modest defense of the least popular part of David Hume’s (1711–1776) theory of belief. Hume, of course, is one of the most celebrated philosophers of all time. But the central doctrine of his doxastic theory, i.e., his claim that belief is (or is at least characterized by) feeling, not so much. As I suggested above, belief nowadays is thought to be an unconscious mental state, often treated as a disposition. Philosophers abandoned conceptualizations of belief as feeling, instead preferring to treat them as bloodless “propositional attitudes,” 1 and psychologists study them almost exclusively through their attendant behaviors. But according to Hume, believing was characterized by both a felt quality and quantity. The quantity was meant to be scalar: Hume argued that believing comes in greater and lesser degree. And since Hume’s time we have understood that scalar nature of belief in a variety of different ways: either as varying degrees of (objective) warrant for the belief’s content, or as a credence, i.e., a (subjective) assessment of the probability of that content, or as a measure of what a believer would be willing to stake (for example, varying quantities of money) on its 1. An example, and a vantage from which we may view the more standard interpretation of Hume’s doxastic legacy, is D. M. Armstrong’s Belief, Truth and Knowledge (London: Cambridge University Press, 1973). See particularly his discussion of “Hume’s Problem,” 70–76. 33

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basis. We have thereby adopted a part, but only one part, of Hume’s original theory: we still think of believing as involving motive power, and perhaps as the basis for all epistemology, and we still think of that motive or warrant as quantized. But we no longer think of believing as consciously experienced. 2 Why did we shift away from the felt aspect of Hume’s theory? What evidence was there to embrace only some parts of the Humean account of belief? A nagging suspicion might be that this paradigm shift, however correct, was accomplished through some unreasoned historical mechanism. Could we be the victims of some sort of doxastic fad? The real question I would like to ask presently is whether all of our babies have been accounted for, now that we have changed out the bathwater. Hume thought that the force and vivacity of believing was both a motive power and feeling, i.e., a quantity but also a felt quality. 3 And Hume recognized that “this conclusion [that belief is a feeling] seems a little surprising; but we are led into it by a chain of propositions, which admit of no doubt” (T Abstract 21; SBN 653). 4 Strong words! In the spirit of historico-philosophico inquiry, let’s ask: what was Hume’s chain of propositions? And why have we ourselves come to doubt it? In the next section I will review the fundamental concepts of Hume’s doxastic theory, emphasizing his analogy between believing and the kind of mental representation he called an “impression.” Then I’ll reconstruct Hume’s main argument for doxastic sentimentalism and defend a strong version of it from one of its most influential and explicit criticisms, a criticism first articulated by another great Scottish empiricist, Thomas Reid (1710–1796). Reid’s criticism is not merely of historical curiosity. As we shall see below, it is still being voiced by Hume’s

2. The full history of this transformation is interesting, and still largely untold, but also beyond my reach here. Suffice it to say: behaviorism. While we no longer think of language as “speech behaviors,” i.e., noises made in reflex to environmental stimuli, the conceptualization of belief as dispositional is still very much its legacy. 3. “[I]t is almost true to say that beliefs are sensed, or something very close to that.” David Owen, Hume’s Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 167. 4. The references here and following are to A Treatise of Human Nature [1739/1740]. Edited by David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, abbreviated “T” and cited by book, part, section, and paragraph numbers. I will also include the page numbers from the traditional Selby-Bigge edition, revised by Nidditch, and abbreviated “SBN.”

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critics today, philosophers like Barry Stroud and Henry Allison. 5 I will argue that Reid’s criticism forces a Humean sentimentalist to give up Hume’s claim that all beliefs are feelings of existences, but nevertheless I’ll insist that it does not establish that beliefs cannot be (characterized by) feelings. Scoring the historical tête-à-tête helps secure an important distinction that Hume himself did not make perfectly clear, viz. the difference between the felt intensity of belief and the degree to which it is either warranted or behaviorally efficacious. I will conclude by reporting on the secondary literature’s discovery of a subtle, yet significant, shift in Hume’s view. The rehabilitation of a more modest form of sentimentalism will require some significant concessions: (1) doxastic sentimentalists must incorporate a more robust doctrine of intentionality into their account of belief, and (2) doxastic sentimentalists must abandon one of Hume’s signature doctrines about the relationship of believing to existence, but I will be at pains to show in conclusion that does not mean we must reject all forms of sentimentalism.

CONCEPTION, THIS TIME WITH FEELING While it is not what Hume is principally remembered for, doxastic sentimentalism is at the core of his philosophy, including his more famous critiques of causation and knowledge. Everyone remembers “constant conjunctions” and “matters of fact;” far fewer remember that ideas so conjoined and impressive were meant to be full-fledged beliefs. But belief was one of only two topics occupying Hume’s attention as he worried over adjustments to arguments at the end of his Treatise, adjustments now recorded in that work’s Appendix. And in the anonymously published Abstract it was the account of belief that was billed (by Hume himself), not only as original, but as broaching “a new question, unthought of by philosophers,” viz. the question, “What then is this belief? And how does it differ from the simple conception of any 5. Cf. Allison regarding the degree of “philosophical interest” we might have in this subject matter: “Although the most familiar and oft-criticized feature of Hume’s answer to this question lies in his sentimentalist conception of belief, according to which what differentiates belief from simple conception are their respective degrees of FLV, it is not the feature of Hume’s account that is of the greatest philosophical interest. On the contrary, I regard Hume’s doxic sentimentalism as the least interesting (because least plausible) aspect of his account.” Henry E. Allison, Custom and Reason in Hume: A Kantian Reading of the First Book of the Treatise (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008), 161.

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thing?” (T Abstract 17; SBN 652). 6 Hume took this belief question (and his answer to it) to have been one of the Treatise’s signature accomplishments. So understanding sentimentalism is important for understanding Hume’s aims generally, not only because of its neglected significance and our subsequent rejection of it, but because of its centrality for Hume’s theoretical project, as conceived and professed by Hume himself. To come to terms with Hume’s arguments for sentimentalism we must situate it as a part of his broader theory of belief. That theory can be summarized in approximately a half-dozen claims, but no fewer: (i) belief is a manner of conception, (ii) characterized by forceful and vivacious feeling. That feeling is (iii) either identical or analogous to the feeling of impressions, but also memory, and is (iv) capable of being transferred to other “weaker” ideas via association. It (v) arises in us naturally, as (vi) an observation of more or less constant conjunctions producing in us the idea of causation through custom. It is always (vii) belief in an existence. In this chapter my main concern will be with disambiguating and defending (ii), and to do that I will eventually need to abandon (vii), but I will be tangentially concerned with each of Hume’s other claims about belief as well, especially (i) and (iii). I focus considerably less on explaining (v) and (vi) below, but only because those doctrines have already been most forcefully inscribed in our own memories and imaginations by the extant literature on Hume. It is well known, if not Hume’s enduring legacy, that he treated belief as the feeling of force and vivacity. 7 It has, however, been notoriously difficult to pin that feeling down, other than to say that it is a kind of felt “oomph” that was meant to accompany the impressions and some of the ideas, and thereby motivate actions. 8 Despite Hume’s own claim that “‘tis impossible by words to describe this feeling, which everyone

6. For discussion of the novelty Hume saw in his account vis-à-vis traditional logic, see T 1.3.7.5 (SBN 96) and his accompanying note #20. 7. Hume uses ‘force’ and ‘vivacity’ either as different descriptors of the same feeling, or perhaps as references to two feelings always fused together in a compound. A very basic kind of evidence for this are the many passages wherein he employs “force and vivacity” as grammatically singular rather than plural. See, for example, T Abstract 22; SBN 654, already quoted above. I follow Hume’s practice in treating them together as one. 8. This was Hume’s position in the earlier-written portions of the Treatise. It was not, however, his position as he completed the Treatise or wrote the first Enquiry. See the discussion of Owen, below, which I rely upon heavily.

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must be conscious of in his own breast,” 9 the literature on Hume is littered with attempts to further describe the feeling in words. Those attempts can, I think, be divided into three main groups: a traditional interpretation that read force and vivacity as a phenomenal quality, 10 a revisionist interpretation that now reads force and vivacity exclusively as a description of belief’s motive power, 11 without any phenomenal feel, and some more recent interpreters who now read force and vivacity as Hume’s account of both the motive force and the feeling of belief. 12 Readers may now surmise (correctly) that my allegiance cannot be with the second of these three groups of scholars. I hereby declare myself with the third. However, my approach below will not be to adjudicate amongst these claimants directly; the brunt of my analysis will simply remove an obstacle for the first and third interpretations. I do not attempt to refute the second interpretation because, as we shall see by

9. “He [i.e., Hume himself] calls it sometimes a stronger conception, sometimes a more lively, a more vivid, a firmer, or a more intense conception” (T Abstract 22; SBN 654). 10. Within this group is, of course, wide variety. Flew criticizes it on the basis of its “logically private belief modification or belief feeling.” Antony Flew, Hume’s Philosophy of Belief: A Study of His First Inquiry (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), 101. Bennett is skeptical of its sensory analogues in “auditory intensity” or “washed-out appearance.” Jonathan Bennett, Locke, Berkeley, Hume: Central Themes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 40. Stroud emphasizes that it measures the degree to which ideas “strike the mind,” detectable by introspection alone. Barry Stroud, Hume (London & New York: Routledge, 1977), 19–33. Bricke calls it a “feeling of conviction.” See John Bricke, Hume’s Philosophy of Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 122. Waxman interprets it as the feeling of “verisimilitude.” See Wayne Waxman, Hume’s Theory of Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 33–46. Francis Dauer argues that it is the feeling that “makes us assent to them, act on them, use them in our reasoning, and makes them the basis of our fears, desires, and so on.” See Francis W. Dauer, “Force and Vivacity in the Treatise and the Enquiry,” Hume Studies 25, No. 1/2 (1999): 89. Catherine Kemp argues that it is the felt quality or intensity of acts as opposed to their contents. See Catherine Kemp, “Two Meanings of the Term ‘Idea’: Acts and Contents in Hume’s ‘Treatise,’” Journal of the History of Ideas 61, No. 4 (2000): 675–90. 11. The most significant of these is Loeb, who argues not that vivacity lacks phenomenal quality, but that Hume was simultaneously developing a dispositional account of belief (as motive alone), and that this was particularly associated with the cluster of terms he used as synonyms for ‘force.’ See Louis E. Loeb, Stability and Justification in Hume’s Treatise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), especially 65–74. For a discussion of Loeb see Jennifer Smalligan Marusic, “Does Hume Hold a Dispositional Account of Belief?” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 40, no. 2 (2010): 155–84. Another is Stephen Everson, “The Difference Between Feeling and Thinking,” Mind 97, no. 387 (1988): 401–13. An earlier is Trudy Govier, “Variations on Force and Vivacity in Hume,” The Philosophical Quarterly 22, no. 86 (1972): 44–52. 12. See, for examples, Kaveh Kamooneh, “Hume’s Beliefs,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 11, no. 1 (2003): 41–56, and Marusic, “Does Hume Hold a Dispositional Account of Belief?” 155–84.

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and by, force and vivacity was the alpha but not the omega of Hume’s sentimentalism. Let’s begin with his main argument for the sentimentalist thesis. Hume’s main argument for (ii) was that the content of a belief cannot account for the difference between a belief and a mere conception with the same content. For example, a belief that God exists must lie in something other than its content, because the non-believer (i.e., the atheist or agnostic) could also merely conceive that content, i.e., “God exists,” without thereby believing it. Therefore, the difference between belief and mere conception (what Hume generically called “perceptions”), must be a greater amount of force and vivacity characterizing the former perception, in the case of the believer. This was not the only argument for sentimentalism; indeed, a variety of arguments for the basic thesis can be found scattered throughout the Treatise. 13 But this is the well-known argument serving as centerpiece of sec. 7: “Of the nature of the idea or belief:” Thus when we affirm, that God is existent, we simply form the idea of such a being, as he is represented to us; nor is the existence, which we attribute to him, conceiv’d by a particular idea, which we join to the idea of his other qualities, and can again separate and distinguish from them. But I go farther; and not content with asserting, that the conception of the existence of any object is no addition to the simple conception of it, I likewise maintain, that the belief of the existence joins no new ideas to those, which compose the idea of the object. When I think of God, when I think of him as existent, and when I believe him to be existent, my idea of him neither encreases nor diminishes. But as ‘tis certain there is a great difference betwixt the simple conception of the existence of an object, and the belief of it, and as this difference lies not in the parts or composition of the idea, which we conceive; it follows, that it must lie in the manner, in which we conceive it. (T 1.3.7.2; SBN 94)

This passage has been discussed frequently, but commentators have thus far been lax, if not remiss, in precisely identifying the claim Hume meant to be establishing. However apropos the theological example for 13. See, for examples, the argument from memory (T 1.3.5.3; SBN 85), or the argument from lying (T 1.3.5.6; SBN 86), or the argument from the liberty of the imagination, (T 1.3.7.7; SBN 628–29), or the argument from the difference between histories and romance novels (T 1.3.7.8; SBN 97), etc.

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Hume’s famous broadside against rationalist epistemology, and setting aside now his (also deservedly famous) scoop of Kant’s dictum, “being is not a real predicate,” we ought to situate this argument in its original context: What’s important here was meant to be Hume’s conclusion, i.e., that belief lies “in the manner, in which we conceive.” That conclusion, once secured, was then meant to serve as a key premise for a more controversial and original argument appearing on the following page. On my reading, Hume did not merely presuppose that belief is force and vivacity. He argued for that claim, first by establishing that belief was a manner of conception, and then by using that appeal to a “manner of conception” in further argument. To reach Hume’s more controversial conclusion, we must then keep reading, past (T 1.3.7.2; SBN 94) and to the following: All the perceptions of the mind are of two kinds, viz. impressions and ideas, which differ from each other only in their different degrees of force and vivacity. Our ideas are copy’d from our impressions, and represent them in all their parts. When you wou’d any way vary the idea of a particular object, you can only encrease or diminish its force and vivacity. If you make any other change on it, it represents a different object or impression. The case is the same as in colours. A particular shade of any colour may acquire a new degree of liveliness or brightness without any other variation. But when you produce any other variation, ‘tis no longer the same shade or colour. So that as belief does nothing but vary the manner, in which we conceive any object, it can only bestow on our ideas an additional force and vivacity. (T 1.3.7.5; SBN 96)

And now readers have arrived, not only at doxastic sentimentalism, but also at its situation in Hume’s broader philosophical psychology. The claim that (1) the difference between belief and mere conception lies in the “manner” of conception rather than its content remains relatively unproblematic, 14 (until, of course, one further specifies that “manner.”) Hume’s subsequent assertion, that the only possible difference (other than content) between belief and mere conception is force and vivacity, is his stronger and more dubious claim. Invoking the basic elements of 14. Pace Bennett, who claims that Hume hereby “is assuming that someone’s having a certain belief is just a fact about what ideas he has and how he has them. This assumption is unwarranted, and the resultant analysis of belief is beyond redemption.” Bennett, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, 294.

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his psychological theory, introduced in 1.1.1.1 of the Treatise, Hume then claimed that (2) the mind is composed only of impressions and ideas, and that (3) their only differentiation (supposing they share content) is force and vivacity. 15 And that is why Hume was then able to infer that (4) the only difference in manner of conception is force and vivacity, and so again conclude that (5) belief itself is force and vivacity. It might be illuminating to dwell for a moment on the basic logic of Hume’s train of thought here. (1) Belief is a manner of conception. (from the first quotation, above) (2) The only mental contents are impressions and ideas. (premise, from Treatise 1.1.1.1) (3) The only difference between impressions and ideas is greater force and vivacity. (premise, from Treatise 1.1.1.1) (4) The only difference in manner of conception is greater force and vivacity. (from 2 and 3) (5) Belief is greater force and vivacity. (from 1 and 4)

Let’s examine the inference from (2) and (3) to (4). In our own time it is well remembered that Hume was committed, at least in the Treatise, to the claim that the very thing characterizing the difference between a belief and a mere conception is that very same thing characterizing the difference between the impressions and the ideas. 16 As beliefs are to conceptions, impressions are to ideas. This oft-discussed “analogy” of the Treatise was meant by Hume to be an analogy in the strictest sense: the relation between the former pair was claimed by him to be exactly the same as the relationship between the latter pair, even though their relata are of quite different types. 17 But Hume’s claim here was not 15. It might be worthwhile to point out that Hume was not strictly consistent on this point. If it is the case that an idea is caused by an impression (Hume’s famous “Copy Principle,” referred to in the second sentence of this passage) then it cannot be the case that such an idea’s lesser force and vivacity is the only difference between it and its cause. Because there is also their etiology. I think that what Hume must have meant, here and frequently, was that force and vivacity is the only perceived difference, i.e., the only difference in manner of conception, between ideas and impressions sharing the same content. But those two distinct claims should not be confused for one another. I have cleaned up Hume’s ambiguity on this point by sharply distinguishing (3) from (4). An advantage of the present analysis is insight into the fact that Hume inferred (4) from (3). 16. The proviso “at least in the Treatise” is a very important qualification here. See the discussion of Hume’s shift in sentiment, below. 17. For more detailed discussion of the significance of the analogy for Hume’s theory, see Owen, Hume’s Reason, 164-72.

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merely that the two relations are type-identical. He thought that they were so because he thought the force and vivacity associated with both the idea and its initial impression is token-identical. The force and vivacity of the impression was meant to somehow rub off onto the idea copied from it, and thereby elevate the idea to the status of belief. The theory was that a believed idea is one that retains a measure of that very same force and vivacity of the impression from which it was copied.

REID’S CRITICISM AND STROUD’S ECHO Despite the old saw about the Treatise falling “dead-born from the press,” Hume’s philosophy in fact received a great deal of critical attention, right from the start. 18 Among its first important critics were other philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment. While none has captured our imagination (not to mention belief!) so much as Hume, some were exceptionally astute and well-received. 19 Thomas Reid’s is a case in point. Reid’s more general argument against Hume, prosecuted over at least a hundred pages, was based upon his rejection of the entire “theory of ideas” that came to dominate Early Modern Philosophy. Working through all of that, even just canvassing the arguments identifiably devoted to Hume, is beyond my power. Instead I will simply draw out a snippet, particularly because this snippet was among the first, most squarely and forcefully addressed, arguments against Humean sentimentalism. But what is this belief or knowledge which accompanies sensation and memory? Every man knows what it is, but no man can define it. Does any man pretend to define sensation, or to define consciousness? It is happy, indeed, that no man does. And if no philosopher had endeavoured to define and explain belief, some paradoxes in philosophy, more incredible than ever were brought forth by the most abject superstition or the most frantic enthusiasm, had never 18. See the multi-volume Early Responses to Hume, ed. James Fieser (Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum, 2005). For an overview of the early responses see the “Editor’s Introduction to Volumes 3 and 4,” in Early Responses to Hume 3: xxvii–xxxvi. See also Richard H. Popkin, “The Early Critics of Hume,” in The High Road to Pyrrhonism, ed. Richard A. Watson and James E. Force (San Diego: Austin Hill Press, Inc., 1980): 197–212. 19. For a brief account of the reception of Reid’s criticisms particularly, see Fieser, Early Responses to Hume, 315–16.

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seen the light. Of this kind surely is that modern discovery of the ideal philosophy, that sensation, memory, belief and imagination, when they have the same object, are only different degrees of strength and vivacity in the idea.

Though Hume is not explicitly named in the passage, Reid obviously had no one but Hume in mind; no other proponent of the “ideal philosophy” was committed to Hume’s characteristic doctrine that belief and imagination are “only different degrees of strength and vivacity in the idea.” Against this doctrine, Reid mustered the following argument: Suppose the idea to be that of a future state after death: one man believes it firmly—this means no more than that he hath a strong and lively idea of it; another neither believes nor disbelieves—that is, he has a weak and faint idea. Suppose, now, a third person believes firmly that there is no such thing, I am at a loss to know whether his idea be faint or lively: if it is faint, then there may be a firm belief where the idea is faint; if the idea is lively, then the belief of a future state and the belief of no future state must be one and the same. The same arguments that are used to prove that belief implies only a stronger idea of the object than simple apprehension, might as well be used to prove that love implies only a stronger idea of the object than indifference. And then what shall we say of hatred, which must upon this hypothesis be a degree of love, or a degree of indifference? If it should be said, that in love there is something more than an idea—to wit, an affection of the mind—may it not be said with equal reason, that in belief there is something more than an idea—to wit, an assent or persuasion of the mind? 20

Here we should pause for a moment of reconstruction. There are at least two different arguments woven together in this passage. One identifiable strand is simply an argument by analogy. Toward the end of the passage Reid argues that, if it were the case that belief is only a greater degree of force and vivacity, then that would be equivalent to claiming that love is only a greater degree of sentiment about the beloved object. And that cannot be the case. Obviously, love is not just indifference to an object plus some greater degree of feeling; therefore belief, likewise, 20. Thomas Reid, “Inquiry into the Human Mind, Chap. II, Sec. V” [1764], in The Works of Thomas Reid, D. D.: Now Fully Collected, with Selections from his Unpublished Letters, Vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Maclachlan and Stewart, 1872), 107.

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is not merely a greater degree of force and vivacity in the perception of an idea. But why would it be so implausible to think of the difference between indifference and love as solely a greater feeling? For the analogical portion of this argument to work, it must be augmented with the pairing of love and hatred, i.e., it must have the comparison of indifference to either, and to both. Reid’s response to Hume, hereby, appeals to our richer phenomenological life, one that includes a wider range (not to mention kinds) of feeling than the one dimension of feeling that Hume seemed to propose at the beginning of the Treatise. This phenomenology, I suggest, lies at the core of Reid’s rejection of Humean sentimentalism. The theory that love is only a greater degree of feeling than indifference seems implausible, not merely when love and indifference are taken into consideration, but especially when either or both are contrasted with love’s opposite or close cousins. Reid’s alternative is to propose that beliefs (along with what he called “conceptions”) are necessary for perception. 21 Whatever Reid’s own positive views about belief, let us set them aside here and instead further appraise his argument against Hume. Consider its first example: one person believes strongly in an afterlife, a second is indifferent to that (same) idea of an afterlife, and a third believes strongly that no such afterlife awaits. We might call these three people “believer,” “agnostic,” and “disbeliever,” respectively. Hume’s theory seems singularly ill-equipped to deal with the trio, all of whom might plausibly be construed as entertaining an idea of the afterlife with exactly the same content. Which perceives the idea with the greater force and vivacity? Is it the believer and the disbeliever, as opposed to the agnostic? In that case it could no longer be mere force and vivacity that distinguished the belief of the believer and the belief of the disbeliever from one another. Or is it instead the believer from the agnostic and the disbeliever? In that case it could no longer be mere force and vivacity that distinguished the agnostic and the disbeliever from one another. Hume’s theory seems in distress when confronted with the following problem: once content is fixed, we need at least two distinc21. He appeals to this theory in both An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense and in the Essay on the Intellectual Powers of Man. For discussion see Adam Pelser, “Belief in Reid’s Theory of Perception,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 27, no. 4 (2010): 359–58.

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tions to separate at least three doxastic states, and the intensity of one feeling alone seems not up to the task. And lest we think this argument has been lost in the mists of history, only dusted off by me here, compare it with the words of a much more recent critic of Hume, who appears to have taken his page straight from Reid, scandalously without attribution: If assent or belief is just a matter of having a lively idea before the mind, what is dissent or denial? It would seem to be either a matter of having that idea before the mind in some different ‘manner’, or else assenting to or believing the opposite of the original idea. But in the case at least of existential beliefs it makes no sense to Hume to talk of ‘the opposite of the original idea.’ If to think of God is to think of God as existing, or as He would be if He existed, then it is not possible to have the idea of God’s not existing. And therefore it is not possible to have the belief that God does not exist by having ‘in the assenting or believing manner’ the idea of God’s non-existence. Of course, it might be said that I believe that God does exist by having ‘in the assenting manner’ the idea, not just of God, but of God’s existence; and therefore I believe that God does not exist by having ‘in the assenting manner’ the idea, not just of God, but of God’s nonexistence. But that could be true only if we had a separate idea of existence (and perhaps of non-existence as well) to add to our idea of God; and that is what Hume explicitly denies. So we must look to the other alternative––to denial or dissent as another ‘manner of conceiving’. On this view we have only the one idea, that of God, or of God as existing, and we can conceive it either by assenting and thereby believing that God exists, or by denying and thereby believing that God does not exist. And both of those ‘attitudes’ are to be distinguished from simple conception, in which one need not have an opinion one way or the other. But if denial is to be a completely different ‘manner of conceiving’ from both belief and mere conception, and if all difference among ‘manners of conceiving’ are just differences in degrees of force and vivacity, then denial will be just a matter of having an idea before the mind with yet a third degree of force and vivacity. Will it be stronger, or weaker, than belief? And how will it differ from a belief held with less than the highest degree of conviction? Will there be no difference between an atheist and a man who fairly strongly believes that God exists?

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It is clear that, once we think not just about belief and conception, but about all the rest of the great variety of ‘attitudes’ we can take with respect to a single idea, there is no plausibility at all in saying that they differ only in their degrees of force and vivacity. 22

While Barry Stroud does not cite Reid in the lengthy passage I’ve just quoted, his argument is much the same. It reaches exactly the same conclusion via much the same logic. It denies that the difference between belief and mere conception is the feeling of force and vivacity. It poses a dilemma for such a theory. It appeals to the difference between affirmative and negative beliefs to make that case, particularly invoking comparison with “disbelief” (Reid) or “dissent or denial” (Stroud). And it concludes that belief must include a difference in “manner of conception” that goes beyond mere force and vivacity, i.e., invokes a distinct intentional attitude of “assent.” The post-Humean account of belief, first articulated by Reid but now closely echoed by Stroud, is to treat belief as “taking something to be true.” That theoretical innovation was not merely in the treatment of content as propositional, i.e., the celebrated advancement beyond mental representations as mere “ideas,” it was also in the understanding of our comportment toward such content as assent. Assent, in this newer theory, is supposed to be the most basic kind of affirmation, a sort of doxastic “yes-saying” to a particular content. And dissent, its contrary, is supposed to be the most basic kind of denial, a doxastic “nay-saying.” Since Hume, we have presumed that these are things that we all can do (or that our brains do for us) all the time, in “attitude” toward propositions, but without any feelings attached. To sum up: the Humean account of belief is supposedly refuted by its inability to account for negative beliefs, particularly by its inability to account for the forceful and vivacious denial of an idea, i.e., the forceful and vivacious taking of something to be false. Some have been tempted to draw an even stronger conclusion, viz. that Hume’s inability to deal with negative beliefs is sufficient to show that any type of doxastic sentimentalism is refuted. I should hasten to point out that neither Reid nor Stroud drew this stronger conclusion, at least not in the passages I quoted above. Both of them were particularly focused on Hume’s strongest thesis, which treats the feeling of belief as nothing but force 22. Barry Stroud. Hume (London and New York: Routledge, 1977), 75–76.

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and vivacity. (More on this below.) They then conclude only that belief is not merely that feeling of force and vivacity. And their argument at first blush seems quite compelling. It has seemed so compelling, in fact, to otherwise sympathetic readers of Hume, that it is still being trotted out to this very day. What could a Humean hope to say back?

A HUMEAN SENTIMENTAL DEFENSE At the very least a Humean must acknowledge that the content of belief (what Hume called an “idea”) is capable of negation. One of the things Reid and Stroud rely upon is the simple claim that disbelief of P is not equivalent to not believing P. Disbelief of P is equivalent to believing not-P. Similarly: believing P is not equivalent to not disbelieving P. Believing P is equivalent to disbelieving not-P. And clearly their argument turns on the phenomenological possibility of intense disbeliefs, ones that are distinct from either moderate believing or withholding assent. So the very first thing that a Humean must do in response would be to concede that, phenomenologically speaking, negative beliefs can be felt to be as “lively” or “vivacious” as their affirmative counterparts, or that they can have just as much force in motivating our actions. 23 The defender of Hume must begin by not allowing herself to be cornered in a position whereby she is then forced to deny that the beliefs of atheists are as deeply felt or motivating as the beliefs of theists. That would be giving away the store. The next thing Hume’s proxy would need to do is to point out that, at the very least, whatever Hume’s theory of deliberation, Hume was of the sensible opinion that ideas are sometimes judged to be true after careful consideration of their contraries. ‘Tis confest, that in all cases, wherein we dissent from any person, we conceive both sides of the question; but as we can believe only one, it evidently follows, that the belief must make some difference betwixt that conception to which we assent and that from which we dissent. (T 1.3.7.4; SBN 95)

23. Notice here that my suggestion for this Humean response would not require resolving the debate between sentimental and motivational interpretations of force and vivacity.

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I take passages like this one, wherein we “conceive both sides of the question,” as sufficient evidence that Hume himself acknowledged such a thing as “dissent.” (Notice that he uses that exact term.) In coming to one’s judgment it is advisable to consider the beliefs of others who hold to exactly the opposite content. One person believes P, another believes “it is not the case that P.” More than that, both contents can be conceived by the very same person, even if only one of them will ultimately be believed. What else could Hume have meant by “conceive both sides of the question?” Even if we are impressed by the power of the Reid/ Stroud argument, it is simply incorrect to say that Hume had no room for recognizing “dissent.” The real problem, in passages like the one quoted above, is that Hume seems to be conflating not believing with disbelieving. 24 Indeed, one can find this ambiguity even in older uses of terms like ‘incredulity’ and ‘skepticism.’ Sometimes, when a person was said to be “incredulous” or “skeptic” what was meant was that she was a disbeliever. But in other cases what was meant is that she was a mere (or principled) agnostic. Some of our wise forebears might have missed this difference, i.e., the difference between disbelief (or dissent) and lack of belief (or withholding assent), but we ought to carefully observe it ourselves. It is possible, I concede, that even Hume was a victim of this conflation. And it is definitely unfortunate for his defenders that Hume wrote as if belief makes the difference “betwixt that conception to which we assent, and that from which we dissent.” That is unfortunate because, technically, that is not really what he must have meant. Dissent also involves belief, after all. Dissenters simply believe the opposite of what somebody else believes. So it is not really belief that distinguishes assent from dissent, it is rather the content of what is being believed, viz. in Hume’s language, the “idea.” So a better formulation for Hume would be the one that he made in the Abstract (which he appears to have treated as equivalent, though it most certainly is not), i.e., the one that goes like this: “The belief, therefore, makes some difference betwixt the conception to which we assent, and that to which we do not assent” (T Abstract 18; SBN 652, my italics). I suggest that this is what Hume 24. Note, for example, the subtle shift in topic in T 1.3.7.3 (SBN 95). Hume begins the paragraph by asking: “I therefore ask, wherein consists the difference betwixt believing and disbelieving any proposition?” But four sentences later he is instead asking, “I still ask, Wherein consists the difference betwixt incredulity and belief?” and he seems to be treating that as if it were the same question.

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really meant (i.e., what we ought to interpret him as saying, if we are to interpret him “charitably”) despite the fact that he did not everywhere keep quite clearly distinguished this “dissent” from “not assent[ing.]” So the defender of Hume must be careful to straighten all of this out. There is a genuine problem in the way that Hume expressed himself, to be sure. But once that kink is ironed, I think we are well on our way to dodging Reid’s criticism. Here’s how the rest of the dodge might go: if, on Hume’s account, “assent” is merely the having of a forceful and vivacious idea, then “dissent” is just the having of a forceful and vivacious negation of that idea. Hume could then easily have said (though he perhaps did not) that “withholding assent” is simply mere conception, and he should have said that disbelief in P (however strong or weak) is merely belief in non-P (however strong or weak.) Hume of course did not quite say some of those things. But I am humbly suggesting, not only that he should have (and that one of his proxies should on his behalf), but that he could have, given the other things that he did actually say. As I suggested at the beginning of this chapter, there are only a few dissenters to Hume’s claim that the difference between believing and merely conceiving is a difference in “manner of conception.” Hume’s account of belief is much more often said to founder because it lacks a more robust theory of intentionality, 25 the hallmark of which is content shared not only between mere conceptions and beliefs (Hume’s two “perceptions”) but also amongst a laundry list of modern mental states, including perceptions, desires, wishes, willings, rememberings, etc. To forestall confusion about my own assessment of the present criticism, let me now just state baldly that I agree with Stroud and those who think that Hume needed this more robust doctrine of intentionality, particularly one that supports content with logically compound propositional structure (e.g., negated contents), and the diversity of intentional acts interrelated by shared or at least partially shared content (e.g., disbelief in P as belief that non-P). And like the critics, including and as far back as Reid, I also believe the Humean ought to acknowledge the contribution a distinct intentional act, now commonly called “assent” (even though it is not necessarily voluntary, I would 25. See Stroud, conclusion of the passage quoted above (i.e., Stroud, Hume, 74.) Also see Allison, Custom and Reason in Hume, 170–71.

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insist), makes to belief. It is this intentional comportment as “taking to be true,” and not its content, that distinguishes believings from other intentional acts, i.e., its kind and quality, and not merely its degree. 26 Belief is different from other intentional acts precisely insofar as it is a “taking to be true.” 27 But unlike many of Hume’s critics, I do not think that any argument has yet shown that this “taking to be true” could not also be characterized by feeling. Reid’s argument does not even prove that the force and vivacity of a particular idea is unnecessary for belief, let alone insufficient, let alone that any other feeling would be neither necessary nor sufficient. To see that this is so, it is useful to look back at Reid’s criticism and carefully identify its conclusion. Reid takes the fatal flaw to be either the strong claim “that modern discovery of the ideal philosophy, that sensation, memory, belief and imagination, when they have the same object, are only different degrees of strength and vivacity in the idea,” or a weaker claim “that belief implies only a stronger idea of the object than simple apprehension” (emphasis added). Reid was not distinguishing those two quite different formulations of his argument’s conclusion, probably because the weaker one seems a consequence of the stronger, and there is good textual evidence that Hume himself (at least at one time) subscribed to the stronger. And Reid was certainly onto something, insofar as his argument shows that Hume’s doxastic theory contains a flaw. But in the next section I will argue that Reid and the more recent critics are wrong in their identification of that flaw. Reid’s argument reveals that there is a weakness in Hume’s theory of belief, but it is not sentimentalism. It is instead the claim that belief is always of an existence.

26. Another of Reid’s criticisms was that force and vivacity conflates the difference in degree with the difference in species. See Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man [1813–1815] (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1969), 22. Excerpted in Fieser, Early Responses to Hume 3: 317. 27. Here, again, I simply patch a part of Hume’s theory already identified by others as flawed: “The reason why all Hume’s suggestions founder on such counter-examples is that it is impossible to develop a theory of belief that makes so little use of assertion and truth.” David Pears, “The Naturalism of Book I of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature,” in Rationalism, Empiricism, and Idealism: British Academy Lectures on the History of Philosophy, ed. Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 108.

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ALLISON’S ACCOUNT OF HUME’S FLAW Yet another recent critic of Hume takes up Reid’s argument. Henry Allison, discussing exactly the same passage from Reid that I have quoted above, writes the following: Reid here mounts a powerful reductio against Hume’s sentimentalist conception of belief, which appeals to many of the considerations noted in the previous section [see Allison’s Custom and Reason in Hume, pp. 162–167] in connection with the analysis of the connection between belief and the idea of existence. Nevertheless, rather than focusing on the idea of existence, Reid concerns himself with the absurdities that arise when the difference in the manner of conception is construed as a matter of relative FLV. In effect, he argues that even if the FLV criterion were accepted in the case of the contrast between simple conception and belief, it is of absolutely no use in the case of the belief-disbelief contrast and that the attempt to combine these two contrasts into a coherent account on Hume’s sentimentalist terms is a total disaster. Reid puts the latter point in the form of a dilemma. Either the idea of someone who believes firmly that there is no future state is faint, which contradicts Hume’s fundamental principle that liveliness is the criterion of belief, or if it is lively (as Hume’s theory requires), then, since, ex hypothesi, someone who believes and someone who disbelieves in a future state have the same idea, the two beliefs are equivalent, which is absurd. In short, the FLV criterion and the principle of the identity of content are incompatible in the case of conflicting beliefs regarding the same state of affairs. 28

Allison concludes that Reid’s dilemma is effective, and that any attempt Hume might have made to reconcile disbelief with his thesis that belief is force and vivacity (what Allison calls “FLV,” adding liveliness to the compound) is a “total disaster.” Hopefully I have already made clear to you how that “total disaster” may be averted. As I have suggested above, in regard to the dilemma Reid posed for Hume’s theory of belief, the Humean must take the second horn. Hume must say that it is not the case that someone who believes and someone who disbelieves have 28. Allison, Custom and Reason in Hume, 170.

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exactly the same idea. He must say instead (and I think there really is only one significant concession required to enable him to say it) that the person who believes “there is a future state” believes something quite different from the person who believes “there is no future state.” Indeed, the content of the one belief and of the other are as different as any two things may possibly be: contradictories. There is, however, a significant textual problem for this proposed Humean response to the dilemma. Readers familiar with the first book of the Treatise will have already noted it, perhaps long ago. In addressing the possibility of Hume’s treating disbelief of P simply as the belief that not-P, I have done a bit more than “charitably” reconstruct his theory and attribute to him the more robust doctrine of intentionality. I have also willfully ignored Hume’s explicit arguments that there is no separate idea of existence. 29 If the Humean were to answer Reid’s objection in the fashion that I have suggested, then he or she would be committed to saying that a disbeliever (i.e., a dissenter) possesses a forceful and vivacious idea that there is, e.g., no future state. But that requires theoretical room for an idea of something not existing, quite different from the idea of that same thing existing. And Hume hamstrung himself quite completely in this regard, with a well-known doctrine that “whatever we conceive, we conceive to be existent” (T 1.2.6.4; SBN 66). This is a doctrine that he recognized as following immediately from his argument that there can be no separate idea of existence, and it has sometimes been called Hume’s “Parmenidean Principle.” But why does Hume need such a dubious doctrine? Following T 1.2.6.3 (SBN 66), Allison argues that Hume was forced into it by his Copy Principle. 30 But the argument at T 1.2.6.3 (SBN 66) is truly terrible, and not least of all because of the Parmenidean Principle’s wellknown problem that, were it true, then conceiving of something nonexistent (e.g., Santa Claus) would be self-contradictory. 31 The principle is perhaps as old as it is dubious. But that only means that it has been soundly refuted umpteen thousand times, for example by Peter Geach, 32 but one could also here go back to Plato himself. Amongst the 29. See T 1.2.6.1-8 (SBN 66-7). 30. Allison, Custom and Reason in Hume, 163–64. 31. Allison cites John Passmore, Hume’s Intentions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), 97–98; see also Bricke, Hume’s Philosophy of Mind, 118–19. 32. See P. T. Geach, “Assertion,” The Philosophical Review 74, no. 4 (1965): 449–65, particularly 468–60.

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more recent critics of Hume, Allison has perhaps been most thorough in pointing out all the problems it causes. 33 But in short, it is not selfcontradictory to conceive of a non-existent Santa Claus, hence the “Parmenidean Principle” must be false. What is more, to salvage Hume’s doxastic sentimentalism it must be sacrificed. What I would like to presently suggest is that this would not be a particularly dear sacrifice. There is no free lunch, of course (to mix my metaphor), but here the “lunch” can be had rather cheaply. We can relinquish Hume’s strong version of the Parmenidean Principle, and just politely ignore his embarrassing argument for it, instead falling back on his more reasonable claim that whenever we conceive of something “we conceive it as it might exist” (T Abstract 19; SBN 653, my italics), i.e., that “whatever can be conceiv’d by a clear and distinct idea necessarily implies the possibility of existence” (T 1.2.4.11; SBN 43, my italics), or that “whatever is clearly conceiv’d may exist” (T 1.4.5.5; SBN 233, my italics). All of those formulations express more modally modest versions of Hume’s most dubious doctrine. It is not clear that Hume was distinguishing any of those weaker versions of his principle from his strongest one. So why not relinquish that strong Parmenidean Principle in favor of one or the other of these three more modally modest alternatives? To sum up: (1) there is clear textual evidence in the later-written portions of the Treatise for a weaker version of the Parmenidean Principle. (2) That weaker version does not lead immediately to the absurdity that conceiving something non-existent is self-contradictory, and (3) it possesses the additional advantage of being consistent with other major doctrines in Hume’s theory of belief, e.g., his doxastic sentimentalism. So why follow Hume down the primrose path into the so-called Parmenidean Principle? We should not. Hume shouldn’t have gone down that path himself. In conclusion, does Reid’s argument show that belief is not a “strong and lively idea deriv’d from a present impression related to it” (T 1.3.8.15; SBN 105)? No, not at all. Despite the claims of Reid, Stroud, and now Allison, Reid’s argument merely shows that we cannot treat disbelief as a forceful and vivacious belief that non-P and simultaneously claim that whatever is conceived is conceived as existent. More re-

33. Allison, Custom and Reason in Hume, 164–67.

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cent theories of mind have followed Hume’s reasoning that the difference between mere conception and belief must lie somewhere other than in their intentional content. They have advanced somewhat beyond Hume’s philosophical psychology in recognizing that difference as in the character of the intentional acts themselves, not all of which are reducible to a one-dimensional difference in degree of feeling. But Hume could have done that too. Reid’s argument does not establish that force and vivacity is not identical to belief; it merely shows that it is inconsistent with the Parmenidean Principle. I.e., the argument merely establishes that, given that belief is force and vivacity, then our belief in a non-existent state of affairs must be capable of possessing an equal degree of force and vivacity. For the textual and philosophical reasons cited above, I think we should instead reject Hume’s more dubious doctrine that whatever we conceive, we conceive as existent.

FOUR THEORIES AND A SHIFT IN SENTIMENTS As David Owen has recently observed, 34 sometime after writing the main text of the Treatise, and perhaps as he was working on the Abstract, Hume came to question, and perhaps even abandon, his strictest analogy between beliefs/conceptions (on the one hand) and impressions/ideas (on the other). What this means in the context of the present analysis is that Hume himself came to question, and perhaps even to abandon, proposition (4) in his main argument for sentimentalism. The most direct piece of evidence that Owen cites in this regard are the final sentences of the Appendix, i.e., Hume’s last words before the grand “FINIS”: The second error may be found in Book 1, page 67, where I say, that two ideas of the same object can only be different by their different degrees of force and vivacity. I believe there are other differences among ideas, which cannot properly be comprehended under these terms. Had I said, that two ideas of the same object can only be

34. See Owen, Hume’s Reason, 172–74. The shift is also observed, if not emphasized to the same degree, by Flew in Hume’s Philosophy of Belief, 100, 102–3. I follow Owen closely in the analysis that follows.

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different by their different feeling, I shou’d have been nearer the truth. (T Appendix 22; SBN 636) 35

This is no minor adjustment, but after 636 pages Hume’s reader might be excused for not fully grasping everything that it entails for the foundations of Hume’s doxastic theory. Re-reading the first Enquiry now, however, after a good night of sleep and with Owen’s point clearly in mind, the shift is quite unmistakable. Careful re-reading confirms that the “feeling” that Hume associates with belief in the first Enquiry (or the later-written portions of the Treatise) is never explicitly identified as that very same force and vivacity characterizing the impressions at the beginning of the Treatise. Owen explains this discrepancy by arguing that Hume ultimately retreated to a theoretical position wherein the feelings of belief have merely the same effects as the force and vivacity of the present impressions. 36 We can see Hume preserving his claim that beliefs are characterized by feeling, i.e., remaining faithful to doxastic sentimentalism, but also systematically soft-pedaling the Treatise’s bolder assertion that the feeling in question must be that very same force and vivacity rubbed off onto them through association with an immediate sensory experience. As Owen laments, and as others have observed, 37 this change meant a weakening in Hume’s “Newtonian” psychological program: Hume could no longer hope to explain belief as the result of a feeling transferred to the idea through association with the previous impression; he was deprived of an explanatory power that he had reached for in the Treatise. Without exploring all of the reasons for Hume’s subtle yet significant shift in this regard, a crucial consequence becomes visible to us, simply by returning to the logic of the argument reconstructed above. To be sure, Hume did not give up on his claim that (2) the mind is composed only of impressions and ideas. Yet, if Owen is correct (and I think that he is), and if the last sentence of the Appendix is to be taken at face value (as I think that it should), then even Hume himself came to doubt that (4) the only difference in manner of conception is a belief’s greater degree of force and vivacity. So even according to Hume himself, there

35. Quoted by Owen in Hume’s Reason, 173. 36. Owen, Hume’s Reason, 173. 37. See Owen, Hume’s Reason, 274; see also Harold Noonan, Hume (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007), 79–80.

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must ultimately be more feelings than that one, if we are to account for the full phenomenology of believing. Re-reading the first Enquiry we also clearly see that Hume did not back off of his claim that belief is characterized by feeling, i.e., a feeling that is supposed to at least have the similar effect as force and vivacity. (Here I simply echo Owen.) But this is quite a different thing from claiming that believing simply is force and vivacity. It suggests to us at least two or three quite different theses for doxastic sentimentalism, one or two that are stronger, and at least a pair that are weaker. The strongest thesis is the one held by Hume when he began writing the Treatise. But he was pushed into a slightly weaker one by the time that he penned the Treatise’s conclusions, including his summary of its views now preserved for us in the appendix and Abstract. Hume’s Strong Doxastic Sentimentalism: For all x, if x is believed, then the manner of x’s conception is the feeling of force and vivacity. Hume’s Weaker Doxastic Sentimentalism: For all x, if x is believed, then the manner of x’s conception is a feeling of some sort or another, which has an effect similar to force and vivacity. Even More Modest Doxastic Sentimentalism: For all x, if x is believed, then the manner of x’s conception is sufficient for there being a feeling (of some sort or another) characteristic of that belief.

An important difference between these three theses is the greater specificity of Hume’s Strong Doxastic Sentimentalism and the greater generality of the weaker two doctrines. Both Hume’s Weaker Doxastic Sentimentalism and Even More Modest Doxastic Sentimentalism involve claims about a “feeling,” of some generic type. Hume’s strongest thesis identified believing specifically with force and vivacity, i.e., that specific feeling Hume defined as characteristic of impressions. Hume’s weaker thesis retreated to the claim that beliefs are characterized by an unspecified “feeling,” relinquishing the claim that the feeling in question was itself force and vivacity. This opened up the possibility, for Hume, for a variety of feelings in relation to conceptions of objects, and the possibility that the feeling of belief might be quite different from the force and vivacity of the impressions (even if it produces effects similar in the operations of the mind.)

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But this was not the only retreat Hume might have beaten. Notice also that Hume’s Strong Doxastic Sentimentalism and Hume’s Weaker Doxastic Sentimentalism are both identity theses. Part of their strength lies in presuming (as Hume did) not only that believing is a manner of conception, but in identifying believing with that feeling characterizing that manner of conception. For Hume, as he began the Treatise, what it meant to believe x, is simply to conceive of x with the additional (unspecified) degree of force and vivacity. We should notice that Hume’s Weaker Doxastic Sentimentalism, despite being weaker, still maintains that strong identity claim. So both of Hume’s doctrines ought to be contrasted with the view I’ve now dubbed “Even More Modest Doxastic Sentimentalism.” Even More Modest Doxastic Sentimentalism is a thesis that, to my knowledge, Hume himself did not retreat to. It is instead a Hume-like position that additionally relinquishes Hume’s identity thesis, in favor of an (even weaker) claim that a feeling characterizes belief, but is not identical to it. Recall that “characterize” may be defined (as in the Introduction) as that feeling being about that belief. EMMDS stakes the claim that having a belief would be sufficient for producing some feeling characteristic of believing, but nevertheless leaves room for the fact that the characteristic feeling does not exhaust believing. 38 This is a doctrine that retreats to the same degree of generality as Hume’s Weaker Doxastic Sentimentalism, but unlike Hume’s Weaker Doxastic Sentimentalism additionally relinquishes Hume’s identity thesis. Nevertheless, even this more modest version of sentimentalism should not be confused for the weakest forms of doxastic sentimentalism. 39 The reason is because EMMDS still maintains a relatively strong claim that there is a doxastic sentiment, perhaps somehow akin to force and vivacity, characterizing all believing (i.e., necessary for belief). Weaker still would be to relinquish that claim too, i.e., to relinquish the claim that there is any sentiment characteristic of all belief. The weakest sentimentalist thesis would simply adopt the idea that some feeling or other may be affiliated with believing. (Recall from the Introduction the discussion of fear and anxiety in relation to the presence of a bear.) 38. Whether a feeling characteristic of belief (i.e., necessary for belief) must always be a focal object of consciousness or attention, or may instead be peripheral to consciousness/ attention, is my topic in chapter 6. 39. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for Lexington Books, for pushing me to make this distinction.

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Weakest Doxastic Sentimentalism: For all x, if x is believed, then the manner of x’s conception is sometimes accompanied by a feeling (but sometimes not).

Weakest Doxastic Sentimentalism is a doctrine that Hume almost certainly would have embraced, and that few philosophers would deny. For that reason it is not the doctrine that I will pursue further into the pages of this book; I will instead be most concerned with Even More Modest Sentimentalism. That is because, despite its modesty, EMMDS is a doctrine that is not commonly attributed to modern epistemologists other than Hume, despite many being committed to it.

CONCLUSIONS FROM HUME Reid’s argument, despite being championed by Stroud and Allison, does not by itself refute Hume’s Strong Doxastic Sentimentalism. This is not to say that Reid’s argument does not bother Hume’s theory of belief. What it instead forces upon us is the question of which parts of Hume’s theory to keep, insofar as we cannot (as Hume at least once thought we could) have them all. I’ve already made my suggestion in this regard: keep sentimentalism, and instead let go of the Parmenidean Principle. Nevertheless, I have not myself endorsed Hume’s Strong Doxastic Sentimentalism, i.e., his claim at the beginning of the Treatise that beliefs are nothing but force and vivacity. I have merely shown that Reid’s Argument does not refute it. One might be tempted to additionally conclude that Hume’s Weaker Doxastic Sentimentalism, not to mention the doctrine that I have called Even More Modest Doxastic Sentimentalism, are also vindicated: because if Reid’s argument does not establish that beliefs are without feelings, even on the strongest version of the doctrine, then it doesn’t touch those views either. In many parts of the Treatise, Hume claimed that belief is identical to the feeling of force and vivacity. Belief is paradigmatically the force and vivacity of a present impression, and the communicability of that force and vivacity to other ideas was meant to explain why they too, are believed. Cf. “Thus my general position, that an opinion or belief is nothing but a strong and lively idea deriv’d from a present impression related to it” (T 1.3.8.15; SBN 105) and “the belief, which attends

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experiences, is explained to be nothing but a peculiar sentiment, or lively conception produced by habit” (T Abstract 27; SBN 657). In particular, those “nothing but” claims stake out Hume’s strong equation of belief with feeling, either the feeling of force and vivacity in the earlier-written portions of the Treatise, or perhaps the “peculiar sentiment” in the later ones. But as originally pointed out by Flew and explained by Owen, Hume himself eventually came to question, and perhaps even abandon, his strongest claim in that regard. By the time Hume wrote the Abstract and the Appendix, we not only find him shifting toward a discussion of belief as a more generic “sentiment,” and away from the claim that it is “deriv’d from a present impression,” but we also find him adding passages like the following: “A like reflection on general rules keeps us from augmenting our belief upon every encrease of the force and vivacity of our ideas” (T 1.3.10.12; SBN 630–32). While Hume did claim, in parts of the Treatise, that belief is “nothing but” force and vivacity, he also eventually came to the conclusion that the force and vivacity of an individual idea may be swamped by sentiments associated with other ideas, for example those arrived at through application of, or reflection upon, those General Rules. 40 I hope to have shown that this was not a wholesale abandonment of all forms of doxastic sentimentalism. Indeed, it was not even a renunciation of Hume’s identity thesis with regard to beliefs and feelings. It was instead merely a renunciation of Hume’s Strong Doxastic Sentimentalism in favor of Hume’s Weaker Doxastic Sentimentalism, i.e., a retreat to a version of the doctrine that still identifies belief with feeling, but without specifying the feeling as the specific force and vivacity of the once-present impression. An even weaker version of the sentimentalist thesis would be the claim that some sentiment is characteristic of, if not identical to, belief. In this chapter I floated a version of that even more modest doctrine as a claim that some feeling is necessary, if not suffi40. I have argued elsewhere that the reading of Hume required for unraveling his account of wisdom need not claim that the force and vivacity of any particular idea is sufficient for belief in that particular idea. The sine qua non of a more traditional voluntarist account of deliberation, i.e., “withholding assent,” was replaced by Hume with this account of the General Rules. On my interpretation of those, the force and vivacity of any particular idea however strengthened and enlivened by custom, even one that would naturally amount to belief were the General Rules not in effect, is itself insufficient for belief once such rules come into play. See Ryan Hickerson, “What the Wise Ought Believe: A Voluntarist Interpretation of Hume’s General Rules,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 21, no. 6 (2013): 1133–53. None of that, of course, is to say that a feeling (of some kind or another) isn’t necessary for belief.

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cient, for belief. I have not, however, attributed that even more modest doctrine to Hume. 41 It was not necessary as a part of my defense of Humean sentimentalism, because whether we ourselves are ready to endorse Hume’s identity thesis or not, in any case Reid’s argument missed its mark. My task here (in addition to detangling the various sentimentalisms from one another) has merely been to show that one argument, perhaps one of a great many to be found in the history of philosophy, failed. Insofar as we must “sacrifice” one of Hume’s signature doxastic doctrines (and logic itself forces this choice: I conceded that much to Reid and Stroud and Allison), there will be an important sense in which we cannot fully defend Hume, but instead only a Humean sort of position. If the choice must be between sentimentalism and the Parmenidean Principle, then the choice is clear. For all of my professed modesty in this chapter, I am sufficiently immodest to have taken myself to have shown that one of the most forceful and squarely addressed arguments against Humean sentimentalism, an argument still being trotted out by excellent philosophers in our present day, does not establish what it purports to have established. Upon reflection, its conclusion ought not feel so certain to us. 41. There is, however, precedent in the literature for attributing such a position to Hume. See, for example, Thomas K. Hearn, “‘General Rules’ in Hume’s Treatise,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 8, no. 4 (1970): 405–22, particularly 412.

2 FEELING CERTAIN AND THE CIRCLE A Sentimental Interpretation of Cartesian Clarity

INTRODUCTION TO THE CIRCLE

In the history of philosophy, perhaps the most infamous doxastic sentiments are René Descartes’ (1596–1650) clarity and distinctness. Hesitance about that claim can only come from the fact that it is not so obvious Descartes conceptualized either “clarity” or “distinctness” as sentiments. So the burden of my argument in this chapter will be to show, despite Descartes’ distance from the sentimentalist tradition of Hume, that his concept CLARITY (and hence also DISTINCTNESS) ought to be regarded as reference to feeling, if “feeling” be allowed appropriately broad construal. I think this sentimentalist approach can advance our understanding even of Descartes, insofar as it breaks a deadlock between rival interpretations of his Clarity and Distinctness Principle. Amongst the many fundamental problems the father of modern philosophy bequeathed us is the Problem of the Criterion. 1 In Descartes’ case (and often to emphasize that he himself did not come to a satisfactory solution) this is commonly called “The Problem of the Circle.” Descartes is supposed to have fallen victim to a classic logical blunder. First, he supposedly argued from the principle that whatever is per1. The Problem of the Criterion can be traced back further than Descartes, to Sextus Empiricus, but Descartes is responsible for its modern formulation. The locus classicus is now Roderick M. Chisholm, The Problem of the Criterion (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1973). 61

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ceived clearly and distinctly is true (hereafter referred to as “The Clarity and Distinctness Principle”) 2 to the conclusion that God exists. But second, he argued from God’s benevolence (and hence existence) back to the truth of the Clarity and Distinctness Principle, i.e., back from exactly what had supposedly been proved using the Clarity and Distinctness Principle. It is a notorious case, perhaps the most notorious case of circular reasoning in the history of philosophy. Before making inquiries, we should pause to notice that clarity and distinctness, thereby, whether we ultimately judge Descartes’ argument circular or not, are the very heart and soul of Descartes’ epistemological project. Since its identification by Marin Mersenne and Antoine Arnauld, a massive amount of attention has gone ‘round in this Circle. Surprisingly, less thought and ink have spilled over CLARITY and DISTINCTNESS themselves. So upon those concepts a little of ours will be let to splash. As I’ve already stated, my goal in this chapter is an assessment of clarity, i.e., an assessment of the feeling about which the infamous principle is composed. I am particularly interested in its prospects when construed as a quality of perception, and my main line of my argument will be that clarity and distinctness ought to be interpreted as doxastic sentiments. But to arrive at that conclusion I will need to begin by surveying some of the literature on Descartes’ notorious circularity problem, i.e., the literature of his supposed failure (or success) at justifying the Clarity and Distinctness Principle. But my aim here is not that of a simple surveyor. In the vast country of Descartes scholarship I seek an answer to a quite specific question: what did the father of modern philosophy think it was like to feel sure about something, and how did he think that feeling is connected to believing? The consensus of that now-massive literature, at least at this particular juncture, seems to be that Descartes was not guilty of the infamous circularity that he has long been accused of. 3 In a now-classic paper from 1992, Louis Loeb remarks: “An enormous literature offers a be2. The principle in question has been called a variety of different things: “truth rule,” “truth criterion,” “clarity and distinctness criterion.” Not all of these variations are merely innocent differences in nomenclature. Disambiguation of the principle is a crucial step in my analysis below. 3. It was not always so. When Willis Doney was working on the topic in 1955 he began by citing the previous generation of scholars who had concluded that Descartes did reason circularly, including Norman Kemp Smith, A. Boyce Gibson, and Stuart Hampshire. See Willis Doney, “The Cartesian Circle,” Journal of the History of Ideas 16, no. 3 (1955): 324–38, especially 324.

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wildering variety of solutions to this problem.” 4 I can attest myself to their bewildering variety. And since Loeb wrote about them in 1992 the catalog has only grown, and grown more bewildering. Three notable acquittals of Descartes’ reasoning, penned in the intervening years, will draw my attention below: Newman (1999), Broughton (2002), and Della Rocca (2005). 5 But unfortunately, even in “bewildering variety,” the various vindications have not shifted non-professional opinion about Descartes’ reasoning even an iota. Those of us who sit down casually with the Meditations, either as undergraduates in our first philosophy courses, or professors dutifully teaching them, still rise with the sense that Descartes posed a significant skeptical challenge, but ultimately failed to justify his Clarity and Distinctness Principle. If not a “circle,” Descartes appears, at least to the laity, to have reasoned in a tightly closed curve. Hence, I suppose, all of the repeated demonstrations to the contrary by the experts. The disconnect between these two groups of readers is lamentable. While I would prefer to be adding to the enormity and bewilderment of the expert literature, i.e., vindicating Descartes’ reasoning, I must confess now that I will instead end up amongst those who think that Descartes did beg his most central, if not most celebrated, epistemological question. At the end of the day I do not side with Mersenne and Arnauld (and the legion of undergraduates) so much as with an observation first made by Pierre Gassendi in the Objections and Replies. Analysis of Cartesian CLARITY will ultimately confirm that there were two quite different “problems of the Circle.” Descartes is often, and rightly (if not commonly) exonerated of the most infamous one. But I will follow a remark of Van Cleve (1979) and argue that a deeper problem of circularity remains. 6 Closer attention to Cartesian CLARITY has the advantage of explaining several otherwise mysterious elements in the Clarity and 4. Louis E. Loeb, “The Cartesian Circle,” in The Cambridge Companion to Descartes, ed. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 200–35; this quote 201, my emphasis. 5. Lex Newman, “The Fourth Meditation,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59, no. 3 (1999): 559–91. Janet Broughton, Descartes’s Method of Doubt (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002). Michael Della Rocca, “Descartes, the Cartesian Circle, and Epistemology Without God,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 70, no. 1 (2005): 1–33. 6. See James Van Cleve, “Foundationalism, Epistemic Principles, and the Cartesian Circle,” The Philosophical Review 88, no. 1 (1979): 55. Discussed below in conclusion.

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Distinctness Principle, but also the disadvantage of laying bare one of Gassendi’s original objections: Descartes had no resources for distinguishing genuine clarity from its counterfeits.

LITERATURE REVIEW: SIX WAYS OUT OF THE CIRCLE The Problem of the Circle is among the most well-discussed in the history of philosophy. But despite that, or perhaps because of it, the problem itself has been presented in a variety of ways, some quite a bit more perspicacious than others. As suggested above, and for purposes of this chapter, I will take the “Problem of the Circle” to be the problem of determining the logical relationship between two Cartesian claims: (A) “Whatever I perceive clearly and distinctly is true,” and (B) “God exists.” The Problem of the Circle can then be formulated in the following way: Which of those two claims was supposed to come first in Descartes’ order of argument? Was (A) supposed to be his premise for (B) as conclusion? Or was (B) supposed to be his premise for (A)? Descartes cannot answer “both,” on pain of circular reasoning. This way of posing the problem has the advantage of an august pedigree. Formulated as a question, it was originally Mersenne’s in the Objections and Replies (AT VII, 124–25; CSM II, 89); and posed as a criticism it is almost verbatim one of Arnauld’s criticisms (AT VII, 214; CSM II, 150). 7 This particular formulation also has the advantage of close contact with several key arguments from the Meditations themselves. It is true that the proof of God’s existence in the Third Meditation does not appeal to the Clarity and Distinctness Principle, at least not verbatim. But a key premise for that argument appears to be the following: “Whatever is revealed to me by the natural light––for example that from the fact that I am doubting it follows that I exist, and so on––cannot in any way be open to doubt.” (AT VII, 38; CSM II, 27) From which follows what must certainly be a key premise for that proof of God’s existence: it is manifest, by the natural light, that causes must 7. References to Descartes are to Œuvres de Descartes [1897–1913], publiées par Charles Adam & Paul Tannery (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1964–1974), and its nowstandard English translation, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Hereafter abbreviated (AT; CSM).

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have at least as much reality as their effects (AT VII, 40; CSM II, 28). I dutifully report that there is no consensus, amongst the experts, about whether Descartes treated all perceptions by the natural light as equivalent to perceptions clear and distinct. 8 Some Descartes scholarship now interprets the one as a species of the other, and much recent scholarship does not treat them as wholly equivalent. 9 But for the moment, and merely for the sake of exposition, I will instead follow the lay practice of simply lumping them together. 10 Because it is not practically possible to review all of the defenses grown up around Descartes’ reasoning, I will muster only a few. It is tempting to simply skip this step and get on to the business of providing my own interpretation (readers bored by literature review might be tempted to skip ahead to where my own argument picks up), perhaps under the pretext that reviewing all the extant interpretations of Descartes would prove far too tedious. But we may not skip this step, on pain of losing the benefits of the literature’s accumulated wisdom. So, beginning with a pair of somewhat older solutions, and then proceeding

8. See Dale Jacquette, “Descartes’ Lumen Naturale and the Cartesian Circle,” Philosophy and Theology: Marquette University Quarterly 9, no. 3/4 (1996): 273–320. An even more recent interpretation, distinguishing natural lighting from clear and distinct perceiving, such that Descartes’ reasoning is thereby exonerated, is Sam Rickless, “The Cartesian Fallacy Fallacy,” Noûs 39, no. 2 (2005): 309–36. 9. For examples see Della Rocca (2005), 20–21, or Howard Wickes, “Descartes’s Denial of the Autonomy of Reason,” in Reason, Will, and Sensation: Studies in Descartes’s Metaphysics, ed. John Cottingham (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 112–13, and 122–28. Della Rocca cites a good piece of textual evidence for this, i.e., (AT VIIIA, 16; CSM I, 203). I note also that E. M. Curley, Descartes Against the Skeptics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 97, makes the substitution exactly as I have here, for exactly this purpose of posing the problem of circularity. For an analysis of Descartes’ uses of ‘natural light,’ (though I warn readers this may make the posing of the problem even more tendentious), see John Morris, “Descartes’ Natural Light,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 11 (1973): 169–87. 10. A good criterion for distinguishing what I am calling “expert” readers of Descartes from those of us who have not devoted our lives to his study is whether we interpret Descartes as distinguishing clear and distinct perception from perception via the natural light. Amongst the laity (“the lumpers,” as I label them) there have also been some traditional luminaries, e.g., no less a personage than Norman Kemp Smith, New Studies in the Philosophy of Descartes (New York: Macmillan, 1953) 55–63. If lumped, then the claim that whatever is revealed by the natural light cannot in any way be open to doubt is almost equivalent to the Clarity and Distinctness Principle. It then appears to be a key premise in Descartes’ argument for God’s existence in the Third Meditation. That the Clarity and Distinctness Principle was not, in fact, a premise for Descartes’ Third Meditation argument, we discover from close study of the text, but also from the near consensus on this point amongst the expert readers. Distinguishing the two epistemic principles amounts to a seventh solution to the Problem of the Circle, in addition to the six that I will canvass immediately below, though I hasten to add, only a solution to the traditionally posed Problem of the Circle, and not to the more fundamental problem of circularity with which I will ultimately conclude.

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in reverse chronologically, my quick selection here will be of a half dozen of the most formidable defenses. These are, of course, not randomly sampled. I have selected amongst the “bewildering variety,” on the basis of their quality, representativeness, and range over plausible interpretive possibilities. In each case a quick thumbnail sketch should be enough to refer readers back to the relevant arguments themselves.

Solution #1: Willis Doney, 1955 Already in the Objections and Replies, Descartes had been challenged to justify his argument as non-circular. And, famously, he explicitly denied it. In his own defense Descartes wrote in the Second Set of Replies to Mersenne: Thirdly, when I said that we can know nothing for certain until we are aware that God exists, I expressly declared that I was speaking only of knowledge of those conclusions which can be recalled when we are no longer attending to the arguments by means of which we deduced them. (AT VII, 140; CSM II, 100)

And then he wrote in the Fourth Replies to Arnauld: Lastly, as to the fact that I was not guilty of circularity when I said that the only reason we have for being sure that what we clearly and distinctly perceive is true is the fact that God exists, but that we are sure that God exists only because we perceive this clearly: I have already given an adequate explanation of this point in my reply to the Second Objections, under the headings Thirdly and Fourthly, where I made a distinction between what we in fact perceive clearly and what we remember having perceived clearly on a previous occasion. (AT VII, 245–46; CSM II, 171)

Three centuries later, drawing not merely on these particular passages, but also from Descartes’ Rules for the Direction of Our Native Intelligence (1628), Willis Doney (1955) argued that Descartes thereby distinguishes two forms for the Clarity and Distinctness Principle. 11 One was the claim that whatever is currently being perceived clearly and distinct11. Willis Doney, “The Cartesian Circle,” Journal of the History of Ideas 16, no. 3 (1955): 324–38.

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ly is true. But another is that whatever we remember having once clearly and distinctly perceived is true. The former principle, according to Doney, is enough for Descartes to have believed that he had established the existence of God, at least while he was attending to the relevant proofs. But it is only the latter principle (and particularly not the former) that Descartes supposedly sought to justify by appeal to God’s non-deceptiveness. So, Descartes’ reasoning, thereby, was noncircular. Since it first appeared, this vindication (and others like it) has come to be called “the Memory Reading.” It is important to notice that the interpretation now under consideration includes a substantive commitment to the relative reliability of reason (the source of epistemic authority for so long as we are attending to proofs) and the relative unreliability of memory (which requires the appeal to God’s non-deceptiveness in order to be fully trusted). This is thought to fit nicely with Descartes’ generally rationalist bent, and particularly with his skepticism of sensation’s bona fides. I merely add that on this account, technically (and now pace some of the claims of Doney himself) it is not the Clarity and Distinctness Principle itself that requires divine justification. 12 It is instead our memories, and particularly the memory that we have worked through a sound proof leading to the conclusion “God exists,” i.e., one that requires the further support of the Third and Fourth Meditations. Truths can only become part of the organized system of knowledge, the system Descartes called “scientia,” after having some justification of the reliability of memories of having conducted proofs of them. But on this accounting things can be perceived clearly and distinctly, if not known to be true in the most developed sense, even prior to proofs that whatever we clearly and distinctly perceive is true, and that whatever we remember once having clearly and distinctly perceived remains true. This interpretation has been roundly criticized in the literature. It was criticized by Cottingham for implying an epistemic endorsement of memory, once the existence of God is proved, something Cottingham thought “highly implausible” given the notorious unreliability of memory. 13 Notwithstanding, Cottingham agrees that the import of the proof 12. At least not on the interpretation of the Clarity and Distinctness Principle proposed below, viz. whatever is perceived clearly and distinctly is true. 13. John Cottingham, Descartes (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 77n25.

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of God’s existence is establishing knowledge (i.e., the system of scientia) rather than momentary flashes of certainty. It was also criticized by Frankfurt as “both false and unhelpful,” and by Curley for relying too heavily on passages from the Regulae. 14 Nevertheless, despite these and many other criticisms, we must at least grudgingly admit something fundamentally correct about the Memory Reading: Descartes thought that there is a difference in the epistemic status of clear and distinct perceptions as attended to, and as remembered. And Descartes thought it was particularly the latter that require divine justification.

Solution #2: Harry Frankfurt, 1970 A quite different, if equally influential, approach has been taken by Harry Frankfurt (1970). Frankfurt is now often cited as the first and best critic of the Memory Reading, and he argued that Descartes’ procedure in the Meditations does not involve establishing the truth of the Clarity and Distinctness Principle, at least not if “truth” means the correspondence of an explicitly articulated principle to some independent reality. On Frankfurt’s reading the Meditations were instead designed to question whether, and were supposed to establish that, clarity and distinctness can be trusted. That is to say, on Frankfurt’s reading, the focus of Descartes’ method is not establishing a particular piece of propositional knowledge, but instead “the validation of reason” itself, i.e., a project designed to establish the coherence (i.e., consistency) of one (but not the only possible) set of clear and distinct perceptions. On this account the well-known appeal to God as justification for the Clarity and Distinctness Principle was not meant as a “proof,” at least not one where the truth of that particular principle was meant to be established by logical derivation from antecedently established propositions, but instead a procedure for vouchsafing. That is, the provision of a “divine guarantee.” 15 The task is carried out in the face of skeptical doubts that any knowledge can be secured in such a fashion.

14. See Harry G. Frankfurt, Demons, Dreamers, & Madmen: The Defense of Reason in Descartes’s Meditations [1970] (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008), 223; and Curley, Descartes against the Skeptics, 101–4. 15. Harry G. Frankfurt, Demons, Dreamers, & Madmen: The Defense of Reason in Descartes’s Meditations [1970] (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008), 215.

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Like the Memory Reading, Frankfurt’s interpretation has not been universally wellreceived. It “subjectivizes” Descartes, according to Cottingham; Della Rocca hesitantly classifies it amongst the “dark view[s that are] perennial popular.” 16 Not all the criticisms of Frankfurt have been completely fair, I think, given the depth and astuteness of his somewhat Wittgensteinian approach. Some criticisms may even be motivated by the general misapprehension that all forms of coherentism must reduce to subjectivism or anti-realism. But this is not the place to discuss the obstacles facing coherentist epistemology. The case at hand might provide an object lesson in how broader conceptualizations of the aims of philosophizing invariably inform even what appear to be narrowly-defined technical puzzles, i.e., insofar as characterization of the puzzle itself always depends crucially upon understanding its place in a background of other philosophical aims and purposes. But focusing on the case at hand, Frankfurt distinguished what can reasonably be doubted from what is established as a true principle governing the relation between having grounds for reasonable doubt with what is true. The removal of the skeptical hypothesis of the evil demon is, according to him, the removal of the reasonableness of a metaphysical doubt, i.e., of the reasonableness of doubting clarity and distinctness. And what removes the reasonableness of such a doubt? According to Descartes, according to Frankfurt, it is merely remembering that God’s existence has been definitively proved, i.e., something inconsistent with the skeptical hypothesis. So despite Frankfurt’s criticisms of the Memory Reading, I point out here that Frankfurt himself does not deny the key role memory plays in the argument. According to Frankfurt the removal of reasonable doubt can be accomplished without first presuming the truth of the Clarity and Distinctness Principle, at least not as such. The appeal to clarity is simply done by reason whenever it is employed in its most impeccable manner. It is this use of reason, i.e., in its “most impeccable” manner, that implicates clarity and distinctness because, on Frankfurt’s account, to perceive clearly and distinctly simply is to no longer have rational grounds for doubting. And using reason in the impeccable manner, i.e., perceiving each step of one’s argument clearly and distinctly, is something

16. Cottingham, Descartes, 77, no. 23; and Della Rocca (2005), 6, respectively.

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everyone (including the skeptic) must do if he or she is to employ argument. Appealing instead to a principle that whatever is perceived in such a manner is true, wherein that characteristic use has been elevated to a “truth,” and made into an explicit premise, is something quite different. The aim of Descartes, on Frankfurt’s account, was instead to deprive skeptics of their own tacit appeals to clarity and distinctness, i.e., to deprive them of what they inevitably must deny whenever they attempt to capture reason’s ammunition and use it against itself. In order to deprive them of that ammunition Descartes himself employed the ammunition. But that is nothing self-defeating (presuming, for the sake of analogy, that one has a large enough stock of ammunition), let alone circular. In Frankfurt’s own words: “When someone remembers having perceived clearly and distinctly that reason is guaranteed by God, he remembers in effect that there is no good reason for doubting the trustworthiness of reason.” 17

Solution #3: Louis Loeb, 1992 Louis Loeb (1992), to take another influential example, advanced beyond either of the foregoing accounts by distinguishing epistemic interpretations of Descartes from psychological interpretations. An “epistemic interpretation” is one that reads Descartes as claiming that the anti-skeptical arguments (particularly the proof of God’s existence in the Third Meditation and the derivation of the Clarity and Distinctness Principle from God’s non-deceptiveness) remove doubt by providing good reasons for no longer doubting. A “psychological interpretation” is one that instead reads Descartes as claiming that those anti-skeptical arguments simply make it psychologically impossible to doubt. 18 This is not exactly what I myself will identify below as the “big divide in the literature,” but no work on the Circle since the early 1990s can safely neglect Loeb’s contribution of this distinction; my own analysis (below) included. A key element of a psychological interpretation, like Loeb’s, is belief’s unshakability. An “unshakeable” belief is one that characterizes 17. Frankfurt, Demons, Dreamers, 240. 18. See Louis E. Loeb, “The Cartesian Circle,” in The Cambridge Companion to Descartes, ed. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 201.

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knowledge. Loeb cites passages where Descartes associates unshakability with “perfect certainty,” “scientific knowledge,” and “true and certain knowledge.” Beliefs that lack this particular character, i.e., those that are capable of being “dislodged,” do not survive to be incorporated into scientia. And while doubt need not always dislodge a belief directly, according to Loeb it is what makes beliefs capable of being dislodged by “unsettling or destabilizing them.” 19 Importantly, on Loeb’s account, the skeptical hypothesis (particularly that of the evil demon) cannot dislodge current clear and distinct perceptions. Recollected clear and distinct perceptions, on the other hand, can be unsettled or destabilized by the skeptical hypothesis. (Again here we see a debt to the Memory Reading, even in stark opposition to it.) What is particularly significant in Loeb’s account is that unshakability may then be understood completely independently of the question of whether a “good shaking” would or would not be justified. It is supposed to be a purely psychological metaphor. This interpretation then claims that knowing that God exists, and is not a deceiver, is psychologically incompatible with the supposition that clear and distinct perceptions are false. So while recollected clear and distinct perceptions can be dislodged by the skeptical hypothesis (insofar as they are not currently perceived clearly and distinctly), knowledge of the Clarity and Distinctness Principle itself would be “inconsistent” with the skeptical hypothesis. Here it is worthwhile to emphasize that Loeb simply means Descartes thought it would be psychologically incompatible, i.e., as a mere matter of fact we are never able to believe both. So knowing the Clarity and Distinctness Principle would not justify our certainties, though it would remove our skeptical doubts, in the sense that it would simply eliminate them: once we know the Clarity and Distinctness Principle we become (quite literally, but here merely statistically and in accordance with empirical observation) unable to entertain skeptical doubts in the face of clear and distinct perceptions. Descartes “reasoning” is non-circular because, strictly speaking it is not reasoning. It is instead merely the narrative of the Meditator’s (psychologically typical) shift from one set of mutually exclusive beliefs to another.

19. Ibid., 205.

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Solution #4: Lex Newman, 1999 But let us say, for the moment, that Descartes meant to actually derive the Clarity and Distinctness Principle. If that were the case, how and where would it have been done? Lex Newman (1999) argues that the Clarity and Distinctness Principle is explicitly argued for, if enthymematically, by Descartes in the Fourth Meditation, i.e., just where Descartes said he would argue for it in the Synopsis. In particular, Newman finds the key argument deriving the Clarity and Distinctness Principle at AT VII, 62; CSM II 43, where Descartes claims that every clear and distinct perception “is something [positive],” 20 and therefore must have God as its cause. Newman fills in the missing premises for that argument by appealing both to a logical analysis and to Descartes’ Replies to the Second Objections. In particular Newman argues that the Clarity and Distinctness Principle is actually a particular case of an even more fundamental truth criterion, one that he calls the “Inclination-WithoutCorrection Rule.” The IWC Rule states: “p is true if I clearly and distinctly perceive that (i) I am positively inclined to assent to p; and (ii) I have no faculty/capacity for correction by which I could ascertain that not-p.” 21 On Newman’s account being unable to correct what would otherwise be natural errors of judgment, is key to the veracity of what we perceive clearly and distinctly, and hence to Descartes’ entire epistemology. If, on a case of false judgment, both of those conditions held, then we would have a positive imperfection in the nature of our judgment itself, one that Descartes believed inconsistent with the divine nature of its creator. So, according to Newman according to Descartes, you cannot be positively inclined to falsely assent to p, have no faculty/ capacity for correcting your error, and be the creation of a non-deceptive God, all at the same time. And according to Newman the reason why, when Descartes was pressed by his objectors to defend his Clarity and Distinctness Principle, he consistently appealed to the logical impossibility of God being a deceiver, is because of his more fundamental commitment to the IWC Rule.

20. “something real and positive” in the French. 21. Lex Newman, “The Fourth Meditation,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59, no. 3 (1999): 559–91, this definition 580.

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Newman offers his reconstruction of the argument in the Fourth Meditation (Newman, 1999) as complement to another paper co-authored in the same year (Newman and Nelson, 1999), which even more explicitly argues that Descartes is not guilty of circular reasoning. 22 In short, Descartes is not guilty of the Circle because he need not have appealed to the Clarity and Distinctness Principle prior to its derivation in the Fourth Meditation. Newman and Nelson identify “grounds exemption” anti-skeptical strategies as those that attempt to secure some particular perception by proving it immune from doubt. And they interpret Descartes as instead pursuing a “grounds enhancement” anti-skeptical strategy, whereby “the meditator’s ground of assent (to the divine guarantee) is enhanced from mere demonstrative clarity and distinctness, to self-evident, axiomatic, intuitive, clarity and distinctness.” 23 The former of the two standards, presumably, would be sufficient to establish God’s existence in the first place. And Descartes’ reasoning would thereby be non-circular, insofar as arguments prior to the Fourth Meditation required (in addition to some other substantive premises, to be sure!) only that their conclusions “induce assent” when perceived clearly and distinctly, but did not require demonstration of the Clarity and Distinctness Principle itself. In particular those early arguments would not require grounds that are themselves self-evident, axiomatic, and intuitive, i.e., those supposedly established by the “enhanced” clarity and distinctness.

Solution #5: Janet Broughton, 2002 Janet Broughton (2002), argues that Descartes’ method of doubt in the early stages of the Meditations (i.e., before God is proved to be nondeceptive) provides grounds for treating some, but not all, clearly and distinctly perceived ideas as certainly true. 24 Among these especially certain truths are “I exist,” “Something cannot come from nothing,” and the other important premises for establishing God’s existence and benevolence in Meditation Three. So on Broughton’s reading, like many

22. Cf. Lex Newman and Alan Nelson, “Circumventing Cartesian Circles,” Noûs 33, no. 3 (1999): 370–404. 23. Ibid., 386. 24. Janet Broughton, Descartes’s Method of Doubt (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 181–82.

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others, the proof of God’s existence comes first (in the Third Meditation), and it comes on the basis of perceptions that are clear and distinct. What makes her account distinctive is that those clear and distinct perceptions necessary for proving God’s existence are a special few that can be known with certainty even in the skeptical scenarios. It is on the basis of that proper subset of clear and distinct perceptions, i.e., those we can be especially certain of even in the absence of God, that God’s existence is then established. And it is only once God’s existence has been established that we can then go on from there to prove that all clear and distinct perceptions (and not merely those privileged few) are true. On Broughton’s reading there is no circle because Descartes does not appeal to the universal claim made by the Clarity and Distinctness Principle in the arguments leading up to the proof of God’s existence and benevolence in Meditation Three. He instead merely appeals to those particular certainties necessary for establishing the divine existence.

Solution #6: Michael Della Rocca, 2005 Following Cottingham (1986) and Gewirth (1970), Michael Della Rocca (2005) argues that there is an important difference between a normative certainty and a psychological certainty. 25 We may be psychologically certain of some beliefs held as the result of a compulsion, but nevertheless not know or have reasons for them, i.e., not be normatively certain of them. 26 According to Della Rocca, the normative certainties (like knowledge) entail truth, but the psychological certainties do not. 27 Like the Memory Reading, Della Rocca understands the proof of God’s existence particularly as a retrospective guarantee. But Della

25. Michael Della Rocca, “Descartes, the Cartesian Circle, and Epistemology Without God,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 70, no. 1 (2005): 1–33. See also Alan Gewirth, “The Cartesian Circle Reconsidered,” The Journal of Philosophy 67, no. 19 (1970): 668–85. 26. Della Rocca (like Frankfurt) criticizes interpretations of the compulsion of clear and distinct perceiving as mere psychological compulsion, as opposed to that peculiar normative compulsion of the better reasons. So the difference between Della Rocca’s two notions of certainty here cannot be that one of them isn’t the result of compulsion while the other is, but must instead be that they result from different kinds of compulsion, or (as Della Rocca prefers to put the point) that they result in different kinds of certainty. 27. Della Rocca (2005), 4.

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Rocca understands this as the provision of “retrospective certainty” for the content of the clear and distinct perceptions, a kind of certainty that truths otherwise lack, insofar as they are not being perceived in the moment of clear and distinct perception. Della Rocca explicitly opposes his view to Frankfurt’s, but like Frankfurt he is also critical of the claim that Descartes’ reasoning is circular, on grounds that Descartes’ reliance on the proof of God’s goodness to remove doubt and establish the Clarity and Distinctness Principle does not itself require the Clarity and Distinctness Principle be antecedently justified: it instead merely requires that clarity and distinctness themselves, i.e., the experiences of them, provide us with normative certainties. However, Della Rocca’s interpretation is also quite distinct from earlier normative readings, insofar as it argues that a key to escaping the Circle is Descartes’ doctrine of God’s creation of the eternal truths. Della Rocca points out that the Clarity and Distinctness Principle was meant by Descartes to be a necessary truth. But against the objection that it would not have been in God’s power to make clearly and distinctly perceived ideas be false, insofar as they are necessarily true, Della Rocca also points to Descartes’ somewhat unique doctrine that God created even the eternal truths, and that God could have made them otherwise. 28 On Della Rocca’s account then, Descartes’ reasoning is non-circular because, even though it is true that if the Meditator were merely psychologically certain as he began his epistemological project, then he could not have become normatively certain by means of argument, still it is false that the Meditator possessed mere psychological certainty when he began the First Meditation. On Della Rocca’s reading, clear and distinct perceptions are normatively certain, by necessity, even though they cannot become part of scientia, i.e., be retrospectively certain, until after the Third Meditation. God made it necessarily the case that clearly and distinctly perceived ideas are true (though he could have made it otherwise), even though the Meditator (and presumably the rest of us) cannot be sure of them in those moments they are not being clearly and distinctly perceived, at least not until the completion of Meditation Three.

28. Ibid., 22.

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AMBIGUITIES IN THE CLARITY AND DISTINCTNESS PRINCIPLE And that was only a small selection of the “bewildering variety.” What shall we conclude from their review? It is a bedeviling irony that the Clarity and Distinctness Principle itself was neither. The difficulty in deciphering it can, in part, be chalked up to the heady and treacherous terrain that it occupies: invariably there will be ambiguities in basic concepts like CLARITY, DISTINCTNESS, and TRUTH. But Descartes himself must shoulder some of the responsibility for what he has wrought. At the very least he must be held responsible for any discrepancies to be found within his own formulations of his own famous principle. Upon review and consideration, I now humbly suggest that Descartes himself did not crisply enough distinguish two quite different things: (1) a normative principle meant to govern our belief acquisition, and (2) a descriptive principle meant to account for the general relationship between truth and its feeling. I shall call (1), Descartes’ Judgment Rule. This rule is one of the substantive conclusions of the Fourth Meditation. A classic formulation of it can also be found as the first of the four “rules of logic” proposed in the Discourse on the Method (1637): The first was never to accept anything as true if I did not have evident knowledge of its truth: that is, carefully to avoid precipitate conclusions and preconceptions, and to include nothing more in my judgements than what presented itself to my mind so clearly and so distinctly that I had no occasion to doubt it. (AT VI, 18; CSM I, 120) 29

It should be clear that this is not a “rule of logic” in our modern sense, at least not as taught and learned in “modern” logic classes. It is instead, I would insist (though I think this is also as Descartes himself conceived it), a methodological prescription for the regulation of judg-

29. The older Haldane and Ross translation instead renders the last clause of this passage, “so clearly and distinctly that I could have no occasion to doubt it.” The Philosophical Works of Descartes, Vol. 1. [1911], trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 92, italics added. This is a delicate matter of decoding the grammatical mood. But whether doubt is possible in this instance is significant for the modality attributed to Descartes’ claim. See discussion below.

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ments. 30 The Judgment Rule is supposed to provide us with practical guidance for avoiding errors. As such, it should not be confused for what I have been calling (2) the Clarity and Distinctness Principle, viz. the claim that whatever is perceived clearly and distinctly is true. The latter is not a “rule of logic” either, of course. But neither is it a bit of practical advice. The Clarity and Distinctness Principle is instead a descriptive principle offering a general claim about the relationship between qualities of a subjective experience and those objective facts of the matter helping give rise to it. It is, thereby, I will argue presently, a phenomenological principle. The distinction between the two kinds of principle is straightforward, but Descartes himself conflated them. And this conflation led even the most astute philosophers into similar conflations. To cite one example, consider Bernard Williams. (I choose Williams here only because he is perhaps the most impressive philosopher I can imagine, and even he follows Descartes down this garden path.) 31 Williams claimed that “Descartes repeatedly says that what one should do at the basic level of forcing back Doubt is to give one’s assent to all and only those ideas that one clearly and distinctly understands.” 32 I do not deny that Descartes wrote things of exactly the sort. But I contest this as the best interpretation of Descartes, on grounds that the doctrine of “assent” that it saddles him with rides roughshod over the important difference between the Clarity and Distinctness Principle and the Judgment Rule. A better interpretation of Descartes is simply that he claimed both that (1) whatever is perceived clearly and distinctly is true, and that (2) we should judge to be true only what we perceive clearly and distinctly. 33 30. I do not mean to deny that rules of logic are themselves normative for thought. I only mean to emphasize that not all norms for regulating judgment ought to count as “rules of logic.” For an account of “bridge laws,” see John MacFarlane, “In What Sense (If Any) Is Logic Normative for Thought?” (unpublished talk from the Central Division APA in 2004) http://johnmacfarlane.net/normativity_of_logic.pdf. 31. Frankfurt, to take another ready example, also conflates the Judgment Rule with the Clarity and Distinctness Principle (see, for example, Frankfurt’s Demons, Dreamers, 226–29). 32. Bernard Williams, Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (New York: Penguin, 1978), 182. 33. The problem with Williams’ doctrine of “assent” in this regard becomes clearer once we distinguish both the Judgment Rule and Clarity and Distinctness Principle from what I will call below the “Necessitation Claim.” Contra Williams, Descartes does not claim that we should give our assent to “all and only” what is perceived clearly and distinctly. Descartes claims that we should only, and either that we always do (as a matter of psychological necessity), or that we must (as a matter of rational necessity).

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The attribution of that conjunction of doctrines does not require Williams’ stronger interpretation that we should assent to all and only the ideas that are clearly and distinctly understood. First of all, no suspicious doctrine of “assent” need be involved. We would thereby disarm one of Williams’ principal criticisms, i.e., we need not attribute to Descartes a “theory of assent” that “requires a step which cancels out the notion of assent,” and “founders in this way on the basic certainties.” 34 But second, while the conjunction of the two principles implies that we should believe only what is clearly and distinctly perceived, presumably because it is always true, it does not imply that we should believe what is clearly and distinctly perceived. That (rightly) becomes a quite separate matter. In the vast majority of places Descartes expressed the Clarity and Distinctness Principle he did so with language identical to the language I’ve used above. In the Meditations, one of the first of these is: “everything that we clearly and distinctly understand is true in a way which corresponds exactly to our understanding of it.” (AT VII, 13; CSM II, 9) But we find equivalent language at (AT VII, 15; CSM II, 11), (AT VII, 35; CSM II, 24), (AT VII, 62; CSM II, 43), twice at (AT VII, 65; CSM II, 45), and (AT VII, 80; CSM II, 55). However, there is also at least one passage where Descartes suggested a modally more robust formulation than the one that I have so far been attributing. Compare the passages just cited with the following formulation: Now, however, I have perceived that God exists, and at the same time I have understood that everything else depends on him, and that he is no deceiver; and I have drawn the conclusion that everything which I clearly and distinctly perceive is of necessity true. Accordingly, even if I am no longer attending to the arguments which led me to judge that this is true, as long as I remember that I clearly and distinctly perceived it, there are no counter-arguments which can be adduced to make me doubt it, but on the contrary I have true

34. Williams, Descartes, 183.

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and certain knowledge of it. (AT VII, 70; CSM II, 48, emphasis added) 35

This threatens to open up the proverbial can of worms. Did Descartes mean to claim that whatever is clearly and distinctly perceived is a necessary truth? Is that stray necessario, included in this lone passage, meant to modify the vera near to which it sits? Or did Descartes mean to say that the Clarity and Distinctness Principle itself is a necessary truth? That would be a quite different way of reading the necessario, i.e., instead modifying the dependent clause in which it is embedded. Latin was, of course, famously flexible about where the words go, so the position of a term in the sentence helps us not a jot. But the ablative case of this adjective provides no clue to its referent either. 36 I am, anyway, hesitant to allow the grammar of the sentence final authority for deciding such an important point of modal interpretation (even if I understood that grammar better). But alas, the literature on Descartes’ metaphysics is not helpful for disambiguating this crucial point either, as it includes wide disagreement over whether Descartes thought eternal truths are necessary or contingent. 37 A third possibility, however, is available. We may say that the stray necessario in this passage is genuinely aberrant. Let us consider the possibility that Descartes meant, even here, to articulate his more modally modest version of the Clarity and Distinctness Principle, i.e., the very same principle we find espoused everywhere else. In that case the aberrant necessario in this passage ought to be read as applying neither 35. “Postquam verò percepi Deum esse, quia simul etiam intellexi cætera omnia ab eo pendere, illumque non esse fallacem; atque inde collegi illa omnia, quæ clare & distincte percipio, necessariò esse vera; etiamsi non attendam amplius ad rationes propter quas istud verum esse judicavi, modo tantùm recorder me clare & distincte perspexisse, nulla ratio contraria afferri potest, quæ me ad dubitandum impellat, sed veram & certam de hoc habeo scientiam” (AT VII, 70, emphasis added, replacement of the “long s,” throughout). 36. I have been told that it was not long before this kind of construction evolved into an adverbial one. 37. Della Rocca cites numerous pieces of textual evidence that the necessary truths are so because God wills them to be. See Della Rocca (2005), 22–23. In support he cites JeanMarie Beyssade, La Philosophie Première de Descartes (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), 112. But, then again, he also cites Frankfurt, “Descartes on the Creation of the Eternal Truths,” Philosophical Review 86, no. 1 (1977), 42, and Alvin Plantinga, Does God Have a Nature? (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1980), 113, as taking the view that even the eternal truths are contingent. Clearly Descartes held, in opposition to Suárez, that the eternal truths depend upon God, i.e., there would be no eternal truths if God did not exist. See T. J. Cronin, “Eternal Truths in the Thought of Descartes and of His Adversary,” Journal of the History of Ideas 21, no. 4 (1960): 553–59. But does that make them necessary or contingent?

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to the principle itself nor to the truths the principle concerns, but instead in reference to the way that clear and distinct perceptions compel our believing, i.e., so long as we are perceiving clearly and distinctly. This third interpretive possibility is plausible given the proximity of the passage to Descartes’ discussion of that very issue, 38 and it is my favored one here, for some reasons that I will now invite you to share. A central tenet of Cartesian epistemology is its doxastic voluntarism. Judgment, according to Descartes, characteristically and theologically, is a matter of willing. The solution to the problem of error that Descartes provided in the Fourth Meditation is a solution and problem that famously take the character of an epistemic theodicy, and hinges upon our (voluntarily) restricting judgments to what we clearly and distinctly perceive. It famously implies freedom to choose to do so, or not, with all of its incumbent rewards and responsibilities. According to Descartes, canonically, errors may be avoided simply by abstaining from judgment in cases where perceptions are not clear and distinct. But Descartes’ general doxastic voluntarism is, rather ironically, complicated in exactly those cases where beliefs are formed as a direct result of clear and distinct perceiving. In those cases it is considerably more questionable whether Descartes was voluntarist or not, because in regards to them he frequently claimed that clear and distinct perceiving, so long as it lasts, makes believing compulsory. Compare the passage just cited with the famous passage about the “great light:” I have realized that from the very fact of my raising this question it follows quite evidently that I exist. I could not but judge that something which I understood so clearly was true; but this was not because I was compelled so to judge by any external force, but because a great light in the intellect was followed by a great inclination in the will, and thus the spontaneity and freedom of my belief was all the greater in proportion to my lack of indifference. (AT VII, 58–59; CSM II, 41, emphasis added)

38. This is Sarkar’s reading of the passage. See Husain Sarkar, Descartes’ Cogito: Saved from the Great Shipwreck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 92. It is plausible because immediately prior to the passage Descartes wrote: “Admittedly my nature is such that so long as I perceive something very clearly and distinctly I cannot but believe it to be true.” (AT VII, 69; CSM II, 48, emphasis added). Sarkar concludes that the “necessity” in question is therefore a reference to Descartes’ “nature” or “essence” (Sarkar, Descartes’ Cogito, 92), rather than to a truth or to the Clarity and Distinctness Principle itself.

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Descartes is not denying that there is compulsion in this case. He is insisting that there is compulsion, but pointing out that it is not a compulsion by any “external force,” and hence that it is not a compulsion in conflict with the “spontaneity and freedom of my belief.” My argument here does not concern the complicated Cartesian concepts FREEDOM and INDIFFERENCE, or any kind of fancy doxastic compatibilism. 39 Thankfully, it is not my job presently to try to explain to you how they might be made consistent with the peculiar sort of compulsion Descartes had in mind. 40 All that I mean to have shown, thus far, is that beliefs formed on the basis of clear and distinct perceptions were treated by Descartes as quite unlike those formed on the basis of perceptions lacking clarity and distinctness. In particular, Descartes claimed that we necessarily believe when our perceptions are clear and distinct, 41 but that we do not necessarily believe what is perceived only unclearly. Except in that one case quoted above (i.e., AT VII, 70; CSM II, 48), Descartes reserves the language of necessity for those judgments formed on the basis of clearly and distinctly perceived ideas, as opposed to the truths associated with them. On that basis I suggest now that whatever sense of ‘necessity’ we find in the “great light” passage, it is that very same necessity that should be attributed to the sole, aberrant formulation of the Clarity and Distinctness Principle at (AT VII, 70; CSM II, 48).

39. See Michelle Beyssade, “Descartes’s Doctrine of Freedom: Differences between the French and Latin Texts of the Fourth Meditation,” in Reason, Will, and Sensation: Studies in Descartes’s Metaphysics, ed. John Cottingham (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 191–206. 40. What the “great light” passage implies for Descartes’ doctrines about the freedom of the will has, of course, been taken up by many others. For accounts sensitive to the historical and theological context of Descartes’ view (and for argument that Descartes sided with Jansenists against Jesuits) see Thomas M. Lennon, “The Fourth Meditation: Descartes’ theodicy avant la lettre,” in The Cambridge Companion to Descartes’ Meditations, ed. David Cunning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 168–85, and Cecilia Wee, “The Fourth Meditation: Descartes and libertarian freedom,” in that same volume, 186–204. These papers on Descartes’ account of freedom face the difficulty of reconciling the “great light” passage with a letter that Descartes wrote to Mesland (probably) dated the 9th of February 1645, in which he explained that it is “always open to us to hold back from pursuing a clearly known good, or from admitting a clearly perceived truth, provided we consider it a good thing to demonstrate the freedom of our will by so doing” (AT IV, 173; CSMK III, 245). Compare that claim with any of the compulsion passages cited in the next note and you’ll see what I mean by saying Descartes’ otherwise voluntarist view is “complicated” by cases of belief based on clear and distinct perception. Other significant work on this topic has been done by Vere Chappell, “Descartes’s Compatibilism,” in Reason, Will and Sensation: Studies in Descartes’s Metaphysics, ed. John Cottingham (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 177–90. 41. In addition to the one quoted above, other passages expressing this necessitation claim are (AT VII, 68; CSM II, 47), (AT VII, 65; CSM II, 45), and (AT VII, 69; CSM II, 48).

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DESCARTES’ NECESSITATION CLAIM What kind of necessitation did Descartes have in mind here, i.e., particularly when he claimed that we necessarily believe on the basis of clear and distinct perceptions? At the risk of multiplying principles, I shall call Descartes’ claim that we must believe on the basis of a clear and distinct perception his “Necessitation Claim.” 42 The Necessitation Claim is simply Descartes’ frequent asseveration that clear and distinct perceptions compel believing, or as others have put the point, slightly less cautiously, “compel assent.” In our survey of the recent literature we found lots of agreement. The smart money now has it that Descartes did not, at first, attempt to establish the truth of the Clarity and Distinctness Principle (as argued by Frankfurt), at least not as applied to all clear and distinct perceptions (as emphasized by Broughton), and at least not prior to the end of the Third Meditation (if not prior to the end of the Fourth Meditation, as argued by Newman.) Though the Memory Reading came in for several rounds of criticism, there is now some consensus that an important function of the Fourth Meditation argument is securing “retrospective certainty” (as argued by Della Rocca), i.e., a kind of certainty not possessed by the non-skeptical arguments prior to the point at which the Clarity and Distinctness Principle is finally derived. That “retrospective certainty” is unavailable to the atheist, according to Descartes, but required for the organized and systematic body of knowledge he called scientia. There remain, however, also significant divisions in our best collective understanding of the Meditations’ arguments. I will highlight one of them now, not to stir up trouble in the genteel circles of Descartes scholarship, but only because explaining that division is one of the principal virtues of my own analysis of CLARITY below. A sentimentalist reading can account, not only for the conceptual foundations of Descartes’ Clarity and Distinctness Principle, but also for why it has been interpreted in disparate fashion by so many astute readers. Two quite different types of reading are currently favored. One way of interpreting Descartes’ Necessitation Claim is that it is wholly 42. It may have been A. K. Stout, “The Basis of Knowledge in Descartes,” Mind 38, no. 151 (1929): 332, who first discussed this Necessitation Claim. It has long remained muddled, unfortunately, with the Clarity and Distinctness Principle.

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psychological. On this account we must, as a matter of some natural mechanism, believe whatever we are perceiving clearly and distinctly. Louis Loeb provides explicit defense of this type of account. 43 It is an account that fits nicely with our contemporary reliabilist epistemologies. On Loeb’s reading, Descartes is describing a natural necessity when he accounts for the necessitation of belief on the basis of clearly and distinctly perceived ideas. But another way of reading the Necessitation Claim is as normative. We must, but only on pain of irrationality, believe what we perceive clearly and distinctly. In some broader sense of possibility we might not. But in this normative sense of ‘must’ believing is “necessary” once we remove all rational grounds for doubting. We ought to believe what we clearly and distinctly perceive, simply because there is no good reason for doubting it. Whereas the psychological reading treats Descartes as describing a natural relation between believing and clear and distinct perceiving, an epistemic reading instead treats the “must” as an epistemic norm relevant for the strength of warrant or justification that clear and distinct perceptions provide judgments. 44 This latter type of interpretation has been defended by a variety of commentators, but most recently and explicitly by Della Rocca. 45 Which of the two types of interpretation is correct? Before hazarding your answer, I encourage you to observe the distinction between the Clarity and Distinctness Principle and the Judgment Rule. (To refresh your memory, the first claims that whatever is perceived clearly and distinctly is true. The latter counsels to judge (as true) only what we perceive clearly and distinctly.) It is important to notice that neither is what is presently under discussion. The present question is whether Descartes thought: (A) whatever is perceived clearly and distinctly must be [by psychological necessitation] believed, or (B) Whatever is per-

43. Wickes identifies its origin in the natural light and our faculty of volition, as opposed to the inellect. See Wickes, “Descartes’ Denial,” 120–28. 44. ‘Warrant’ and ‘justification’ are frequently distinguished from one another (by philosophers), but also frequently treated as synonyms (by other people, including philosophers.) I am not distinguishing them here. 45. Another example is Curley, Descartes Against the Skeptics, 119–23. See also Edwin M. Curley, “The Cogito and the Foundations of Knowledge,” in The Blackwell Guide to Descartes’ Meditations, ed. Stephen Gaukroger (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 41–42. I read Curley in this camp because he treats not merely propositions, but also arguments as “assentcompelling.” Compare Loeb, “The Cartesian Circle,” 226–27, no. 7, who explicitly denies this is a good reason to treat the necessitation as normative.

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ceived clearly and distinctly must be [by epistemic, i.e., normative necessitation] believed. Before choosing either (A) or (B) as your own favored interpretation of the Necessitation Claim, you might also consider two weaker alternatives. Instead of taking Descartes’ rather aggressive stance here, some philosopher might instead prefer to stake the less risky empirical claim (C) that whatever is perceived clearly and distinctly might be believed, where “might be” means simply that it is psychologically possible for a subject to believe on that basis. Or, some philosopher might stake the less risky epistemic claim (D) that whatever is perceived clearly and distinctly may be believed, where “may be” means that it is epistemically permissible to believe given the degree of warrant (or justification) afforded by clarity and distinctness. Now (C) is a logical consequence of (A), I think. So if you are going to interpret the Necessitation Claim as (A) then you are probably also attributing (C) to Descartes. Somewhat more controversially, (D) follows from (B), at least according to the traditional definitional schema undergirding Standard Deontic Logic, i.e., insofar as obligatory acts are defined as those permissible acts that are also non-omissible. 46 But either of the two weaker claims are open, independently of the stronger ones. Descartes himself wanted one of the two stronger claims, i.e., either (A) or (B). That much is clear. The passages cited above make it obvious that, in cases of clear and distinct perception, he thought that belief is necessitated and not merely possible or permissible. I point out the two weaker alternatives merely to indicate the possible relations, between even Descartes’ own doxastic sentiment and the belief/judgment made on its basis, not to mention the various possible ways of thinking about the relata of those various relations. A weaker claim might well be more palatable to those of us unwilling to bite off quite so much as Descartes meant to chew. My take-home message here is this: the normative necessity of the Necessitation Claim, were one to choose (B), must not be confused for the normative force of the Judgment Rule. The Judgment Rule is a practical principle, perhaps even a prudential one. It tells us that we ought-not believe in cases where we are not perceiving clearly and distinctly. Why not? In order to avoid errors! But that “ought not” must

46. See G. H. von Wright, “Deontic Logic,” Mind 60, no. 237 (1951): 4.

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not be allowed to bleed into our understanding of the force of Descartes’ claim that we must believe in cases where we are perceiving clearly and distinctly. The normativity of that latter claim is quite different I think (presuming, for the moment that it is not merely the witnessed regularity of a psychological law). Above I called it “epistemic normativity,” but I do not take myself to have characterized it adequately here, so much as simply identified it, and distinguished it from the “ought” of the Judgment Rule. Why does this matter? My revelation below will be that both of these two plausible interpretations of Descartes’ Necessitation Claim are correct, and that the dichotomy between them in the literature is not an artifact of varying reading agenda, cognitive biases, or outright mistakes by one or the other group of commentators. It exists instead because there is a basic duality in Descartes’ own understanding of clarity, one that produced his Necessitation Claim with both the psychological and normative valences. 47 If not an outright ambiguity, it is this “duality” that allowed Descartes (perhaps illicitly) his two distinct (if not entirely distinguished) claims, viz. that we ought only to believe on the basis of clear and distinct perceptions, and that we must.

AMBIGUITIES IN CLARITY ITSELF Which mode of thought, precisely, did Descartes believe could either be clear and distinct, or not? What kind of a thing is it, within Descartes’ mental theory, that could be characterized by “clarity and distinctness?” (Or to put this question in another equally awkward way, what is it that is “clear and distinct”-able, or “clear and distinct” -apt?) There are two possible candidates: Either it is Cartesian ideas that were meant to be capable of being clear and distinct, or it is Cartesian perceptions that were so capable. The interpretive dilemma for deciding which of these Descartes meant to be the principal “bearer” of clarity 47. Della Rocca flirts with the interpretation that I think is correct here when he claims: “All of these passages support the view that Descartes draws no sharp distinction between psychological and normative certainty and, in particular, that Descartes takes his claims that he is compelled to assent to particular ideas as more than mere claims about his psychology” Della Rocca (2005), 11. That is exactly what I am hoping to explain below! Unfortunately, Della Rocca also argued “that Descartes’ discussion of compelled assent may concern only normatively compelled assent” (2005, 8, emphasis added). Upon that “only” would I dare dispute Della Rocca.

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and distinctness arises because he applied those modifiers clare and distincte to those nouns idea and perception with general equanimity. Following his original lead, many commentators have treated clarity and distinctness as qualities of perceptions, and many others have treated them as attributes of ideas. Many others have treated them as both. 48 The problem of sorting those two types of interpretation from one another is compounded by the fact that either usage could be treated as shorthand for the other. I.e., Descartes’ writing about “clear and distinct ideas” could simply be shorthand for his reference to an idea that is perceived clearly and distinctly. But just as well his phrase “clear and distinct perception” could easily have been shorthand for reference to a perception of an idea that is clear and distinct. For this reason merely citing individual passages, wherein he used the one construction or other, cannot settle the question about the particular mode of thinking clarity and distinctness was meant to primarily characterize. Presuming, of course, it was meant to primarily characterize either the one or the other. Thankfully there is no problem, so far as I can tell, in interpreting Descartes as claiming that clarity and distinctness are sometimes attributes of ideas. It is just fine to talk about “clear and distinct ideas,” in the Cartesian sense. However, it cannot be the case that he treated clarity and distinctness only as attributes of ideas. This cannot be correct because of passages like the one at Principles of Philosophy, Pt. I, 50, i.e., (AT VIIIA, 24; CSM I, 209), wherein Descartes argued that the eternal truths (which were often, if somewhat problematically, called “common notions”) are not perceived clearly by everyone. It is possible for some, i.e., those freed from “preconceived onions,” to perceive clearly those very same eternal truths that others do not (and perhaps cannot) perceive clearly. And if that is so, then we must conclude that clarity and distinctness were meant by Descartes, at least in those particular cases, as qualities of the perceptions of the people, rather than as attributes attaching exclusively to the ideas or the truths being perceived. Either that, or the eternal truths when perceived by one person are not identical to those same eternal truths when perceived by someone else, a 48. Some examples: Bernard Williams treated them as attributes of ideas, arguing from this claim to the conclusion that what we “assent” to are ideas. See Williams, Descartes, 182. Cottingham reads them as both. See Cottingham, Descartes, 67–69. Curley, both perceptions (Curley, Descartes Against the Skeptics, 101), and ideas (Curley, Descartes Against the Skeptics, 113). Frankfurt both (Frankfurt, Demons, Dreamers, 180–82).

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consequence considerably more disastrous, and one that Descartes explicitly denied. I do not think passages like the one at (AT VIIIA, 24; CSM I, 209) establish that Descartes treated clarity and distinctness only as qualities of perception. I am arguing instead that passages like it are inconsistent with the interpretation of Descartes as treating clarity and distinctness only as attributes of ideas. But that does not exclude the possibility that Descartes treated clarity and distinctness as both qualities of perception and attributes of ideas. 49 So my conclusion on this point will remain modest and follow the majority in the literature: it is merely that he treated them at least as qualities of perception, and perhaps also as both. If that move is correct, then I will have cleared enough space to ask this follow-up question: what did Descartes think it was about those qualities of perception that necessitates believing (in either of the two plausible readings of the Necessity Claim marked out above)? And finally, here, the rubber meets the road. I call a perception ‘clear’ when it is present and accessible to the attentive mind – just as we say that we see something clearly when it is present to the eye’s gaze and stimulates it with a sufficient degree of strength and accessibility. I call a perception ‘distinct’ if, as well as being clear, it is so sharply separated from all other perceptions that it contains within itself only what is clear. (AT VIIIA, 22; CSM I, 207–8)

These definitions from the Principles have frequently been cited, but their citation is often followed by nothing but bitter complaining that Descartes thereby leaves the whole matter vague. Less frequently, but more helpfully, it is noted that these definitions entail that all distinct perceptions are clear, but that not all clear perceptions are distinct, i.e., DISTINCTNESS stands to CLARITY as a subordinate category to a superordinate one. But only a very few, thus far, have attempted to explain why, on the basis of Descartes’ definitions in this passage, that the particular logical relationship between CLARITY and DISTINCTNESS

49. I am attempting to follow Descartes’ own notions of “attribute” and “quality.” See (AT VIIIA, 26; CSM I, 211–13).

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holds. 50 One advantage of the phenomenological analysis that I am about to undertake, in order to fill this explanatory gap, is that it not only accounts for the fact that Descartes defined CLARITY as a determinable and DISTINCTNESS as its determinate, but can also explain why that would be so, given Descartes’ peculiar definition of clarity. I judge this analysis to be superior to its rivals, in part because it is able to explain something they leave mysterious. An object of perception φ is claimed by Descartes to have been perceived clearly, if and only if φ is “present and accessible” by means of a perceptual experience. This claim has several important consequences. 51 One feature of Descartes’ definition, as I’ve just reformulated it, is that it leaves indeterminate the ontology of what instantiates φ. Famously, Descartes claimed that the immediate objects of our perceptions are ideas. But the definition as stated leaves open the question whether only ideas are perceived (hence all values of φ are ideas) or whether we may additionally (perhaps in some looser sense) also perceive bodies. 52 Some people, and I am now looking at Frankfurt, have even argued that the objects of all Cartesian perceptions are proposi-

50. Here Frankfurt is the important exception. For an equally detailed, albeit quite incorrect, analysis see Frankfurt, Demons, Dreamers, 175–99. Frankfurt went so far as to conclude: “The criteria of clarity and distinctness themselves have nothing essentially to do with any state of consciousness” (Frankfurt, Demons, Dreamers, 208). Preposterous! My analysis here forces us to almost exactly the opposite conclusion. Another important exception on this point is Steven Nadler, “The Doctrine of Ideas,” in The Blackwell Guide to Descartes’ Meditations, ed. Stephen Gaukroger (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 98–99. 51. My analysis here is indebted to Kasimir Twardowski. Idee und Perception: Eine erkenntnis-theoretische Untersuchung aus Descartes. (Wien: Verlag von Carl Konegen, 1892). However, there are at least two respects in which I cannot follow Twardowski. First, somewhat more narrowly, Twardowski interprets Descartes’ definition of clarity as including “vivacity.” (In Twardowski’s case this was “Lebhaftigkeit.” Twardowski, Idee und Perception, 20.) But I do not find any hint of that in Descartes’ definition. I find only Aufmerksamkeit and Offenheit. Second, and somewhat more broadly, I cannot follow Twardowski in his treatment of perceptions as judgments (Twardowski, Idee und Perception, 14–18), because that does not sufficiently respect (on my own analysis) the important distinction between the Clarity and Distinctness Principle and the Judgment Rule. Twardowski’s interpretation of clarity as vivacity has been echoed more recently by Nadler, who writes: “the clarity of an idea is a matter of its vivacity,” and that a distinct idea is one that is “semantically discrete,” and “leaves no room for doubting what does and does not belong to it.” Nadler, “The Doctrine of Ideas,” 98. 52. For argument that Descartes was, through his debt to Aquinas, actually a direct realist, see Steven Nadler, Arnauld and the Cartesian Philosophy of Ideas. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989). For discussion see Paul Hoffman, “Direct Realism, Intentionality, and the Objective Being of Ideas,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 83, no. 2 (2002): 163–79.

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tions. 53 An important phenomenological insight is that the question of whether φ can be perceived clearly and distinctly, and what that would mean, can be treated independently of the question about what Descartes meant the possible objects of perception to be, even, and particularly, their ontology. So let us leave open, for purposes of this analysis, 54 the question whether φ is instantiated by an idea, or a body, or even a proposition or a concept. An important feature of the definition is that it has both a subjective/ phenomenal component, and an objective/relational one. On the side of the former, φ must be “present and accessible” in the sense that it is an object of consciousness or attention, i.e., it must be “present” in the phenomenal sense that it is currently perceived by someone. It is crucial to understand that not everything in one’s immediate perceptual environment is “present” in this quite particular way. The eyeglasses on my face right now, for example, almost completely occupy my visual field (I happen to be wearing them in the traditional manner) but still fail to be “present” in this phenomenal sense. Insofar as eyeglasses are working correctly, i.e., presuming that they are not smudged or otherwise distracting, they simply aren’t attended to by the wearer. They are, of course, designed to be not-attended-to-by-the-wearer. There is at least one sense of ‘perceived’ on which an object of perception is not “present and accessible,” until the elusive moment when attention is first directed toward it. On my reading of this passage, Descartes believed that clear perceptions require not only consciousness, but focally attentive consciousness. I shall call this clarity’s phenomenal condition. A seemingly trivial but far-reaching consequence of the phenomenal condition is that for φ to be perceived clearly it must be perceived. On this account of consciousness or attention there is no such thing as someone attending to something when that someone is not also perceiving it. Another way to put this definitional point is simply to say that clarity is a quality of perception. That is why there is no such thing as clearly perceiving φ without thereby perceiving φ. 55 One could addi53. Or concepts. But Frankfurt argues these latter reduce to perceptions of propositions, viz. that the perceived concept contains what it is perceived as containing. See Frankfurt, Demons, Dreamers, 175–79. 54. It might be noted, hereby, that this is a particularly Husserlian phenomenological analysis. 55. Or, were the object of perception propositional: There is no clearly perceiving that φ without perceiving that φ.

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tionally put the point by saying that all perceptions are divided into two great classes, those that have the quality of clarity, and those that do not. Now let’s look at the side of the definition that was meant to be objective and relational. On that side, according to Descartes, φ must actually be “present and accessible” in order for φ to be perceived clearly. “Present and accessible” in this sense means to be part of a real state of affairs including the perception. I am not confident enough of Descartes’ meaning here to say that he thought that φ must, strictly, be a cause of its own perception. Others have rejected such an interpretation. 56 For my analysis here I am content with the more modest claim that φ has some objective relation or other to the act of clear perceiving. 57 Maybe φ causes the clear perception. Maybe the clear perception depends upon φ (in Descartes’ own ontological sense of “depends”). But whatever that objective relation, Descartes thought that φ being perceived clearly means more than the mere characterization of some particular person’s subjective state. We know this to be the case because, famously, Descartes drew robust ontological conclusions from the existence of clear perceptions (conclusions like “I exist,” or “God exists.”) The requirement that φ has an objective relation to any clear perception of it, I shall call clarity’s veracity condition. On the analysis I am now offering these are two importantly interrelated, if heterogeneous, dimensions of Descartes’ definition of clarity. His analogy with seeing should guide us. Just as there is a sense of ‘seeing’ in which we are hesitant to say that someone “sees” in those cases where he or she is not attending to what he or she sees, Descartes believed clear perceptions require conscious attention to what is clearly perceived. 58 And just as there is a sense of ‘seeing’ in which we are 56. Margaret Wilson, “Descartes on the Representationality of Sensation,” in Central Themes in Early Modern Philosophy: Essays Presented to Jonathan Bennett, eds. J. A. Cover and Mark Kulstad (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1990), 1–22, especially 11. For discussion of the problems that “pure referentialist” accounts of Cartesian ideas face, and their background in late Scholasticism, see also Calvin Normore, “Meaning and Objective Being: Descartes and His Sources,” in Essays on Descartes’ Meditations, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 223–41. 57. Or, to put the point in its historical context, that it be a relationes reales rather than a mere relationes rationis. 58. So far as I can tell, this crucial interpretive observation is neglected by almost everyone except Vere Chappell, “The Theory of Ideas,” in Essays on Descartes’ Meditations, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 177–98, particularly 184.

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hesitant to say that someone “sees” something in those cases where that something is not actually present (these are the uses of ‘see’ that treat it as a success verb), Descartes believed clear perceptions require the actual presence of what is clearly perceived. I do not mean to suggest that taken together, the phenomenal condition and the veracity condition are jointly sufficient for clarity. They are not. There is more to feeling certain, even on Descartes’ account, than mere attention and true judgment. But on the analysis that I have offered here, each is necessary in order to capture Descartes’ meaning of ‘clarity.’ It is insufficiently emphasized, even in the otherwise voluminous and bewildering literature, that Descartes’ definition of clarity thereby has truth baked into it. All clear perceptions are true, by dint of their definition. And to be distinct they must not only be perceptions of things actually “present and accessible,” but also among the proper subset of the clear perceptions that are perceptions only of what is actually “present and accessible.” So all distinct perceptions are true too, again by dint of their very definition. But ask yourself now: how could that subset of distinct perceptions be selected? I suggest that it could only be selected by appeal to something like the attention required by the phenomenal condition. That is the case because, depending on how we individuate them, there are indefinitely many antecedent causes for any single perception. There are an innumerable variety of eternal truths upon which perception might be said to depend. Any objective state of affairs, including whichever one(s) the clear perception must appeal to for its/their veracity condition, is always going to be substantially more than the narrow sliver of the world toward which an individual attention is tenuously attuned, at some fleeting moment of time. To determine whether a perception at that moment perceives only what is clear, i.e., perceives distinctly, Descartes must have appealed to some criterion significantly narrower than the veracity condition alone. Descartes thought that this narrowing was accomplished, I propose, by the attention already required by the phenomenal condition. Distinct perceptions may be explained as a narrower determination of clear perceptions, but only if clarity possesses the phenomenal condition. Without the phenomenal condition it becomes a mystery why some clear perceptions are distinct, but others are not.

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It is a consequence of Descartes definition of ‘clarity,’ i.e., as having both these phenomenal and veracity conditions, that the Clarity and Distinctness Principle is strictly speaking pleonastic. The proof of the principle (over which, I parenthetically remark, there has been considerable fuss) proceeds in the Fourth Meditation in much the way that Descartes demonstrated the three-sidedness of the triangle, or the impossibility of the “I think” that does not exist while someone is thinking it, or the impossibility of “God” (appropriately defined) not existing. It was not, on Descartes’ account, an empirical principle.

PAINFULLY CLEAR FEELINGS Before drawing my final conclusions I would like to consider one last telling example, an example used by Descartes to illustrate the difference between clarity and distinctness. I have already argued that clarity (and thereby distinctness) is at least, on Descartes’ account, a quality of perception. I would now like to try to convince you that it is not just any old quality, but also a full-blown feeling. That word ‘feeling,’ in the sense to which I appeal to it in this book, is admittedly somewhat more broad than Descartes’ own term affectus. 59 So this final argument must mark out the broader sense. I will try to do that with some of Descartes’ own definitions, and by appeal to his own telling example of perceptions that are clear but indistinct. I do this to try to persuade you that I am not so perversely bending his claims out of their native shape as it might at first appear, when I call him a “doxastic sentimentalist.” The interpretation of clarity offered here will make Descartes more than a sentimentalist of the weakest sort, insofar as clarity is always about believing, but not quite a sentimentalist of the “Even More Modest” sort, insofar as clarity isn’t necessary for belief. Descartes’ one example of a perception that is clear but indistinct is the perception of pain. And what could be more clear to you than whether you are, or (hopefully) are not, currently experiencing a pain? Nevertheless, on Descartes’ account pains are perceived indistinctly, insofar as perceptions of them can include, in addition to the clear 59. Though Descartes did use ‘affectus’ to refer to what we now commonly call “emotions,” see, e.g., (AT VIIIA, 316–18; CSM I, 280–81), where he treats some of them as a kind of internal sensation.

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perception of the pain itself, also a judgment about the pain’s causes or locations. Those accompanying judgments can prove erroneous, on Descartes’ account. The example of pain in a phantom limb, famously, was Descartes’ own. 60 And on that account, even if the perceptions of pains in the phantom limb are clear, there is no guarantee that they contain only what is clear. This is a result of Descartes’ doctrine that sensory perceptions are “confused,” insofar as they result from the mind’s union with the body. Whatever the merits or faults of the example, it is a nice one for illustrating what Descartes thought it was like to feel something clearly: it is like the clarity of a felt pain. The example is also useful for testing the depth of readers’ understanding of Descartes’ philosophy: it puts to bed the misapprehension that Descartes meant to claim that only nonsensory knowledge can be perceived clearly. The example is also useful for making us skeptical of, if it does not outright refute, certain prominent misinterpretations of clarity that have gone around in the literature. Above I cited Frankfurt as chief amongst those who argue that the objects of Cartesian perceptions are propositions. 61 But pain is no proposition. It was treated by Descartes as a sensation. 62 And pain was used by Descartes as the paradigmatic example of something perceived clearly but indistinctly. So, despite Frankfurt’s fine argumentation, the objects of clear perceptions were not exclusively propositional, at least not according to Descartes. More generally, any interpretation that attempts to reduce the clearly perceived to a propositional content will be similarly skewered by this example. Notice also how Descartes’ example fits neatly with the analysis I’ve provided above. Pains are perceived clearly in the sense that they are “present and accessible” to an even moderately attentive experience. Indeed, one of the troubling things about pains is that they commandeer attention. And if anything compels belief it is pain. Characteristically, you are certain when you are experiencing it. All of which is to say: 60. It arises in a variety of places. A nearby one is (AT VIIIA, 319–20; CSM I, 283–84). 61. Wickes does not go so far as Frankfurt in claiming that the clearly and distinctly perceived in all cases is propositional. But I think Descartes’ example presents a serious challenge even for a reading like Wickes’, which claims that “to have perceived something clearly and distinctly is to have subjected an idea to a full and successful logical analysis” (Wickes, “Descartes’s Denial,” 122). But perceiving a pain requires zero logical analysis. It merely requires having the sensation, i.e., having a feeling of the particular quality. 62. Consistently attested in a variety of passages, but a particularly clear one at Principles of Philosophy, Pt. I, 48 (AT VIIIA, 23; CSM I, 209).

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pain meets the phenomenal condition. But even if there could be such a thing as an unfelt pain, e.g., a pain that was somehow not the object of someone’s attention, there could in that case be no clear perception of it, on Descartes’ definition of clarity. And that is to say: clear perceptions require the phenomenal condition. So any non-phenomenological analysis of clarity (and hence distinctness) will founder on this example as well. To be clear myself, I am not claiming that because Descartes used pain as his sole example of something perceived clearly but indistinctly, and because pain is a “feeling,” that therefore he must have treated the clarity of that perception of pain as a feeling. That would be a bridge too far, and it has not been my argument. My argument has merely been that clarity is a quality of perception, and that it requires the phenomenal condition and veracity condition. It is true that if anything turns out to have a “feeling,” then pain has a feeling. But it would, of course, be quite possible that the clarity of a perception with a felt quality would not itself be a feeling. As I noted above, Descartes treated pain as a sensation. So, in my final bit of defense of my own terminological choices, I will now point out that on Descartes’ account sensations have “feelings,” even if not all “feelings” characterize sensations. By “feeling,” I myself simply mean a qualitative character of a perception, i.e., its affect, whether that perception is sensory or not. I prefer to leave the sense broad, but broad in that particular way. The reason is because, on such a definition, warm, tickle, and pepperminty will all count as feelings. But on such a definition sobering, surprising, and uneasy will count as feelings too. And that is as it should be, I think. I am not claiming that Descartes treated clarity (and hence distinctness) as exclusively sensory. That was definitely not the case. But that is because, on Descartes’ account, not all perceptions are sensory.

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For purposes of this chapter, when I have used the word ‘perception’ I have meant to follow Descartes’ own usage of that term. 63 I take it as a relatively uncontroversial point that Descartes treated all perceptions as passions, including the passion that is the “activity” of the understanding when caused either by something other than itself, or even by itself. 64 On Descartes’ account perceptions are either pure understandings, imaginations, or sensations. 65 And those three great categories of perception can be divided according to whether they are caused by the mind or caused by the mind’s union with a body. Perceptions caused by the mind alone are the pure understandings. Perceptions caused through union with the body are called the sensations. (And the imagination is a “mixed” case because, while it is initially caused by the mind, one of its effects is to trigger bodily responses in the nerves that are themselves then the causes of attendant emotions in the soul.) The sensations are divided by Descartes corresponding to the different regions of the body into which the nerves producing them extend, i.e., into internal senses and external senses. The internal senses then divide into natural appetites of hunger and thirst (and presumably other appetites Descartes decorously left out of account, i.e., those associated with the “stomach, oesophagus, throat,” and the “other internal parts whose function is to keep our natural wants supplied.”) Another group of internal senses come from nerves connected with the heart and the chest and get called emotions: “joy, sorrow, love, hate and so on.” The external senses then divide into the five traditional sense modalities associated with the five traditional sensory systems. 66

63. From the letter to Regius, December 1641: “Those who think perception should be called an action are apparently taking the term ‘action’ to mean any real power, and the term ‘passion’ to mean the mere negation of a power; for since they think perception is an action, they would no doubt say that the reception of motion in a hard body, or the power whereby it receives the motions of other bodies, is an action. Yet it is incorrect to say this, since the ‘passion’ correlative to this action would exist in the body imparting the mtoion while the ‘action’ would be in the body that is moved” (AT III, 455; CSMK III, 199). I follow Shouls in reading this, and the letter to Regius of May 1641 (AT III, 372; CSMK III, 182), as implying that the only mental actions, strictly speaking, are those of rational willing. Peter Shouls, “Human Nature, Reason, and Will in the Argument of Descartes’s Meditations,” in Reason, Will, and Sesnation: Studies in Descartes’s Metaphyscis, ed. John Cottingham (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 160. 64. The scare quotes are here because on Descartes’ account it is, of course, a passion rather than an action. 65. See (AT VIIIA, 17; CSM I, 204). Cf. (AT XI, 343–51; CSM I, 335–40). 66. This paragraph is a synopsis of Descartes’ claims about sensation in Principles, Pt. IV (AT VIIIA, 315–19; CSM I, 279–83). Cf. Chappell, “Descartes’ Compatibilism,” 177.

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Descartes’ example of the clear but indistinct perception of pain demonstrates that he thought that clarity applied not only to perceptions caused by the mind, e.g., the perception of the idea of triangularity, but also to sensations. So Descartes thought clarity (and hence distinctness) were qualities of perception irrespective of their mental or bodily causes. But Descartes also thought they were qualities of perception applying to the mind exclusively in its passive capacity, i.e., he never associated the term ‘clear’ (so far as I know) with volitions. So, in conclusion, if someone were able to produce for me a word in English, classifying a distinctive quality of perception sufficiently broadly to capture both bodily and non-bodily perceptual states, but that was also particularly reserved for affective (i.e., passive) states as opposed to active ones, and if that word were something other than the word ‘feeling,’ I would happily embrace it, and I would thank that person profusely, and I would concede my complete ignorance of that word hitherto. But until such time, I must continue to use ‘feelings.’

RESIDUAL CIRCULARITY: THE PROBLEM OF THE CRITERION I have belabored several of these interpretive points because, while they are simple and should be relatively uncontroversial in their own right, they have far-reaching, deeply problematic, and generally underappreciated consequences. One deep consequence is that on Descartes’ account there is no such thing as a false judgment that is also clear. There are merely false judgments that seem to be clear. What this means is that Descartes’ sentimentalism, even on my interpretation, cannot be so strong as Even More Modest Doxastic Sentimentalism, as presented above. The reason is because, despite positing clarity as a feeling characteristic of believing (as I have argued), Descartes believed that this feeling characterizes only true judgments and not the false ones. Descartes’ sentimentalism was not of the weakest variety, because it still treats clarity as characteristic of belief, but it lies somewhere between the weakest forms of sentimentalism and EMMDS. A second underappreciated consequence of Descartes’ account is epistemological: it is possible for something to seem clear and distinct to someone, when that perception isn’t in fact clear and distinct. But if

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that is the case, then under what circumstances could that person ever know? How could a meditator himself or herself tell the difference between a genuinely clear and distinct perception and one that merely seemed to be so? This question was first raised by Pierre Gassendi, in one of his lengthy and somewhat prickly objections in the Objections and Replies. But if I may make a suggestion, what you ought to be working on is not so much establishing this rule [i.e., the Clarity and Distinctness Principle], which makes it so easy for us to accept falsehoods as true, but putting forward a method to guide us and show us when we are mistaken and when not, on those occasions when we think we clearly and distinctly perceive something. (AT VII, 279; CSM II, 194–95)

Do we see the way that Gassendi, following Descartes himself, blends together the question whether the clearly and distinctly perceived is true, with the question whether we ought to believe on the basis of clear and distinct perceptions? I hope, by now, that we do. Gassendi was among the first, though he was certainly not the last, to fail to distinguish the descriptive Clarity and Distinctness Principle from Descartes’ normative Judgment Rule. But I will stop grinding that axe for a moment, long enough to allow you to consider Descartes’ response to Gassendi’s “helpful” suggestion here, about what Descartes ought to have been doing, instead of making all of the arguments that he actually made in the Meditations: You say at the end of this section that what we should be working on is not so much a rule to establish the truth as a method for determining whether or not we are deceived, when we think we perceive something clearly. This I do not dispute; but I maintain that I carefully provided such a method in the appropriate place, where I first eliminated all preconceived opinions and afterwards listed all my principal ideas, distinguishing those which were clear from those which were obscure or confused. (AT VII, 361–62; CSM II, 250)

The slander that Descartes did not even consider this difference, i.e., the difference between a thing’s seeming clear and its actually being so,

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is dispatched by citing this particular passage. 67 But Descartes’ reply here is not without significant remaining difficulty. His answer to the question whether a perception could merely seem to be clear was unequivocally “yes.” There is a difference between a really clear and distinct perception and a counterfeit. On the analysis given above that is simply to say that there are cases where the phenomenal condition for clarity is met, but where the veracity condition for clarity is not met. Even though both the phenomenal condition and the veracity condition are necessary for clarity, only the phenomenal condition is necessary for a perception that merely seems to be clear, but is not actually so. And in this passage Descartes goes so far as to concede to Gassendi that he (i.e., Descartes) himself ought to have been working on providing a method to distinguish clear perceptions from those that merely seem to be so. But what could such a method be? By what criterion could one ever know one’s perceptions were genuinely clear, rather than only apparently so? Descartes’ response seems to be that it was his own procedure in the conduct of the Meditations, one that involved “distinguishing those [ideas] which were clear from those which were obscure or confused.” But if that is the extent of his response, then he has clearly begged a question. If the question is: “how does one know which perceptions are clear and which only apparently so?” the answer cannot be: “by distinguishing the clear perceptions from those that are not.” It is well and good to lay claim to a special methodological procedure for performing such crucial work. But if the question then becomes, “what is that procedure?” or “what special technique can sort the clearly and distinctly perceived from the counterfeits?,” one cannot simply answer “by carefully providing such a method for distinguishing the clear from the obscure or confused.” Gassendi’s “suggestion” can be sharpened into an argument. Whatever criterion Descartes may have appealed to here, it would itself require a second criterion to know whether the first criterion had been met, which would raise a similar problem of knowing whether the sec67. No less a philosopher than C. S. Peirce accused Descartes of failing to even consider the question: “The distinction between an idea seeming clear and really being so never occurred to him.” C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vol. V and VI [1934], eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 249, emphasis in original. Frankfurt dispatches this nonsense quite handily at Frankfurt, Demons, Dreamers, 201–2.

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ond criterion had actually been met or had only apparently been met. Therefore some third criterion . . . , and some fourth . . . , ad infinitum. This is, of course, a formulation of the age-old Problem of the Criterion. 68 Without presuming some antecedent body of knowledge, against which we may test any putative criterion for knowledge, it becomes impossible to establish that a given criterion produces knowledge itself, rather than simply whatever happens to meet the test of that particular criterion. 69 So now to summarize: review of the secondary literature on The Cartesian Circle leads to a pair of important distinctions. There must be a difference between The Clarity and Distinctness Principle and the Judgment Rule. Each must be distinguished from Descartes’ Necessitation Claim. The Necessitation Claim need not be interpreted exclusively psychologically or epistemically/normatively. That is because Descartes’ definition of clarity itself appealed to both a phenomenal condition and a veracity condition. But none of those distinctions helps him out of the deeper problem of circularity. Quite the opposite. If we believe that clarity was meant to be a criterion for truth, and we are observant (as Descartes himself was) of the way that the phenomenal condition may be met even while the veracity condition is not, then the real problem of circularity draws only tighter. The Clarity and Distinctness Principle was meant to play an important role in Descartes’ broadest argumentation in the Meditations. According to the most erudite scholars it is not derived until the Fourth Meditation, from God’s goodness, in order to free us from skepticism and establish a firm foundation for knowledge, conceived not merely 68. I am not, of course, the first to identify the Problem of the Criterion in this context. See James Van Cleve, “Foundationalism, Epistemic Principles, and the Cartesian Circle,” The Philosophical Review 88, no. 1 (1979): 55, and somewhat more recently Jacquette, “Descartes’ Lumen Naturale,” 279–80. 69. My critic might argue that attributing to Descartes the Problem of the Criterion is far less “charitable” than the alternative readings canvassed above, none of which saddled him with circularity. I would respond by pointing out that like those others I have at least acquitted Descartes of one circularity, i.e., “The Problem of the Circle.” But I would also ask: “which is more ‘charitable?’ attributing to history’s greatest philosophers solutions to problems so basic that they are ridiculed in introductory logic classes?, or attributing to them problems amongst the greatest conundrums in all of epistemology?” Descartes appealed, even if at a later stage of his argumentation, to a proof of the Clarity and Distinctness Principle. That principle was meant to retrospectively vindicate mere feelings of clear and distinct perception associated with earlier proofs: the Clarity and Distinctness Principle was thereby meant to secure the conclusions of those earlier proofs for scientia. But if that is correct, and if there is such a thing as phony clarity, then at least one of Gassendi’s many prickly remarks is considerably more devastating than has traditionally been acknowledged.

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momentarily, but as scientia. And if that is correct, then we should conclude, along with those scholars, that Descartes was not victim to the Problem of the Circle, insofar as he did not purport to argue from a premise that whatever is perceived clearly and distinctly is true to the conclusion that God exists. The proof of God’s existence was meant to come first, and on the basis of quite different premises. In particular, it relies upon momentarily clear perceptions in order to establish God’s existence and goodness, but without appealing to the Clarity and Distinctness Principle itself. Descartes was able to prove his own existence, so long as he observed himself thinking, and he was able to refute atheism, so long as he attended to the arguments proving God’s existence. Those initial proofs merely required the unprincipled feelings of clarity and distinctness (and hence the truth of their conclusions, even if the principled connection between those feelings and those truths could not be vouchsafed until later). They worked so long as, but only so long as, they were attended to. Despite the wealth of literature telling tales of Descartes’ heroic escape from the Circle, my own assessment must conclude somewhat more elegiacally. 70 I do not mean to deny the heroics in the half-dozen tales retold above, nor in any of their other numerous and uncounted variations. Each is a genuine escape, I think, and one that I would happily celebrate, insofar as it deftly outmaneuvers that specific “Problem of the Circle,” i.e., the argumentative problem of the Meditations that has the august pedigree dating back to Mersenne and Arnauld. But I am skeptical that any solution sufficient to exonerate Descartes of that more limited and famous “Problem of the Circle” will also be sufficient for the deeply philosophical problem of circularity, i.e., for answering Gassendi’s “suggestion” that we must distinguish, in some principled way, genuine clarity from phony clarity. Readers of the Meditations, from the most erudite to the most naïve, have interpreted Descartes as attempting to justify his certainties. They interpret his presentation of the Clarity and Distinctness Principle as vindication of his feelings in his previous moments of clarity in the Meditations. And if the Clarity and Distinctness Principle were ever “proved,” then Descartes was right to feel certain when he did, e.g., 70. Another relatively recent, similarly pessimistic, appraisal is Gary Hatfield, “The Cartesian Circle,” in The Blackwell Guide to Descartes’ Meditations. Edited by Stephen Gaukroger. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006, 122–41.

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upon his discovery of the Cogito, or upon his proofs of God’s existence. But the Clarity and Distinctness Principle cannot serve in that retrojustificatory/vindicative capacity, insofar as it provides no independent grounds for assessing the veracity of the qualities of those earlier perceptions, even on supposition that those perceptions were, in fact and by Descartes’ own definition, clear, and even recognizing that a justification of the principle itself was meant to be subsequent in Descartes’ order of argumentation. This is because the principle itself is merely an analytic truth, i.e., it merely expresses the veracity already defined into CLARITY itself. In which case, the Clarity and Distinctness Principle cannot serve as independent criterion for distinguishing genuine clarity from its counterfeit. The real problem of circularity remains, even if not the traditional “Problem of the Circle.”

3 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF OVERCONFIDENCE

INTRODUCTION TO OVERCONFIDENCE

Descartes did not treat the Clarity and Distinctness Principle as an empirical principle. But in the previous chapter I argued that clarity is best interpreted as a feeling. If that is the case, how could I avoid treating it as an empirical principle? I myself cannot. And if it is to be treated empirically, then pronouncements regarding its prospects ought to come from empirical psychology. Unfortunately, no psychologists (that I am aware of) have done experiments on Cartesian clarity, at least not under the specific sense in which it was interpreted in the previous chapter. Nevertheless, psychologists have done a great deal of experimenting on feelings like clarity, viz. feelings characteristic of believing. So it is to that psychological literature that I will now turn in this chapter, i.e., the relatively recent (i.e., past half-century’s) empirical studies of the relationship between feeling certain and being correct. Shifting some methodological gears here, I propose that we review the psychological literature on overconfidence. My task in this chapter will be considerably less historical, if no less synoptic. What I aim for presently is a representative sampling of more recent studies on the modern philosophers’ same topic, albeit one that separates robustly measured phenomena from ongoing research controversies. Reading through even this (not so) small corner of the psychologists’ literature proved laborious, and the summary of it that I present 103

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below is offered not as an overview, so much as a sampling. I will attempt to spare readers (and myself another) painstaking tour through each little technical nook and cranny; the particularly intrepid or masochistic among you will easily enough find your own way down into the details, through the references. What I will pay particular attention to instead is the arc of the psychologists’ developing conceptual framework. Neither empirically established facts nor their theoretical explanations are free from framing (something the psychologists would be the first to admit.) So while this chapter refrains from plumping for one or another pet theory, it does seek to draw general conclusions available from the experts’ broadest consensus. My ultimate conclusions here will be two: (1) The psychologists are concerned to measure a feeling characteristic of believing, i.e., a feeling of confidence that they typically classify as a metacognitive feeling, and (2) the state of the art in the measurement of overconfidence is not yet equipped to distinguish feelings of confidence from judgments of confidence. One of the least controversial concepts to which psychology now appeals dovetails neatly with the history of philosophy thus far recounted. The label the scientists of the mind use for feelings of the sort we’ve already had under consideration is “metacognitive feelings.” 1 “Metacognitive” here is meant to indicate that the feelings in question accompany other cognitive processes, and that it is those other cognitive processes that the so-called “metacognitive feelings” are about, particularly insofar as they are either caused by them, or explained by them. This terminology in one way neatly fits my project: notice the close connection with my definition of feelings characteristic of belief. But the terminology is also not ideal for the sentimentalist’s purposes, i.e., construing believing as affective rather than cognitive. On my account metacognitive feelings would better be labeled “meta-affective feelings” (or, more directly, simply “affective feelings,” or less redundantly, simply “feelings.”) But that is not what the psychologists currently call them, so I will try not to quibble here. The most famous metacognitive feeling is the “feeling of knowing” possessed when something is on the tip of one’s tongue, when stored information remains 1. See Asher Koriat and Ravit Levy-Sadot, “Conscious and Unconscious Metacognition: A Rejoinder,” Consciousness and Cognition 9 (2000): 193–202. Hereafter cited as Koriat and Levy-Sadot, 2000.

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inaccessible to searching memory. I will be particularly interested below in the studies concerning feelings of confidence, including that degree of confidence amounting to subjective certainty. According to that literature, confidence is a metacognitive feeling, i.e., a feeling characteristic of believing. Metacognitive feelings are sometimes contrasted with metacognitive judgments in order to distinguish them from subsequent, or otherwise independent “analytic” or inferential processes, which may (or may not) be based upon those metacognitive feelings. 2 However, not all of the psychological literature keeps crisp that distinction between confidence as feeling, and confidence as judgment. 3 I will begin by appeal to Koriat and Levy-Sadot, because they are admirably careful in this regard. The conflation of feelings with judgments is not of great concern to psychology presently, but I propose that it may also partially explain why “little is known about the relative contribution” of “analytic, knowledge-based inference that takes into account domain-specific considerations retrieved from memory, and by a nonanalytic, experience-based process that relies on the application of general-purpose heuristics.” 4 To understand the relationship, one must first differentiate the relata. But another reason may simply be that it is extremely difficult to design experiments that could tease apart subjects’ feelings of certainty from their judgments of certainty. Whatever the reasons for the current state of the art, in all cases considered in this chapter, the experimental design has measured only the latter, without yielding a clear way of distinguishing it from the former. However clearly or poorly distinguished from judgment, it is nevertheless common for psychologists to think of certainty as a feeling, and only derivatively (if then) treat it as a matter of rational assessment, e.g., the assessment of probabilities. Consider:

2. See Asher Koriat and Ravit Levy-Sadot, “Processes Underlying Metacognitive Judgments: Information-Based and Experience-Based Monitoring of One’s Own Knowledge,” in Dual-Process Theories in Social Psychology, ed. Shelly Chaiken and Yaacov Trope (New York and London: Guilford, 1999), 483. Hereafter Koriat and Levy-Sadot, 1999. 3. Cf. Thomas O. Nelson and Louis Narens, “Metamemory: A Theoretical Framework and New Findings,” in The Psychology of Learning and Motivation: Advances in Research and Theory 26, ed. Gordon H. Bower (San Diego: Academic Press, 1990), 130, who simply define “feeling of knowing” as a type of judgment. Hereafter Nelson and Narens, 1990. 4. Koriat and Levy-Sadot, 1999, 494.

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Subjective confidence in a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that this judgment is correct. Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it. It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously, but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true. 5

This pronouncement by Daniel Kahneman, quoted from his bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow, in addition to denying something like the Clarity and Distinctness Principle, clearly postulates confidence as feeling, associating it with intuitive systems of cognition, particularly those that operate quickly and involuntarily. Kahneman follows Stanovich and West in calling those sorts of processes “System 1,” 6 in order to contrast them with slower, more rational and effortful cognitive processing supposedly transpiring in “System 2.” 7 Kahneman’s preferred explanation appeals, thereby, not merely to the influential research program of “heuristics and biases,” but also to an older dual-process theory. Without prematurely endorsing Kahneman’s substantive theoretical commitments, I want to begin simply by recognizing the basis for such a distinction as similar to the one proposed above by Koriat and Levy-Sadot, 1999, and Koriat and Levy-Sadot, 2000. Feelings of confidence (i.e., confidence in System 1) can be distinguished from judgments of confidence (i.e., confidence in System 2). And these are not, of course, the only psychologists who believe the speed and fluency of the brain’s processing of information is especially important for certainty. In this regard the relationship of confidence to attention and memory are two of the most currently active areas of research. As for retrieval fluency, Nelson and Narens (1990) found that people express stronger confidence in the answer that they retrieve more quickly, whether those answers are correct or incorrect. Similarly, in a study by Kelley and Lindsay (1993), retrieval fluency was manipulated through priming. Participants were asked to answer general5. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 212. Hereafter Kahneman, 2011. 6. Keith E. Stanovich and Richard F. West, “Individual Differences in Reasoning: Implications for the Rationality Debate?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (2000): 645–726. 7. See Kahneman, 2011, 20–24.

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information questions and to express their confidence in the correctness of their answers. Prior to this task, participants were asked to read a series of words, some of which were correct and some of which were plausible but incorrect answers to the questions. This prior exposure was found to increase the speed and probability with which the answers were provided in the recall test, and, in parallel, to enhance the confidence in the correctness of these answers. Importantly, these effects were observed for both correct and incorrect answers. 8

Whether all phenomena related to confidence can be explained via this appeal to ease of retrieval, or to related cognitive biases in the brain’s processing of information, remains to be seen. And whether one needs a dual process theory in order to explain the phenomena remains controversial amongst the psychologists themselves. All that I mean to suggest here, quoting these initial reports of Kahneman and Koriat and Levy-Sadot, is that the treatment of confidence as feeling is not merely an artifact of early modern philosophers: it is now a mainstay in the conceptual framework used in psychology. The degree to which confidence results from metacognitive feeling (as opposed to metacognitive judgment) may remain little known, but the degree to which confidence judgments are inaccurate has been extensively studied. Despite a few vocal skeptics there is now a broad consensus amongst the experts that overconfidence is real (if not reaching a point of catastrophe). This overconfidence has been measured multiple times, and in a wide variety of ways. Many different mechanisms have been posited to explain it. A complicated picture is now emerging of a variety of different but inter-related overconfidence phenomena, though the psychologists have yet to reach consensus on any one preferred measurement technique (if one will ever be settled upon), let alone agree about its ultimate explanation. Nevertheless, we can survey their points of broadest consensus from the “bird’s eye” perspective of philosophers and report, at least tentatively and generally, on a basic number. There have been many hundreds of papers published on overconfidence since the 1970s, the vast majority of which contain unique empirical studies. My conclusion from a brief (and completely unscientific) review of roughly a hundred of 8. Koriat and Levy-Sadot, 1999, 493.

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them corroborates the much more professional review conducted by Fischhoff: A typical study might show probabilities of .75 to be associated with a “hit rate” of only 60 percent and expressions of certainty (p = 1.00) being correct only 85 percent of the time. When people assess how much they know about the values of numerical quantities (e.g., “I am .98 certain that the number of registered Republican voters in Lane County is between 12,000 and 30,000”), it is not uncommon to find true answers falling outside of their 98 percent confidence intervals 20 percent to 40 percent of the time. 9

What Fischhoff is telling us here is that when people estimate themselves to be about 75 percent certain, they are really only correct about 60 percent of the time. And when we estimate ourselves to be 100 percent sure, that’s when we are really only correct about 85 percent of the time. So the result of these many studies is that we are about 15 percent overconfident. (And the situation gets worse when estimating numerical ranges: in those cases our overconfidence jumps from about 15 percent up to 20–40 percent.) Here are several other conclusions that I will draw, from the overconfidence literature highlighted below: Despite confidence judgments being generally predictive of performance or ability, (1) people of all different demographic types, ages, and levels of expertise exhibit this systematic phenomenon of being more certain than we are accurate. (2) This phenomenon of overconfidence is most pronounced for difficult tasks or questions, but is reduced when we (a) become more expert, and is in some cases supposedly even reversible when we (b) perform easier tasks or answer easier questions. (3) The phenomenon may be reduced by anchoring, or feedback about performance, or other attempts at “debiasing,” but it is (presently) unclear to what degree that is systematically possible. (4) Theoretical explanations of the phenomena, including prospects for effective “debiasing,” remain (at this particular moment in time) controversial amongst psychologists. The phenomenon of overconfidence itself, however, is not.

9. Baruch Fischhoff, “Debiasing,” in Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, ed. Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 432.

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AN OVERVIEW OF THE CLASSICAL OVERCONFIDENCE LITERATURE Interest in confidence dates all the way back, and the literature on overconfidence is now diverse and well-established. By the 1940s psychologists were already prompting subjects to use a percentage scale to report their “confidence ratings,” an act of quantification that attempted to standardize otherwise subjective confidence judgments. An early attempt at devising a method for measuring the accuracy of such ratings, i.e., for standardization, was in 1961 by Adams and Adams. 10 By the 1970s psychologists had begun to amass a considerable body of work showing that, for judgments about a variety of different domains, we report a degree of certainty (and we probably also feel certain!) considerably greater than is warranted. This literature, i.e., the measurement of the judgment (and perhaps also the feeling!), developed under a variety of influences. A work that must be mentioned, even in the most cursory recounting of that history, is a classic one by Paul Meehl: Clinical vs. Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence (1954). 11 This was an early argument, within psychology, that judgments of clinicians could be helpfully augmented, if not outperformed, by mechanical tools, particularly those drawing on robust statistical analysis. Long before the advent of diagnostic algorithms—the tools available at the time were actuarial tables describing success rates in academic or military training, recidivism rates, cure rates for psychotherapeutic treatments 12—Meehl foresaw our era. 13 In addition to being an important moment for the statistical methods of clinical psychology, the psychologists of the 1950s were keen to know more about the relationship between the confidence and accuracy of predictions. Our interest in making accurate predictions is far older, of course, but the systematic study of our predictive accuracy, for several 10. Joe K. Adams and Pauline Austin Adams, “Realism of Confidence Judgments,” Psychological Review 68, no. 1 (1961): 33–45. 11. Paul E. Meehl, Clinical Versus Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1954). 12. See Paul E. Meehl, “When Shall We Use Our Heads Instead of the Formula?” Journal of Counseling Psychology 4 (1957): 268–73, especially 272. 13. For discussion of a more recently developed clinical diagnostic tool, in Meehl’s wake, see Wayne M. Martin and Ryan Hickerson, “Mental Capacity and the Applied Phenomenology of Judgement,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 12, no. 1 (2013): 195–214.

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key professions, took an uptick after World War II. Drawing on data kept carefully in meteorology, 14 medicine, 15 and business, particularly the prediction of stock prices, 16 it was also at about this same time that psychologists began to write about an initially surprising result related to their own predictions in the clinical setting: they were themselves reliably less confident (if not less accurate) in predicting outcomes of therapeutic intervention than people who had no training in psychology whatsoever. 17 Why would that be? Why would experts, who were, at least moderately (something established in Oskamp, 1962) better at predicting outcomes, be systematically less confident than neophytes? (The “experts” in Oskamp 1962 were psychologists working in VA Hospitals around San Francisco and the “neophytes” were undergraduates taking a psychology course at Stanford.) Observers of human nature have long believed that one salubrious effect of expertise may be a more accurate assessment of one’s own abilities. The psychologists posited that this might mean not just moderating, but actually lowering, one’s self-assessments. (Philosophers here might be reminded of Socrates’ presumably expert claim that he knew nothing.) But whatever the origins of the idea, in the latter half of the twentieth-century psychologists began experimentally testing and measuring it as a hypothesis. An interesting result is that whether it proves true, i.e., whether experts are actually more accurate at judging their own level of knowledge depends crucially on the difficulty of the tasks that they are being asked to perform. Another interesting result is that the experts’ confidence continues to rise with increasing experience and greater information about the particular case (as one would expect), but that it does so even after the

14. See Allan H. Murphy and Barbara G. Brown, “A Comparative Evaluation of Objective and Subjective Weather Forecasts in the United States,” Journal of Forecasting 3, no. 4 (1984): 369–93. 15. See Jay J.J. Christensen-Szalanski and James B. Bushyhead, “Physicians’ Use of Probabilistic Information in a Real Clinical Setting,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 7, no. 4 (1981): 928–35. 16. See J. Frank Yates, Linda S. McDaniel, and Eric S. Brown, “Probabilistic Forecasts of Stock Prices and Earnings: The Hazards of Nascent Expertise,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 49 (1991): 60–79. 17. Stuart Oskamp, “The Relationship of Clinical Experience and Training Methods to Several Criteria of Clinical Prediction,” Psychological Monographs: General and Applied 76, no. 28 (1962): 1–27. Hereafter Oskamp, 1962.

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accuracy of their predictions plateaus. 18 So even expertise is not a perfect antidote to overconfidence. The details of the resulting literature are complicated in a variety of different dimensions: the tasks that subjects were asked to perform, the domains of knowledge required for performing those tasks, the experiments designed to measure their results, not to mention the theories invoked to explain them, but also the conceptualizations of overconfidence itself. Overconfidence, as most often referred to by psychologists, indicates a discrepancy between a mean reported confidence and a percentage of accurate judgments. In what became the standard experimental design, 19 subjects self-report their degree of certainty for answers provided on a general knowledge quiz. The questions on such quizzes ask the subjects to choose between two possible answers, and then provide a rough (usually divided into quintiles) estimate of certainty for each answer, ranging on the half-scale from guessing (0.5) to complete certainty (1.0). Here is an example of one of these so-called “almanac questions:” Absinthe is [a] a liqueur or [b] a precious stone? Confidence percentage: [a] 51–60 [b] 61–70 [c] 71–80 [d] 81–90 [e] 91–100?

In other studies subjects are asked to report an unspecified range of certainty for each answer, or a self-assessment of their performance in comparison to performances attributed to others. But in what I will henceforth call “the classic studies” or “the classical calibration studies,” the percentage of correct answers for a set of questions rated by the subject as equiprobable is simply subtracted from the degree of reported certainty, and then plotted over the various possible probability rankings. Most generally, overconfidence is then defined as a mean of the reported confidences greater than the subject’s percentage of correct answers.

18. See Stuart Oskamp, “Overconfidence in Case-Study Judgments,” Journal of Consulting Psychology 29, no. 3 (1965): 261–65. 19. See Sarah Lichtenstein, Baruch Fischhoff, and Lawrence D. Phillips, “Calibration of Probabilities: The State of the Art,” in Decision Making and Change in Human Affairs: Proceedings of the 5th Research Conference on Subjective Probability, Utility, and Decision Making, Darmstadt, 1–4 September, 1975, eds. Helmut Jungermann and Gerard de Zeeuw (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1977).

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Thus, reports of overconfidence grew out of a literature largely interested in the relationship between reported (but perhaps also felt!) certainty and accuracy. The discrepancy was originally studied, and is now commonly referred to, as an issue of calibration. That particular concept was first invoked by Lichtenstein, Fischhoff, and Phillips, but is now commonly treated as the center of the literature. 20 Cf. “We say that an individual’s probability judgments are well-calibrated to the extent that those judgments match the proportions of times that the target event actually occurs.” 21 Calibration, however, is neither the only measure of accuracy, nor the only one studied. Another classic measure was resolution, i.e., “the ability of the responder to discriminate different degrees of subjective uncertainty by sorting the items into categories whose respective percentages correct are maximally different from the overall percentage correct (i.e., maximum variance across category hit rates).” 22 Yet another important measure of accuracy is discrimination, i.e., “the ability to distinguish instances when a target event is going to occur from those when it is not.” 23 A nice general introduction to calibration graphs is Yates, 1990, 37–74. But the main result of the classic studies, for whatever underlying psychological reasons, is that our certainty appears biased, or “miscalibrated,” in the sense that we report confidence (and perhaps also feel it!) to a degree that reliably overshoots our actual rate of success. Though not universally (as I will discuss below) psychologists now frequently describe this as the result of a cognitive bias, and the phenomena are now often referred to as the overconfidence bias. 24 But we should tread lightly here, as many different phenomena lurk under this terminology. A common use of the term “bias” in the literature is simply a measure of the difference between mean Judgments of Learning 20. Compare Gerlinde Fellner and Sebastian Krügel, “Judgmental Overconfidence: Three Measures, One Bias?” Journal of Economic Psychology 33 (2012): 142–54, who are at odds with this standard usage. They quote Baruch Fischhoff, Paul Slovic, and Sarah Lichtenstein, “Knowing with Certainty: The Appropriateness of Extreme Confidence,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 3, no. 4 (1977): 552–64, but then treat “calibration” as if it instead meant overprecision. 21. J. Frank Yates, Judgment and Decision Making (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1990), 50. Hereafter Yates, 1990. 22. Sarah Lichtenstein and Baruch Fischhoff, “Do Those Who Know More Also Know More about How Much They Know?” Organizational Behavior and Human Performance 20 (1977): 162. 23. Yates, 1990, 57, emphasis added. 24. See Asher Koriat, “The Self-Consistency Model of Subjective Confidence,” Psychological Review 119, no. 1 (2012): 93–96. Hereafter Koriat, 2012.

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(JOLs) and mean cued recall. 25 And it is quite possible to make that measure without positing any underlying explanation. Kelemen, Winningham, and Weaver not only record positive “bias” values (i.e., overconfidence) across a variety of undergraduate foreign language learners taking vocabulary tests for words in Swahili, with overconfidence values that decrease after repeated training, but also show that “debiasing” after repeated training, while significant for students with high SAT scores, is significantly less so for students with lower SAT scores. 26 Even amongst psychologists ready to posit deep cognitive explanations there is an important difference between those who would treat overconfidence as a result of a motivating bias, and those who treat it more specifically as a directional bias. These two types of theories are nicely distinguished by Anderson, Brion, Moore and Kennedy. 27 To treat overconfidence as the product of a motivating bias is to suggest that the ultimate explanation is that our processes of reasoning have been affected by “any wish, desire, or preference concerning the outcome of a given reasoning task,” 28 i.e., our judgments become “biased” by our own values and preferences, and are not merely the dispassionate weighings of (all) the available evidence. But to treat belief as directionally biased, more specifically, is to theorize that the motive in question is one oriented toward arriving at a particular conclusion, i.e., reasoning is biased by the conclusion that we prejudicially favor (for whatever reason). It might be the case, for example, that I would preferentially attend only to evidence confirming what I already believe (confirmation bias), or it might be that my appearing confident to others would enhance my social status, as argued by Anderson, Brion, Moore and Kennedy, 2012. The former of these two (quite different, but not necessarily competing) explanations of overconfidence would treat it as a directional bias, the latter would treat it simply as a motivating bias.

25. See, for example, William L. Kelemen, Robert G. Winningham, and Charles A. Weaver, III, “Repeated Testing Sessions and Scholastic Aptitude in College Students’ Metacognitive Accuracy,” European Journal of Cognitive Psychology 19, no. 4/5 (2007): 694. Hereafter Kelemen, Winningham, and Weaver, 2007. 26. Kelemen, Winningham, and Weaver, 2007, 699. 27. Cameron Anderson, Sebastien Brion, Don A. Moore, and Jessica A. Kennedy, “A Status-Enhancement Account of Overconfidence,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 103, no. 4 (2012): 718–35. Hereafter Anderson, Brion, Moore, and Kennedy, 2012. 28. Ziva Kunda, “The Case for Motivated Reasoning,” Psychological Bulletin 108, no. 3 (1990): 480.

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Those are not, however, the only available theoretical options. In addition to understanding overconfidence as a cognitive bias, mechanisms recently postulated to explain it have included self-consistency, 29 a stochastic model of calibration based on support theory, 30 protection of self-confidence as an ego-related trait, 31 an adaptive benefit for wellbeing and mental health, 32 a sensory sampling model, 33 the biased underweighting of evidence relative to strength, 34 or the result of a probabilistic mental model. 35 And that is to name only a few. How might we come to grips with this rich variety of competing theories? There is an important distinction to be drawn between research that principally studies cognitive tasks, for example those employing the general knowledge questions in the classic calibration studies, from research that principally studies confidence in immediate perceptual judgments. Effects related to memory have been particularly relevant for the former. Already cited in a quotation above were Nelson and Narens, 1990, and Kelley and Lindsay, 1993. 36 But attention has been particularly studied in relation to the latter. One recent psychophysical study shows that confidence is closely tied to attention, even more closely than to accuracy, suggesting that there is a mechanism for the production of confidence judgments (and perhaps also feelings!) independent of (the authors write: “at least partially independent of”)

29. Koriat, 2012. 30. Lyle A. Brenner, “A Random Support Model of the Calibration of Subjective Probabilities,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 90, no. 1 (2003): 87–110. 31. Lazar Stankov, “Calibration Curves, Scatterplots and the Distinction Between General Knowledge and Perceptual Tasks,” Learning and Individual Differences 10, no. 1 (1998): 29–50. 32. Shelley E. Taylor and Jonathon D. Brown, “Illusion and Well-Being: A Social Psychological Perspective on Mental Health,” Psychological Bulletin 103, no. 2 (1988): 193–210. See also Janet Metcalfe, “Cognitive Optimism: Self-Deception or Memory-Based Processing Heuristics?” Personality and Social Psychology Review 2, no. 2 (1998): 100–10. 33. Peter Juslin and Henrik Olsson, “Thurstonian and Brunswikian Origins of Uncertainty in Judgment: A Sampling Model of Confidence in Sensory Discrimination,” Psychological Review 104, no. 2 (1997): 344–66. Hereafter Juslin and Olsson, 1997. 34. Dale Griffin and Amos Tversky, “The Weighing of Evidence and the Determinants of Confidence,” Cognitive Psychology 24 (1992): 411–35. Hereafter Griffin and Tversky, 1992. 35. Gerd Gigerenzer, Ulrich Hoffrage, and Heinz Kleinbölting, “Probabilistic Mental Models: A Brunswikian Theory of Confidence,” Psychological Review 98, no. 4 (1991): 506–28. Hereafter Gigerenzer, Hoffrage, and Kleinbölting, 1991. 36. Colleen M. Kelley and D. Stephen Lindsay, “Remembering Mistaken for Knowing: Ease of Retrieval as a Basis for Confidence in Answers to General Knowledge Questions,” Journal of Memory and Language 32, no. 1 (1993): 1–24. Hereafter (and heretofore) cited as Kelley and Lindsay, 1993.

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whatever mechanism is responsible for the first-order judgments themselves. 37 (Attention to doxastic sentiment is my own topic in chapter 6.) There is of course not a sharp line to be drawn between “perceptual” and “cognitive” studies of overconfidence. Nevertheless, I would be remiss if I did not report that the data collected from these two (roughly) different types of research has been reported in the literature as conflicting. Systematic underconfidence has been reported in studies of perception. 38 These results have sometimes been presented as opposed to the results of robust overconfidence in the classical calibration studies, i.e., those studies that rely on the general knowledge questions. Attempts to reconcile the findings have suggested multiple cognitive mechanisms, 39 or that underconfidence is domain specific, 40 or that overconfidence correlates particularly with “self-consistency” in both domains. 41 One recent study has confirmed the previous findings of underconfidence for a particular perceptual task, i.e., a visual line length test, but not for several other perceptual tasks. 42 This is not merely messiness in the reporting of the facts: it also reflects doubt, at least amongst some of the psychologists, about the generality of the original findings. One possible explanation of the inconsistency, other than those already mentioned above, is that the classical studies were methodologically flawed. Potential methodological problems have been identified as statistical, or as related to experimental design. One notable study attempts to explain the phenomenon as a

37. Leopold Zizlsperger, Thomas Sauvigny, and Thomas Haarmeier, “Selective Attention Increases Choice Certainty in Human Decision Making,” PLoS One 7, no. 7 (2012): 1–9. 38. E.g., in Mats Björkman, Peter Juslin, and Anders Winman, “Realism of Confidence in Sensory Discrimination: The Underconfidence Phenomenon,” Perception & Psychophysics 54, no. 1 (1993): 75–81; also Henrik Olsson and Anders Winman, “Underconfidence in Sensory Discrimination: The Interaction Between Experimental Setting and Response Strategies,” Perception & Psychophysics 58, no. 3 (1996): 374–82; also Juslin and Olsson, 1997. 39. Lazar Stankov, Gerry Pallier, Vanessa Danthiir, and Suzanne Morony, “Perceptual Underconfidence: A Conceptual Illusion?” European Journal of Psychological Assessment 28, no. 3, (2012): 190–200. Hereafter Stankov, Pallier, Danthiir, and Morony, 2012. 40. Guillermo Macbeth and Valeria Morán, “Underconfidence Bias as a Specific-Domain Phenomenon,” Revista Latinoamericana de Psicologia 41, no. 1 (2009): 47–57; and Peter Juslin, Henrik Olsson, and Anders Winman, “The Calibration Issue: Theoretical Comments on Suantak, Bolger, and Ferrell (1996),” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 73, no. 1 (1998): 3–26. 41. Asher Koriat, “Subjective Confidence in Perceptual Judgments: A Test of the SelfConsistency Model,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 140, no. 1 (2011): 117–39. 42. Stankov, Pallier, Danthiir, and Morony, 2012.

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statistical artifact. 43 It claims that the effect is the result of error, and concludes that the many reports of general overconfidence are an artifact of data analysis conditioned on subjective probabilities: if one instead begins with objective probabilities, then the result from the same data will be underconfidence. Another notable study attempts to explain overconfidence as an ecological artifact, i.e., an effect created by the particularities of experimental design. 44 Nevertheless, generalization of the classical results, despite the notable dissenters, is endemic to the literature. At its best the generalization is argued for explicitly, e.g., in the extension of results from the general knowledge questions to prediction, as argued for explicitly (and not merely presumed) in Fischhoff and MacGregor. 45 But I must also report that this is not universally the case, despite the generalization’s not being universally accepted. 46 Whether human beings are systematically overconfident, or not, is perhaps the most important conclusion to be drawn from any review of the psychology on the topic. But the science itself necessitates that any review be at least moderately critical, and that the strongest conclusions be couched as preliminary. In addition to the complexities and difficulties suggested above there are basic differences in the methodologies and interests of diverse research programs. Some of the criticisms of the classic overconfidence studies have come from “ecological psychologists,” or from the perspective of “bounded rationality.” Defenders of the classical result have (at least in some cases) been affiliated with the influential “heuristics and biases” camp. But I think that an even more helpful way to understand the main philosophical fault line may be to distinguish purely cognitive approaches from those with a more social scientific orientation. Cognitivism is the reigning paradigm. And we all now believe that human cognition is embedded in a fundamentally social animal. But there is a real difference between researchers who would approach the phenomena in question as principally produced by events happening mostly (if 43. Ido Erev, Thomas S. Wallsten, and David V. Budescu, “Simultaneous Over- and Underconfidence: The Role of Error in Judgment Processes,” Psychological Review 101, no. 3 (1994): 519–27. 44. Gigerenzer, Hoffrage, and Kleinbölting, 1991. 45. See Baruch Fischhoff and Don MacGregor, “Subjective Confidence in Forecasts,” Journal of Forecasting 1 (1982): 155–72. Hereafter Fischhoff and MacGregor, 1982. 46. See, for example, the argument against such an extension in George Wright and Peter Ayton, “Subjective Confidence in Forecasts: A Response to Fischhoff and MacGregor,” Journal of Forecasting 5 (1986): 117–23.

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not exclusively) between the ears, i.e., as effects of the brain’s processing of information, and those who would instead seek to explain them by appeal to environmentally mediated mechanisms, e.g., as more directly tied to personality traits or competition for resources or social status. These two different approaches (again, only roughly drawn, and again, not necessarily competing) have in point of fact led to studies of quite different and easily conflated phenomena. Given this broad overview, I propose that we now focus, briefly and completely unscientifically, on three or four of this literature’s key “highlights.” My purpose is not cherry-picking the data. You should feel free to draw all (or none) of your own conclusions here. My purpose is instead merely to retell some of the psychological stories, with an eye on their basic concepts. In this regard it is particularly useful to begin with Don Moore and Paul Healey, 47 who invoke a helpful distinction between three different conceptualizations of overconfidence. This not only has the potential to be most interesting for historically-minded philosophers, but is also a fruitful way to see how some of the more recent studies have diverged from the classic work on calibration. I’ll then turn attention to some of the methodological and statistical challenges to that work. In particular I will look at the influential criticism by Gigerenzer, Hoffrage, and Kleinbölting, 1991, already mentioned, and an important response to it. 48 I’ll also highlight a relatively recent study on the relationship of confidence to reason-giving, 49 and then conclude with some recent theorizing about social mechanisms for one of the three more recently studied types of overconfidence, including the so-called “Dunning-Kruger Effect.” 50

47. Particularly with Don A. Moore and Paul J. Healy, “The Trouble with Overconfidence,” Psychological Review 115, no. 2 (2008): 502–17. 48. I judge one of the most important of these to have been Lyle A. Brenner, Derek J. Koehler, Varda Liberman, and Amos Tversky, “Overconfidence in Probability and Frequency Judgments: A Critical Examination,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 65, no. 3 (1996): 212–19. Hereafter Brenner, Koehler, Liberman, and Tversky, 1996. 49. See Asher Koriat, Ravit Nussinson, Herbert Bless, and Nira Shaked, “InformationBased and Experience-Based Metacognitive Judgments: Evidence from Subjective Confidence,” in Handbook of Metamemory and Memory, ed. John Dunlosky and Robert A. Bjork (New York: Psychology Press, 2008). Hereafter Koriat, Nussinson, Bless, and Shaked, 2008. 50. See Justin Kruger and David Dunning, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77, no. 6 (1999): 1121–34. Hereafter Kruger and Dunning, 1999.

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ESTIMATION, PRECISION, AND PLACEMENT Moore and Healy, 2008, begin with a conceptual distinction. Several claims tested in their work concern differences and relationships amongst three types of overconfidence. Their motive for the tripartite distinction is stated explicitly: review of the literature on overconfidence itself forces the distinction, if one hopes to reconcile what otherwise look like inconsistent results. 51 Following their own order of presentation, I will first introduce Moore and Healy’s definitions for their terms, and then discuss one of their findings about a relationship amongst two of the three different types of overconfidence. Moore and Healy define overestimation as “the overestimation of one’s actual ability, performance, level of control, or chance of success.” 52 We should not be too persnickety here about their use of the defined term in the definition, as it is relatively clear which sorts of results they mean to subsume. They mean for their term to apply, at least, to the classic calibration studies, wherein one of two possible answers to a general knowledge question is coupled with a report of a level of confidence on the half-scale, analysis of which classically reveals miscalibration. Like that classical literature, their new concept OVERESTIMATION is meant not merely to cover general knowledge questions and retrospective confidence judgments, but also predictions. It is also clear, however, that Moore and Healy do not mean for their definition of overestimation to apply only to those classical studies, insofar as overestimation is also said to include assessment of one’s own “ability” or “level of control,” in addition to “performance” or “chance of success.” This first sort of overconfidence is contrasted with a second, what Moore and Healy identify as overprecision. This second phenomenon arises particularly when subjects are asked to provide a confidence interval, typically a range for a numerical judgment, in which that subject would be, e.g., 90 percent confident that a correct value is included. For example, a researcher might ask a subject to provide an estimate for the speed of sound (in dry air, at sea level, at a temperature of 68 degrees Fahrenheit, etc.) Instead of providing that subject with two possible answers and asking for a numerical value representing 51. Moore and Healy, 2008, 502. 52. Ibid.

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their subjective confidence, the researcher instead asks the subject for a range, e.g., in miles per hour, within which the subject would be 90 percent confident. Results show that these confidence intervals are too narrow, suggesting that people are too sure they know the correct answer; 90 percent confidence intervals contain the correct answer less than 50 percent of the time. (Alpert and Raiffa, 1982; Klayman, Soll, González-Vallejo, and Barlas, 1999; Soll and Klayman, 2004) 53

According to Moore and Healy this sort of overprecision, clearly one kind of overconfidence in one’s knowledge, is frequently conflated with overestimation. 54 But both of these types of overconfidence are contrasted with overplacement. Following Larrick, Burson, and Soll, 55 Moore and Healy use this terminology to describe a phenomenon more commonly known in the psychological literature as “the better-than-average effect.” 56 When asked to rate their own driving ability, particularly in relation to perceptions of others’ driving ability, 93 percent of US drivers (but only 69 percent of Swedish drivers, interestingly) responded that their driving is better than the mean. 57 Any particular individual who rates his or her driving as above average would not strike us as particularly noteworthy, but many researchers have concluded that the interesting irrationality is revealed in the fact that a majority of us make this estimation. The familiar joke from “Lake Woebegone,” is that it is the place where “all the children are above average.” The absurdity that almost everyone assesses themselves as better than average, suggests to some research-

53. Ibid. 54. Moore and Healy, 2008, 503, 514. 55. See R. P. Larrick, K. A. Burson, and J. B. Soll, “Social Comparison and Confidence: When Thinking You’re Better Than Average Predicts Overconfidence (And When It Does Not),” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 102, no. 1 (2007): 76–94. Hereafter Larrick, Burson, and Soll, 2007. 56. For review of the literature on the better-than-average effect see Mark D. Alicke and Olesya Govorun, “The Better-Than-Average Effect,” In The Self in Social Judgment, ed. Mark D. Alicke, David A. Dunning, and Joachim I. Krueger (New York: Psychology Press, 2005). Hereafter Alicke and Govorun, 2005. 57. Svenson, Ola. “Are We All Less Risky and More Skillful than Our Fellow Drivers?” Acta Psychologica 47 (1981): 146.

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ers a cognitive bias, i.e., a bias toward believing one’s own level of skill is greater than what it must be, statistically, for half of us. 58 While Moore and Healy do not make this point sufficiently explicit, there is an important conceptual difference envisioned here between overestimation and overplacement, one that is somewhat different in kind from that posited between overestimation and overprecision. The difference between overestimation and overprecision is clearly meant to result from a different way that confidence judgments are reported. In one case subjects are prompted to provide, or themselves spontaneously provide, a numerical value corresponding to (if not the strength of their feeling, then at least!) their judged strength of judgment. In another case they are prompted to provide, or spontaneously provide, a range of judgments to match (if not the strength of feeling, then at least!) their confidence judgment. But the relationship between overplacement and overestimation is quite different. OVERPLACEMENT is meant to be a subordinate concept. To employ the jargon of philosophers for a moment, OVERESTIMATION is a determinable, insofar as it is contained within OVERPLACEMENT. OVERPLACEMENT is a determinate, insofar as it is contained under OVERESTIMATION. So to overplace oneself is not merely to be inaccurate (in the particular sense of miscalibrated, specified above), it is to additionally judge one’s own performance or ability relative to the performance or ability of other people. One could say that judgments involving overplacement are overestimations of a particular sort: they are the overestimations of one’s own performance or ability relative to others’. Moore and Healy present a variety of claims about the relationship that these three types of overconfidence have to one another, but I will present only one of their main empirical findings here: overestimation and overplacement are negatively correlated. To quote their discussion: On the other hand, across the 18 quizzes, overestimation and overplacement were negatively and significantly correlated, r(18) = –.64, p = .004. This is a natural consequence of the effects documented

58. Cf., however, Don Moore and Deborah Small, “When It Is Rational for the Majority to Believe That They are Better than Average,” in Rationality and Social Responsibility: Essays in Honor of Robyn Mason Dawes, ed. Joachim I. Krueger (New York: Psychology Press, 2008). Moore and Small instead suggest a perfectly “rational” (i.e., Bayesian) explanation for the phenomenon, as opposed to a cognitive bias.

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above: Task ease affects overestimation and overplacement in opposite ways. 59

While Moore and Healy do not credit it as loudly as they might have, a similar finding was already reported. 60 But Moore and Healy do have a unique explanation for this negative correlation. They explain the effect by appeal to the limited, and notably different, amounts of information we have about our own performances and abilities, as compared to the performances and abilities of others. Because we have imperfect information about ourselves, our judgments about our own performances exhibit the effect of regression: on recently completed tasks we judge our performance as having been somewhere between the place it actually was and our prior expectation of where it would be. On tasks that prove difficult, i.e., where the actual performance falls below a prior expectation, our judgment of the performance thereby falls above the actual performance, i.e., overestimation. On tasks that prove easier, i.e., where actual performance falls above prior expectation, our judgment of it thereby falls below actual performance, i.e., underestimation. But, according to the hypothesis of Moore and Healy, we have even more imperfect information about others. So our judgments about them exhibit a similar pattern of regression, albeit one with even wider margins. So comparing our own (judged) performances to others’ (judged) performance results in underplacement (for the difficult tasks) and overplacement (for the easier ones.) These particular explanations, posited for the overconfidence phenomena by Moore and Healy, are ultimately Bayesian. There is, however, another crucial conceptual distinction, not discussed explicitly by Moore and Healy (2008) but suggested by their work, and one that has been studied subsequently. It is the distinction between overestimation of a particular performance, as they have defined it, and overestimation of one’s abilities. We note that Moore and Healy treat both as a matter of overestimation. As described by them, overestimation involves one’s certainty of a particular fact, e.g., the correctness of an answer provided on a trivia quiz. But this may be quite different from the confidence one has in one’s ability to provide that correct answer, a case where significantly more ego may be at stake. 59. Moore and Healy, 2008, 510. 60. See Larrick, Burson, and Soll, 2007.

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The ability to perform a particular task may be logically tied to the actual performances of the task, but may psychologically prove quite loosely connected. The distinction of confidence in abilities from confidence in performances will not be a trivial one for psychologists. It already marks an important divide in their literature, insofar as those more oriented toward group dynamics and finely attenuated ego-sensitivities are considerably more likely to postulate psycho-social explanations for the overconfidence phenomena, if only to augment the largely cognitive explanations already hypothesized, e.g., by Moore and Healy, 2008. That such a distinction is significant, and is significant for establishing that overconfidence does not result merely from biased information processing, e.g., holding inaccurate prior probabilities and the effects of Bayesian updating, is already claimed to have been empirically established. 61 Moore and Healy are not critics of the overconfidence results reported in the classical studies. 62 Their results largely confirm the findings of the 1970s (which they now subsume under their term “overestimation.”) Nor do they use their basic conceptual distinctions to suggest such studies were methodologically flawed. They instead introduced the distinctions to clarify which of several different phenomena are being measured in the burgeoning psychological literature on overconfidence. I will conclude discussion of them by pointing to a fact especially evident when Moore and Healy, 2008 is read in conjunction with Grossman and Owens, 2012: the psychologists have not yet experimentally established that the classic calibration studies were measuring overestimation as distinct from, for example, overplacement. To establish that one would need to repeat the original studies, controlling for overplacement. (Work that, to my knowledge, has not yet been attempted.) It may well be the case that the effect reported in the classical studies remains, regardless of subjects’ beliefs about the performances of others and themselves on the general knowledge quizzes. It could also turn out to be the case that what initially looked like a purely personal matter, i.e., an effect based merely on the way we update our beliefs given 61. See Zachary Grossman and David Owens, “An Unlucky Feeling: Overconfidence and Noisy Feedback,” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 84 (2012): 510–24. Hereafter Grossman and Owens, 2012. 62. At least not in Moore and Healy, 2008.

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new information, in fact has an other-regarding component. The results of Moore and Healy, 2008, particularly the one that I have presented above, i.e., that overestimation and overplacement are negatively correlated, are strongly suggestive. But we cannot really know that relationship without further research.

OVERCONFIDENCE ABOUT OVERCONFIDENCE? Not everyone has been so reticent about criticisms of the classic calibration studies. Until the 1990s the overconfidence literature did not appear to contain much controversy, but beginning with work done by Regine S. May, published in 1986, 63 a series of papers has now suggested, not merely different measurements of confidence, and different theories to explain those measured phenomena, but also that the classic calibration studies were seriously flawed. Complaints can be divided into roughly two types: one line of criticism argues that the classical studies contain a problem of experimental design, and another claims that the interpretation of the data from those studies is misleading, to such a degree that were those data interpreted appropriately (or simply otherwise) it would no longer support the conclusion that there is any systematic psychological phenomenon of overconfidence. 64 I.e., overconfidence, if there is such a phenomenon, is merely an artifact of the way psychologists have interpreted one set of data. I hasten to point out that these criticisms are not universally endorsed. The fecundity of the subject, much of its literature generated since the 1990s, by itself suggests that psychologists find the overconfidence phenomena robust. Explicit rejection of, and argument against, the two lines of criticism mentioned above has appeared already in a variety of places. I understand my task presently, not so much as offering a judgment about which side of this dispute is correct (a judgment 63. See Regine S. May, “Inferences, Subjective Probability and Frequency of Correct Answers: A Cognitive Approach to the Overconfidence Phenomenon,” in New Directions in Research on Decision Making, ed. Berndt Brehmer, Helmut Jungermann, Peter Lourens, and Guje Sevón (Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 1986). 64. Cf. the review of this controversy presented by Phillip E. Pfeifer, “Are We Overconfident in the Belief that Probability Forecasters Are Overconfident?” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 58 (1994): 203–13. Cf. Markus Glaser and Martin Weber, “Overconfidence,” in Behavioral Finance: Investors, Corporations, and Markets, ed. H. Kent Baker and John R. Nofsinger (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2010).

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that I would hardly be qualified to make) so much as accurately characterizing the disagreement. To this end I will first review the criticisms of Gigerenzer, Hoffrage, and Kleinbölting, 1991, and then present one response to them by Brenner, Koehler, Liberman, and Tversky, 1996. This latter paper is noteworthy, in part for the empirical study it conducts, designed to try to settle one of the points of dispute. I emphasize that this is now a review of only two papers, and not an exhaustive report of the variety of existing criticisms of the classic calibration studies, let alone the possible responses. The goal of Gigerenzer, Hoffrage, and Kleinbölting, 1991 is to construct a theoretical model of reasoning that would explain the findings of overconfidence in the classic studies, and explain the phenomenon of increased overconfidence for difficult tasks (and the reduced or eliminated overconfidence for easy tasks.) To accomplish this Gigerenzer, Hoffrage, and Kleinbölting propose a theory of probabilistic mental models (PMM) to rival the influential explanation of overconfidence as a cognitive bias. On the PMM theory it is not the case that our brains produce predictable errors in their processing of information about probabilities, e.g., errors like the Base Rate Fallacy or the regression effect described by Moore and Healy, 2008. On the PMM theory a reference class determines which cues will function (and how they will be lexically ordered) in determining a probability judgment. A PMM is said to be well adapted to its environment (or the environment to a particular PMM) if the cues that it receives are a representative sampling of the objects already in its reference class. If it does not receive cues that are representative, then it performs more poorly (i.e., less accurately) in its production of judgments of probability. But importantly, this is an ecological effect, i.e., a mismatch between the model and the particular environment in which it happens to be situated, and not a “bias” within the model itself (which may be nicely adapted, i.e., calibrated, to a different sort of environment.) One important consequence of this sort of theory is that probabilities of single events and probabilities of frequencies are not evaluated by the same cognitive processes. 65 There are then two main criticisms of the classic calibration studies, from the perspective of this PMM theory. One is that the standard

65. Gigerenzer, Hoffrage, and Kleinbölting, 1991, 510.

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almanac questions, administered by psychologists in trivia quizzes, are not well adapted to the PMMs that subjects have developed while performing more natural predictive and retrospective confidence tasks. Our probabilistic mental models are trained in one sort of environment, and then they perform poorly on the “trick” questions administered by the psychologists, who then conclude that we are systematically overconfident. A second is that the administration of those quizzes conflates confidence judgments about particular events (e.g., whether an answer to a particular question on the quiz was correct) with confidence judgments about frequencies, i.e., about percentages of correct answers. “According to this view, the common interpretation of overconfidence as a bias is based on comparing apples with oranges.” 66 Gigerenzer, Hoffrage, and Kleinbölting (1991) report on two empirical studies which demonstrate these criticisms, and on the ability of the experimenters to manipulate, invert, or even completely extinguish the phenomena of overconfidence. I will not report all of their details. Suffice for this summary two from their first experiment: First, a comparison of two sets of sample questions. One selected set is simply taken over from a previous calibration study. Its questions have paired names of cities and ask participants to judge which city they believe to be larger in population. A second set is then constructed by randomly sampling 25 of 65 cities with populations over 100,000 in West Germany, and randomly pairing those cities to create 300 pairs, i.e., constructing a random sample of questions that nevertheless include cities wellknown by the 80 students from the University of Konstanz who were being paid to participate in the study. This representative set of questions is constructed to meet two criteria, (1) to be better adapted to the PMMs of the participants in the experiment, and (2) to be randomly constructed in order to avoid the (perhaps unconscious) selection of counterintuitive pairings by the experimenters. Second, subjects were asked to report, not only their confidence for each individual answer (confidence judgments that when collated and compared to the percentage of correctly answered questions for each given rating, exhibited the same overconfidence effect familiar from the classic calibration studies) but also to report, for each block of 50 questions, a percentage that the subject believed he or she had correctly answered, and at the

66. Gigerenzer, Hoffrage, and Kleinbölting, 1991, 512.

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conclusion of the experiment to report a percentage of questions he or she believed were correctly answered for each confidence ranking. The results of this study are striking: using the classical experimental design, i.e., with selected questions and the comparison of aggregated individual confidence judgments, Gigerenzer, Hoffrage, and Kleinbölting found overconfidence of the same type and degree familiar from the classic studies. But there was no overconfidence when the experiment was performed using a representative set of questions as opposed to the selected ones. And there was no overconfidence when subjects were prompted to make judgments about their percentage of correct answers as opposed to their judgments for individual confidence rankings. 67 These results suggest overconfidence, as defined, measured, and reported upon in the classic calibration studies, was actually an artifact of experimental design, as opposed to a cognitive bias. Not everyone, however, agrees with this negative finding. In particular the result was taken up by Brenner, Koehler, Liberman, and Tversky (1996), who point to several studies that also used random sampling to construct questions (as opposed to selection), but nevertheless found overconfidence, of the classic degree and pattern, and thereby contradicts the results of Gigerenzer, Hoffrage, and Kleinbölting (1991). Those studies are reported upon by Griffin and Tversky (1992), but also in two unpublished manuscripts presented at the fifteenth Subjective Probability, Utility and Decision Making Conference (SPUDM-15) in 1995, one by Juslin, Olsson, and Björkman, a second by Ariely, Zauberman, and Wallsten. It might be noted that Juslin (at least) had drawn exactly the opposite conclusion in print, in 1994. 68 Brenner, Koehler, Liberman, and Tversky also argue that the conceptual distinction between a representative sampling and a selected sampling is problematic. They rightly point out that without a precise definition of what counts as “relevant” or “natural” for a given population, we cannot pin down what will count as “representative.” And they suggest that the failure of Gigerenzer, Hoffrage, and Kleinbölting to find overconfidence may have more to do with the ease of the questions used in their

67. Gigerenzer, Hoffrage, and Kleinbölting, 1991, 514–17. 68. See Peter Juslin, “The Overconfidence Phenomenon as a Consequence of Informal Experimenter-Guided Selection of Almanac Items,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 57 (1994): 226–46.

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quiz (which has been known since the 1970s to extinguish the overconfidence effect) as opposed to its representativeness. But to address the issue of the difference between reported confidence judgments of frequencies, as opposed to reported confidence judgments of single events, Brenner, Koehler, Liberman, and Tversky could not simply point to studies conducted by their colleagues. As they themselves admit, such a discrepancy had already been corroborated in print. 69 So, to address the question of whether the overconfidence effect is merely the result of aggregating confidence judgments of individual events, and does not occur in our assessment of frequencies, they designed an experiment that draws on one performed by Kahneman and Tversky in 1973. 70 Their study prompts participants to rate themselves along three dimensions of a personality profile: extrovert/introvert, analytic/intuitive, and adaptive/decisive. Prompting each subject to classify themselves on only one pole of each of these three dimensions yields eight distinct personality profiles: EAA, EAD, EIA, EID, IAA, IAD, IIA, and IID. Subjects then answered 50 binary choice questions expressing their own dispositions, behaviors, and preferences, and chose between 28 pairs of possible occupations that best fit their personality. The experimenters then selected the two most common profiles differing in at least two of the three dimensions, i.e., EID and IAD, and asked subjects to predict the responses for those two personality profiles. However, the experimenters also asked participants for two different sorts of predictions. In one group subjects were asked to predict the responses of particular individual target subjects: they were given the initials of a person about whom they were making their predictions, and his or her personality profile, and asked to predict that individual’s answers to the 50 questions and preferred occupations. A second group of subjects were instead asked to predict the percentage of people who answered one way or another, within one of the two particular target personality profiles. For each question they were asked to first predict the response chosen by the majority of the target sub69. See, in addition to Griffin and Tversky, 1992, also Regine S. May, “Overconfidence in Overconfidence,” in Progress in Decision, Utility and Risk Theory, ed. Attila Chikán (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1991), and Janet A. Sniezek, Paul W. Paese, and Fred S. Switzer III, “The Effect of Choosing on Confidence in Choice,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 46, no. 2 (1990): 264–82. 70. See Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “On the Psychology of Prediction,” Psychological Review 80, no. 4 (1973): 237–51.

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jects, and then give a number (from 50 percent to 100 percent) indicating their prediction of the percentage of the target group giving that answer. The results of this study (which also gathered estimates of response base rates) revealed that personality profiles were roughly diagnostic for question responses. Most interestingly, whether subjects were asked to make predictions about an individual’s responses, or instead to make predictions about the percentage of people providing a given answer, they displayed similar amounts of classic overconfidence. Comparisons between the two groups on the 78 items yielded 8 significant differences (at α = .10) for the IAD profile and 10 significant differences for the EID profile, which is very close to what is expected under the null hypothesis of no difference. 71

Whether this experimental design and its result is sufficient to refute the evidence presented in Gigerenzer, Hoffrage, and Kleinbölting (1991), as is clearly claimed by Brenner, Koehler, Liberman, and Tversky (1996), 72 or instead simply recapitulates the same problems of design identified in the classical calibration studies, I now leave to the judgment of capable readers.

REASONS FOR FEELING CONFIDENT Some more recent studies, e.g., those performed by Koriat, Nussinson, Bless, and Shaked in 2008, are even more metacognitive. In particular these researchers are interested in teasing apart, experimentally, two different research paradigms for studying metacognitive judgments, including confidence judgments. One research paradigm for studying metacognitive judgment has been that it is “information based.” The basic idea is that the processes underlying our judgments that we have learned something or know something are themselves based upon the contents of our memories, and perhaps upon some roughly rational operation on the contents of those memories that allows us to draw the conclusion that we have learned or know it. Of course, our judgments of 71. Brenner, Koehler, Liberman, and Tversky, 1996, 216. 72. In particular at Brenner, Koehler, Liberman, and Tversky, 1996, 218.

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what we have learned or know might be seriously skewed if the beliefs upon which they are based turn out to be false, or if the content of the memories on which they are based turns out to be false. But if that were so, it might simply be taken as yet further evidence that the processes by which we come to form judgments about our own learning or knowledge are, in fact, based upon the contents of those antecedently formed beliefs or memories. A quite different paradigm suggests that our beliefs about what we have learned or know are instead “experience based,” in the particular sense that they are based upon feelings produced as we are storing or retrieving information from memory. Any beliefs about what we have learned or know are instead simply based upon those feelings. The idea here is that a “mnemonic cue” is associated with the ease with which information is encoded and/or retrieved, and that it is this cue (rather than the informational content of the belief or memory itself) that gives rise to a feeling, and that feeling then forms the implicit basis for the “metacognitive judgment.” (But please notice that what the psychologists are really talking about here is a feeling.). Koriat, Nussinson, Bless, and Shaked cite not only a number of earlier studies which have presumed this sort of operation, but also several that have shown that the success and speed of forming such cues is enhanced by interactive images, 73 and has been correlated with predictions of ability to later recall answers on a free-recall test, 74 and has been correlated with advance priming. 75 Response latency in these studies has generally been observed as correlated with the correctness of answers. 76 Of course, it may be the case that one or the other (or both) sorts of processes are in play in the formation of metacognitive judgments. The 73. Christopher Hertzog, John Dunlosky, A. Emanuel Robinson, and Daniel P. Kidder, “Encoding Fluency Is a Cue Used for Judgments About Learning,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 29, no. 1 (2003): 22–34. 74. Aron S. Benjamin, Robert A. Bjork, and Bennett L. Schwartz, “The Mismeasure of Memory: When Retrieval Fluency Is Misleading as a Metamnemonic Index,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 127, no. 1 (1998): 55–68. 75. Lynne M. Reder, “Strategic Control of Retrieval Strategies,” in The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 22, ed. Gordon H. Bower (San Diego: Academic Press, 1988). Also Bennett L. Schwartz and Janet Metcalfe, “Cue Familiarity but not Target Retrievability Enhances Feeling-of-Knowing Judgments,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 18, no. 5 (1992): 1074–83. 76. See Kelley and Lindsay, 1993, but also Michael D. Robinson, Joel T. Johnson, and Felix Herndon, “Reaction Time and Assessments of Cognitive Effort as Predictors of Eyewitness Memory Accuracy and Confidence,” Journal of Applied Psychology 82, no. 3 (1997): 416–25.

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three experiments reported in Koriat, Nussinson, Bless, and Shaked, 2008 borrow an ease-of-retrieval paradigm from Schwarz, Bless, Strack, Klumpp, Rittenauer-Schatka, and Simons, 77 and were designed to test exactly this question. Like the classic studies, in each of these experiments subjects were asked a series of general knowledge questions, each followed by a confidence judgment. But for each question subjects were then also instructed to provide a varying number of reasons justifying their answers. Some subjects were allowed to provide as many reasons as they liked. Some were required to provide a specified number of reasons. The experiments were designed to tease apart the “information based” and “experience based” paradigms insofar as the presence of the forced reporting condition (which increases the difficulty of producing reasons by forcing the subjects to report a specific number of them) was expected to swamp the effect on confidence one might have expected from possessing more reasons, i.e., the effect one might have expected on the “information based” paradigm. And this is, indeed, what the results of Koriat, Nussinson, Bless, and Shaked, 2008 showed. In their first experiment each subject was given the freedom to report as many reasons as he or she liked in support of his or her answers. Each of those responses was then paired with another subject who was forced to provide exactly that number of reasons supporting his or her answer. So for every subject who freely provided three reasons (for example) for her confidence judgment, another was asked to provide exactly three reasons. The hypothesis of Koriat, Nussinson, Bless, and Shaked, 2008 was that people forced to report reasons, as opposed to those allowed to freely provide them, would have decreased confidence in their reported answers, as providing a greater number of reasons proved more and more difficult. Having more than two reasons to justify an answer does not make us more confident in the answer, if we are asked to provide a specific number of reasons (greater than two) rather than left to freely report as many reasons as we like. In such circumstance the more reasons we are asked to provide the less confident we become in the correctness of our answer. This is because (according to the “experience-based paradigm”) it is actually the ease or difficulty with which we formulate the reasons that gives rise to our 77. See Norbert Schwarz, Herbert Bless, Fritz Strack, Gisela Klumpp, Helga RittenauerSchatka, and Annette Simons, “Ease of Retrieval as Information: Another Look at the Availability Heuristic,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 61, no. 2 (1991): 195–202.

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feeling of confidence, rather than the content of the reasons themselves. The result of the first experiment bears this hypothesis out. Subjects in the free-reporting group had a greater number of reasons correlated with an increased reported confidence in their answers. But subjects in the forced-reporting group had a decreased mean confidence as they were forced to provide more than two reasons. In their second experiment the forced-reporting group was asked to provide one reason for half of the questions on a 16-question quiz, and four reasons for the other half. The number of people allowed to freely report (one reason or four or however many they liked) was doubled in order to create comparable groups who freely reported either one reason or four. (The total size of the study was eighty people, participating as volunteers). Results were similar, either when the number of reasons were grouped as “few” (1 or 2) or “many” (3 or 4), or when they were broken down individually: certainty increased as subjects freely provided more reasons, but certainty decreased as subjects were forced to provide more reasons. Grouping subjects into those who provided “few” reasons and those who provided “many” allowed Koriat, Nussinson, Bless, and Shaked to gain a more statistically significant comparison. (In this latter breakdown the p-values were less than .05.) In their third experiment Koriat, Nussinson, Bless, and Shaked used a similar design, but instead administered the quiz to undergraduates with a computer. Each question appears on a screen, the student then mouse-clicks an answer and is asked to type reasons supporting that answer (freely in this case, ranging from one to five reasons) into text fields that are then displayed on the screen. The computer is able to keep track of response latency, from the time the answer is clicked to the time the first reason is typed. The result is that latency (between answering and providing that first reason) decreased monotonically with the number of reasons provided. As in the previous measures of free-reporting, confidence increased with the number of reasons given. The design of this experiment shows a correlation between the speed with which information is retrieved from memory and the confidence one has in the correctness of that information. Does this mean that the “experience based” research paradigm has been definitely proved? It is important to note that this is not the conclusion drawn by the authors themselves. They write:

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The results of this study are consistent with the distinction between IB and EB metacognitive judgments. These results suggest that confidence judgments are affected conjointly by the content of declarative information retrieved from long-term memory and by the ease or effort with which that information is retrieved. When reasons in support of an answer are retrieved spontaneously, confidence increases with number of reasons, possibly because of the increased supportive evidence as well as the greater ease of retrieval. In contrast, when number of reasons is experimentally imposed, the two cues conflict, and the greater effort required to retrieve many reasons may tip the balance, producing a negative relationship between number of reasons and confidence. . . . Throughout this chapter, we treated information-driven and experience-driven processes as if they represent alternative routes to metacognitive judgments. Both processes, however, would seem to operate conjointly, contributing in different degrees to these judgments. The results that we presented on confidence judgments underscore the need to examine the complex interactions that exits between the two processes when they operate in tandem. 78

I will not amplify their own statement of their results, other than to point out that the phenomena they report upon, if they have been rightly reported, cannot be readily explained without invoking an experience-based contribution to metacognitive confidence judgments. As good scientists, Koriat, Nussinson, Bless, and Shaked are hesitant about drawing any sweeping general conclusions. But as a philosopher, I am less constrained: whatever mechanism or degree of contribution metacognitive feelings ultimately have, Koriat, Nussinson, Bless, and Shaked (2008) already show that we must invoke feelings in order to explain metacognitive judgments of confidence.

THE DUNNING-KRUGER EFFECT I conclude now with one last “highlight” of the literature, interesting in part because it is the work of recent psychology most frequently cited in Internet comment threads. This is a somewhat dubious honor, to be sure. But it is also an honor held because of the familiarity of the 78. Koriat, Nussinson, Bless, and Shaked, 2008, 130–31.

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reported effect, and the plausibility of its explanation by Kruger and Dunning in 1999. These days, accusing one’s interlocutor of falling victim to the “Dunning-Kruger Effect” is considerably more erudite than more traditional forms of ad hominem, but is also sufficiently de rigueur to have attracted multiple (relatively accurate) definitions of the effect on urbandicitonary.com. Kruger and Dunning themselves sometimes refer to the phenomenon they have identified as an example of “overestimation,” but in the terminology of Moore and Healy, 2008 it is mainly a phenomenon of overplacement. Kruger and Dunning (1999) present four individual studies, each establishing that people who perform in the bottom quartile on a given task, overplace themselves (relative to others) to a degree significantly greater than the other 75 percent who perform better on that task. While on average people exhibit moderate overplacement, ranking themselves somewhere between the 60th and 70th percentile, people who actually score in the 12th percentile estimate themselves to be in the 62nd percentile. 79 The paper demonstrates that this is the case for a range of intellectual tasks that extends broadly: from the recognition of humor, to logical reasoning, to sensitivity to rules of English grammar. And Kruger and Dunning propose that the reason the particularly unskilled consistently rank their performances higher than they in fact prove to be, relative to others, is because the particularly unskilled, in addition to lacking a first-order ability at whatever tasks they have been asked to perform, also lack a metacognitive ability possessed by the more skillful, i.e., the ability to accurately assess their own level of skill. Kruger and Dunning argue that the unskilled “suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.” 80 This is the so-called “Dunning-Kruger Effect.” Study 1 assessed the ability of 65 Cornell University undergraduates to appreciate humor. In particular, it measured their ability to assess, if not the funniness of a joke itself, at least whether other people would find particular jokes funny. As it happens this is not only a sophisticated sort of socio-cultural skill, but there are experts who make a living employing it in our society, viz. professional comedians. Kruger and Dunning solicited eight professional comedians to rate the funniness of 79. Kruger and Dunning, 1999, 1121. 80. Kruger and Dunning, 1999, 1132.

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a variety of jokes, on an 11-pt. scale from 1 (not at all funny) to 11 (very funny), and discovered, through a bit of statistical analysis, that only one of those experts’ ratings failed to correlate positively with the others. After discarding the judgments of that one comedian with the “off” sense of humor, they ended up with a moderately reliable correlation amongst the rest. 81 As it turns out, some of us are quite a lot better than others at recognizing which jokes are, if not intrinsically funnier, at least judged to be funnier by that small cadre of professional comedians. Even more interestingly, people who were worst at making the assessment were also worst at rating their ability to make it relative to their peers. On average people place themselves in the 66th percentile (above the mean by 16 percent) but people actually in the 12th percentile rate themselves in the 58th percentile (an overplacement of a whopping 46 percentile points.) Subjects in the other three quartiles did not exhibit nearly this degree of overplacement. Subjects in the top quartile actually underplaced their ability relative to their peers. 82 The pattern was similar for logical reasoning. Study 2 administered a 20-item logical reasoning quiz, with questions taken from the Law School Admissions Test. Participants were asked to provide three judgments of their ability and test performance in relation to their peers: (1) their “general logical reasoning ability,” expressed as a percentile ranking, paired with a percentile ranking for the “other students from their psychology class,” but also (2) their percentile rank on the test, along with a percentile rank for other students in their class on the test, and finally (3) an estimate of how many test questions they thought they had answered correctly. Again, on average, the participants placed themselves in the 66th percentile for “general logical reasoning ability,” an example of moderate overplacement. And they also overplaced themselves regarding their performance on the individual test. But, interestingly, they did not overestimate the number of questions they had answered correctly. Kruger and Dunning do not comment on this interesting discrepancy. But we ourselves, now armed with the conceptual distinction taught to us by Moore and Healy, 2008, might well attribute it to the difference between overestimation and overplacement. Breaking the participants into quartiles of ability, Kruger and Dunning dis-

81. They report an α of .76. Kruger and Dunning, 1999, 1123. 82. Kruger and Dunning, 1999, 1124.

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cover again that it is the bottom quartile that exhibits the greatest overplacement, with numbers similar to those found in Study 1. Study 3 was divided into two stages, the first of which was conducted similarly to Study 2, albeit substituting a test of the participants’ knowledge of English grammar. In this case the questions for the 20-item quiz were taken from the National Teacher Examination preparation guide. Each question included a sentence with a specific portion underlined and asked whether the underlined portion was “grammatically correct” or instead ought to be changed to one of four proffered rewordings. The results were quite similar to the results of Study 1 and Study 2. But the second stage was designed to more directly test the hypothesis of Dunning and Kruger that the reason for the dramatic overplacement of those in the lowest quartile is that they lack a metacognitive ability, viz. the ability to accurately assess their own relative placement. In the second stage of Study 3 participants from the top quartile and the bottom quartile were asked to return to the laboratory, several weeks after having completed stage one, in order to “grade” five quizzes that had been taken by their peers. The five quizzes were selected to reflect the actual range of performances on the quiz, i.e., each batch of five had a representative mean and standard deviation. After asking for a report on the number of correctly answered questions for each of the five quizzes graded, participants were then shown their own quiz again, and asked to re-rate themselves relative to their peers. The results were dramatic: participants in the bottom quartile were, as one might expect, less able to accurately score the performance of their peers. But even more interestingly they did not revise their estimates of their own scores down after seeing the performances of others. In fact, Kruger and Dunning report that they (slightly) raised their estimates of their own performance! Contrariwise, participants from the top quartile, upon seeing the relatively poorer performance of their peers, raised their estimation of their own score on the quiz. Kruger and Dunning attribute this latter adjustment to the False-Consensus Effect. 83 They suggest that the participants in the top quartile initially underplaced themselves because they did not have information about the performance of their peers, and so mistakenly assumed their peers would 83. See Lee Ross, David Greene, and Pamela House, “The ‘False Consensus Effect’: An Egocentric Bias in Social Perception and Attribution Processes,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 13, no. 3 (1977): 279–301.

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have provided the same (mostly correct) answers they had, an effect dispelled once they received information to the contrary, but only because they already possessed the metacognitive ability necessary to recognize it. Study 4 was designed to manipulate the hypothesized relationship between competence and the purported metacognitive ability to recognize competence. In this study participants were given a logic quiz based on the Wason Selection Task and asked to assess their own and others’ performance as in the previous three studies. 84 Half of the participants were then given a “training session” in logic (the other half were given an unrelated task that took the same amount of time) and asked to go back through their quiz and re-estimate their judgments of their percentile ranking and percentage of correct answers. Prior to this training the results in Study 4 were strikingly similar to those in the previous three studies: “individuals scoring in the bottom quartile (n = 37) were oblivious to their poor performance.” 85 After the training the poor performers (who had received the actual training) revised their estimates of their previous performance downward to the 44th percentile (generally) and 32nd percentile (on the test), results that still amounted to overplacement and overestimation (respectively), but that are more in line with the average amount of overplacement one finds across ability level. 86 Subsequent work by Miller and Geraci, 87 confirms the main results of Kruger and Dunning, 1999, i.e., that poor performers especially lack the ability to assess the accuracy of their own performance, but also calls into question claims about their level of awareness. Recall that Kruger and Dunning summarize their conclusions about those in the lowest quartile in the following way: they “suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.” 88 Miller and Geraci deny the second of those two claims by distinguishing what

84. Peter C. Wason, “Reasoning,” in New Horizons in Psychology, ed. Brian M. Foss (Baltimore: Penguin, 1966). 85. Kruger and Dunning, 1999, 1128. 86. Kruger and Dunning, 1999, 1129. 87. Tyler M. Miller and Lisa Geraci, “Unskilled But Aware: Reinterpreting Overconfidence in Low-Performing Students,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 37, no. 2 (2011): 502–6. Hereafter Miller and Geraci, 2011. 88. Kruger and Dunning, 1999, 1132.

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they call functional overconfidence from what they call subjective overconfidence. Functional overconfidence is simply being more certain of one’s abilities (or a predicted outcome) than one is accurate. It is equivalent to what we have thus far been calling, following Moore and Healy, overestimation. If I estimate that I will score 80 percent on the quiz, but then score 50 percent on the quiz, I have been proved “functionally overconfident.” An analogue of functional overconfidence, something Miller and Geraci do not themselves discuss, but that we might invoke now in order to better compare with Kruger and Dunning, 1999, is functional overplacement. If I rate in the 12th percentile on the quiz, but rank myself as being in the 58th percentile, then I have functionally overplaced myself. But subjective overconfidence, according to Miller and Geraci, 2011, is being overly certain of our predictions or retrospective confidence judgments themselves. Miller and Geraci follow Dunlosky, Serra, Matvey, and Rawson, 89 in asking subjects, not only to make a confidence judgment about how they have scored on a quiz, but also provide a number representing their confidence in that judgment. For example, you could ask me, about my judgment that I have scored 80 percent on the quiz, and how sure I am of getting that score, and I might be very unsure. I might not have any feeling of certainty at all. I might simply be guessing that I scored 80 percent, and I might tell you that I am only 50 percent confident that I scored 80 percent on the quiz. And in that particular sense my level of confidence might be neatly correlated, not with my assessment of how I did, but with my assessment of that assessment, insofar as it reflected selecting an answer at chance. So it would be possible to be functionally overconfident (i.e., report that I had achieved higher scores than I actually achieved), without being subjectively overconfident (i.e., without feeling overly certain about my retrospective confidence judgments.) And this, indeed, is the result that Miller and Geraci, 2011 report. They report that “low-performing students were less subjectively confident in their predictions than were high-performing students.” 90 How 89. John Dunlosky, Michael J. Serra, Greg Matvey, and Katherine A. Rawson, “SecondOrder Judgments About Judgments of Learning,” The Journal of General Psychology 132, no. 4 (2005): 335–46. 90. Miller and Geraci, 2011, 505.

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can this be reconciled with the results reported by Kruger and Dunning? One way is by distinguishing their two types of overconfidence. Importantly, there is a different object of the two types of overconfidence. The object of functional overconfidence is an ability or result, e.g., one’s score on a quiz. We could extend this concept to functional overplacement, the object of which would be a ranking of one’s own ability or result in comparison with others’. But the object of subjective overconfidence is one’s own prediction or retrospective confidence judgment. The question in that case is not “how likely is such-and-so to transpire?” but “how likely is my prediction that such-and-so will transpire to be correct?” But another way to understand the difference between functional overconfidence and subjective overconfidence, as appealed to by Miller and Geraci, is as I have already suggested above: it is the difference between a solicited report of a metacognitive judgment, and the strength of the metacognitive feeling itself. The recent work of Miller and Geraci, 2011 suggests that the results of Kruger and Dunning, 1999 are quite correct, but that the conclusion that those in the lowest quartile are unaware that they are underperforming may be somewhat premature, insofar as their functional overconfidence is not matched by an equivalent degree of subjective overconfidence. An explanation of that discrepancy, one that does not challenge the findings reported by either group of psychologists, but instead reconciles them, not only with one another, but also with the work done by Koriat, Nussinson, Bless, and Shaked, 2008, is that functional overconfidence is not equivalent to the metacognitive feeling of confidence itself.

CONCLUSIONS ABOUT OVERCONFIDENCE The most important conclusion to be drawn from review of the psychology is that the definitions of overconfidence, i.e., the conceptualizations of overconfidence, themselves matter. This conclusion could be drawn merely from a sympathetic reading of the conceptual distinctions proffered by Moore and Healy (2008), but it is especially apparent to anyone who would attempt to make sense of the broader literature of which they are a part. No reviewer of the young science comes away thinking the theoretical explanation of overconfidence has been settled.

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Alicke and Govorun (2005), for example, list five distinct explanations, just for overplacement; another recent survey lists six, but they are six different theoretical models than those presented in Alicke and Govorun (2005). 91 One finds instead a rich variety of inter-related overconfidence phenomena, disagreement amongst experts about which is primary, and considerable lack of consensus about their labeling and causes. From the perspective of an outsider, this lack of consensus looks not so much like lively dispute regarding a research method or result, so much as a maelstrom of basic concepts. 92 Since the 1970s overconfidence has been understood as a cognitive bias. Through the 1980s the classical overconfidence literature was treated as central for the influential “heuristics and biases” research program. 93 But this once-dominant view now faces growing skepticism from within the ranks, both as a result of criticisms of the classic calibration studies, leveled in the 1990s, but also due to the multiplication of theories and conceptualizations of overconfidence in the 2000s. Since the 1990s the important questions have been shifting away from establishing that we are more confident than we are accurate, and toward determining how various measures of the phenomena are related to one another, and what might cause them. Given this situation, what ought we conclude regarding the prospects for effective “debiasing?” Most psychologists agree that for some tasks, in some populations, excellent calibration is possible. 94 Fischhoff and MacGregor already reported, more than thirty years ago, a variety of different strategies for “debiasing,” and the results of those strategies as mixed. In this particular respect the literature has not changed significantly since 1982. A decade later Gigerenzer was still able to quote from Winterfeldt and Edwards, 1986:

91. Cf. Ulrich Hoffrage, “Overconfidence,” in Cognitive Illusions: A Handbook on Fallacies and Biases in Thinking, Judgement and Memory, ed. Rüdiger F. Pohl (New York: Psychology Press, 2004). Hereafter Hoffrage, 2004. 92. Cf. Dale Griffin and Lyle Brenner, “Perspectives on Probability Judgment Calibration,” in Blackwell Handbook of Judgment and Decision Making, ed. Derek J. Koehler and Nigel Harvey (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 178–80, who add to the half-dozen grappled with in this chapter, “overextremity” and “overprediction.” Hereafter Griffin and Brenner, 2004. 93. Hoffrage, 2004, 245. 94. On this point, cf. the summary of Griffin and Brenner, 2004, 181–82.

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“Overconfidence is a reliable, reproducible finding.” And they conclude, with a tone of regret “Can anything be done? Not much” 95

But Gigerenzer then proceeds to describe how the effect can be entirely eliminated, simply by asking subjects for assessments of frequency rather than judgments about particular events. 96 That should be contrasted, however, with a number of other studies of overconfidence, e.g., the one discussed above by Kruger and Dunning, 1999 in Study 4. Nevertheless, wider difference in expert opinion on the prospects for successful “debiasing” would not be possible. Though I am sympathetic with Gigerenzer’s criticisms, I have not followed critics of the classical calibration studies to their conclusion that overconfidence is merely an artifact of statistical analysis or experimental design. I do not follow them there (as in normal circumstances I might) because such a conclusion remains controversial amongst their peers, and my task here has merely been tracking points of broadest conceptualization and consensus. So, under my own methodological constraint, I instead dutifully follow Fischhoff and MacGregor, 1982, and simply report that the prospects for “debiasing” look promising when subjects can be given extensive personalized training, be prompted to provide reasons for thinking their answers might be wrong, or are simply given easier tasks or questions. 97 Whichever of the psychologists you yourself treat as authoritative on these matters, at the very least we should admit that there is not yet consensus amongst psychologists regarding the prospects for “debiasing.” Not least of all because there is increasing disagreement amongst them about whether overconfidence is a cognitive bias in the first place. Regarding the broader question about whether there are phenomena of “overconfidence,” however, (whatever their causes or explanations), no psychologist seriously doubts. Here there is a consensus. Even those who are dubious the phenomena are deeply cognitive, rather than statistical or ecological artifacts, acknowledge the robustness 95. Detlof von Winterfeldt and Ward Edwards, Decision Analysis and Behavioral Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 539, 656, as quoted by Gerd Gigerenzer, “How to Make Cognitive Illusions Disappear: Beyond ‘Heuristics and Biases,’” in European Review of Social Psychology 2 (1991): 5. 96. See also Gerd Gigerenzer, “The Bounded Rationality of Probabilistic Mental Models,” in Rationality: Psychological and Philosophical Perspectives, ed. K. I. Manktelow and D. E. Over (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 299. 97. Fischhoff and MacGregor, 1982, 158.

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and reproducibility of the basic findings. Whatever the causes or conceptualizations of overconfidence, as multiply defined above, they have been reproduced many times, and in many different studies and populations, far too many for serious doubt about their reality to remain. An increasing variety of overconfidence phenomena are reported, and with them comes increasing agreement that there are a variety of kinds of overconfidences, including those few discussed above. What does feeling certain tell us about our chances of being correct? The past half century of psychologizing has amassed voluminous evidence that judgments of confidence (and perhaps also feelings of confidence!) outstrip accuracy, at least when that is understood as a discrepancy between a mean reported confidence and a percentage of correct answers. A safe conclusion might be that something like Descartes’ Clarity and Distinctness Principle, were it construed as capable of empirical disconfirmation, appears to have been proved false. This will hardly be news to most philosophers, of course. But the task of this chapter has not been changing the contents of their beliefs, so much as raising our own belief to judgment. That is something that can only be accomplished by careful study of the available evidence, which I take to have been provided by the psychologists sampled above. In addition to discharging my own methodological obligation, mentioned some time ago in my Introduction, the purpose of this chapter has been to teach us about the plausibility of conceptualizations of doxastic sentiments, and their eminent naturalizability. Our more subtle conclusion might be this one: It is not currently clear whether overconfidence results from metacognitive judgments not being entirely rational, or metacognitive feelings not being entirely well-trained. Even if the psychology of the last half century has not given us the final word on feelings of believing, i.e., even if it must develop further in distinguishing such feelings from metacognitive judgments, it nevertheless shows that feeling cannot be neglected by epistemology, if that epistemology is to remain psychologically realistic.

4 THE FEELING OF SELF-EVIDENCE Husserlian Evidenz as Gefühlsindex

SUSPICIONS ABOUT SELF-EVIDENCE

In chapter 2 I argued that Descartes’ conceptualization of some perceptions as clear ought to be understood as a claim about the quality of an experience, viz. a feeling. The feeling in question was proposed by Descartes to be especially important epistemically: the Clarity and Distinctness Principle was implicated in his infamous “Problem of the Circle.” I followed many others in exonerating Descartes of that Problem of the Circle, but argued that CLARITY still leaves us facing another, more fundamental, circularity: the Problem of the Criterion. Those two quite different circles, often conflated, are nevertheless sufficiently severe, and sufficiently infamous, to have caused more than a few to abandon Cartesianism altogether. But not quite all. And not quite altogether. Descartes’ approach lived on, several centuries later, in the work of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). The task of the present chapter is, in part, an assessment of whether Husserl was able to make progress with respect to the Problem of the Criterion. Husserl’s Cartesian legacy is, admittedly, complicated. I will not be able to tease out all of the multifarious ways he was indebted to Descartes. Instead I will consider myself to have contributed if I am able to answer precisely, by the end of this chapter, how Husserl’s approach does not commit him to the circularity identified at 143

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the end of chapter 2. I will argue that Husserlian phenomenology built upon its Cartesian foundations by substituting for Descartes’ concepts PERCEPTION and CLARITY Husserl’s concepts EXPERIENCE and EVIDENZ. I will then argue that Husserl followed Descartes in treating Evidenz as a quality of an experience, viz. a feeling. But Husserl additionally invoked a distinction amongst various kinds of Evidenz, i.e., a distinction capable of insulating him from the Problem of the Criterion, even if he cannot solve it. SELF-EVIDENCE has played a significant, if waning, role in modern epistemology and ethics. In epistemology it was associated with foundationalism and knowledge conceived as necessary or a priori. In ethics it is associated with intuitionism. But appeals to the self-evident have not been merely theoretical. Philosophers concocted the concept, but more than mere philosophers have invoked it. A famous practical example is the appeal to the self-evident in the preamble of the American Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, [etc., etc., etc.]” 1 That line would have been considerably altered had Jefferson or the first Congress settled upon “foundational,” or “axiomatic,” or “a priori.” And while this next point may scandalize the patriotic Americans amongst us, it must also be said that many philosophers today deny that there is any such thing as a “self-evident truth.” Once popular in the literatures of epistemology, “self-evidence” has begun to sound a bit quaint. 2 Motives for increased suspicion of the self-evident have been numerous and irreproachable. Consider the phenomena of overconfidence, discussed in the previous chapter. Or consider the fact that “self1. “[A]ll men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” The Declaration of Independence [1776], in The American Revolution: Writings from the War of Independence, ed. John Rhodehamel (New York: The Library of America, 2001), 128. 2. The reasons are legion. The shift in attitude, at least amongst academic philosophers, began in the nineteenth century and progressed apace in the twentieth century. An example of a (nevertheless-red-blooded-American) philosopher who was an early denier of self-evident truths is Charles Saunders Peirce. See C. S. Peirce, “Questions Concerning Reality, in Writings of Charles S. Peirce, Vol. 2: 1867–1871 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 165. Or C. S. Peirce, “Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man,” in Charles S. Peirce, Selected Writings, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Dover 1958) 17.

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evident truths,” e.g., the axioms of Euclidean geometry, eventually turned out not to be so. Moreover, as in the case of infallible authority, it should be noted that the breakdown of the claim to self-evidence for this outstanding instance carries with it all other supposed instances. The criterion of self-evidence itself is discredited. For if in one good instance the criterion of self-evidence fails, how can it ever be trusted again? The criterion could not have been better tested than in the example of the Euclidean axioms. These for centuries were accepted as selfevident by the keenest minds. If the claim must be abandoned for these, how can it be legitimately offered for the truth of any other principles? 3

Another irreproachable motive for suspicion has been the fact that appeals to self-evidence, insofar as they mark the end of deliberation and demand for proof, are often used as camouflage for lazy convictions or obdurate dogmatism. It is all too easy to merely say that premises are “self-evident,” in hopes of shutting off others’ inquiry, or in the bad faith of lying to oneself about whether that inquiry is even necessary. Merely to accept self-evidence at its face value is fundamentally opposed to the whole spirit of Criticism; Kant regards it as legitimate in science, but not in philosophy. Once we admit self-evidence as ultimate, we are faced with a whole host of audacious pretensions claiming such self-evidence; and nothing is more usual than for the deliverances of common sense or tradition (in themselves no guarantee of truth) to be mistaken for axioms, that is, for propositions which have a genuine measure of self-evidence. 4

I agree, in spirit, with both Pepper and Paton, respectively, in the passages just quoted. But neither of their arguments is sufficient to establish that there is no such thing as self-evidence. At best these two arguments merely establish that what was once thought to be self-evident turned out not to be so. Pepper’s argument commits the fallacy of the pessimistic induction. And Paton’s, if interpreted as an argument 3. Stephen C. Pepper, World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1942), 22. 4. H. J. Paton, Kant’s Metaphysics of Experience, Vol. II (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1936), 368.

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against anything being self-evident, collapses the difference between treating something as self-evident, and treating all the “deliverances of common sense or tradition” as if they were. However dangerous a doctrine (and dangerous it is), it is still logically possible for something to be self-evident, without indulging all of the “deliverances of common sense or tradition.” Acknowledging this possibility requires taking up the difficult task of sorting pretenders from legitimate claimants. To be clear, I do not suggest that there are no grounds for suspicion. Quite the contrary. I think that we ought to be considerably more suspicious of SELF-EVIDENCE than any off-hand dismissal will allow. But even were we to reject wholesale all conceptualizations of self-evidence, we would still need (as the old defenders would have needed) some account of what the putatively self-evident things are supposed to have been. In order to responsibly reject a concept we must have some idea of the work it is supposed to have done (if only in the minds of our benighted forebears), not to mention our enlightened and scientific reasons for rejecting it. This general responsibility presses particularly in the present case, because we otherwise risk taking the fact that there is nothing self-evident as a fact that is itself self-evident, a patent absurdity if there ever were one. Unfortunately, the history of philosophy does not clearly distinguish feelings of self-evidence from self-evident truths. The traditional presumption has been that beliefs are propositional attitudes, and that a believing attitude taken toward a self-evident truth is much like a believing attitude taken toward a plain old truth: there’s nothing that it particularly feels like to believe a proposition. However, there must be some way in which self-evident truths are recognized as such, i.e., discriminated by their believers from merely true propositions, otherwise all the hullaballoo about their special status would be moot. It is not obviously the case that such recognition, which I myself suspect must come down to an experience or a quality of experience, should not (perhaps also) be treated as self-evident, rather than (or perhaps in addition to) its propositional content. The phenomenology of propositional “attitudes” has been sorely neglected. 5

5. A notable exception, and a discussion of the neglect, is Søren Harnow Klausen, “The Phenomenology of Propositional Attitudes,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7, no. 4 (2008): 445–62.

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Thus far, I have been attempting to couch claims about the selfevident in a way neutral with respect to whether it is to be analyzed as a property of a proposition, or a quality of an experience. But I will drop that pretense now. In this chapter I propose an interpretation and limited defense of a phenomenological account of self-evidence. In order to do that I am going to distinguish the somewhat unusual thing I mean by that (i.e., involving a feeling of truth) from ways that “self-evidence” has been more traditionally treated. In particular I will contrast my somewhat iconoclastic interpretation of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology with a recent and better-known treatment by Robert Audi. In order to advance the kind of account that I think Husserl gave, I will map out a few of the dark and gnarled corners of the Husserlian corpus (if not burn down some of its overgrown brambles). My most radical departure from Husserl’s own words will be to attribute to him a doctrine towards which he was uncharacteristically (but merely nominally, I will argue) hostile. Despite frequent denunciations of “feeling,” Husserl was nevertheless a doxastic sentimentalist, at least if we are allowed a sufficiently expansive notion of feeling. I will then be in a position to advertise a particular benefit of my approach: a distinction between various feelings of Evidenz. Armed with that distinction, we can show how Husserl had a solution to a puzzle bequeathed to us by G. E. Moore, a puzzle about “empirical proofs” that Audi-style accounts of self-evidence are unable to solve, i.e., insofar as they treat self-evidence as a type of truth. The self-evident is something that does not require further proof. I will call this “the core idea” of self-evidence, and start into the woods armed merely with this “core idea.” We should be careful not to trespass into other, possibly related claims. For example: “self-evident truths need only to be declared, and on that basis everyone ought acknowledge them,” or “self-evident truths need only be adequately understood, and on that basis anyone would be justified in believing them.” Of course, not everyone does acknowledge self-evident truths as true, whether they are ceremoniously declared or otherwise. But for the purposes of this chapter I will not take that to be definitive. I will not conclude, from the mere fact that a thing’s self-evidence has been (and hence can be) disputed, that it is not, in fact, self-evident. 6 If this is 6. Cf. Quine who writes, in a moment of uncharacteristic weakness, that self-evidence requires broad (if not universal) assent. See W. V. Quine and J. S. Ullian, The Web of Belief (New York: Random House, 1970), 31.

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basically the right starting place, then one of two things immediately follows: either the self-evident doesn’t require proof at all, or it comes down to us already proved. Which should we choose? I think the latter squares better with the core idea of self-evidence, i.e., whatever is selfevident already has sufficient evidence, namely itself. The former, I might argue (but not in any greater detail here), is less an idea of selfevidence than a renunciation of the doctrine that all truths or experiences require evidence of some kind or another. If we are to preserve the doctrine that all truths or experiences require evidence (a big “if,” but one that would be worth saving, if possible, and that will be explored in greater detail in chapter 5), then the place to begin inquiry into the self-evident is with the idea of something proving itself. One might wonder, how could something like either a truth or an experience do anything like that?

MOORE’S PUZZLE ABOUT PROOF The philosopher G. E. Moore (1873–1958) is remembered in ethics for his arguments against ethical naturalism, and for his defense of intrinsic value, and for his insistence on the un-analyzability of the Good. He has been almost as influential in epistemology. Epistemology classes to this day often include his early essay “The Refutation of Idealism” (1903), or his later essays “Proof of an External World” (1939), or “Certainty” (1959), or “Four Forms of Skepticism” (1959). Many undergraduates remember nothing from their class on the theory of knowledge but their profound irritation at Moore’s simple “proof” of the existence of the external world: “Here is one hand, here is another. Therefore, two human hands [i.e., objects in the external world] exist.” It is an absolute classic. Moore’s notorious proof was met with, and still meets with (and Moore himself foresaw that it would perpetually be met with), almost universal dissatisfaction. In response to the dissatisfaction Moore was careful to point out that the premises of his argument are not what he claimed to have proved. Nevertheless, he was at pains to defend the bona fides of the argument qua proof. In that regard he made two diagnoses of the dissatisfactions he foresaw his proof would perpetually engender: The first was that we are dissatisfied because we want a proof

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of something (i.e., the premises) that Moore himself made no claim to have proved. Moore thought that we thereby demand too from his particular argument. But second, he also thought we thereby demand too much simpliciter, insofar as we demand proof of something, i.e., a premise of the sort HERE IS A HAND, that simply cannot be proved at all. Of course, what they really want is not merely a proof of these two propositions, but something like a general statement as to how any propositions of this sort may be proved. This, of course, I haven’t given; and I do not believe it can be given: if this is what is meant by proof of the existence of external things, I do not believe that any proof of the existence of external things is possible. Of course, in some cases what might be called a proof of propositions which seem like these can be got. If one of you suspected that one of my hands was artificial he might be said to get a proof of my proposition “Here’s one hand, and here’s another,” by coming up and examining the suspected hand close up, perhaps touching and pressing it, and so establishing that it really was a human hand. But I do not believe that any proof is possible in nearly all cases. How am I to prove now that “Here’s one hand, and here’s another”? I do not believe I can do it. 7

It is important to notice that Moore himself did not appeal to SELFEVIDENCE anywhere in this passage. But elsewhere he defines the selfevident as that which “has absolutely no reason.” 8 What could be more self-evident than a simple perceptual observation, made on the basis of reliably functioning sensory organs in near-ideal perceptual circumstances, e.g., a claim of the sort “here is a hand?” Another important point to notice is that if we are to understand Moore’s claim as involving self-evidence, then it must be a stronger sort of self-evidence than what I identified above as the “core idea” of self-evidence. That is because, in addition to the claim that proof of the proposition HERE IS A HAND is 7. G. E. Moore, “Proof of an External World,” reprinted in Philosophical Papers (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1959), 149. 8. “The expression ‘self-evident’ means properly that the proposition so called is evident or true, by itself alone; that it is not an inference from some proposition other than itself. The expression does not mean that the proposition is true, because it is evident to you or me or all mankind, because in other words it appears to us to be true. That a proposition appears to be true can never be a valid argument that true it really is. By saying that a proposition is selfevident, we mean emphatically that its appearing so to us, is not the reason why it is true: for we mean that it has absolutely no reason.” G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica. [1903] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 193.

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unnecessary, Moore advanced the stronger thesis that proof of such a proposition is impossible. Let us call Moore’s claim that proof of such a proposition is not merely absent, but also impossible, “Moore’s strong notion of self-evidence.” 9 Unlike the way that I accounted for selfevidence above, Moore thought that self-evident truths are not so much truths already proved, as truths unprovable. A close reading of the passage reveals even a bit more. In addition to claiming that any proof of the premises is impossible, Moore also claimed that “in some cases” proofs of propositions that “seem like these can be got.” He mentions particular circumstances wherein there might be reasonable doubts about whether one of his hands was a genuine “human hand,” rather than a prosthesis or clever facsimile. He goes on to say that in cases of that sort, i.e., cases of genuine doubt about whether something is as it seems, the proof of HERE IS A HAND is possible, viz. by inspecting more closely, with our oldest and most reliable method of simple empirical investigation. So in some cases, proofs of propositions such as HERE IS A HAND turn out to be quite possible after all. Moore’s initial claim that the premises cannot be proved turns out not strictly to be true, at least not in all cases. Hmm. What is going on here? Did he contradict himself? I propose that he did not. We must simply be more careful about his ultimate claim: Moore must have merely meant that the premises cannot be proved “in nearly all cases.” That shift, however sensible for Moore to have made, or for us to make on Moore’s behalf, ought now wholly dissatisfy us. It is important for me to point out that this new dissatisfaction, the one that I am talking about presently, is a very different dissatisfaction from those two dissatisfactions that Moore elegantly diagnosed in relation to his proof. It is also a different dissatisfaction (I hope) than those expressed by my many students, who upon reading Moore’s essay suspect that all philosophy is some kind of sham. It ought to dissatisfy us, insofar as we have more than merely sophistical interests in Moore’s argument, we ought to find Moore’s maneuver here unsatisfactory, not because it is a sensible retreat to a more defensible claim from the broader one (in per9. Put a bit more carefully: according to Moore P is self-evident iff P is unprovable and P is true. For argument that this was, in fact, Moore’s understanding of self-evidence, see Noah Lemos, “Self-Evidence and Principia Ethica,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 23, no. 4 (1985): 451–64, especially 452–53. Another discussion can be found in Robert Audi, The Good in the Right: A Theory of Intuition and Intrinsic Value (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), 12-13.

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fectly good order), but because Moore gives us no principled reason for distinguishing the two sorts of cases from one another. Moore gives no criterion for distinguishing the cases where proofs of propositions like HERE IS A HAND “can be got,” from those cases (which he apparently considered more common) where they cannot be got. 10 What’s the difference between the scenario in which there is, and in which there isn’t, further provability of an otherwise self-evident empirical proposition? This is not the Problem of the Criterion. But it is a puzzle about empirical provability that lives in the same neighborhood. I propose that we raise the question about what separates the “nearly all cases” of self-evident perceptual knowledge from those few where Moore thought further proof possible, up out of these narrower concerns for the interpretation of Moore’s essay and into philosophy proper. The first-order epistemological question, raised by Moore’s maneuver here, is the following: how do we distinguish cases where perceptual beliefs are self-evident, from those in need of (or perhaps merely capable of, if we employ Moore’s strong notion of self-evidence rather than the core idea) further proofs? Let us call this “Moore’s Puzzle.” 11 It lays down a marker that any successful account of self-evidence must meet. I argue below that Husserl meets this marker in a way that a family of contemporary theories of self-evidence (I take Robert Audi to be paterfamilias) cannot.

10. Perhaps Moore envisioned the difference as being between different types of doubt, or different contexts for doubt. Doubt that HERE IS A HAND may be motivated in rarer cases by practical considerations or interests. Compare those to the more mundane cases, wherein doubt can only be generated by philosophical scruples, e.g., epistemological skepticism. This would suggest, e.g., pragmatist or contextualist solutions to the puzzle. One pragmatist standard is briefly discussed below and in the next chapter. For a contextualist approach see, e.g., Keith DeRose, “Solving the Skeptical Problem,” The Philosophical Review 104, no. 1 (1995): 1–52. There are, of course, a wide variety of other potential solutions to the puzzle. I focus below exclusively on Husserl’s. 11. “Moore’s Puzzle,” as described here, ought not be confused for the more famous “Moore’s Paradox” discussed by Wittgenstein, i.e., the absurdity of asserting that something is the case while at the same time asserting that one does not believe it to be the case. Nor should it be confused for “Moore’s Dilemma,” i.e., the dilemma for theorizing sensory awareness recently described by M. G. F. Martin, “Moore’s Dilemma,” in Phenomenal Qualities: Sense, Perception, and Consciousness, eds. Paul Coates and Sam Coleman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 147-80.

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AUDI’S ACCOUNT OF SELF-EVIDENCE Moore’s strong notion of self-evidence is not the only one available. Another, somewhat more recent, definition of self-evidence has been advanced by Robert Audi. p is self-evident provided an adequate understanding of it is sufficient for being justified in believing it and for knowing it if one believes it on the basis of that understanding. 12

Audi’s account has many virtues, and many details, and surely deserves the attention it has garnered. Because it is relatively well-known (amongst epistemologists) and discussed in our contemporary literature, 13 I will confine myself here to commenting on only a few of its most basic features. One important point is that Audi, like Moore, is committed to the difference between a truth’s self-evidence and the doxastic state of believing the truth to be self-evident. It is one thing for a truth to be true, or even to be its own proof; it is quite a different thing for some particular person to believe either is the case. Moore insisted upon such a distinction, and Audi respects it, and so should we. However, a second important point is that, unlike Moore, Audi defines a truth’s self-evidence in terms of the subject’s possible epistemic states in relation to it. In particular, a truth must meet two criteria in order to be self-evident: (a) “adequate understanding” of that truth would be sufficient for justified belief in it, and (b) believing it on the basis of that “adequate understanding” would amount to knowing it. 14 To be sure, this does not define self-evidence on the basis of any particular person’s actual epistemic states, but it does define it in terms of conditions under which it could be justifiably believed and known by someone. A third important point is that those conditions are conditions in which the truth is, in Audi’s words, “adequately understood.” Clearly, an important part of Audi’s notion of self-evidence is the nature of this “adequate

12. Robert Audi, “Self-Evidence,” Philosophical Perspectives 13 (1999), 206. 13. One discussion that has been particularly useful for me is Elizabeth Tropman, “Renewing Moral Intuitionism,” Journal of Moral Philosophy: An International Journal of Moral, Political and Legal Philosophy 6, no. 4 (2009): 440–63. Another is Klemens Kappel, “Challenges to Audi’s Ethical Intuitionism,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice: An International Forum 5, no. 4 (2002): 391–413. 14. See Audi, “Self-Evidence,” 206. Or Audi, The Good in the Right, 48–49.

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understanding,” and that is what I will briefly turn my attention to in the remainder of this analysis. Before doing so, however, it might be useful to highlight one further contrast with Moore. According to Moore it is a definitional consequence of a truth being self-evident that it cannot be proved. This is not the case according to Audi. Developing his analysis of W.D. Ross, Audi devotes considerable care to arguing that self-evident truths are not unprovable. By way of contrast he develops another, narrower, technical concept that is more closely aligned with unprovability. According to Audi, a truth is strongly axiomatic if and only if (i) it is immediately selfevident, and (ii) it is unprovable from anything epistemically prior. 15 We need not plumb the depths of Audi’s accounts of immediately selfevident or epistemically prior in order to realize that a consequence of this definition will be that self-evident truths can meet these two basic conditions without thereby forfeiting their status as possible conclusions of inferences. This is one of the unique features of Audi’s account: selfevident truths are those that we would be justified in believing on the basis of an “adequate understanding” alone (and would thereby know them if we did), but that doesn’t rule out their derivation from premises. The real test for such a definition, therefore, is in its appeal to the “adequately understood.” Audi himself understands “adequate understanding” as more than merely having a general sense of a sentence expressing a truth, but also being able to apply such sentences and parse some (if not all) of their logical implications. In addition he thinks “adequate understanding” would involve being able to distinguish the truths expressed by them from similar truths, and understanding (at least some) of their relationships. So “adequate understandings,” according to Audi, must always be a matter of degree, but all are similar insofar as they possess a sufficient degree of non-defectiveness. By way of contrast, he gives examples of “defectiveness” in the following four distinct kinds: misunderstandings, partial understandings, distorted understandings, and clouded understandings. 16 Putting aside Audi’s typology of misunderstandings, themselves interesting, it should be said that his account of self-evidence has faced 15. Audi, “Self-Evidence,” 216. This concept is further developed, if not defined in exactly this way, in Audi, The Good in the Right, 81–83. 16. See Audi, “Self-Evidence,” 207–8; or Audi, The Good in the Right, 49–51.

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a variety of challenges. One of them is nicely discussed in the literature, and directly related to Moore’s Puzzle: because Audi’s account of selfevidence is an account relying upon on the “adequate understanding” of a proposition, it classifies the self-evident as a kind of general principle, as opposed to a perceivable fact. A principle like ‘cheating is wrong,’ might be self-evident on Audi’s analysis, whereas an event like Maradona’s Hand of God goal in the 1986 World Cup cannot be. 17 According to Audi, the wrongness of a particular handball, something that might be quite independent of the wrongness of handballs generally, can be “non-inferentially knowable” but not self-evident. 18 An excellent discussion of the stark departure this takes from traditional intuitionisms, despite Audi’s otherwise staunch defense of them, can be found in Tropman (2009). 19 This, of course, would only be a problem for Audi’s view if there are, in fact, self-evident truths (moral facts or non-moral facts) that are particular, i.e., if it is not the case that all self-evident truths are general principles. But now recall the premises of Moore’s infamous argument. Our understanding of the sentence ‘here is a hand’ does not appear to be in any way defective, i.e., our understanding of the proposition HERE IS A HAND is perfectly adequate in both of the two types of cases to which Moore appealed, i.e., cases where further proof was forthcoming and cases where further proof can’t be got. Let us say, for the sake of argument, that in neither of those two types of cases is the proposition misunderstood, nor “partially understood,” nor “distortedly understood,” nor “cloudily understood.” If so, aren’t we thereby justified in believing it, and knowing it on that basis? In which case, oughtn’t Audi say that the proposition is self-evident? (Though he would not.) Set aside, for the moment, the important metaethical question about whether there are any self-evident truths that are particular (and hence whether Audi’s account of self-evidence accurately depicts the selfevident as a set of general propositions, or is thereby flawed). At the very least, we have reached a crossroads for solving Moore’s Puzzle. It has become clear that on Audi’s account a truth like ALL PEOPLE ARE CREATED EQUAL may be self-evident, but a truth like HERE IS A HAND may not be. 17. This is not to say it wasn’t wrong. It was definitely wrong. It is simply to say that on Audi’s account the experience of an event cannot itself be self-evident, except as subsumed under a self-evident principle. 18. Audi, The Good in the Right, 68. 19. See Tropman, “Renewing Moral Intuitionism,” 452–56.

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Because a claim of the latter sort cannot be self-evident, Audi’s definition can be of no help in distinguishing cases that appeal to particular facts as self-evident, from those wherein particular facts warrant further proof. This for the simple reason that on Audi’s account particular facts are never self-evident, at best they are “immediately known.” So Robert Audi, the current standard-bearer for the Rossian tradition begun almost a century ago, i.e., the intuitionist tradition appealing to selfevident truths, whence Audi’s considerably more sophisticated definition of them, and which delivers us some considerable distance down the road of contemporary rationalist epistemology, still leaves us singularly unequipped to handle Moore’s Puzzle. The resources required for that task simply demand that we look elsewhere. Audi’s account of self-evidence cannot solve Moore’s Puzzle, because on Audi’s account simple perceptual knowledge is never selfevident. But even if Audi had claimed that perceptual knowledge could be self-evident, or even were we to give up the language of ‘self-evidence’ here for the terminology that Audi uses for perceptual particulars, e.g., “perceptually evident,” 20 his theory would still be unable to serve in the way that I have been asking. This is because, in due fairness to Audi, I have been asking it to do something that it was not designed to do. Audi’s account of self-evidence belongs in a family of theories that treat the self-evident as a special kind of proposition. And Audi himself treats self-evident propositions as possessing a property tracking cognitive, rather than affective, conditions for knowledge. The property in question is “special” in the sense that it is both modal and epistemic: self-evident propositions are supposed to be those that some subject would be justified in believing, were those propositions adequately understood by that subject, and then known on that basis. But at bottom, according to Audi, to be self-evident is simply to be a fancy kind of proposition. If we think of Audi’s account as prototypical for a group of possible theories, i.e., theories that treat self-evidence propositionally, then the result here generalizes to them too. It is not merely Audi’s theory, but all theories that conceptualize self-evidence propositionally, that fail to solve Moore’s Puzzle. This final inductive step in my present argument can be made by showing that it is exactly the feature that Audi’s account

20. Audi, The Good in the Right, 49.

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shares with others of its family that causes the relevant failure: treating the self-evident as propositional is exactly what is inapt for solution to Moore’s Puzzle. The reason for this is quite simple: it is because, in Moore’s puzzle, the proposition in question is identical in both perceptual scenarios. In some cases HERE IS A HAND needs no (or perhaps admits of no) further proof. In other cases proof of that very same proposition “can be got.” So the difference between those two cases cannot lie in the content of the proposition.

HUSSERL’S FEELING OF EVIDENZ Detangling Husserl’s claims is notoriously difficult, but I think a safe place to begin is simply by stating that Husserl accounted for selfevidence in a way significantly different from Audi. In particular, I will argue below that Husserl’s account belongs to an entirely different family of theories. While Audi treats the self-evident as a kind of proposition, Husserl treated Evidenz as a qualitative character of experience. This is one thing that might be meant by saying that Husserl gave a phenomenological account of self-evidence. But readers here should be warned that I will depart significantly from some of Husserl’s own terminology. In explaining self-evidence as a quality of experience, I am going to analyze it as what is now commonly called a “feeling.” Whatever the ultimate merits or demerits of Husserl’s approach, I will say that tallied amongst its merits is (1) a solution to Moore’s Puzzle. I will then argue that, if we allow Husserl several distinctions amongst various kinds of doxastic sentiment, then also tallied amongst its merits is (2) an advance upon the Cartesian epistemology discussed in chapter 2. Husserl of course did not himself use the language of ‘evidence’ or the ‘self-evident.’ He used the German term ‘Evidenz.’ Husserl’s translators have not come to complete consensus about how that term ought to be rendered into English: most have settled upon the English word

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‘evidence,’ 21 but a not-insignificant minority have used ‘self-evidence’ instead. 22 Perhaps the most important reason for J. N. Findlay choosing ‘self-evidence,’ when translating the Logical Investigations, is that when Husserl wrote about Evidenz he was almost exclusively writing about something associated with consciousness, as experienced by creatures like us, i.e., consciousness from what we now refer to as the “firstperson point of view.” 23 By way of contrast Husserl was not talking about “evidence” as a document, or scientific experiment, or an authority figure like a dissertation director or the Oxford English Dictionary. Except in special circumstances, he also was not talking about a proposition, or a property of propositions, or a relation amongst propositions. Because our English word ‘evidence’ can also be used to refer to any of those, and not merely to our experiences of them, individually or collectively, the word ‘evidence,’ is somewhat problematic as a rendering of Husserl’s term. However, there is also a problem with Findlay’s choice of ‘self-evidence.’ The problem is not merely that it suggests analysis as a property of a proposition or a type of truth (à la Audi), but also that it suggests a property that may be had in isolation from other mental acts. Could we know that ALL PEOPLE ARE CREATED EQUAL without first having had experiences of people, or experiences of equality (not to mention the antecedent experiences of the fundamental equality of people)? While there are many who believe principles like the one in question are “selfevident truths” (Husserl and Audi among them, presumably) it is quite a different thing to claim that we are somehow able to grok such princi21. Dorian Cairns prescribes ‘evidence’ in his Guide for Translating Husserl (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 49. Cf. what I sometimes refer to as “Kersten’s translation:” Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke, Bd. III/1: Ideen zu Einer Reinen Phänomenologie und Phänomenologischen Philosophie: Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die Reine Phänomenologie [1913], Hrsg. Karl Schuhmann (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976). Translated as Edmund Husserl, Collected Works, Vol. II: Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book. General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1983). Hereafter cited as (HUA III/1; CW II). 22. I’m thinking particularly of “Findlay’s translation” of Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke, Bd. XVIII/XIX: Logische Untersuchungen [1900/1901], Hrsg. Elmar Holenstein (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975). Translated as Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970). Hereafter cited (HUA XVIII/ XIX; LI 1/2). It should also be noted that this is also the choice of James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks in their translation of Erfahrung und Urteil. John J. Drummond distinguishes the two terms on Husserl’s behalf; see his Historical Dictionary of Husserl’s Philosophy (Lanham: Scarecrow, 2008), 70, 188. 23. See the Translator’s Introduction in Findlay’s translation (LI I, 40).

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ples entirely independently of other experiences. Neither Husserl nor Audi need have signed up for anything like that. It is important also to notice that there is no hint of the concept SELF in Husserl’s preferred bit of technical terminology, neither as reference to the subject of experiences, nor for purposes of sequestering individual experiences from others of their ilk. For these reasons, when I mean to talk about what Husserl meant by self-evidence, I will henceforth simply use his German term Evidenz, without translating it, i.e., without employing its potentially misleading prefix, picked up (however legitimately or illegitimately) in Findlay’s translation. Abdicating my responsibilities as translator, I neatly solve one set of (not insignificant) interpretive difficulties. However, another more serious set lurks. Husserl meant many different things by ‘Evidenz’ in the many places that he employed the term. In the interests of brevity I will baldly claim that Husserl had five (5) distinct concepts of Evidenz. But here I should also warn readers that I count this number very selectively, and from only a couple of pages of the Cartesian Meditations (1931). I will count only these five, and only from these scant few pages, because this number will be entirely sufficient for the simple points that I mean to make below. The discussion in the remainder of this chapter will not be a full account of everything that Husserl had to say about Evidenz, nor do I offer it as such. According to Husserl, Evidenz in its most basic sense is the experience of truth. 24 Or, to put his point in a slightly different way: Evidenz ist in einem allerweitesten Sinne eine Erfahrung von Seiendem und So-Seiendem, eben ein Es-selbst-geistig-zu-Gesicht-bekommen. 25 In its widest sense Evidenz is an experience of something that is, and that it is so; it is a self-givenness-to-mental-seeing.

24. Cf. Logical Investigations VI, §39 (HUA XIX/2, 652; LI II, 766). 25. Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke, Bd. I: Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge. Hrsg., S. Strasser (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950), 52. Hereafter citations are to this edition and its translation by Dorion Cairns, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1960), abbreviated (HUA I; CM). This passage CM, 12. Cf. Logical Investigations, Prolegomena, §6 (HUA XVIII, 28-29; LI I, 60–61), where Husserl calls it “unmittelbares Innewerden der Wahrheit selbst,” and “die lichtvolle Gewissheit, dass ist, was wir anerkannt, oder nicht ist, was wir verworfen haben,” i.e., “immediate awareness of truth itself” and “the luminous certainty that something is as we’ve recognized it, or isn’t, when we’ve rejected it.”

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Perhaps the most significant point to be made about this, Husserl’s general notion of Evidenz, is that he is talking about a quality of an experience. “Experience” here is used in a wide, non-technical sense. But equally important for understanding Husserl’s most basic concept is that Evidenz characterizes not all experiences, but only those taken by their subject to be veridical. The significance of Husserl saying that the object of such an experience is a “Seiendem” and that it is “Esselbst-geistig-zu-Gesicht-bekommen” is that Evidenz is what characterizes the experience of things as being what they seem, i.e., an experience not just of “mentally seeing,” but also of having the feeling that things actually are as they seem. This may suggest to us the famous adaequatio rei et intellectus, but here we must be very cautious. Things actually being as they seem should not be confused for the experience or feeling of things being as they seem, i.e., for things seeming as being as they seem. The distinction here is subtle, but crucial. Here we must become phenomenologically sensitive. Importantly, experiences characterized by Evidenz do not entail, according to Husserl, that they are actually true, i.e., that the extra-mental states-of-affairs actually are as they appear to be. 26 This is a basic point for all of Husserlian epistemology, but one that has been missed by more than a few of Husserl’s otherwise able, if exhausted, readers. And Husserl in many places seems to contradict the claim. So I must choose my own words carefully when presenting him now: an experience with Evidenz is an experience of something as intuitively given, i.e., as characterized by “self-givennes,” but that does not require that what is intuitively given actually be as it appears. So Evidenz is not a special character of all and only veridical experiences. Evidenz is instead the character of experiencing something as veridical. That is what “self-givenness” means for Husserl. It is not that an experience is true; it is rather that an experience seems true, and perhaps seems true in that very strongest of possible ways, viz. the way such that any subsequent experience to the contrary would seem to be ruled out. Husserl elsewhere describes Evi-

26. I am not the first to make this crucial point. It can be found already in Elisabeth Ströker, Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology [1987], trans. Lee Hardy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 35, and 214. An even earlier source is David Michael Levin, “Husserl’s Notion of Self-Evidence,” in Phenomenology and Philosophical Understanding, ed. Edo Pivcevic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 55.

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denz as truth “from the subjective point of view.” 27 What I add to that claim by way of interpretation is merely the following: If believing is simply taking something to be true, then Evidenz is the qualitative character of that taking-to-be-true, i.e., it is the feeling characteristic of believing. The contrast to be made here with Descartes’ Clarity and Distinctness Principle is stark, and illustrative. To make the difference even more plain I will claim that Husserl committed himself to a singularly different principle, one that might now be dubbed Husserl’s Evidenzprinzip: Descartes’ Clarity and Distinctness Principle: Whatever is perceived clearly and distinctly is true. Husserl’s Evidenzprinzip: The degree to which an experience is characterized by Evidenz is the degree to which it is taken to be true, i.e., believed. 28

Notwithstanding the family resemblance (the Evidenzprinzip is a direct descendent of the Clarity and Distinctness Principle) there are at least

27. “Wahrheit, bezw., subjektiv gesprochen, Evidenz,” Edmund Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil: Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik [1939], Hrsg. Ludwig Landgrebe (Hamburg: Claassen & Goverts, 1948), 8. Translated by James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks as Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic (London: Routledge, 1973), 17. Hereafter cited (E&U; E&J). 28. Cf. Lee Hardy, Nature’s Suit: Husserl’s Phenomenological Philosophy of the Physical Sciences (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2013), 77–101. Hardy argues, persuasively, that the degree to which experiences are perceived with Evidenz is also the degree to which Husserl treated them as justifiably believed. He cites Henry Pietersma, “Husserl’s Views on the Evident and the True,” in Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals, eds. Frederick A. Elliston and Peter McCormick (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), 38–53, as first suggesting this line of interpretation. I do not dispute Hardy and Pietersma on this point; I find their reading highly plausible. It is important to notice, however, that it is also a considerably stronger claim, despite being consistent with, what I am attributing to Husserl here. As defined above, the Evidenzprinzip is simply a descriptive theoretical principle, about the conditions under which we in fact believe. It should not be confused for a claim about belief’s justification(s), whatever else Husserl may have additionally said about that/ those.

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three important differences between them. 29 One important difference is that Descartes’ concept CLARITY (and hence DISTINCTNESS) is replaced by Husserl’s concept EVIDENZ. A second is that Husserl’s account of imperfect Evidenz (see discussion below) is clearly meant to be scalar: Evidenz was meant to come in degrees. This is considerably less obvious in Descartes’ treatments of clarity, though perhaps that Cartesian concept was meant to be scalar too. But most significantly, Evidenz marks an experience taken to be true, rather than simply true. 30 Because this last difference is so stark, if easily missed or misinterpreted, I will reinforce it now by invoking some of the technical terminology from chapter 2. I wrote there that the Clarity and Distinctness Principle, because it is built upon CLARITY, includes a veracity condition. 31 In order to be clear, a Cartesian perception must be true. The Evidenzprinzip, by way of contrast, does not require that veracity condition. It instead merely characterizes a quality of an experience, i.e., the quality of verisimilitude. Husserl hoped to forge a strong alliance between Evidenz and the true. But despite those hopes the appropriate contrast for experiences characterized by Evidenz are not false experiences, e.g., illusions, misperceptions, or hallucinations. The complementaries for Evidenz-experiences are, rather, experiences not felt to be true. Such non-Evidenz experiences could be false, or may be felt to be false, but needn’t be either. They are instead simply those experiences where things are not immediately taken to be as they seem, i.e., experiences not immediately 29. My interpretation of the Evidenzprinzip here is almost unique. Cf. Oskar Becker: “the first methodical principle is that I may not pass any judgment or accept it as valid if I have not ‘obtained’ it ‘in evidence.’ That is basically Descartes’s principle of the clare et distincte percepere.” Oskar Becker, “Husserl and Descartes” [1936/1937], trans. Marcus Brainard, The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 1 (2001): 352. Becker here confuses Husserl’s and Descartes’ two quite different principles. Also confused are Descartes’ descriptive Clarity and Distinctness Principle with Descartes’ normative Judgment Rule. Cf. Elisabeth Ströker, “Husserls Evidenzprinzip. Sinn und Grenzen einer methodischen Norm der Phänomenologie als Wissenschaft” [1978], reprinted in The Husserlian Foundations of Science, ed. Lee Hardy (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987), 31–53. What Ströker there calls the “Principle of Evidence” is, again, a normative principle, which should not be confused for the descriptive principle that I attribute here. 30. One way to understand this is to think of the Evidenzprinzip as remaining under the epoché. But the foundation for Husserl’s claim can be found in his pre-transcendental writings. Cf. Husserl. Logical Investigations, Prolegomena, §51 (HUA XVIII, 190–95; LI I, 193–96). 31. Cf. Ideas I, §21 (HUA III/1, 46; CW II, 40) where Husserl criticizes such a condition as a “mystic index veri.” On the basis of passages like that one, I do not attribute a veracity condition to Husserl.

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believed. Many experiences of this sort have further distinctive qualities. For example, reflect upon your feelings associated with recognizing a fake or forgery, when the fake is felt under the suspicion that someone is trying to trick you. Not all non-Evidenz experiences are like that. Compare your variety of different kinds of imagination or reverie. Compare the way a hallucination sometimes feels to you, i.e., when you begin to recognize it as hallucinatory, or the feeling in a dream simultaneously dreamt and recognized to be a dream. 32 Compare those to your beliefs about what you are actually seeing when you look at a visual illusion. Those are all quite different feelings than the ones possessed about the “Rolex” that a guy on the street is trying to sell you for $10. Of course, none rule out the fact that other experiences of illusions, misperceptions, or hallucinations are felt (wrongly) to present veridically, or that in other circumstances a $10 Rolex might be taken to be an actual (probably stolen) Rolex. Many such experiences share content. But many also lack perception’s (typically) veritistic quality. What nonEvidenz experiences and experiences with Evidenz share, according to Husserl is intentional content, despite their qualitatively different (and hence fundamentally different) act-characteristics. To return to Moore’s example, Evidenz is the characteristic quality of the experience when we are not simply seeing a hand, but taking it to be an actual hand, i.e., believing it. It is, of course, also the quality of the experience of confidently adding two and two to get four, or concluding Q on the basis of P, and Q if P. Etc. There are, of course, a wide variety of different kinds of experience as veridical, and not all of them dovetail neatly with empirical contents, as my motley list of examples suggests. But they are nevertheless all members of one big happy family (according to Husserl) insofar as they are not mere experiences, but experiences of things as being as they seem. A consequence of defining Evidenz as this quality of experience, rather than as a property of a proposition or a type of truth, is that we cannot say about any given proposition, once decontextualized, e.g., the proposition HERE IS A HAND, whether it has been experienced with Evidenz. This is an important part of what makes Husserl’s theory fallibilist, but also an important part of what makes it phenomenological: it concerns the manner of the 32. Not all dreams have this quality of lucidity of course. The possibility of a dream instead possessing the quality of verisimilitude is what Descartes’ famous epistemological argument relies upon.

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mental acts themselves (i.e., the “quality of experience”) rather than their contents. Unlike other admirers of Husserl, perhaps including Husserl himself, I believe that the best way to understand this quality or manner is to interpret it as a feeling. The most significant textual difficulty that such an interpretation faces is that in many places Husserl explicitly denied my claim, i.e., in many places he explicitly discussed, and clearly rejected, my interpretive thesis that “daß Evidenz ‘ein Gefühl’ sei.” In perhaps the clearest of these he wrote: “Aber was kann hier ein Gefühl verständlich machen? Was soll es leisten? Soll es uns etwa zurufen: halt! hier ist die Wahrheit? Aber warum müssen wir ihm dann glauben, muß dieser Glaube wieder einen Gefühlsindex haben?” 33 For this (good) reason it is standard for interpreters to follow Husserl in denying that he treated Evidenz as feeling. 34 So my attribution of the doctrine to him faces the largest obstacle any interpretation can possibly face: direct protest from the object of interpretation himself, from beyond the grave, that he meant nothing of the kind. I beg your patience in this regard. In order to explain why, nevertheless, this is still the best way to read him, I will first need to appeal to some of Husserl’s own distinctions. I’ll then be able to muster a distinction of my own, in order to try to defend my apparently perverse interpretive choice.

FIVE KINDS OF FEELING I will now present several different, more specific, types of Husserlian Evidenz. But as I mentioned above, I will limit myself here to reconstructing only five. This count is made from §5 and §6 of the Cartesian Meditations (1931), and I appeal to these five feelings not merely be33. “But what can a feeling here make intelligible? What should it do? Should it call out to us: Stop! Here is the truth? And why must we believe it? Must this belief have a feelingindex?” Edmund Husserl. Gesammelte Werke, Bd. II: Die Idee der Phänomenologie: Fünf Vorlesungen, Hrsg. Walter Biemel (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1958), 59. Translated (with my minor adjustment) by Lee Hardy. Collected Works, Vol. 8: The Idea of Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1999), 44. Hereafter cited (HUA II; CW 8). 34. Some examples are: Ströker, Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology, 29; George Hefffernan, “An Essay in Epistemic Kuklophobia: Husserl’s Critique of Descartes’ Conception of Evidence,” Husserl Studies 13 (1997): 89–140, especially 96–105; but also Matheson Russell, Husserl: A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Continuum, 2006): 98–99.

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cause they are nicely grouped over only a couple of pages, but also because distinctions amongst them will be sufficient for solving Moore’s Puzzle. Additionally, they neatly contrast Husserl’s epistemology with both Descartes’, and Audi’s. Those are my limited aims here. This list is not (and is not meant to be) exhaustive as an account of Husserl’s treatments of Evidenz; I purposely keep it short, in an attempt to salvage the remaining bits of this chapter’s frayed decorum. No one should be surprised to discover many more senses of Evidenz than these five in Husserl’s writings, 35 or to discover alternative enumerations amongst Husserl’s many able commentators. 36 (1) As I mentioned above, a lack of Evidenz is not evidence that something is not the case. For the latter Husserl appealed to the notion of an “evident falsity” or “negative Evidenz.” 37 Experiences characterized by negative Evidenz are experiences that have content inconsistent with the content of experiences characterized by Evidenz. For example, if a hand were visibly waved before you at a moment a skeptic said “there are no objects in the external world,” you might have the experience of negative Evidenz. As Moore pointed out, your experience would amount to a sort of proof, but in this case it would prove that what the skeptic was telling you is not the case. Simple perceptions militate against claims, as well as for them, insofar as the claims express some content inconsistent with the experience, or as Husserl put it, have negative Evidenz. It is because our experiences themselves can speak against a variety of silly (and not so silly) propositions that we may trust what we see “with our own two eyes” rather than rely exclusively on the testimony of others: testimony from the two different sources can conflict. Indeed, it is a trivial fact that for any experience we can construct a proposition for which that experience provides negative Evidenz. A familiar equivalence is at work here: For any two perceptual experiences with contents φ and non-φ, experiencing φ with Evidenz

35. For example, an alternative list can be found at Logical Investigations VI, §39 (HUA XIX/2, 651–56; LI II, 765–70). Conspicuously absent from my count here is Husserl’s distinction of predicative from pre-predicative Evidenz. See (E&U, 1-72; E&J, 11–68). 36. Cf. David Woodruff Smith, Husserl (London & New York: Routledge, 2007), 335. Smith is slightly more decorous than me: he counts only three. Cf. Herbert Spiegelberg, “Phenomenology of Direct Evidence,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2, no. 4 (1942): 429–30. Spiegelberg is considerably less decorous than me: he counts no less than fifteen. 37. Cartesian Meditations, §5 (HUA I, 52; CM, 12).

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amounts to negative Evidenz of non-φ, and experiencing φ with negative Evidenz amounts to Evidenz of non-φ. 38 (2) Whether a perceptual judgment will be in need of further evidence depends upon practical purposes and commitments relative to a given situation. In general, any experience will admit of further Evidenz. But for the most part, when we are not engaged in attempts to refute skeptics or conduct robust scientific investigations, relative Evidenz suffices for those practical purposes and commitments. Husserl introduced this notion of relative Evidenz in explicit contrast with truths as they are pursued by the natural sciences, i.e., “Wahrheiten, die ein für allemal und für jedermann gültig sind und gültig bleiben [truths that are always valid for everyone, and that remain so.]” 39 Truths that do not rise to that scientific standard, but are nevertheless good enough for us in our everyday lives, mark out a domain measured by what I will call the pragmatic standard for evidence. I label Husserl’s treatment of relative Evidenz this way because he explicitly connects it to the “wechselnden und relativen Zwecken [changing and relative purposes]” 40 of everyday experience. I imagine that pragmatists would say something similar about self-evidence, were they to take seriously such a notion: what counts as “self-evidence” depends, in no small measure, upon the work getting done and the practical purposes it is put to. A theory in this neighborhood will be discussed somewhat further in chapter 5. We are sometimes told that “every argument must stop somewhere.” But this is not because every argument must ground out in a fundamental truth or axiom that could not, in principle, have further warrant. The point is instead a pragmatic one that some things must usefully be assumed relative to the arguer’s purposes and audience. We should think of Grice here, rather than Euclid, and should not expect that HERE IS A HAND will possess the same relative Evidenz independent of the shifting aims of persons wielding a sentence. What has relative Evidenz 38. Given this situation Husserl could have reduced his number of kinds of Evidenz by defining negative Evidenz with two more primitive notions: Evidenz and negation. That was not, however, his approach. In fact, he defined propositional negation by appeal to what he viewed as the “more original” phenomenon of negative Evidenz. See Experience & Judgment, §21a (E&U, 94–98; E&J, 88–91). This particular phenomenological maneuver was taken up by Heidegger as one of his central theses in “What is Metaphysics?” (1929). For discussion see Greg Shirley, Heidegger and Logic: The Place of Lógos in Being and Time (London: Continuum, 2010), 80–85. 39. Cartesian Meditations, §5 (HUA I, 53; CM, 12). 40. Ibid., (HUA I, 52; CM, 12).

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at one moment may no longer have it once the goal posts have been moved. (3) By contrast, the standard for the sciences, according to Husserl, is unitary and high. While Husserl certainly did not believe that sciences, as practiced, ever achieve perfect Evidenz, i.e., while he did not believe that they acquire, de facto, the status of “truths that are always valid for everyone, and remain so,” he believed that this is what they all ideally seek, insofar as they are sciences. The practice of science, according to Husserl, is fundamentally the refinement of existing knowledge, and it is an infinite revision not merely of pre-scientific knowledge, but of all previous knowings heretofore treated as “scientific.” The goal is a unified and complete account of reality as it actually is. Truth, objectively speaking, is the “idea” of such a “correlate.” 41 In various texts Husserl calls this ideal correlate, i.e., the ultimate system of knowledge produced by theoretically complete science, “adequate Evidenz” or “perfect Evidenz.” 42 While Husserl himself was not always perfectly clear on this point, I follow others in saying on his behalf that this concept PERFECT EVIDENZ marks out a regulative ideal, impossible to achieve in any actual experience. 43 The consequence for my interpretation is that perfect Evidenz,

41. Ibid. 42. Cartesian Meditations, §5 and §6 (HUA I, 52, 55; CM, 12, 15). Cf. Ideas I, §138 (HUA III/1, 319–21; CW II, 331–33). This technical term ‘adequate’ should not be confused with Audi’s notion of an “adequate understanding.” Husserl inherited ADEQUATE from Leibniz, who originally developed it in response to Descartes. For discussion see Burt C. Hopkins, The Philosophy of Husserl (Durham: Acumen Publishing, 2011), 125–28. 43. The published text of the Cartesian Meditations attempted to leave this question “open,” but Husserl then marked a key sentence “unsatisfactory.” See Cairns’ note in his translation of Cartesian Meditations, §6 (CM, 15). Precedent for treating it as a regulative ideal, i.e., an “idea in the Kantian sense,” is Ideas I, §143 (HUA III/1, 331; CW II, 342), a point already made clear by Ernst Tugendhat, Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967), 105, and echoed by Hardy, Nature’s Suit, 95. For another example, see A. D. Smith, Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 52. Whether Husserl at one time thought perfect Evidenz is actualizable, at least for some domains of knowledge, or instead always only an ideal, for all domains of knowledge, remains somewhat controversial. I argue for the latter interpretation below. There seems to be general consensus that Husserl never applied it to cases of so-called “outer perception,” (i.e., what we normally call “perception.”) See Logical Investigations V, §5 (HUA XIX/1, 365–67; LI II, 542–43); Cf. Cartesian Meditations, §9 (HUA I, 61-63; CM, 22–23). The dispute instead turns on whether he ever applied it to “inner perception,” i.e., “reflective apprehension of the acts of consciousness.” Cf. Hardy, Nature’s Suit, 94–95.

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unlike the other four kinds of Evidenz, is not a feeling. 44 It is the ideal of the feeling. It is not a quality of any person’s possible experience. We might attempt to think of it instead as akin to “God’s experience,” if that divine analogy be permitted, and if (unlike possible human experiences) the “experience” of God could be omni-perspectival, rather than unfolding over a series of mutually corroborating sensory perspectives ranging across relatively unchanging perceptual objects. Perfect Evidenz was defined by Husserl as characterizing that “experience” that would have no further corroboration, i.e., the ideal of an Evidenz that would be absolutely complete. Perfect Evidenz, unlike the other more mundane sorts of Evidenz (including the imperfect Evidenz referred to by Husserl’s Evidenzprinzip) wears its Cartesian heart on its sleeve, insofar as perfect Evidenz implies the veracity condition: whatever could be “perceived” with perfect Evidenz would be true. It is significant that Husserl’s ideal of a perfect Evidenz is akin to Moore’s strong notion of self-evidence, insofar as both are defined by the impossibility of further proof. However, it is also important to notice two quite important differences between Husserl and Moore. First, Husserl appealed to perfect Evidenz, not as something that could be a quality of a possible experience, but neither was it a property of a proposition or type of truth. And second, Husserl thought that perfect Evidenz was a limit concept for defining science’s perpetual refinement of closer and closer approximations to truth. At the deepest level Husserl meant to analogize the refinement of scientific knowledge with the refinement of an individual perceiver’s perceptual knowledge via mutually corroborating experiences. It bears repeating that Husserl did not believe that perfect Evidenz could ever actually be possessed by anyone, not even by God himself. 45 The scare-quotes in my previous paragraph were required, not merely because human knowledge of the divine is 44. This is problematic for my interpretation of Evidenz generally. As Walter Hopp has pointed out (in personal communication): “if the genus Evidenz isn’t such that all of its species are feelings, then feelings are not essential to the genus Evidenz.” I find this objection trenchant. While perfect Evidenz was clearly meant by Husserl to be a regulative ideal, perhaps even an “ideal feeling,” I see no other conclusion to draw from Hopp’s insight but that the relationship between Evidenz’s ideal and its more typical sentimental expression cannot literally be species to genus, despite the presentation I have given it here. 45. God might be interpreted as an ideal perceiver, but even an ideal perceiver would nevertheless still be a perceiver, i.e., possessed of an experience with perception’s characteristically perspectival progression. The conclusion I draw here is contentious, but the comparison with God’s experience is especially illuminating. See Ideas I, §150 (HUA III/1, 351; CW II, 362).

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limited, but because it is not clear whether the omni-perspectival “perception” of God can any longer count as perception. (4) Have we gotten any closer to solving Moore’s Puzzle thereby? What is still needed, I suggest, is the complementary notion of an “incomplete Evidenz,” or “imperfect Evidenz.” 46 This fourth technical notion especially marks out the fact that Evidenz, according to Husserl, is always a matter of degree. This is the kind of Evidenz appealed to in the Evidenzprinzip, described above, and it is the kind of Evidenz that Husserl frequently (but not always) meant when he simply used the term Evidenz. 47 Individual experiences have more or less of the character of imperfect Evidenz. An experience has a greater degree of imperfect Evidenz the more its intentional content has been corroborated by other experiences with that same content, and the less that content has been refuted by experiences of negative Evidenz. Consider again Moore’s example of the hand. Not only is it characterized by relative Evidenz, given our practical purposes (as opposed to those we might have when discussing skepticism in the philosophy classroom), its Evidenz is a matter of degree. It has imperfect Evidenz at the first glance, but increasing degrees of Evidenz as the content of that initial glance survives scrutiny and is corroborated by further investigation. It remains an experience of imperfect Evidenz, even upon the most thorough of inspections, but the conclusion of such scrutiny is characterized by a substantially greater degree of imperfect Evidenz than the initial glance that prompted it. Husserl’s account was offered to explain why it is that we believe more strongly (and perhaps more justifiably, though I have not been staking that claim on Husserl’s behalf here) upon a more complete and well-rounded perceptual investigation, even when our individual experiences do not rise to the level of science, and even though they can never be ideally complete. (5) None of the foregoing should be confused for a final (for my enumeration) feeling of Evidenz: apodictic Evidenz. The technical term ‘apodictic’ has a long and storied history in philosophy. Its original Aris46. Cartesian Meditations, §6 (HUA I, 55; CM, 14–15). In earlier works Husserl also called this most basic form of Evidenz “assertoric evidence” or “inner evidence.” Cf. Logical Investigations, Prolegomena, §6 (HUA XVIII, 27–32; LI I, 60–63). Readers may interpret me as identifying these, at least for purposes of the argument below. 47. Mostly (but not always) Husserl meant imperfect Evidenz when he used the unmodified term ‘Evidenz.’ I have adopted his practice, albeit somewhat more strictly than he himself adopted it. Heretofore and henceforth, I exclusively mean imperfect Evidenz when I do not specify which type of Evidenz.

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totelian sense, demonstrable, is now largely obscured by more recent associations with certainty, in either the Kantian sense of necessity or the Cartesian sense of indubitability. APODICTIC EVIDENZ is particularly important for Husserl’s characterization of transcendental phenomenology and his criticism of Descartes in the Cartesian Meditations. In Husserl’s usage, there it is again to be understood as a quality of experience, but Husserl claimed, following Descartes, that this particular feeling signifies an “absolute indubitability.” 48 Nevertheless, I hasten to add, Husserl thought all of the different kinds of Evidenz are (relatively) doubt-free, insofar as they are all experiences of things as being more-or-less what they seem. The apodicticity Husserl had on offer here as an analysis of Cartesian indubitability was meant to be particularly strong as a quality, but also distinctive in quality, viz. the unique indubitability of a principle. Apodictic Evidenz was associated by Husserl particularly with general principles rather than (either particular or general) states-of-affairs. So here, finally, we find the Husserlian conception of the self-evident more akin to Audi’s. Husserl thought that Descartes conflated two very different kinds of certainty, viz. two different kinds of Evidenz. It is particularly part of the nature of imperfect Evidenz to be provisional: what is imperfectly Evident in one moment may be expected to become more or less so in the next. Apodictic Evidenz, on the other hand, contrasts with imperfect Evidenz in this qualitative respect: experiences with apodictic Evidenz are not only experiences of things as being presently doubt-free, but experiences promising that all future doubts will be similarly unwarranted. According to Husserl, apodictic Evidenz is the experience of a scientific principle as being so true that its contrary would be unthinkable, i.e., the experience of “absolute indubitability.” 49 We should be careful to note that not all feelings of certainty feel like this one. Husserl, erstwhile mathematician, was sensitive to those differences between various feelings of certainty and doubt, i.e., to the relative certainties associated with various kinds of Evidenz, and to the unique character of the experience of a truth as a logical or mathematical principle. Apodictic Evidenz characterizes the experience of the principle as felt to be permanently warranted because its contrary implies contradiction. Doubt in such a principle is felt to be permanently unwar48. Cartesian Meditations, §6 (HUA I, 55-57; CM, 14–16). 49. Ibid.

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ranted because such doubt is felt to be proscribed by logic itself, in all possible circumstances, rather than by matters of merely contingent future or otherwise possible fact (i.e., proscribed only in some possible circumstances.) In his more careful moments Husserl used the Law of Non-Contradiction to make this point. 50 Unlike the imperfect Evidenz of “here is a hand,” we believe with apodictic Evidenz (through what Husserl called a “useful psychological application,” 51 ) that it could never be the case that HERE IS A HAND and (at the same time and in the same respect) IT IS NOT THE CASE THAT HERE IS A HAND. But according to Husserl those are not merely different propositional contents: in play are also two different experiences of Evidenz, i.e., two qualitatively different feelings of believing. Here it should be pointed out that while the ideal of perfect Evidenz includes the veracity condition, apodictic Evidenz does not imply the veracity condition, as there are many cases where people experience apodictic Evidenz in relation to principles that then turn out to be false. 52 That phenomenon is not limited to heartfelt mathematical errors. In moments of deep delusion or madness a person may doubt, entirely pathologically, even the most basic principle expressed by the Cogito. 53 50. Logical Investigations, Prolegomena, §27 (HUA XVIII, 96-101; LI I, 117–21). 51. Ibid. 52. In reading even apodictic Evidenz as fallible I follow a variety of other notable Husserl scholars. Hardy, for example, “all occurrent cases of evidence are fallible.” Hardy, Nature’s Suit, 93. “The lack of adequacy on the part of evidence is to be found in the context not only of assertoric claims, but of apodictic claims as well” (ibid., 95). Also Spiegelberg, in the passage quoted below (from Spiegelberg, “Phenomenology of Direct Evidence,” 431.) Nevertheless, it is sometimes difficult to discern the teams here. Consider Arne Naess, “Husserl on the Apodictic Evidence of Ideal Laws” [1954], reprinted in Readings on Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, ed. J. N. Mohanty (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977). Naess writes: “On the other hand, there is nothing in the description by Husserl that eliminates the possibility of mistaking knowledge of less than the strictest kind for a piece of knowledge of the strictest kind. The history of pure mathematics and doctorate theses turned down illustrates this point. There is nothing in the description of how we arrive at and judge apodictic knowledge that can help people who do not really have a Sachverhalt wirklich vor Augen but are fully convinced that they have.” (Naess, “Husserl on the Apodictic Evidence,” 72) Is Naess agreeing with Hardy and Spiegelberg, that even apodictic Evidenz is defeasible? Or is he instead claiming that sometimes people may believe they possess a genuine apodictic Evidenz when in fact they do not? If the former, then I happily pick him for our team. If the latter, then I’m afraid he must face The Problem of the Criterion. 53. I am thinking here of Cotard’s Syndrome. See German E. Berrios, The History of Mental Symptoms: Descriptive Psychopathology Since the 19th Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 304ff. However, we should be careful. To believe “I am a corpse” or “I am dead,” is not equivalent to judging, “I do not exist” or “I am not thinking,” let alone to deny the principle that “I must exist, so long as I am thinking.”

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In the Cartesian Meditations, Husserl’s goal in distinguishing the various kinds of Evidenz was phenomenological analysis of Cartesian indubitability. Husserl claimed that not all forms of Evidenz amount to the same feelings of certainty. His conclusion was that the basic principle “I think, therefore I am” is indeed a principle experienced by us with apodictic Evidenz. But, according to Husserl Descartes proceeded to make a fatal and fateful mistake by inferring from that certainty the additional certainty that there must be a substantia cogitans. Husserl himself did not believe that the existence of a substantial soul (i.e., the “thinking thing”) could be proved by mere thinking, despite the apodictic Evidenz of the Cogito. 54 The existence of the individual thinker, as opposed to the mere principle that there must be something existing so long as there is a thinking, is a certainty for which we at best have imperfect Evidenz. So on Husserl’s account, Descartes’ illicit inference was from the (apodictic) Evidenz of a principle to the (imperfect) Evidenz of a thing, an inference precipitated by Descartes’ failure to recognize the domain of transcendental subjectivity. 55 I will not myself ascend to that rarified domain here. Suffice it to say for our empirical world: if we do not recognize the key distinctions between the various kinds of Evidenz, then the entire sense of Husserl’s criticism of Descartes will be lost. I would challenge anyone hesitant about distinguishing these types of Evidenz, i.e., the various feelings of believing, to provide an alternative explanation of Husserl’s criticisms of Descartes. But now I must also set aside Husserl’s criticisms of Descartes, in order to attend to my own, apparently perverse, interpretive choice.

THE PUTATIVE COUNTER-EVIDENCE I mentioned several times already that there is a big problem for my account of Husserlian Evidenz. Now is the time for me to face the music. The music can be heard most readily in passages like this one:

54. Cf. Ströker, Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology, 211, who emphasizes Husserl’s rejection of the Cartesian project of deriving the respective certainty. My reading follows hers, but on my account it is instead the distinction between the two kinds of Evidenz that is doing the work in this regard. 55. Cartesian Meditations, §10 (HUA I, 63-64; CM, 23–25).

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When Evidenz is conceived strictly [strengen] in the manner made basic here, it is plain that such doubts as have from time to time been expressed are preposterous, doubts as to whether the experience of Evidenz might be associated with A for one person, while absurdity is associated with it for another. Such doubts are possible only so long as Evidenz and absurdity are interpreted as peculiar (positive or negative) feelings, which contingently attach to an act of judgment and impart to it specific features that we assess logically as truth and falsehood. If someone experiences the Evidenz of A, it is also evident that no second person can experience the absurdity of the same A, for “A is evident” means that A is not merely meant, but also truly given exactly as it was meant. In the strictest sense it is itself present. 56

Passages like this one (and many similar) appear to count against my interpretation of Husserl in at least two different ways. (1) They suggest that Husserl did not think Evidenz was a feeling, but considered my thesis and firmly rejected it. And (2), they suggest Husserl was not merely committed to the Evidenzprinzip, as defined above, but also to a much stronger claim that Evidenz provides a veracity condition, by which the content of some experience could putatively be known to be true (rather than carry a more-or-less established appearance of being true, which of course would not rule out its actually being either true or false.) It is on the basis of passages like the one just quoted, for example, that Spiegelberg wrote the following: It is, therefore, all the more remarkable that in the Formale und Transcendentale Logik Husserl reverses his earlier stand almost completely. Here it seems a foregone conclusion that self-evidence by its very nature includes the possibility of illusion; and that is supposed to apply even to apodictic self-evidence. To be sure, selfevidence can be refuted only by better self-evidence. But never does

56. Logical Investigations VI, §39 (HUA XIX/2, 656; LI II, 769). Findlay’s translation, with my minor modifications. See also Logical Investigations, Prolegomena, §51 (HUA XVIII, 192-93; LI I, 194). Cf. Ideas I, §21 (HUA III/1, 46-47; CW II, 40), and Ideas I, §145 (HUA III/1, 334; CW II, 345). This textual evidence seems bad for me in the sense that in each of these places Husserl vehemently denies Evidenz is a feeling. However, these second two passages are also significant for showing that Husserl may have (erroneously) thought that move necessary in order to reject Evidenz as implying a veracity condition. But we can easily do the latter without the former.

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it hold out an absolute guarantee which would enable us to use it as an infallible criterion of truth. 57

It should be clear by now that I want to agree with Spiegelberg’s interpretation of Husserl’s remarks about Evidenz in the Formal und tranzendentale Logik (1929). 58 They hold particularly in regard to what I have called the Evidenzprinzip, i.e., “never does it hold out an absolute guarantee which would enable us to use it as an infallible criterion of truth.” But I do not agree with Spiegelberg’s assessment that Husserl, thereby, must have abandoned a rival epistemology taken up in his earlier works, particularly the Logical Investigations. It is my view that Husserl’s earlier and later works are consistent, if not always perfectly harmonious in their expression, even though the later works present substantially different doctrines. But at no time did Husserl endorse a veracity condition for imperfect Evidenz; he only ever endorsed such a condition in those contexts in which he was actually discussing perfect Evidenz. So, the distinction between perfect Evidenz and imperfect Evidenz is crucial here, not merely for understanding Husserl’s arguments against Descartes, but also for making consistent what has traditionally been construed as an inconsistency in Husserl’s corpus. In order to see that this is so, I invite re-reading of the passage quoted above from the Investigations. It is important to take care about the particular sense of Evidenz that Husserl had in mind in that passage. In particular, we should ask which of the various five senses of Evidenz from the Cartesian Meditations Husserl meant when he was writing about Evidenz conceived “strictly” [strengen] in the Investigations, i.e., we should retroactively invoke Husserl’s own distinction between the five different kinds of Evidenz. I suggest that the “strict” sense of Evidenz discussed in the Investigations is actually perfect Evidenz, i.e., the regulative ideal rather than the quality of any actual experience. 59 If it were the case that one could have an experience 57. Spiegelberg, “Phenomenology of Direct Evidence,” 431. 58. For example, Edmund Husserl, Husserliana. Gesammelte Werke, Bd. XVII: Formale und Transzendentale Logik: Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft, Hrsg. von Paul Janssen (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 286-87; translated by Dorion Cairns as Formal and Transcendental Logic (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 280-81. Hereafter abbreviated (HUA XVII; FTL). 59. That this is the correct reading of Husserl’s sense of “strict” Evidenz is established earlier in the same section, where he writes: “…Evidenz is the perception (in a sufficiently wide sense) of truth, and in the case of strict [strengen] Evidenz, the adequate perception of truth.” Logical Investigations VI, §39, (HUI XIX/2, 652; LI II, 766).

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characterized by perfect Evidenz, then it would not be the case that any other experience (either one’s own or someone else’s) could corroborate it or undermine it. In that sense alone, i.e., the “strict sense,” does Evidenz converge on the veracity condition. So, invoking Husserl’s own future distinction, and associating the “strict” sense with perfect Evidenz, we meet at least the second of the two interpretive challenges just mentioned. The first of those challenges, however, i.e., Husserl did not think of Evidenz as a feeling, is not so neatly dispatched. In response to that one I must instead invoke a distinction of my own, and thereby appeal to a sense of ‘feeling’ that was not Husserl’s own. Here it might appear that I would not be able to give a contextually sensitive reading, because the more one reads and contextualizes the more apparent it becomes that Husserl was deeply opposed to the interpretation of Evidenz as a “feeling” [Gefühl]. This fact has been thoroughly documented by George Heffernan. 60 On the basis of passages like the one quoted above, but also after a diligent study of the Lectures on Logic and General Theory of Science (1917/1918), Heffernan makes the following report: Now for what evidence is not: Evidence is not a subjective character of consciousness which guarantees objective validity of being. Evidence is not a psychological feeling of certainty or pleasure––and otherwise indefinable. Evidence is not a feeling of subjective necessity or impossibility. Evidence is not merely a psychological phenomenon. Evidence is not a psychic character of the judgment involved. Evidence is not a valid index of veracity and falsity. What these denials have in common is that they are rejections of reductionist answers to the question about the whatness of evidence . . . As for what evidence is (not), Husserl appears to be utterly dismissive of and even intensely hostile toward the possibility that it could be any kind of feeling. Ironically, precisely this attitude seems to help prevent him from developing the strongest arguments pro and contra this very position. For example, he is mainly and mostly content to let it go at saying that evidence cannot be a feeling because one experiences evidence sometimes with and sometimes without certain

60. See his aptly-tiled, “Miscellaneous Lucubrations on Husserl’s Answer to the Question ‘was die Evidenz sei’: A Contribution to the Phenomenology of Evidence on the Occasion of the Publication of Husserliana Volume XXX,” Husserl Studies 15 (1998): 1-75. My discussion here is deeply indebted to this work.

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feelings. . . . The mere fact that evidence may be accompanied by emotion does not decide the issue in favor of the position that evidence is an emotion. The reason is that evidence does not have to be accompanied by emotion. 61

That we should not attribute to Husserl the claim that Evidenz “guarantees objective validity of being,” or treat it as a “valid index of veracity and falsity,” has already been emphasized above. That it is not a psychological feeling “of certainty or pleasure,” or “subjective necessity or impossibility” I would also encourage. But none of those specific observations should be confused for one another. And it seems to me that we should not pass over Husserl’s own understanding of feeling uncritically. The fact that Evidenz is not to be understood as one sort of feeling, or that it might occur unaccompanied by a pleasure or an emotion, or that a pleasure or an emotion might occur quite independently of Evidenz, cannot be taken as proof that Evidenz is itself not a feeling, particularly if it were a doxastic sentiment of an entirely different sort. The clue for my insight in this regard is that in the various passages Husserl (most vehemently) criticized Evidenz as a feeling, he contrasted feeling with perfect Evidenz rather than imperfect Evidenz. Now for some contextualization. Especially in his earlier work from the 1890s, but also during the period that extends through the Göttingen years (1901–1916) and up to the Freiburg Lectures on Logic and General Theory of Science (1917/1918), Husserl was concerned with the refutation of psychologism. Taking to heart the lessons of Frege, and hoping to decisively reject the contentions of psychologistical logicians of his day, perhaps first amongst them the contention that “daß Evidenz ‘ein Gefühl’ sei,” the demands of Husserl’s engagement in this debate included his adopting, as a part of the dialectical necessity of time-bound interlocution, at least some of his adversaries’ terminology. ‘Feeling’ [Gefühl] in particular, was a word that Husserl himself inherited from those nineteenth-century debates about the relationship of logic to psychology. It was not presuppositionless. Husserl’s own presuppositions were at one time (famously) closer to those psychologistical logicians, and may have remained closer to them than he himself

61. Ibid., 27-29.

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cared to admit. 62 ‘Feeling’ is also a term that he attempted, not entirely successfully, to disambiguate. 63 In our own time we gaze upon a quite different landscape in the philosophy of mind. The critique of psychologism and the mathematization of logic are accomplished now over a century ago, followed in psychology by the paradigms of behaviorism and cognitivism. We should not remain stuck, I hope, with the nineteenth-century’s conceptualization of feeling [Gefühl]. But that would mean getting beyond Husserl’s own concept, in order to find in Husserl what we may take forward. Additionally, we should reflect seriously, as Husserl himself did, on the nature of any “feelings” that may or may not be associated with mental acts like believing. Husserl clearly was not a doxastic sentimentalist, given the concept of feeling inherited from his own era’s logic and psychology. In exactly that context he wrote, in his printed copy of the Ideas, that the catalog of “feelings” referred to in Theodor Elsenhans’ Lehrbuch der Psychologie (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1912) are “psychological fictions.” 64 But why should we, today, still be beholden to Elsenhans’ understanding of feelings? In precisely this context Husserl considered himself a critic of “feeling” as an index of truth, a doctrine that he associated with an empiricist tradition including Mill and Sigwart, Wundt, Höfler and Meinong. 65 But for that criticism to reach its full potential it must be understood as generated within a broader empiricist tradition, one concerned with certainties that are not merely about apodictic principles or propositions, but also about empirical facts, including those pertinent to Moore’s Puzzle. I would suggest that a correlatively broader sense of ‘feeling’ than Husserl’s own was in play even in Husserl’s own time, and has now been operationalized in a variety of different ways by our contemporary psychology. In addition, I think Husserl simply lacked persuasive argumentation on this point. As Heffernan has already pointed out, the sole argument that Husserl seems to have marshalled for his conclusion that Evidenz is not a feeling is that other sorts of feelings or emotion (e.g., pleasure) 62. “As regards my frank critique of the psychologistic logic and epistemology, I have but to recall Goethe’s saying: There is nothing to which one is more severe than the errors that one has just abandoned.” Logical Investigations, Forward (HUA XVIII, 7; LI I, 43). 63. See his discussion of ‘feeling,’ in Logical Investigations V, §15 (HUA XIX/1, 401-10; LI II, 569-76). 64. This is nicely footnoted at Ideas I, §21 (HUA III/1, 46; CW II, 40). 65. See Logical Investigations, Prolegomena, §49 (HUA XVIII, 183-85; LI I, 187-88).

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may either be present or absent in experiences characterized by Evidenz. 66 But that argument is flatly invalid. It merely establishes that Evidenz is not identical with those other feelings or emotions, not that Evidenz itself is not a feeling. If a better Husserlian argument than that one has not been discovered by now, even after Heffernan’s diligent lucubrations, I am ready to judge that it will not be forthcoming. For those reasons I am considerably less concerned about taking Husserl at his word as concerns this particular word. Nevertheless, I do recognize the awkwardness of the position this puts me in as an interpreter of Husserl. The situation is somewhat simpler for Husserl’s claims that Evidenz is not a “psychological phenomenon” or a “psychic character.” Those claims are easily enough dispatched because their basic concepts have been fixed by our intervening century of psychologizing: PSYCHOLOGICAL and PSYCHIC, unlike FEELING, were unsettled in Husserl’s time, but are now considerably more so today. FEELING, on the other hand, still harbors confusions and ambiguities (and lovely philosophical riddles.) So long as the attribution of sentimentalism to Husserl is accompanied by explicit warning that it cannot apply under Husserl’s own conception (a warning that I have now issued ad nauseam), and so long as feelings are understood broadly, i.e., as qualitative characteristics of experience, then I have done all the diligence I can do. Husserl himself opposed my thesis, but he did so only under a very different conceptual regime.

HOPP’S ARGUMENTS Perhaps the strongest arguments against the view I am now attributing to Husserl (and I include Husserl himself in this comparison) have been 66. This argument is also cited by Russell, Husserl, 99. Russell provides an additional argument on Husserl’s behalf: “To identify evidence with conviction or feeling is to make evidence an irrational psychological phenomenon. It is to render evidence ‘subjective’ and to deny what is most essential to it: namely, that it makes manifest what is objectively the case. By making evidence an essentially private experience, the feeling-theory removes matters of evidence from the sphere of public debate. The end of this road is relativism. But evidence is not an affect; it is a rational and objective ‘“experience” of truth’.” (Russell, Husserl, 99). With respect to Russell, and setting aside the non-trivial question about where this argument may be found in Husserl’s voluminous corpus, I confess to being much more sanguine about the prospects of the disastrous consequences. I do not think that treating Evidenz as affect makes it “essentially private,” or removes it “from the sphere of public debate,” or inexorably leads us to relativism. That Evidenz is affect is exactly what I have been arguing.

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provided by Walter Hopp. 67 I am an admirer of Hopp’s interpretations of Husserl, and am nervous to be out of alignment with him on this point. But I confess that I do not find even Hopp’s arguments to be completely definitive. So I will conclude by attempting to address three arguments derived from Hopp’s Perception and Knowledge (2011), each of which may be construed as targeting the sentimentalist construal of Evidenz presented above. The first is that, while it is psychologically possible to become more confident in a particular proposition, even though evidence in favor of that proposition were to remain constant, that would not itself establish that belief in such a proposition had acquired any new, epistemically relevant property. It would merely establish that the belief in question was at one time (either before or after one became more confident) “inappropriate.” 68 I should point out that Hopp does not mean to target Husserlian Evidenz with this argument, but instead targets remarks made by James Pryor. 69 Nevertheless, I think that it is safe to say, on the basis of this passage, that Hopp, unlike myself does not interpret Husserlian Evidenz as a feeling akin to a feeling of confidence. Nor does Hopp think that subjective confidence, necessarily, is an epistemically relevant property. But another important feature of this argument is that it does not concern the conditions under which (and the degree to which) believing occurs, so much as whether that believing is “appropriate,” i.e., either epistemically warranted or otherwise normatively endorsable. My immediate task in this chapter has been a purely descriptive one. Does Husserl think of Evidenz as a feeling, or does he not? Does Evidenz on his account presuppose a veracity condition, or does it not? But answers to those questions leave open further normative questions about whether such feelings are warranted or justified. We should not conflate the two levels of analysis. Others have interpreted Husserl as claiming that Evidenz is not a feeling of believing, but instead provides justification for believing. 70 I think that such interpretations are reason67. See Walter Hopp, Perception and Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), particularly 113-115. 68. Ibid., 114. 69. He quotes a passage from James Pryor, “The Skeptic and the Dogmatist,” Noûs 34, no. 4 (2000): 517-49, particularly 547, n. 37. 70. Again I am thinking of Hardy, Nature’s Suit, 77-101, who is quite clear on this point.

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able, “appropriate” even. But I also think that we must analytically distinguish (no matter how deeply intertwined they may be in Husserl’s own works) more-narrowly doxastic claims from the richer epistemological ones. Otherwise we will never understand the import of Husserlian phenomenology. So what is “givenness” or “self-givenness” in Husserl? On the interpretation offered above I have been careful not to broach the topic of whether a feeling of Evidenz, in association with any given experience, would itself be, or would make its associated mental act, justified. I have merely hazarded the claim that “self-givenness” be interpreted at least as a feeling, akin to a feeling of confidence. Mindful of that difference between descriptive doxastic theory and normative epistemic theory, I also hasten to add that I do not think Evidenz should be equated with a metacognitive judgment. My view is that Evidenz is unlike confidence, traditionally construed, insofar as it is affective. Strictly speaking, it as an experiential quality of a relation amongst mental states, i.e., a felt quality characterizing the relation Husserl called fulfillment. 71 It is true that this amounts to a “judgment,” in the broad Husserlian sense, but that does not make it a judgment of confidence à la our contemporary psychology, so much as a feeling of confirmation. On this account imperfect Evidenz (to be more precise) is the feeling of fulfillment, i.e., the feeling of something having been proved or warranted. But that must not be confused with proof or warrant itself. So while Hopp presents his first argument against any treatment of “phenomenal force” as epistemically relevant, and while I 71. Imperfect Evidenz, in addition to being the experience of truth, results from what Husserl throughout his career conceived as fulfillment relations. An account of Husserlian FULFILLMENT, perhaps his most important philosophical concept, is beyond my scope here. I would need to stake a claim about whether fulfillment was treated by Husserl as a quality, or a content, or a relation amongst mental acts. If a quality, e.g., the intuitively given quality of Evidenz, then an interpretation would need to distinguish that quality from the content of a simple intuition. If a particular content, then it must explain how it is to be distinguished in “meaning giving” or “merely symbolic” experiences. If analyzed as a relation amongst mental acts, then my interpretation would need to explain whether fulfillment relations happen only between experiences of the same content (of whatever type), or instead are constitutive of that content. Husserl was clearly committed to a tight relationship between EVIDENZ and FULFILLMENT, so any such interpretation would obviously need to explain that tight relation. I offer none of that serious work here. Instead I would like to direct readers to Walter Hopp, Perception and Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). See especially Chap. 7. A slightly older, but equally important, interpretation of fulfillment is Dallas Willard, “Knowledge,” in The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, eds. Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 138-67. For my present purposes all that is necessary are the much more basic points that fulfillments are scalar, and that Husserl thought the resulting defeasibility of imperfect Evidenz is indexed to them.

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recognize that my own interpretation falls within a broad family of views that he might thereby be criticizing, I do not think his first argument adequately targets the account of Evidenz that I have carefully restricted myself to above, i.e., one bracketing Husserl’s epistemology. Hopp is focused on justification, i.e., whether a belief is “appropriate.” I have been at pains merely to discuss the feeling of such justifications. Hopp has a second argument running along similar lines. He appeals to the following claim: “The evidence one has for some proposition p cannot change in the interval from t1 to t2 if one is in mental states with precisely the same intentional content from t1 to t2.” 72 If every change in one’s beliefs depends on a change in one’s body of evidence, and if every change in one’s body of evidence depends upon a change in the intentional contents of one’s mental states, then every change in the evidence that one has for some proposition p (presuming it is a change in the degree to which p is taken to be true) would depend on a change in the intentional contents of one’s mental states. This argument is exquisitely valid. But, respectfully, I deny its first premise. Imagine a sequence of perceptions of some everyday object, let us say a hay barn. The first perception of the barn in the sequence gets characterized by considerably less Evidenz than subsequent ones. After all, you might not be able to see well from your initial vantage point, far afield. You might believe that what you are seeing is, in fact, a hay barn, but still remain doubtful, perhaps because of the twilight, perhaps because you lack familiarity with modern agriculture buildings (not so romantic-looking as they once were), or perhaps because you have read too many works of epistemology in which ersatz hay barns figure liberally. But upon closer inspection, let us say your initial suspicions are nicely confirmed (let us go so far as to say they are “fulfilled,” as Husserl does), and your subsequent perception with exactly the same intentional content is thereby felt by you to be considerably more warranted than your initial one. Unlike Hopp, my interpretation of Husserl’s story here is that Evidenz is not merely a consequence of “one’s body of evidence,” but a qualitative character of one’s experience of that body of evidence. Hopp (and other interpreters of Husserl) would not agree that the content has remained the same across the unfolding experiences of the hay barn.

72. Hopp, Perception and Knowledge, 114.

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He instead intereprets the body of evidence as changing in such cases because the experienced content has changed. Nevertheless, a key element of the account that I am offering instead is that there can be changes in qualitative character (i.e., the “feeling” of an unfolding series of acts), independent of changes in intentional content. The doxastic sentiment may vary, even as the intentional content stays fixed. A third argument is that my type of interpretation is a failure “phenomenologically.” 73 Hopp argues that treating Evidenz as a quality of an experience, i.e., treating it as “phenomenal” rather than the content of a mental act, mischaracterizes the relationship between perception and belief––“we don’t regard a content as evident because we have some peculiar feeling when we entertain it, but instead have the feeling because it is evident.” 74 This last point I think can be understood in at least two different ways. One way it might be understood is as a criticism of my theoretical order of explanation. Hopp may be suggesting that what I have done here is to inappropriately reverse the actual or appropriate order of explanation. But it might also be understood as a claim about how either (or both) of the terms in that explanatory relation are experienced by us, i.e., a claim that the interpretation I’ve proposed genuinely “gets the phenomenology wrong” insofar as it posits a type of experience that we do not in fact have, or that what I have described is not characteristic of experiences that we typically do have when we are believing. But at the risk of a tu quoque here, I am not yet convinced that what we characteristically experience is first and foremost a “content,” which then may be warranted or not, and if warranted then subsequently causes some Evidenz. I think that gets the phenomenology backwards. I really do think that the feeling of things being as they appear is what characterizes, first and foremost, proximally and for the most part, our lived experience of extra-mental objects. It may well be the case that there are other senses of what it means for the content of such experiences to be “evident,” e.g., their logical relationships to other contents, their having been reported in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, or their having been told to us by our moms, etc. (Recall that Husserl himself appealed to many different kinds of Evidenz.) But is it really the case that the experience of something’s being true is first and foremost 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid., 114-15.

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an experience of (a fully warranted) content? And that it is only on the basis of that bloodless and dispassionately appraised content that such an experience is then subsequently felt by us to be true? I am confident that it is not. The truth is felt by us first, whether our experience is of a genuinely warranted content, or not.

CONCLUSIONS FROM HUSSERL According to Husserl, Evidenz characterizes relationships amongst real mental acts, i.e., experiences, and as such is not a property of strictly logical relations holding amongst ideal contents, however much it may depend upon them. Even though Evidenz was not meant to provide a veracity condition, à la Descartes (and despite the fact that the ideal of perfect Evidenz includes such a veracity condition), it was nevertheless meant as an evidentiary feeling. It is the felt quality of those acts’ fulfillment relations. My reading above, if accurate, connects Husserl to a broadly empiricist tradition. Husserl belongs under the big tent with Even More Modest Doxastic Sentimentalists, at least if ‘feeling’ is defined sufficiently widely. The advantage of treating perceptual evidence as a matter of degree, whether we analyze it in this phenomenological sense, or otherwise, is insight into why there remain relevant doxastic differences for simple truths like HERE IS A HAND, prior to and post a particular sequence of experiences. That Husserl was concerned with considerably more than the apodicticity of logical principles should be clear. That he was a Cartesian, but did not adopt all aspects of Descartes’ epistemology, should also be clear. In this chapter I have argued for this latter claim in two particular respects: (1) Husserl restricted his Evidenzprinzip to beliefs, i.e., to takings-to-be-true, rather extending it to truths themselves, and (2) Husserl distinguished various kinds of Evidenz, particularly apodictic Evidenz from imperfect Evidenz. Unlike Descartes, he did not treat all feelings of certainty as equivalent in character. Husserl’s account, whatever the ultimate tally of its merits and demerits, has at least this going for it: a solution to Moore’s Puzzle. It can explain why “here is a hand” in most cases is not in need of further proof. On Husserl’s account this is so because (in those cases that it is uttered in the presence of a hand) it is experienced with Evidenz. An-

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other advantage is that it can explain why “here is a hand” nevertheless always admits of further proof, viz. it is experienced with imperfect Evidenz. Basic perceptual beliefs can always have more of that particular type of Evidenz given for them. Most importantly, however, it explains the relationship of those two facts to one another: It provides an account of possible degrees of evidence in believing as a synthesis of fulfillment relations amongst experiences sharing intentional content. Whereas Moore gave us no principled way of distinguishing the two types of cases, i.e., the cases where HERE IS A HAND cannot be further proved from cases where such proofs “can be got,” Husserl’s theory has it that there is not only a difference in kind between them, but also that difference in degree. This is not to say that there is not an important distinction to be made between them. But in typical scenarios belief results from the balance of the amounts of Evidenz and negative Evidenz in the unfolding sequence of experiences sharing content. That, of course, is not the only story available for explaining Moore’s Puzzle. It was merely Husserl’s story, on the (possibly perverse) interpretation advanced above, i.e., when Evidenz is interpreted as doxastic sentiment. There are, of course, costs for such a theory. In order to solve the riddle Moore bequeathed, it seems as if we must abandon Moore’s strong notion of the self-evident, i.e., incapability of further proof. It seems as if we must instead adopt the core conception of self-evidence discussed above, i.e., self-evidence defined as that which comes down to us already proved. But sometimes even apparent costs turn into benefits, in the final tally. Actually, we needn’t wholly abandon Moore’s strong conception of self-evidence: it lives on in the ideal of perfect Evidenz, i.e., the ideal of a complete scientific knowledge, or of a “perception” that takes place from every perspective. We must, nevertheless, mature past youthful fantasies that we will ever possess such perfection in anything like a human experience. Science itself must mature past youthful fantasies of complete science, something that could never be science as possibly known by finite creatures like us. We must instead content ourselves with an endless grind, and a more and more closely approximate version of the truth, ever more costly to produce. Pity our poor scientists. But pity us most of all. Pity perception’s perpetual struggle to know its objects. Even more poignantly, we must abandon jejune aspirations for something like a criterion for knowledge. Not even Husserl endorsed that particular

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Cartesianism. Husserl’s advance upon Descartes suggests instead that by the dawn of the twentieth century that dream was finally in its twilight, even in the work of a philosopher who was otherwise its stoutest champion. Perhaps more than any other figure of the past 2,500 years, Husserl devoted himself to analyses of self-evidence. It is not merely the Clarity and Distinctness Principle we have outgrown, but any principle that would substitute an alternative doxastic sentiment for clarity, so long as it implies a veracity condition.

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER 4: STRAW-MEN IN DARK TIMES

SCHLICK’S ARGUMENT Appealing to Husserl’s basic distinction between kinds of Evidenz we find one possible, but certainly not the only, solution to Moore’s Puzzle. But before proceeding it may be useful to address one final objection, sometimes couched as an objection to any phenomenological account of self-evidence, including the one discussed in the previous chapter. Phenomenological accounts of self-evidence, in the broad sentimentalist vein in which I have been pursing them, are not unique to Husserl. As I suggested above, such views have antecedents in Early Modern Philosophy, and particular doctrines within the family have fallen into notorious difficulty, to wit, Descartes’ Clarity and Distinctness Principle. Perhaps the best expression of supposedly general difficulty, into which all similar accounts supposedly must fall, was voiced by Moritz Schlick (1882–1936). 75 A physicist turned philosopher (Schlick’s dissertation was for Max Planck in 1904, but by 1910 his Habilitationsschrift was on “The Essence of Truth According to Modern Logic”), Schlick is revered for having been the founder and organizer of the Vienna Circle. The intellectual power assembled in that group, and the influence logical positivism had on the practices and products of the subsequent 75. Similar arguments can be found in A. J. Ayer, “Self-evidence,” in Phenomenology and Philosophical Understanding, ed. Edo Pivcevic. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975) 79-92. But I will focus here on Schlick’s version of the argument.

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century of philosophizing, cannot be overstated. Generations later we may debate whether its brightest star was Neurath, or Carnap, or Gödel, or Feigl, all of whom met as part of that group first calling itself “The Schlick Circle.” They were scattered westward only after Schlick was murdered in 1936, and the Nazi’s annexed Austria in 1938. But Schlick’s importance may not be seriously doubted. I cannot put his argument any better than Schlick himself did. So I will simply quote him here at length: Now we do, of course, establish truth by means of various data of consciousness, and we may if we choose call these self-evidence. But it is impossible to sustain the doctrine that there is a peculiar, irreducible experience of self-evidence, the presence of which constitutes a sufficient criterion and an unmistakable mark of truth. This is proved by the empirical fact that the experience of self-evidence occurs also in the case of notoriously false judgments. Any false claim that is defended with honest fervor may serve as an example. Thus the systems of such great metaphysicians as Descartes and Spinoza consist in large measure of false judgments which their originators nevertheless held to be the most certain of all truths. I am aware that defenders of the doctrine of self-evidence maintain that in these instances what was experienced was not genuine selfevidence; they would have us believe that what was involved instead was a certainty “without self-evidence.” This claim, however, is tangled up in hopeless contradiction. On the one hand, if genuine selfevidence is experienced as essentially different from spurious (a certainty without self-evidence), then the two will never be confused with one another; there will be no mistakes about self-evidence––with the result that we shall have denied the existence of the very set of facts the theory was devised to explain. On the other hand, if there is no immediate difference between the two experiences, then we can decide only indirectly, by means of subsequent investigation, whether what is present is certainty with self-evidence or certainty without it. And this is an admission that a genuine criterion of truth is not to be sought in the experience of self-evidence, that other criteria are decisive, and these would have to be inquired into in connection with that subsequent investigation. Such criteria cannot themselves be experiences of self-evidence; otherwise we would

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be caught up in a circle. But then the claim that self-evidence is the ultimate criterion would be destroyed. 76

Schlick’s argument, in short, is that there can be no quality of experience sufficient for distinguishing the true from the false. A philosopher who claims there can be such a criterion must distinguish the genuine feeling of it from any phony, in order to avoid the objection that while many people have felt they possessed the criterion, in relation to some experience or another, their experiences subsequently proved false. But then Schlick’s rejoinder is to propose a dilemma: either that philosopher proposing a criterion must say that people can be mistaken about having the genuine experience, in which case it can be of no use in sorting the true from the false, or that philosopher must say people cannot be mistaken about having the genuine experience, in which case there is no cause for distinguishing it from its ersatz, but he or she must squarely face the fact that many have felt to be self-evident what patently was not. In my judgment, Schlick’s argument is completely sound. 77 The degree to which I deem an argument like it appropriate, e.g., as criticism of Descartes (who chose the first horn of Schlick’s dilemma), may be judged by my own analysis at the end of chapter 2. Elevated to a regress argument, it is equivalent to the argument that I made there in conclusion. A quibble would be to point out that it is not really “Schlick’s argument,” insofar as it is not original to Schlick. It is, rather, a formulation of the Problem of the Criterion, for which Schlick could have cited (though he did not) many historical sources. 78 76. Moritz Schlick, General Theory of Knowledge [1925], trans. Albert E. Blumberg (New York and Vienna: Springer-Verlag, 1974), 148-49. This quotation is from Blumberg’s translation of the 2nd edition of 1925, originally published Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre (Berlin: Verlag von Julius Springer, 1918), two years prior to Schlick’s appointment at the University of Vienna and the founding of the famous Circle. 77. A more critical discussion of the argument can be found in Wolfgang Stegmüller, Metaphysik, Wissenschaft, Skepsis (Frankfurt am Main: Humboldt, 1954), and somewhat more recently in Franz von Kutschera, “Moritz Schlick on Self-Evidence,” Synthese 64, no. 3 (1985): 307-15. 78. Its ancient source is Book II of Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism, a recent edition of which is The Skeptic Way: Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism, trans. Benson Mates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), especially 125-40. Its early modern source is Montaigne’s, “Apology for Raimond de Sebonde,” The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, Vol. II, trans. Charles Cotton (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1913), particularly 316-17. Readers may recall that at the end of chapter 2 I attributed a contemporary formulation to Roderick Chisholm, The Problem of the Criterion (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1973).

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But the fact that Husserl’s account of Evidenz as the feeling of fulfillment relations does not fall victim to Schlick’s argument is easily enough seen, once we attend to the distinction of perfect Evidenz from imperfect Evidenz, and once we gain the insight that the former was meant to be a regulative ideal. Husserl’s Evidenzprinzip does not claim that whatever is perceived with Evidenz is true. Schlick himself did not observe the niceties of such distinctions, operating at the level Husserl called “the natural attitude.” Such an attitude, I would hasten to add, is not necessarily problematic. Not every good piece of criticism need be informed by phenomenological discrimination, as sometimes phenomenology is neither the topic of consideration, nor relevant for a particular argument. However, criticisms of arguments about phenomenology ought to be armed with phenomenological discriminations. Schlick was not content to attribute the doctrine that the experience of self-evidence is sufficient for truth merely to Descartes. 79 He also attributed that same doctrine to Husserl, 80 but also to Brentano, 81 to Nelson, 82 to Höfler, 83 to Spencer, 84 and perhaps to other philosophers besides. (My counting here has reached the limits of my scholarship; investigation of the other cases I leave aside.) Despite the importance of Schlick’s argument, in its own right, the painting of all of the figures of the history of philosophy with this same broad brush is a flaw in the work of an otherwise careful thinker. Mortiz Schlick, most famous for founding the Vienna Circle, was a champion of reason in dark times, and would have been pleased (I like to imagine) to take this lesson on a particular historical point. For the sake of Schlick’s own high standards of evidence and rational discourse, we should not allow even the most trivial of errors in the application of argument to slip past with merely a wink or a nod. Holding Schlick himself to a high interpretive standard is the best way to celebrate his legacy and his generosity towards his colleagues and students, and towards philosophy itself. Restricting my claim now to Husserl, and merely to what I was able to establish in the previous chapter, I conclude that the feeling of Evidenz is an experience of something as true, but that Husserl nowhere 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

Schlick, General Theory of Knowledge, 86. Ibid., 141. Ibid., 86. Ibid., 87. Ibid., 149. Ibid., 336.

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claimed imperfect Evidenz sufficient for truth. Not only did Husserl believe imperfect Evidenz insufficient for truth, he believed it unnecessary. 85 Only perfect Evidenz would be sufficient for truth, were it realizable. But it is not. Nor was it meant to be. It is, rather, a regulative ideal. Schlick’s perfectly sound argument, as applied to Husserl (i.e., as Schlick himself applied it on p. 141) commits the fallacy of the strawman. 85. See Logical Investigations, Prolegomena, §51 (HUI XVIII, 190-95; LI I, 193-96) and Experience and Judgment, §79 (E&U, 375-80; E&J, 310-13) for examples. This boils down to the trivial point that things can be such and so even when our believing them to be such and so is incorrect. But it also touches on one of Husserl’s life-long concerns: true judgments that lose some degree of Evidenz, i.e., truths previously experienced with higher (or a different sort of) Evidenz that later come to possess less. The project of reconstructing the genealogy of such truths in their “original experiences” (i.e., experiences with the higher degree of Evidenz) implies that a particular degree of Evidenz is unnecessary for such truths, let alone sufficient.

5 DOXASTICITY AS ELECTRICITY William James and the Live Hypothesis

EVIDENTIALISM

According to a widely accepted meta-ethical principle “ought implies can,” we would only be obliged to believe on the basis of evidence if we actually could. 1 Coupled with a major research program in psychology, viz. the investigation of “cognitive biases,” this principle suggests a pessimistic answer to an important normative question: ought we to believe according to evidence? Nevertheless, we certainly do praise each other for believing rationally, and we blame each other for believing irrationally. We want to believe on the basis of facts and figures and data. And if we could train ourselves (or our children, or our politicians) to believe in a manner that was more evidence-sensitive, shouldn’t we at least try? “Debiasing” may or may not be possible, 2 but continued interest in “debiasing” suggests that at least some of us still believe that we ought to believe on the basis of the best reasons. Evidentialism is the normative doctrine that we ought to believe, or even more strongly that we ought only to believe, on the basis of evidence. But even this most stolid Enlightenment doctrine has been con1. Though even well-worn principles have their critics, see Wayne Martin, “Ought but Cannot,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 109, no. 2 (2009): 103–28. 2. For one more recent study, one that hits a bit close to home, see Eric Schwitzgebel and Fiery Cushman, “Philosophers’ Biased Judgments Persist Despite Training, Expertise and Reflection,” Cognition 141 (2015): 127–37. 189

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troversial. It was controverted by one of America’s first and greatest psychologists, William James (1842–1910). Prescient in many ways, James was among the earliest of the newly scientific psychologists to argue that our “passional nature” is the real driving force behind believing. His widely popular essay “The Will to Believe” (1896), defends not only that thesis, but also the claim that it is “lawfully permissible” for passions to do so, and even (in some special circumstances) that they “must.” Against philosophers like T. H. Huxley and W. K. Clifford, who had argued that our believing ought only to be determined by evidence, James prosecuted the case that it is sometimes permissible to believe, even though the evidence is far from conclusive. James’ opposition to the strongest version of Evidentialism, viz. to the claim that we should only believe on the basis of evidence, is one of his most celebrated, if not universally-beloved or well-understood claims. One of James’ own students called James’ argument against Evidentialism, “one tissue of ingenious sophistry from outset to end.” 3 The argument has been a bit too-well celebrated and too-well condemned, I think, and not quite sufficiently well-understood. Determining its limits (and loving it all the more) requires some sober reflection, and a bit of tidying up. And that is what I aim to do for James’ argument presently: just a bit of tidying up. In the cheerful spirit of that chore I will argue that James was not an apologist for irrationalism. This claim puts me in line with some of the most recent scholarship on James, 4 but also puts me at odds with some of his most famous critics, including Allen Wood and Bertrand Russell. 5 I follow George Mavrodes in interpreting James’ underlying account of belief as probabilistic, and thereby evidence-sensitive. While James passionately opposed Evidentialism, he did not mean we are free to believe willy-nilly. Against other defenders of James, I will argue that the particular cases to which James’ will-to-believe doctrine was meant to ap3. Dickinson S. Miller, “James’s Doctrine of ‘The Right to Believe’,” The Philosophical Review 51, no. 6 (1942): 541–58, particularly 552. 4. For example Colin Koopman, “The Will, the Will to Believe, and William James: An Ethics of Freedom as Self-Transformation,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 55, no. 3 (2017): 491–512. See also P. D. Magnus’ “Risk and Efficacy in ‘The Will to Believe’” (unpublished manuscript, August 10, 2018, https://www.fecundity.com/job/james-will.pdf). 5. James’ will-to-believe doctrine also has many more contemporary critics. Cf. Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse, Pragmatism, Pluralism, and the Nature of Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2018): 59–75, who have recently argued it is “immoral” (68–72), and that it “deepens dogmatism” (72–74). But I will focus on Russell and Wood.

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ply are restricted to those wherein he thought our actions are underdetermined by the available evidence: even though James knew well that “passions” (i.e., feelings) drive believing, he treated the landscape of believers’ “live hypotheses” as already shaped by their “assessment” of that evidence. So, against Wood and Russell, I am arguing that James’ theory provides no comfort to those who would seek justifications in willful ignorance, but against the other defenders of James I am arguing that his doctrine is restricted by the feeling of “liveness,” in addition to more robust pragmatic considerations involving inductive risk. I will make this case by showing how James’ theory was a deeply phenomenological one. He claimed that we are sometimes free to believe at will, but only within the bounds of a particular doxastic sentiment. His more famous will-to-believe doctrine must be grounded in his older, lesser-known sentimentalism, developed in the Principles of Psychology (1890), but also further back in the “Sentiment of Rationality” (1879). I argue that it is James’ sentiment of rationality that marks the evidential constraint on willful believing, albeit a subjectively felt one.

SOME INTERPRETIVE OPTIONS FOR LIVE HYPOTHECATING James posited a doxastic attitude towards a propositional content, what he called a “hypothesis.” 6 And his theory begins by drawing a basic distinction between live hypotheses and dead hypotheses, where the meaning of “live” is given through the metaphor of electrified wires. To be a live hypothesis, on James’ account, is to “mak[e] electric connection with your nature.” It is for that hypothesis to be credible to you, in that word’s literal sense, i.e., “able to be believed.” Some hypotheses “scintillat[e] [with] credibility,” James wrote, but others are not readyto-be-believed. So I propose that we begin by inspecting James’ electri6. See William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, eds. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 14. Hereafter abbreviated WTB. Some have objected to James’ terminology, on grounds that “hypothesis” is freighted with significantly more epistemic baggage than “proposition.” See, for example, Richard M. Gale, “William James and the Ethics of Belief,” American Philosophical Quarterly 17, no. 1 (1980): 1. I follow James in using those two terms interchangeably here.

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cal metaphor. If this metaphor of liveness does explanatory work, i.e., if the distinction of live from dead was meant to support his arguments, then a hypothesis being “live” must at least partially explain why that hypothesis comes to be believed by us, when others do not. Importantly, the hypothesis’ credibility was supposed to be the quality of an individual’s subjective experience in relation to the propositional content, and not a property of that content alone. What that means, for a hypothesis to be live for you as opposed to dead for you, is that it produces a relevant experience in you, i.e., that you experience that hypothesis as “scintillating [with] credibility.” It cannot do that all by itself, of course, but relies crucially on dispositions in you. The example James gave to illustrate this point was “belief in the Mahdi.” 7 James presumed that the appearance of the Mahdi would be a dead hypothesis (i.e., incredible) for his immediate audience, but that his audience would recognize that hypothesis’ liveness (i.e., credibility) for people other than themselves. 8 The description of some hypotheses as “scintillating” was meant to characterize a broad type of doxastic experience, shared by all of us about some propositions at some moments, but not shared by all of us in relation to the same propositions. Thus, via appeal to the character of such experience in his most basic doxastic concept, I recognize James’ theory as a phenomenological one. But here already the lights may flicker; so a couple of interpretive options ought to be fully illuminated, before we proceed further. Clearly, live hypotheses are not necessarily believed, i.e., not everything believable is actually believed by a person who countenances a credible hypothesis. (It might be pointed out that this is an important reason that James called them “hypotheses” in the first place.) But did he mean for beliefs to be a proper subset of the believer’s live hypotheses (indexed to her)? Or were beliefs supposed to be completely different in kind from the live hypotheses, i.e., related to the latter only through shared 7. The hypothesis was sufficiently dead to me, personally, that I was forced to Google “the Mahdi,” Islam’s eschatological analogue to the second coming of Christ, the prophesied redeemer who arrives prior to Judgment Day to cleanse the world of evil. 8. James first delivered “The Will to Believe” to Felix Adler’s “Summer School of Ethics” in Plymouth Massachusetts in 1895, and subsequently to the philosophical club at Yale University in 1896. It was first published in New World 5, 327–47, and subsequently by Longmans, Green & Co. in 1897 as the lead essay in James’ first volume of philosophy, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. On matters of historical and biographical detail I am deeply indebted to Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James: As Revealed in Unpublished Correspondence and Notes, Together with his Published Writings (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1935), in this case vol. 2, 207–24.

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propositional contents, or perhaps through the fact that some of the beliefs were once live hypotheses? In short: was liveness meant by James to characterize some of the hypotheses but also the beliefs? Or was it meant exclusively to characterize our relation to the credible hypotheses? Strictly speaking, beliefs are not propositional contents. But less strictly speaking, we often use the term ‘belief’ to mean a merely possible belief, i.e., our possible truth-taking attitude “toward” such a content, or a proxy for the proposition itself. In order to fix what live hypothecating was supposed to be we must first be sure to get clear its relation to believing. So here the most basic interpretive choice must be made in relation to James’ essay: whether to interpret beliefs themselves as live or dead. This might seem a trivial question, but it is one that has far-reaching consequences for understanding his theory, and the text is not completely clear on the issue. One reading would have it that “live belief” is a pleonasm, akin to saying that a shape is a “rectangular square.” But another would have it that “live belief” is instead contradictory, akin to saying a shape is “round square.” I will argue below that beliefs are dead hypotheses. In their crucial phenomenological respect, i.e., the way that they feel to us, they are more like the propositions we treat as literally incredible than those we deem credible. But this is a substantive bit of interpretation, and it will require some argument. Here is a second choice for following out James’ circuit: was James’ distinction between live and dead meant to leave room for degrees of liveness that would themselves be correlative to the degrees to which the hypotheses are believed likely, i.e., was “liveness” not merely credibility, but also an estimate of the hypothesis’ subjective probability? This is a tempting reading, and I will give in to the temptation. The notion of degree is strongly suggested by James’ electrical metaphor. Voltage? Amperage? Wattage? Take your pick. But how those degrees ought to be assimilated with our more recent understanding of subjective probabilities is less clear. I will not interpret James as a full-blown Bayesian. But this much of Bayesianism I will attribute to him: believing involves an estimate of subjective probabilities. I do not go so far as

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to attribute to James the notion of beliefs as credence functions, 9 but he did treat some of the processes underlying belief in the neighborhood of a credence. Everything is complicated by the fact that, for James, beliefs are closely associated with actions. While a live hypothesis is unlike an electrified wire insofar as it scintillates for only some of us, perhaps it was supposed to be quite like an electrified wire insofar as it sparks activity. Do live hypotheses do work like beliefs? Do they jolt us into motion? James was, after all, a pragmatist. And beliefs were, for him, defined by a willingness to act. 10 According to William James we are unwilling to act upon some hypotheses at all; they are dead. But others, according to him, are charged to a maximal degree; he wrote that we would be willing to act upon them “irrevocably” (WTB, 14). So the interpretive question: Are live hypotheses volitional, like beliefs? Or are they more indolent, and is it only the beliefs that are tied to action? This leaves a fourth and final interpretive choice. Let us say that the voltage of a hypothesis ranges from zero, at which point it is not even slightly believable, to one, at which point it is maximally believable. (James did not quantify this scale himself, but let us do so on his behalf, in the spirit of a “friendly” and modernizing interpretation.) Now add the basic tenet of James’ theory just mentioned, i.e., that believing is (or is in some way closely associated with) willingness to act. This suggests a continuum of degrees of willingnesses to act. But what would that mean? Would such a spectrum correspond to the degrees that the underlying hypotheses “scintillate?” This might be readily intelligible in the minimal case, where no action would be ventured. For example, if you were to put it to me that “the moon is made of green cheese” you wouldn’t witness a dramatic shift in my behavior, because that hypothe9. For seminal work on the development of credence functions see Rudolf Carnap, “Inductive Logic and Rational Decisions,” in Studies in Inductive Logic and Probability, Vol. 1, eds. Rudolf Carnap and Richard C. Jeffrey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 7–31, particularly 11–12. The comparison with Carnap’s treatment of subjective probability here is illustratrive. Carnap was quite clear that “Both concepts [i.e., DEGREE OF CREDENCE and CONDITIONAL CREDENCE] are theoretical concepts which characterize the state of mind of a person; more exactly, the nonobservable microstate of his central nervous system, not his consciousness, let alone his overt behavior” (Carnap, “Inductive Logic and Rational Deicisions,” 12.) James, on the other hand, instead treated the assessment of subjective probability as felt in consciousness. That is my principal thesis in this chapter. 10. James inherited this doctrine from Alexander Bain (1818–1903). Whether this was Bain’s “definition” of belief is disputed. For discussion see James C. S. Wernham, “Alexander Bain on Belief,” Philosophy 61, no. 236 (1986): 262–66.

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sis simply doesn’t sparkle (for me). 11 But what about the maximum? How would I instead be willing to act in that case? With a little work I think that one can bring to code James’ charged talk of acting “irrevocably.” 12 Nevertheless, if believing is itself scalar, that presents an interpretive challenge, given James’ insistence upon the intimately close connection (in some passages it is identity) between believing and willing. Even after we have a firm grasp on what it means to act “irrevocably,” it might not be obvious how to explain degrees of action between doing nothing and doing that. 13 Perhaps it makes good sense to talk about a spectrum of willingnesses to act. But I will avoid attributing such a spectrum to James below. Interpreting liveness as degrees of subjective probability, and their relation to believing when believing is treated as willingness to act, is nevertheless my main task. So my strategy will be to appeal to thresholds, i.e., I will attribute to James a continuum of degrees of subjective probability (i.e., the liveness of the hypotheses) but then locate upon that continuum two thresholds where discontinuous disbelieving and believing (i.e., actions) are triggered. 14 I will ultimately conclude that the feeling James associated with believing and acting, not to mention believing and acting, occurs at these thresholds.

11. The example is borrowed from Huxley, in a similar context. See T. H. Huxley, “The Method by Which the Causes of the Present and Past Conditions of Organic Nature Are to be Discovered—The Origination of Living Beings,” Lectures and Essays (London: Cassell and Company, 1908), 53–54. 12. See the discussion below of momentous, which I interpret by lights of existential phenomenology. To act “irrevocably” means to lose alternative opportunities, gauged by the scope of a finite human life and its values. 13. One plausible interpretation, suggested by P. D. Magnus, is that a degree of willingness to act correlates with a degree of caution in practical deliberation. “Somewhat willing to act on the basis of H,” means that consequences of H would be considered, but that H would not be treated as determinative. P. D. says (in personal communication) that “If H entails that I ought to Phi, I entertain Phi-ing but also weigh other factors.” This is, nevertheless not the sort of interpretation I advance below. With due respect to Professor Magnus, I say instead that beliefs, i.e., willingnesses to act, are for James discontinuous thresholds on a continuum of livenesses. 14. For an explanation of thresholds in this context see George I. Mavrodes, “Intellectual Morality in Clifford and James,” in The Ethics of Belief Debate, ed. Gerald D. McCarthy. (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986,) 205–19. My account here is closest to Mavrodes’.

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TWO QUITE DIFFERENT ARGUMENTS AGAINST EVIDENTIALISM Evidentialism is a basic Enlightenment principle. It expresses the value we place on believing rationally. In particular it expresses the normative claim that we ought to believe on the basis of (a rational assessment of) evidence rather than on the basis of parochial prejudices, or superstitions, or biases, etc. Consider a formulation of the principle made by one of James’ more-recent critics. Evidentialism, Wood’s definition: “Apportion the strength of your belief to the evidence; believe only what is justified by the evidence, and believe it to the full extent, but only to the extent, that it is justified by the evidence.” 15

An advantage of Wood’s definition is that it takes into consideration some of the degrees mentioned above. The principle states that we ought to believe to the degree, i.e., in strict proportion to, our degree of possessed evidence. But it is important to notice that the Evidentialist doctrine, as expressed by Wood, is still quite a bit stronger than the mere claim that we ought to believe if we have sufficient evidence. It additionally poses an important second clause that we ought to “believe only what is justified by the evidence.” And it is that second condition, i.e., the strong “only”-claim, that has made Evidentialism controversial. In opposition to that strong, second clause of the Evidentialist doctrine James advanced his “thesis” in the “Will to Believe:” Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such circumstances, “Do not decide, but leave the question open,” is itself a passional decision––just like deciding yes or no––and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth. (WTB, 20)

It is particularly important to notice that this oft-quoted passage advances a pair of interrelated claims. Ignore the proffered premise for the moment; concentrate instead on detangling James’ two quite dis15. Allen Wood, “The Duty to Believe According to the Evidence,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 63, no. 1–3 (2008): 9.

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tinct conclusions from one another: (C1) our “passional nature” is such that we “must” believe when faced with a “genuine option,” and (C2) our “passional nature” is such that it “lawfully may” decide, in those particular cases. James meant to argue for both of these two distinct theses. This interpretive point cannot be overemphasized. A failure to distinguish the two distinct conclusions in this passage plagues the large literature on James’ duly-famous essay. Were it in my power to make one contribution to that literature, however small, it would be a crisp clarification of these two distinct claims. I will have some minor points to make myself about the more-famous “must.” But it is the lessercelebrated of the two conclusions, i.e., James’ normative claim that our passions “lawfully may” determine our beliefs in cases of “genuine option,” that will draw the majority of my attention below. On the basis of the two substantively different conclusions, consider two quite distinct Jamesian arguments. 16 The Necessity Argument: (P1) In cases of “genuine option,” believing cannot be decided by evidence alone. (P2) Nevertheless, not believing has consequences, i.e., “will be attended with the same risk of losing truth.” (P3) The risk of losing truth may outweigh the risk of not believing or believing falsely. (C1) Therefore, in cases of genuine option, one “must” believe on the basis of “passional nature” in addition to evidence. (C2) Therefore, one “lawfully may,” in cases of genuine option, believe on the basis of “passional nature” in addition to evidence. The Permissibility Argument: (P1) In cases of “genuine option,” believing cannot be decided by evidence alone.

16. In identifying the two arguments I follow Rose Ann Christian, “Truth and Consequences in James ‘The Will to Believe,’” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 58, no. 1 (2005): 1–26. What I identify as the Permissibility Argument, Christian calls “the epistemological argument.” It should be sharply contrasted with what I am calling The Necessity Argument, and what Christian calls the “prudential argument.” James’ Permissibility Argument, as I have reconstructed it, does not require many of his other celebrated distinctions, e.g., between believing truths and avoiding falsehoods. Cf. Christian, “Truth and Consequences,” 10–14. Her criticism of James’ “epistemological argument” turns precisely on interpreting it as heavily reliant on such a distinction. Many of James’ most controversial claims are required only for the stronger and more-famous Necessity Argument.

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(C2) Therefore, one “lawfully may,” in cases of genuine option, believe on the basis of “passional nature” in addition to evidence.

By sharply distinguishing the two arguments from one another, and by focusing on the second, I do not deny that the logic of James’ main line of reasoning in the “Will to Believe” follows the Necessity Argument. I readily admit that. However, a good reason to set some parts of that more-famous argument aside, at least for the moment, and in addition to the abundance of analysis of those parts already in print, 17 is that the Permissibility Argument does all of the work against Evidentialism. This fact goes unnoticed because the permissibility claim has been insufficiently distinguished from the necessity claim. An appropriate interpretation of “liveness” can reveal how James had resources at his disposal for a much simpler argument against Evidentialism, i.e., a kind of underdetermination argument that requires fewer controversial premises than those pragmatic ones he in fact deployed. To see that this is so, presume, for the sake of argument, that the “must” in (C1) means either a logical or a psychological necessitation. In that case James’ “must”-claim is descriptive, and any additional claim that our passional nature “lawfully may” decide the genuine option, whatever kind of normativity that latter claim possesses, is logically dependent on the fact that we already must. 18 The logical and/or psychological observation is that passional natures do in fact determine beliefs, at least in cases of “genuine option,” which then becomes the important point in the argument against Huxley and Clifford by supporting the further conclusion (via the contrapositive of the famous “ought” implies “can”) that our passional nature “lawfully may” decide, 17. I am particularly indebted to the work of Richard M. Gale, On the Nature and Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 357–70, and The Divided Self of William James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 93–116. I have also been impressed by the summary and analysis made by Graham Bird, William James (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 161–70. An excellent discussion of James’ main argument in relation to contemporary epistemology is Michael Pace, “The Epistemic Value of Moral Considerations: Justification, Moral Encroachment, and James’ ‘Will to Believe,’” Noûs 45, no. 2 (2011): 239–68. I owe my appreciation of the degree to which that argument prefigures The Argument from Inductive Risk (AIR), discussed now by philosophers of science, to P. D. Magnus, “Risk and Efficacy in ‘The Will to Believe’ (unpublished manuscript, August 10, 2018, https://www.fecundity.com/job/james-will.pdf). For the relevance of the AIR to the philosophy of science see Exploring Inductive Risk: Case Studies of Values in Science, eds. Kevin C. Elliott and Ted Richards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 18. Cf. Jeff Kasser and Nishi Shah, “The Metaethics of Belief: An Expressivist Reading of ‘The Will to Believe,’” Social Epistemology 20, no. 1 (2006): 1–17, especially 10.

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at least in those sorts of cases. It was open for James to have argued from logical or psychological necessitation, to permissibility. Or presume instead, for the sake of argument, that the “must” in James’ famous thesis is itself normative in character. In that case the “must” meant some kind of moral or epistemic obligation, perhaps including those instrumental norms celebrated by pragmatists. 19 And in that case it is the “may” claim in (C2) that is logically prior, at least presuming the traditional definitional schema for deontic claims, whereupon they are obligatory, optional, or impermissible, mutually exclusively and exhaustively. The obligatory and the optional are both supposed to be permissible. And “ought” implies “may.” 20 If that is the case, then after belief in some proposition were established as permissible, further argument would still be required to show that belief in it is also obligatory rather than merely optional. That is because, on the traditional schema, permissibility is the weaker of the two notions. On this second type of interpretation, the “may” can be established independently, and with fewer controversial premises. If it were not even permissible for us to follow our “passional nature” in believing, however much we do so in fact, then no argument that we ought to could ever succeed. However we interpret the “must” in James’ first conclusion, i.e., whether it is elliptical for a descriptive logical or psychological necessity, and perhaps better couched in purely descriptive language, or whether it is a genuinely normative claim, indulging in a bit too much rhetorical flourish, that choice will be significant for whether we interpret the “may” as a premise in James’ main line of argumentation, or as its ultimate conclusion. The descriptive/necessity reading of “must” has it that we may because we must. The normative/obligatory reading of “must” has it that we may, and in addition we must. I will not pick a favorite, leaving this first-order interpretive matter to you and the legions of able Jamesian commentators. Instead I will focus below on reconstructing The Permissibility Argument, i.e., what I take to be a simpler line of reasoning open to James, and one possessing 19. The literature is dominated by this reading, notable among them C. S. Wernham, James’s Will-to-Believe Doctrine: A Heretical View (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987), particularly 33–39, 198. Another important normative interpretation is Gale, The Divided Self, 95. 20. This is the characteristic axiom of Standard Deontic Logic. It has its critics too, of course, but they shall remain outside my present concern.

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fewer controversial premises. It is my contention that interpreting James’ “must” in (C1) is not necessary in order to defeat of the strongest form of Evidentialism, and that the Permissibility Argument alone can do it. It is not necessary because the Permissibility Argument relies exclusively on James’ specification of “genuine options,” and in particular his notion of the live hypothesis. Yet this still leaves us with what James meant by “may.” And James himself was not entirely clear about the kind of normativity he meant to pack into his claim that passions “lawfully may” decide (let alone whether its origins are in the “must”). Obviously he didn’t mean “lawful” in the sense of a customary or established communal authority. Did he mean moral permissibility? 21 Or did he mean epistemic permissibility? 22 The nineteenth-century haziness on this difference is mirrored in our broader discussions of Evidentialism even today; there remains lively dispute about the kind of normativity packed into the Evidentialist doctrine. 23 Because resolving that particular ambiguity is not necessary for my argument here either, I will again carefully insulate my thesis from this potential short-circuit. Hereafter I simply follow Susan

21. See Arnold E. Johanson, “‘The Will to Believe’ and the Ethics of Belief,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy 11 (1975): 110–27, who argues it is moral permissibility. Gale favored this interpretation as well. See Gale, Divided Self, 94–95. 22. Cf. Michael R. Slater, William James on Ethics and Faith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 32–41, who interprets it as epistemic permissibility. 23. Among the most prominent defenders of contemporary Evidentialism are Earl Conee and Richard Feldman, Evidentialism: Essays in Epistemology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004). They treat it as an epistemic doctrine. Cf. Allen Wood, who treats it as a moral doctrine, particularly a procedural obligation rather than a content obligation. See Wood, “The Duty to Believe,” 8. Cf. Koopman, “The Will, The Will to Believe” who argues that it must be understood ethically, or Aikin and Talisse, Pragmatism, Pluralism, who treat it as both.

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Haack, and proceed under the assumption that James meant both of these two quite distinct senses of “permissible” in (C2). 24 This leads naturally to another important clarification: James was not defending either thesis with respect to all beliefs. He was defending them only in regard to a narrowly restricted class of beliefs, i.e., those that result from a “genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds.” Some beliefs, perhaps the majority, do not result from these so-called “genuine options” however defined, i.e., they can “by their nature” be decided upon “intellectual grounds.” On this point James was explicit and scrupulously clear. He thought that there are beliefs in the sciences that are, and ought only to be, believed on the basis of evidence. 25 For this reason it becomes particularly important not to neglect his doctrine’s clearly proposed limits. It should go without saying how ironical it would be if we were to willfully neglect the very part of his argument that then permitted our criticism of him for holding a doctrine that believing may permissibly neglect evidence. We should take special care to attend to that class of beliefs to which James’ doctrine was meant to apply. James called those beliefs “common,” and labeled them “moral beliefs.” 26 But a better understanding of the kind of belief he had in mind would be to think of them as oriented toward the future and as practi-

24. Susan Haack, “The Ethics of Belief’ Reconsidered,” in The Philosophy of Roderick M. Chisholm, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1997), 129–44, see especially 137–38. It is important to remember that James was responding to the full-throated condemnation of believing sans evidence made by Huxley and Clifford, a condemnation that had taken a decidedly moral tenor. Despite that context, I confess that I lean a bit toward those who read “lawfully may” as epistemic permissibility. In this regard Consider one of James’ concluding and most famous objections to Evidentialism: “a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule” (WTB, 31–32). If a demand of that sort would be irrational, then James must have thought that belief beyond evidence (at least in the relevant cases) was rationally permissible, if not rationally warranted, or prudent, or rationally required. I am aware that this interpretation has been dismissed by Gale as “offthe-wall” and having “no textual basis.” Gale, The Divided Self, 96. But had I the chance to argue with Gale, I would have begun by pointing to that bit of text on 31–32. 25. See WTB, 17. See also “The Sentiment of Rationality” (WTB, 80–81). 26. He appealed to the five types of examples listed below, but also adverted to “innumerable cases of other sorts” (WTB, 28).

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cal. 27 Such beliefs involve predictions, insofar as they are about future states-of-affairs, but may also be predictive, insofar as they themselves may be partially responsible for actualizing those states. James was particularly interested in the sort of believing that involves boldness and trust, i.e., faith that “acts on the power above him as a claim, and creates its own verification” (WTB, 28–29). His examples include (1) Friendliness: my faith that you like me, which causes me to act in particular ways toward you that are then reciprocated in your actually liking me more, (2) romantic love: the ardor of a suitor who believes his or her affection will be reciprocated, thereby increasing the chances that it will in fact be, and proving that ardor well-placed initially, (3) promotions, boons, and appointments: the confidence of applicants, e.g., in asking their bosses for raises, i.e., a confidence that increases the likelihood of success, (4) social organizations like governments, armies, commercial systems, ships, colleges, athletic teams: all of which require expectations that other members of the organization will perform their designated tasks, expectations themselves instrumental in ensuring that other people do, or are at least more likely to, and (5) defense against train robbery: which requires a greater number of passengers all rise at the same moment, trusting each other to make a move against the fewer number of better-armed robbers, who are much more likely to gun down anyone who rose against them alone. 28 Unlike Wood, who finds any criticism of Clifford and Huxley regarding this particular class of beliefs “typical of the dishonesty and evasion we find in all attempts to challenge or quibble with the evidentialist principle,” 29 I myself find it difficult not to be charmed by the optimism of James’ examples. Famously, James claimed that beliefs of this sort

27. Such beliefs are named differently by different commentators. Magnus, following Aikin and Talisse, calls them cases of “doxastic efficacy.” They are frequently couched by James in the language of the first-person, i.e., about what I believe that I will accomplish as the result of my own actions. But they need not be. They are instead always about future states-of-affairs, particularly (though not exclusively) insofar as those future states may (or may not) be brought about by individual or cooperative human activity. 28. These are James’ examples from sec. IX (WTB, 27–29). It is interesting that they all involve social phenomena. Elsewhere he makes it clear that he thinks these future-practical beliefs, i.e., those involving “doxastic efficacy,” are also instrumental for more personal virtues. See for example, the discussion of the famous mountain climber in “Is Life Worth Living?” (WTB, 53–54), or “The Sentiment of Rationality” (WTB, 80). 29. Wood, “The Duty to Believe,” 12.

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are self-verifying. 30 But what has been lost in the celebrations of selfverification’s epistemic anomalousness, is whether and how such beliefs result from genuine options. The claim that some beliefs are self-verifying may indeed be key to James’ Necessity Argument. But here again, distinguishing that argument from the Permissibility Argument is absolutely vital. In order to understand the content of James’ permissibility thesis, including his putative counter-examples to the strongest form of Evidentialism, it makes no difference whether the special class of beliefs are self-verifying. We must instead focus on whether they result from genuine options, i.e., options defined as “living, forced, and momentous.”

GENUINE OPTIONS: LIVE, FORCED, MOMENTOUS To be a live option is, according to James, to be a choice between two alternatives, both of which are live hypotheses. I have already sketched above, in a preliminary fashion, what it means for a proposition to be a live hypothesis, and I will further develop my interpretation of that key concept below. What is important presently is simply that live options were thought by James to be choices of the form “p or q,” wherein both 30. For a good discussion of self-verifying beliefs see H. H. Price, Believing (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969), 349–75. Jordan calls them “dependent truths.” See Jeff Jordan, “Pragmatic Arguments and Belief in God,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2011 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2011/entries/pragmatic-belief-god/ They are also sometimes labeled “doxastically dependent.” See Scott F. Aikin, “Evidentialism and James’ Argument from Friendship,” Southwest Philosophy Review 24, no. 1 (2008): 173–80. Gale argues that this particular type of belief is the exclusive target of James’ will-to-believe doctrine. See Gale, Divided Self, 103. Cf. Slater, William James on Ethics and Faith, 33, who argues that the will-to-believe doctrine applies more broadly. Compare my belief that the moon is made of rock with my belief that I will be a faithful husband. My holding the first belief has no consequence for the composition of the moon. But my holding the second, while not solely responsible for my staying faithful, might increase the likelihood that I will in fact end up faithful. (This example is borrowed from Gail Kennedy, “Pragmatism, Pragmaticism, and the Will to Believe—A Reconsideration,” The Journal of Philosophy 55, no. 14 (1958): 580.) Call a belief self-verifying if holding it increases, to whatever degree, the objective probability that the belief is, in fact, true. Here I follow Price’s definition, with only minor adjustment. Cf. Price, Believing, 352. In other places James committed himself to a significantly stronger claim. Cf. “And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.” James, “Is Life Worth Living?” in WTB, 53. Nota bene, however, that the Permissibility Argument requires neither this weaker thesis about self-verifying beliefs nor James’ stronger one.

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hypotheses p and q were live hypotheses. 31 For example, the “option” of either believing the moon is made of cheese or believing it is made of rock wouldn’t count as a live option for you, insofar as the first hypothesis isn’t a live hypothesis for you. Compare that to the live option of either believing the lunar rock is of terrestrial origin, or that it came from a source existing prior to the formation of the Earth. That would be a live option for you, presuming that you grant both of those alternatives some degree of credibility. For some people the question of believing in God, or not, is a live option. It is so insofar as both of those existential hypotheses (GOD EXISTS, and GOD DOES NOT EXIST) retain some degree of credibility. But for others of us, for whatever reasons, such an “option” is not a live option at all but is instead much more like the so-called “choice” between believing the moon is or isn’t made out of cheese. For ardent believers there is no live option here. But for ardent disbelievers there isn’t a live option either. James explicitly claimed that we are unable to “bring to life again” hypotheses that are dead merely by willing them recharged. 32 This is a key point for refuting those commentators who would read James as advocating a doctrine of wishful thinking or self-deception. 33 A

31. On the interpretation of what James meant by “decide an option between propositions” I follow the analysis of Pace, “The Epistemic Value of Moral Considerations,” 247. 32. See WTB, 18. This is a crucial piece of textual evidence for my interpretation of live, but it also raises deep problems for locating James’ doxastic voluntarism. If belief can at least in some cases be willed, then the only way that James can consistently claim that dead hypotheses cannot be willed live, is if live means something quite different from believed, at least in those cases. On my interpretation liveness involves the “assessment” of subjective probability, interpreted as affective and non-voluntary, while some beliefs/actions are voluntary, i.e., those based upon the live hypotheses rather than already dead ones. But for a hypothesis in close proximity to a threshold of credibility (see below), why should it be willable were it only some miniscule amount above that threshold but unwillable were it only some miniscule amount below? I owe my appreciation of this problem to an objection to this account made by Troy Cross. I have not adequately reproduced Professor Cross’ objection here, let alone replied to it. I only begin such a reply by insisting that this is a problem for any interpretation of the limits of James’ doxastic voluntarism, i.e., for distinguishing willable from unwillable beliefs on his behalf, and not merely for the interpretation below that identifies thresholds. 33. I cannot list them all, but they include the likes of A. J. Ayer and John Dewey. The beginnings of the list are provided by Gale, The Divided Self, 99–100. I agree with Gale’s diagnosis that each of these readers fails to understand (what Gale calls) James’ “epistemic undecidability requirement” (100–101). That requirement is incorporated in my interpretation of live below. To Gale’s list I would also add John Hick, Philosophy of Religion. Fourth Edition (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1990), 60, 80, and Stephen Nathanson, The Ideal of Rationality (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1985), 67–76, despite Nathanson’s distinction of self-deception from wishful thinking and irrationalism on 74–75. That still only begins the list.

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live hypothesis must “make some appeal, however small, to your belief.” And to be faced with a live option one must be choosing between two, if not equally credible, then at least minimally credible, live hypotheses. James himself did not quantify the degree of probability the proposition must be felt to possess in order to make it live. So one might be tempted, on his behalf, to assign dead hypotheses a subjective probability zero, and live hypotheses any degree of subjective probability greater than zero. 34 More plausibly, I think, we should treat the dead/live distinction as marking a threshold, somewhere along that scale, but at a point unspecified. Wherever it may lie, let us call that the threshold of credibility. Its numerical location is less significant than its being a boundary between degrees of credence, i.e., the degree at which a hypothesis becomes credible to some specific person, relative to that person. While James himself did not conceive or quantify subjective probabilities in the way that has become customary, he clearly had in mind something agent-relative, and he clearly recognized that not all propositions are treated by us as having the same degree of credibility. A hypothesis being live for a particular person might depend upon recognition of the objective evidence actually amassed in its favor. But it might also depend upon many other factors, including “fear and hope, prejudice and passion, imitation and partisanship, the circumpressure of our caste and set” (WTB, 18). To be momentous, on the other hand, is to be confronted with a unique or irreversible doxastic opportunity, and hence to be a case where the stakes for belief are particularly significant. James’ example in this regard was a choice about whether or not to venture on “Dr. Nansen’s polar expedition.” Whether or not one embarks upon that trek, it would be a momentous choice, not merely in the sense that it cannot be lightly undertaken (supplies must be purchased, dogsleds, I presume, maps, parkas, who-knows-what-else), but particularly because opportunities would be lost otherwise. To be momentous is to have a high opportunity cost. For example, choosing the variety of tea that I will brew for myself in the afternoon is not momentous in the specified sense, because I sacrifice nothing by choosing one way or the other: the 34. Cf. Ellen Kappy Suckiel, Heaven’s Champion: William James’s Philosophy of Religion (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 28, who interprets live as “largely an emotional matter,” rather than a matter of subjective probability. Of course, I agree that liveness involves a feeling. But that does not mean that it doesn’t also involve subjective probabilities.

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choice has little cost because its type can be made and re-made, and because its course of action has no grand significance for my short life. James described momentous choices as “irreversible.” I suggest that what he meant by that is simply that they cannot be re-done later to equivalent effect. Momentous means high stakes and no “do-overs,” as measured by the course of a particular, finite human life and its values. Importantly, and like live, that means that what is momentous is not merely subjectively determined. There are facts of the matter that make my opportunities for brewing tea greater in frequency than my opportunities for polar expeditions with Dr. Nansen. Opportunities for naval exploration of the North Pole are increasing, while opportunities for mushing there across the ice dwindle. But those sorts of objective constraints upon opportunities are also overlaid by systems of values and preferences that we each bring to them as particular individuals. A choice of teas for the practitioner of a tea ceremony, e.g., might be considerably more momentous than my own. Whether others have already been to the North Pole might make the trek considerably less momentous for someone interested in being first, but perhaps not so for people more interested in the journey itself. The objective and the subjective elements are hopelessly intertwined. Nevertheless, James clearly had both objective and subjective constraints in mind in his discussion of what counts as momentous. 35 To be a forced option, according to James, is for a doxastic dichotomy to be practically exclusive and exhaustive. Either believing the moon is made of cheese, or believing that it is formed from a part of the Earth, would not be a forced option insofar as it is possible to believe 35. Consider a possible objection to the explanation of momentousness just offered: “isn’t any decision momentous in this loose sense? Each decision, as a token, is unique and irreversible, even if others of the same type recur. Each is unique, at least insofar as it produces a network of downstream consequences not exactly duplicated by any other. So even if only by virtue of some trivial properties, e.g., the exact time at which the choice was made, or the color shirt the chooser was wearing, no two decisions will be exactly alike.” I do not want to reply that there is anything wrong with this rather tendentious interpretation of “momentous.” But I do think it would be incorrect to attribute to William James. This is why the interpretation I provided above emphasizes opportunities rather than uniqueness or irreversibility. It is important not to lose sight of the distinctively phenomenological orientation of James’ basic concept, in this case too. Opportunities, in a rich phenomenological sense, are not merely matrices of possibility, indexed temporally. They are worlds, not all of which are equally valuable to an individual life, and each of which is available or closed-off at a moment in a short human life. What distinguishes opportunities from mere possibilities is their value: opportunities can be lost. While it is true that my choice of teas in the afternoon is “unique” (in one sense and perhaps many others), as is my decision not to train for the polar expedition, it is not momentous in James’ sense.

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both or neither. Since at least Hegel it has become fashionable, in some circles, to deny the Law of the Excluded Middle. But James, in this context and others, explicitly denounced travel in such circles. 36 He believed that some of our choices are genuinely forced, in the sense that we must either believe, or not, without a third alternative or middle ground. For example, I might believe that the moon is made of rock, or not believe that the moon is made of rock. That would be an example of what James counted as a forced option. To be clear, a forced option must have the logical form, “belief in p, or not belief in p” (where the latter option subsumes agnosticism about p.) That form requires not merely an exclusive and exhaustive disjunction, but a disjunction of a doxastic attitude with its own negation. It does not range over the merely possible contents of beliefs, i.e., “belief in p, or belief in not-p,” despite James’ occasional slide into that looser mode of expression. That cannot be the case because James claimed that options of the forced kind are those “based on a complete logical disjunction,” but also that there is “no possibility of not choosing” (WTB, 15). In such cases the reason one must believe, or not, is logical but also practical. The choice is forced because of the Excluded Middle, but also because the consequences of believing (or not) are themselves ineluctable. So I submit that this is the real meaning behind James’s phrase: “Either accept this truth or go without it” (WTB, 15). Unlike a hypothesis being live or momentous, which clearly have subjective elements, an option being forced is determined simply by the combination of its logical form with the trivial fact that all actions (which James closely associated with beliefs) have practical consequences. 37 Admittedly, the text of the essay itself does not distinguish forced from momentous quite as crisply as I have on James’ behalf. James 36. James’ first reason “why I am not an hegelian. 1. We cannot eat our cake and have it; that is, the only real contradiction there can be between thoughts is where one is true, the other false. When this happens, one must go forever; nor is there any ‘higher synthesis’ in which both can wholly revive” (WTB, 216–17). 37. Consider another objection, this time to the explanation of forced I have provided: “aren’t all beliefs forced? Either you believe something or you don’t, and then you inevitably face the consequences, either of believing it or not.” I think that James’ answer to this objection ought to have been a qualified “yes,” with the caveat that every belief may fit into that form with its own negation. All cases of believing are forced in the relevant sense, so long as we understand forced options as between believing some proposition, or not believing that very same proposition. Nevertheless, not every doxastic option as posed for us is forced (because many of the ways that we pose these options do not fit the logically exclusive form.) One could say this much on James’ behalf without turning him into a Hegelian.

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himself was not clear about the difference between the logical form forcing the choice upon us, as opposed to its practical import. Consider that he seemed to think, erroneously, that there are some beliefs that lack all practical import, i.e., beliefs that would somehow be “purely theoretical,” and consequently that we would never be “forced” to choose. What difference indeed, does it make to most of us whether we have or have not a theory of the Röntgen rays, whether we believe or not in mind-stuff, or have a conviction about the causality of conscious states? It makes no difference. Such options are not forced on us. (WTB, 26)

But James was simply mistaken on this point. He is guilty here of conflating two quite different senses of “forced:” One is the particular sense of forced that I have identified above, and have attributed to him officially. The second is his own sense of momentous. All choices to believe are forced upon us in the first, quasi-formal sense, i.e., insofar as they could occur under the aegis of the Law of the Excluded Middle, and insofar as they have some practical consequence. Otherwise belief would not be ascribable. Therefore, beliefs in X-rays, mind-stuff, or the causality of consciousness are not sufficiently recherché to be excepted from the general principle that believing must make some difference for action, because there are at least some possible circumstances in which those beliefs would make some discriminable differences for some possible actors, even if not actual ones. (It might even make a difference whether we say a “man goes ‘round a squirrel,” if only for settling a possible dispute.) This modal imperfection in James’ account can be smoothed over by a more thorough-going adoption of one of his own basic tenets: that the “test “or “measure” of any belief is one’s willingness to act upon it. (See below.) If that is so, then all beliefs, and that means the so-called “theoretical” ones too, have practical consequences. They must have them because that is the only way they could ever be “tested” or “measured,” and hence be attributable. The decision about whether to venture out without one’s umbrella might be dodged, 38 but its consequences, how-

38. See WTB, 14.

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ever slight, will accrue. And the possible circumstances in which those consequences are discriminable cannot be dodged. 39 A further advantage of detangling the Permissibility Argument from the Necessity Argument is that we may now see how James’ three conditions for being a genuine option do not do equal work in his two quite distinct arguments. The reason for thinking that we must form beliefs beyond available evidence is derived from James’ claims that such beliefs are forced and momentous. If we must choose whether to believe or not, and the consequences of doing so will be weighty, then James has motivated his claim that we must believe, not only via the logic and psychology of the situation, but insofar as the utility of believing will outweigh its disutility. But to the question whether it is permis-

39. Cf. Wernham, who recognizes the ambiguity in James’ notion of forced, but denies that options can ever be forced in James’ sense, because one would either have more evidence in favor of p than against it (in which case one should believe p), or one would have more evidence against p than for it (in which case one should not believe p), or one would have equal amounts of evidence for and against p (in which case one should not believe p insofar as one should suspend judgment in p). Wernham, James’s Will-to-Believe Doctrine, 36–37. According to Wernham, that itself is the “intellectual ground” that should decide the question, in all cases. A similar criticism can be found in Richard Feldman, “Clifford’s Principle and James’s Options,” Social Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture, and Policy 20, no. 1 (2006): 19–33. Feldman argues that either belief in p is not “forced,” insofar as one can suspend judgment in p, or it is “forced,” insofar as one is not able to suspend judgment in p. But in either case the matter is decidable on intellectual grounds, i.e., on the basis of whether one has more evidence in favor of believing, or disbelieving, or suspending judgment. For similar reasoning, see also Brian Zamulinski, “A Re-evaluation of Clifford and His Critics,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 40, no. 3 (2002): 450–51.Whether things are as Wernham, Feldman, and Zamulinski say, or not, clearly these interpreters hold a substantively different understanding of what James meant by “forced.” As they read his notion no options are ever “forced.” But in that case, why would James have made it a condition on either permissible or necessary believing? I do not deny that Wernham, Feldman, or Zamulinski, draw the correct conclusion, given their interpretation. They have recognized the ambiguity in James’ notion of forced, but because they have not interpreted him sufficiently charitably on this point and because they have failed to recognize the important difference between the logic of the Necessity Argument and the logic of the Permissibility Argument, they have attributed to him a significantly weaker argument than one that he had at his disposal. As I have presented him above, James’ most basic claim was that beliefs may be decidable by our “passional nature” in cases of genuine option. But that does not imply that all cases of forced option are “undecidable on intellectual grounds.” James’ definition of a genuine option is that it is forced and momentous, but also that it is live. It was not part of his definition of forced that such choices be undecidable. For a belief to be forced means merely that the dichotomy formed with its negation is logically exclusive and exhaustive, and that it has practical consequences. It is instead because they are live that they are undecidable.

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sible to form such a belief in the first place, James’ doctrine of the live option is left to do all of the work. 40 Most importantly, can evidence ever shut off the power to a live hypothesis? The answer to this question, for any fair-minded and alert reader of James, must unequivocally be “yes.” His famous thesis that there are some cases of genuine option that cannot be decided upon intellectual grounds, and his famous treatment of religious beliefs as among them, ought not blind us to what counted as a genuine option in the first place, and particularly the requirement that it be live. James argued that in those cases we not only believe on the basis of something in addition to evidence, but also that it is permissible. That conclusion was meant to rest upon the claim that the available evidence in those cases could not settle the question. But that does not preclude the available evidence having already determined which were those cases in the first place. 41 If the preponderance of evidence had already clearly opposed a hypothesis, then that would not have been a live hypothesis. It would instead have been an already dead one. The question of believing it or not would already have been settled. For an option to be a genuinely live option the evidence the potential believer has for it, both for and against it, must already be felt. As a phenomenologist might put this point: believing is always already ac-

40. On this point I part ways with almost all other interpreters of James. Compare O’Connell: “His [James’] claim is the much more limited one that volitional intervention is legitimate where the option in question is ‘genuine’-—is living, forced and momentous. Three necessary conditions, but are they sufficient conditions as well? James’s expression is tantalizing: ‘whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds.’ The italics are James’s own; obviously, the qualification was important to him. And yet nothing in the discussion so far has gone to clarify exactly what he intends by it.” Robert J. O’Connell, William James on the Courage to Believe. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 11–12. Unlike O’Connell’s, on my account it is their being live that implies they are undecidable on intellectual grounds. 41. The importance of the interpretation of “genuine option” for one’s interpretation of James’ will-to-believe doctrine, here comes to the fore. Cf. Timothy L. S. Sprigge, James and Bradley: American Truth and British Reality (Chicago: Open Court, 1993), 20, who includes in addition to the three criteria specified by James, a fourth condition that the belief be “not intellectually decidable.” On the interpretation of live provided above James did not give this “fourth condition” because it is redundant: something’s not being intellectually decidable is already captured by the degree to which it is live. If it were intellectually decidable whether a hypothesis should be acted upon, then it would not have resulted from a live option in the first place, as that is precisely what makes them dead. Nevertheless, the temptation to add a (redundant) fourth criterion is strong in the literature: cf. Stephen T. Davis, “Wishful Thinking and ‘The Will to Believe’,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy 8, no. 4 (1972): 233. Even Gale seems to want to treat it separately. See Gale, The Divided Self , 100–102.

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complished by us. It is only relatively rarely that we explicitly engage in consciously deliberative practices and procedures, i.e., the genuine weighing up of evidence necessary in order to make a judgment. Rarer still are such judgments made in the absence of prejudicial beliefs. For better or worse, proximally and for the most part, we discover ourselves already in possession of the beliefs that we hold, for which we may or may not then form rationalizations post facto. This is just what it is like to be a believer with a “passional nature.” There are no live options for us that have recognizably conclusive evidence favoring one or the other of their two disjuncts, even were that evidence construed as probabilistic, because one of those disjuncts in that case would no longer have been a live hypothesis for us, but would instead have already been a belief.

HOW JAMES REALLY FELT ABOUT BELIEVING To make a final appraisal of the live hypothesis, on which James’ Permissibility Argument is based, we must leave the pages of “The Will to Believe” and return to his earlier writings. In particular we must look to his account of the relation between believing and willing in “The Sentiment of Rationality” (1879), and either “The Psychology of Belief” (1889) or The Principles of Psychology (1890). 42 I have already mentioned James’ frequent claim in “The Will to Believe” (1896) that the “measure” of belief is its action. 43 That same doctrine can be found in the earlier essay as the claim that the “test” of belief is the willingness to act. 44 Neither of these formulations commit James to an even stronger

42. The major part of Chapter XXI of The Principles of Psychology, i.e., 913–45 is reprinted with only minor changes from an earlier essay, viz. “The Psychology of Belief,” first appearing in Mind 14, no. 55 (1889): 321–52. References will be to William James. The Principles of Psychology, eds. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), hereafter abbreviated POP 1/ 2. I follow Koopman in treating James’ earlier work as the crucial context for his will-tobelieve doctrine. See Koopman, “The Will, the Will to Believe,” 496–98. But unlike Koopman, I analyze the sentiments to be found there as involving tacit appraisal of probabilities. 43. WTB, 14, 32, 80, 92. 44. “The Sentiment of Rationality” (WTB, 72, 76).

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thesis that believing simply is a willingness to act. 45 Nevertheless, James clearly thought that believing and willing, whether identical or not, had the same physiological origin, and served the same practical function. The paragraph that makes reference to the work of Adolf Horwicz in “The Sentiment of Rationality” displays the origin of the doctrine. And the paragraph at the end of the chapter on belief in The Principles of Psychology, the one adumbrating a following chapter on the will, draws the same conclusion for the dawning psychological science: The objects, in the case of will, are those whose existence depends on our thought, movements of our own body for example, or facts which such movements executed in future may make real. Objects of belief, on the contrary, are those which do not change according as we think regarding them. . . . . Will and Belief, in short, meaning a certain relation between objects and the Self, are two names for one and the same PSYCHOLOGICAL phenomenon. (POP 2, 947, 948)

The source of James’ notions of “will” and “belief” here must be understood in the physiological context of the reflex arc, as much as the traditions of German philosophy. 46 According to James, belief is most fundamentally a “sense of reality,” and “is a sort of feeling more allied to the emotions than anything else” (POP 2, 913). It functions as an intermediary link in a chain that begins with sensory stimulation and ends in bodily motion, something the early psychological literature was calling “consent.” Consent is recognized by all to be a manifestation of our active nature. It would naturally be described by such terms as ‘willingness’ or the ‘turning of our disposition.’ What characterizes both consent and

45. Nevertheless, there is good reason to attribute to James this stronger thesis too. Discussion of the point can be found in Richard M. Gale, “William James and the Willfulness of Belief,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59, no. 1 (1999): 71–91. In this paper Gale invokes Leibniz’s Law to commit James to the stronger thesis (i.e., the identity claim.) The main problem for that interpretation, despite a passage that Gale leans heavily upon and that I myself quote immediately below, wherein James calls “belief” and “will” “two names for one and the same phenomenon,” is that James then goes on to also claim (on the very same page, separated by only a sentence) that the distinction is “one of the most important distinctions in the world” (POP 2, 948). 46. In this regard see the remarkable essay “Reflex Action and Theism” (1881), especially the first couple of pages (WTB, 90–93) before James works himself up to the material about God. The observation that for James “thought occurs in the mid-section of the reflex arc,” is already made by Perry, Thought and Character, Vol. 2, 209.

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belief is the cessation of theoretic agitation, through the advent of an idea which is inwardly stable, and fills the mind solidly to the exclusion of contradictory ideas. When this is the case, motor effects are apt to follow. (POP 2, 913–14)

So unlike Hume, James did not think of believing as fundamentally indolent. Quite the contrary, it is what happens to us when our “theoretic agitation” ceases and our practical agitation begins. He conceived this “theoretic agitation” not merely under the metaphor of sensory stimuli, but as the literal result of sensory contact with the environment. When we are no longer provoked by the world, or when we lose patience for theorizing about it, i.e., when the work of reconciling its apparently contradictory phenomena and explaining its natural mechanisms leaves off, then our more active prodding and poking of it begins. On James’ account, believing and acting are what happen when practical curiosity awakens after theoretical curiosity is put to bed. What is important for the conclusion of my own argument is merely that in both domains, i.e., both the theoretical and practical, James explained the origin of believing in feeling, and particularly in a feeling that further evidence is not required, i.e., the feeling that one’s theories or predictions will be sufficiently accurate to accomplish one’s goals. 47 According to James, the moment when the theoretical becomes practical is marked by the sentiment of rationality. It is the feeling of “ease” when all phenomena are explained, the feeling of the “sufficiency of the present moment, of its absoluteness––this absence of all need to explain it, account for it, or justify it––is what I call the Sentiment of Rationality.” 48 James proceeds from this definition to explain traditional 47. Particularly good at emphasizing James’ early treatment of belief as feeling, as part of a more comprehensive reading, is Wesley Cooper, The Unity of William James’s Though (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002). On this point cf. Gale, who does not endorse James’ tight connection of believing with willingness to act. Concluding that James actually advanced two distinct doctrines, one on which a working hypothesis is “fully believed,” and a second on which it is merely acted upon (i.e., acted upon “as if” it were believed), Gale wonders why James, throughout his life, would have appealed to both when he could simply have had the stronger. See Gale, The Divided Self, 107. His proposed answer is the “principle of Minimal Ordinance,” i.e., James was in some rhetorical contexts (like “The Will to Believe” essay) using the weakest premises possible to support his desired conclusion. I am myself a fan of the Principle of Minimal Ordinance, as should be obvious from the things I have said above about the Permissibility Argument and its distinction from the Necessity Argument. But I am not inclined to agree that “The Will to Believe” essay deployed only minimal ordinance. 48. “The Sentiment of Rationality” (WTB, 58).

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epistemic virtues, like parsimony, universality, or appropriate categorization, as passions of the intellectual mind, i.e., as the cessation of the “theoretical agitations” described in the pages of The Principles of Psychology. Given this context I do not think it a stretch to suggest that the sentiment of rationality already incorporates the believer’s subjective assessments of probability. In the domain of theoretical life James argued that rationality means nothing more or less than unimpeded mental function. In the domain of practical life rationality means whatever will “banish uncertainty from the future.” 49 In other words, the sentiment of rationality, in the practical context, is an experience free from doubt; it was closely associated by James with whatever fosters our predictive power. This feeling was appealed to in his earlier works as a part of an argument about natural selection and the usefulness of overcoming novelty and surprise, i.e., foreseeing dangers or securing potential advantage, but I suggest here that it was also at the core of the development of his will-to-believe doctrine. 50 The close connection that James forged between believing and willing, not to mention feeling, was adopted by neither philosophers nor psychologists. Amongst the first philosophers to reject the idea, and its implications for James’ will-to-believe doctrine, was Bertrand Russell. If, in walking along a country road, I come to a fork where there is no signpost and no passer-by, I have, from the point of view of action, a ‘forced’ option. I must take one road or other if I am to have any chance of reaching my destination; and I may have no evidence whatever as to which is the right road. I then act on one or other of the two possible hypotheses, until I find someone of whom I can ask the way. But I do not believe either hypothesis. My action is either right or wrong, but my belief is neither, since I do not entertain either of the two possible beliefs. The pragmatist assumption that I believe the road I have chosen to be the right one is erroneous. To infer belief from action, in the crude way involved in the assumption that we must ‘either accept this truth or go without it,’ is to ignore 49. “The Sentiment of Rationality” (WTB, 67). 50. Explicitly invoking Darwin, James argued in a fashion familiar now from Evolutionary Psychology. See “The Sentiment of Rationality” (WTB, 68). A nice discussion of the relationship between James’ defense of indirect adaptation and his critique of neo-Lamarkian direct adaption, as applied to human psychology but also specifically for his account of believing, can be found in Matthew Crippen, “William James on Belief: Turning Darwinism Against Empiricistic Skepticism,” Transactions of the Charles Peirce Society 46, no. 3 (2010): 477–502.

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the plain fact that our actions are constantly based upon probabilities, and that, in all such cases, we neither accept a truth nor go without it, but entertain it as an hypothesis. 51

As I hope I have already made clear, I agree with the part of Russell’s criticism that treats as “plain fact” that our actions are based upon probabilities. 52 Russell goes on to analyze scientific research as an activity of dispassionate investigators, who merely confirm or disconfirm hypotheses treated as mere conjectures, mere forks in the road, rather than actively believing them or doubting them. Nowadays that sounds hopelessly naïve. But Russell’s criticism (of what he took to be James’ argument) was correct in at least two important respects: (1) our actions are based upon a tacit assessment of probabilities, and (2) our willingness to act cannot simply be equated with an assessment of those probabilities. I will conclude by arguing that neither of those points is definitive as a response to the Permissibility Argument. The Jamesian can simply take both of those points on board. 53 51. Bertrand Russell, Philosophical Essays [1910] (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966), 84. Cf. Miller, “James’s Doctrine of ‘The Right to Believe’,” 548, who also accuses James of confusing believing and willing. 52. In a now-somewhat-dated, but still fundamentally correct reading of James’ essay, Robert Beard, “‘The Will to Believe’ Revisited,” Ratio 8 (1966): 169–79, takes Russell to task for this criticism: “The second point that Russell urges by way of criticism is that James completely ignores the role of probability in arriving at beliefs. If we confine our attention solely to “The Will to Believe,” this charge may appear to have some merit. It is true that James does not explicitly mention probability here. But it is surprising that Russell fails to recognize its implicit presence, and that he fails also to take into account an article of James’s entitled “Faith and the Right to Believe” in which the notion of probability plays a prominent role. James’s account of probability may be found wanting, but he cannot be accused of completely ignoring it” (Beard, “‘The Will to Believe’ Revisited,” 175). While Beard was right to point to the greater emphasis on probability in ‘Faith and the Right to Believe,’ it had remained unpublished until 1911. So even if it were written around 1906, Russell can hardly be faulted for having left it out of account in his essay of 1910! 53. One reader of James who has already done this on his behalf is George I. Mavrodes. “Assume that evidence is correlated with truth in a probabilistic way, so that what we call the “strength” of the evidence in favor of a certain proposition is identical with the probability of that proposition’s being true, given that evidence. And assume too that a probability of this sort is associated with a frequency outcome––e.g., if one were to make a random selection of a large number of propositions, all of which had a truth probability of 0.6, then about 60 percent of them would turn out to be true. Now, if we construe James’ proposal along the lines of my less radical summary of it earlier, then he defends our right to believe propositions whose truth probability is only 0.5. We would have a 50 percent chance of getting such a belief right, and presumably (unless we had unusually bad luck) we would get about half of them right.” Mavrodes, “Intellectual Morality in Clifford and James,” 214. We do not need to follow Mavrodes all the way to his frequentist analysis of objective probabilities in order to benefit from the broad line of interpretation. Notice that my account, unlike Mavrodes’, attributes subjective probabilities (i.e., credences) that need not be so neatly indexed to truth.

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To see it as so we need merely claim, on James’ behalf, that the live hypotheses are those assessed as having a degree of subjective probability greater than a (numerically unspecified) threshold, what I called above the threshold of credibility. Clearly some people will locate that threshold quite a bit higher up the scale than others. And while we probably all wish that everyone around us would locate their threshold quite a bit higher than they in fact do, nevertheless, on such an account beliefs themselves need not be treated as scalar; they may instead correspond to full-blooded actions. They become permissible to the degree that the subjective probability on which they are based falls above the subjective threshold of credibility. But whether and the degree to which they are then believed, i.e., acted upon, is quite another matter. It may involve quite a few other volitional factors: values, prejudices, biases, risk tolerances. Believing and acting may in that case be treated as fundamentally discontinuous, whether or not they are treated as discrete from one another. Additionally, I think James suggested a second threshold in the scale of subjective probabilities, one above which believing is not only permissible, but also relatively doubt free. On the phenomenological analysis now being offered, it is the transit of this second boundary that guarantees the difference in feeling James wrote about in his earlier work, the “Sentiment of Rationality.” This second threshold marks the point at which we no longer have any practical doubts about what we are believing/doing. For most of us this second boundary lies quite a bit northerly of chance. And in most normal believers this second boundary is some (still unspecified) degree higher than the threshold of credibility. Let us call this second threshold, i.e., the one under which the subjective probability of the hypothesis is still (to some degree) credible, but over which any further evidence for it would become otiose, insofar as it is already fully believed, its threshold of reasonable dubitability. 54 To complete my interpretation now, a live hypothesis is one that lies within the more-or-less narrow band of subjective probabilities bounded by the two thresholds. That band is more-or-less narrow de54. As we have seen already above, the sort of doubt that concerned James in his early work was the kind that melted in the Sentiment of Rationality. It is particularly the sort that influences actions. I do not take my proposal of this standard for the upper threshold to be particularly controversial or innovative (except, perhaps, as an interpretation of James’ notion of live) insofar as this standard of evidence “beyond reasonable doubt” is familiar.

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pending upon how risk averse the particular individual entertaining the hypothesis happens to be. 55 It can be defined as a band of subjective probabilities bounded below by the threshold of credibility and above by the threshold of reasonable dubitability. For most of us it lies somewhere around or to the north of chance. What this reinforces is that for a hypothesis to be live, in James’ sense, is not for it to lack all evidence. Quite the contrary. If a hypothesis lacked all evidence, or even worse had evidence recognizably against it, then it would be counted by most normal believers as below the threshold of credibility, i.e., literally incredible, and practically unbelievable. However, neither can a live hypothesis have more than a preponderance of evidence in its favor, in which case it would be above the threshold of reasonable dubitability, and in that case would already be believed. For a hypothesis to be live simply means, on the interpretation now offered, that the assessment of its subjective probability is in that intermediary range between the two (numerically unspecified) thresholds. 56 This reading of James attributes to his theory a feeling, the presence of which is necessary and sufficient for the hypothesis being live for us, and hence of the permissibility of believing it without further evidence, i.e., without any more evidence beyond what already established it as lying between the two thresholds in the first place. This band of believability is one that James identified, in at least one place, with the “feeling of irrationality,” 57 but that he elsewhere called “theoretic agitation.” He claimed, we remember, that it characterizes those hypotheses that “scintillate with credibility.” However described, it is a feeling that should be sharply contrasted with the “feeling of rationality,” i.e., the feeling of ease that characterizes believing. And here we must be clear 55. I am also not the first to suggest that we ought to understand an epistemic component of James’ theory of belief as providing constraints for his will-to-believe doctrine. Cf. Cooper, The Unity of William James’s Thought, especially 204–21. Another analysis, close to my own on this particular point, is Aikin, “Evidentialism and James’ Argument from Friendship,” 176. On the other hand, compare someone like Nathanson, who writes that, “James’s account supports the adoption of beliefs on passional grounds that are, on evidential grounds, thought to be false.” Nathanson, The Ideal of Rationality, 73. James’ account supports no such thing. 56. Cf. POP 2, 914–15, where James claims that the contrary of belief is doubt rather than disbelief (because disbelief in p is simply belief in non-p.) What I am suggesting on James’ behalf is that the band of live hypotheses be contrasted not only with the band of dead ones below the threshold of credibility, but also with the band of equally dead, subjectively certain hypotheses above the threshold of reasonable dubitability. 57. “The Sentiment of Rationality” (WTB, 57).

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that the feeling of rationality characterizes both the beliefs above the threshold of reasonable dubitability and the disbeliefs below the threshold of credibility. Too much evidence squelches the feeling just as surely as too little does, i.e., either by pushing the live hypothesis up into belief beyond reasonable doubt, or by pushing it down below the threshold of credibility, where its charge is too low to any longer be countenanced.

CONCLUSIONS FROM JAMES James argued that the Evidentialist principle overreaches. He thought that there is a particular class of beliefs for which the strong, second clause of that principle, viz. that we ought only to believe on the basis of evidence, does not in fact hold. The beliefs in question were not exclusively religious, and did not merely include future ventures for which believing might make the uncertain success more likely. In those sorts of more famous cases James argued that we must believe for the sake of our own successes (but that is an argument that I have not discussed here). More fundamentally, I have argued, he also claimed that we may believe in such cases, if they are cases that also involve live option. I have attempted to update James’ account of live options by taking into consideration the scalar nature of subjective probabilities. Doing so introduced a few minor complications. In particular we must distinguish the willingness to act upon p, from our subjective “assessment” that p is to some degree likely. 58 James himself did not fully explore this distinction. Nevertheless, a Jamesian must admit this Russellian difference, i.e., between belief and our subjective assessment of that belief’s chance of success, even if that should lead somewhat afield of James’ pragmatic insistence on the unity of believing and willing. Beliefs cannot be assimilated with assessments of subjective probability, even on James’ own account, and even if those beliefs themselves (and not merely the live hypotheses) were to come in degrees. This is not merely because we also act on the basis of desires, values, or preferences. It is 58. I am not the first to observe this distinction. A similar one has been proposed and defended (in more rigorous detail) by L. Jonathan Cohen, An Essay on Belief and Acceptance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Cohen treats belief as a disposition to feel, if not necessarily act, whereas I am interpreting James as treating feeling as a marker of belief and action, under the assessment of probability.

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because, on the interpretation of live offered above, the potential believer’s assessment of how likely an outcome will be is already baked into whether it falls above or below the thresholds of credibility and reasonable dubitability, i.e., it is already made by the time we are having the sparkly feeling and choosing whether to believe, come what may. That would make James an Even More Modest Doxastic Sentimentalist, as identified at the end of chapter 1. James was no defender of Evidentialism. He was a champion of epistemic courage. But he was also no fool. He was not a champion of blind courage in all circumstances. And even for those special circumstances for which he made himself willful belief’s stoutest champion, i.e., in cases of genuine option, their parameters were meant to have already been set by feelings for the available evidence. It may or may not be a particularly Jamesian thing to say here in conclusion: but there is a deep rationality in his unwillingness to endorse actions on anything less than credible feelings for their chance of success. Imagine the captain of a ship who, harried by pursuers, must decide whether to pilot his vessel through some treacherous rocks. In that circumstance the captain might refuse an opportunity to hear the declaration of his precise odds of success, 59 e.g., if he already had a good idea that the odds are generally long, or if he were busy attending to matters of piloting. What wouldn’t be permissible is for him to refuse such knowledge merely because knowing the precise odds might discourage him, even if learning the odds would in fact practically diminish his chances of success. That would be, I think, the sort of willful ignorance of which James is sometimes (but erroneously) accused. I have been careful to avoid attributing James that more dubious doctrine. In this paper I take myself to have shown that a better interpretation is that the Permissibility Argument does not commit James to such a thing, despite his stronger statements about believing’s necessity. In particular, a person may not rationally refuse knowledge on mere grounds that it would be discouraging, if the case does not already involve live option. The captain of such a ship may have many different reasons for refusing to hear his odds, but only if he already has a feeling

59. For the sake of the example let us say that they were exactly 3,720 to 1.

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for what they are. He may believe willfully, but only within a range of probabilities already bounded by his own assessment of the evidence.

6 ATTENTION AND FEELING NOTICED Phenomenology and Psychology

INTRODUCTION

The main thesis of this book has been that, despite notable absence from the tellings of modern epistemology, doxastic sentimentalism was ever-present. In focusing on the cases of Hume and Descartes, Husserl and James, I do not take myself to have exhaustively examined all available evidence. As noted in the Introduction, a more complete survey of the tradition’s most influential figures would of necessity include Bertrand Russell, at least, but perhaps many other culprits besides. Nevertheless, I hope that the four philosophers treated in the preceding pages, each of whom possessed an otherwise quite distinct theory of knowledge, will have sufficed for establishing my point. Let us say for a moment, here at the beginning of chapter 6, that my thesis were true. If so, it would raise an interesting explanatory puzzle in its own right. If feelings of believing have been central for such prominent philosophers, then why haven’t they been more celebrated in our own history of epistemology? Why are they neglected? While I cannot provide a complete answer to this question, given its rich sociohistorical context, the present chapter aims to take us toward explanation of the invisibility of feelings of believing, by appeal to the nature of consciousness itself. In this chapter I will argue that doxastic sentiments can go unnoticed, i.e., we are not always focally attentive to everything 221

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that we feel. 1 I will defend the apparently (but only apparently) contradictory notion of an unfelt feeling. And I will offer this defense to suggest an explanation of why doxastic sentimentalism (and not just sentiment) has not been more prominent in our historical consciousness: theorizing about feeling has not been treated as the center of epistemology because doxastic sentiments themselves often lie in the periphery. My claims in this chapter are not particularly novel. They are based on an observation made long ago by Husserl, who wrote: “Man lebt in der Evidenz, reflektiert aber nicht über Evidenz.” 2 In chapter 4 I was at pains to explain how I thought Husserlian Evidenz should be interpreted. In this chapter I take up Husserl’s challenge to do a little bit better by way of the reflektiern über, but I also try to explain why such reflection is typically absent. In order to make this further case I will need to venture beyond the strictly interpretive theses of the previous chapters, and into the more decontextualized domain of the philosophy of mind itself. I will begin with a few remarks on a phenomenon discussed by Husserl, i.e., the phenomenology of absorption. I will then trace the roots of that phenomenon back into our contemporary psychology of attention. Recent work on attention and inattentional blindness proves edifying in its own right, but it is especially useful for burnishing the significance of a distinction sometimes invoked in the philosophy of mind, viz. the distinction of consciousness’ “center” from its “periphery.” I will then defend that distinction from possible misinterpretations. Combining Husserlian phenomenology with the empirical psychology of attention reveals the role feelings play as consciously experienced (i.e., felt) in the periphery of consciousness, even while they remain outside attention (i.e., unfelt.). My conclusion will be to draw the analogy for doxastic sentiments. 1. In this chapter and the next ‘attending’ and ‘noticing’ are used synonymously. This is an important break from Brentano, who distinguished noticing [bemerken], i.e., the basic method of his descriptive psychology, from attending [aufmerken.] See Kevin Mulligan and Barry Smith, “Franz Brentano on the Ontology of Mind,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 45, no. 4 (1985): 631. I don’t believe Brentano’s distinction is necessary for my arguments below. 2. “One lives in the self-evident, but does not reflect upon the self-evident.” Edmund Husserl, Husserliana. Gesammelte Werke, Bd. XXIV: Einleitung in die Logik und Erkenntnistheorie: Vorlesungen 1906/07, Hrsg. Ullrich Melle (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985), 164. Translated as Edmund Husserl, Collected Works, Vol. 13: Introduction to Logic and Theory of Knowledge: Lectures 1906/1907, trans. Claire Ortiz Hill (Dordrecht and London: Springer, 2008), 162. Hereafter abbreviated (HUA XXIV; CW 13).

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ABSORPTION AND OBLIVIOUSNESS Though Husserl himself did not thematize it to the degree one might have hoped, he frequently discussed a phenomenon of attention that I will henceforth call absorption. 3 An early, if somewhat circumlocutory, account of this phenomenon can be found in his Logical Investigations (1900, 01): Obviously we are dealing here with attention, which despite all efforts has not yet been understood sufficiently clearly. Surely nothing has obstructed true knowledge here so much as misunderstanding the fact that attention is a marking function, which belongs to acts in the previously defined sense of intentional experiences, and which cannot be understood descriptively so long as “experience,” in the sense of the mere existence of a content in consciousness, is confused for having an intentional object. There must be acts, before we can “live” in them or be fully “absorbed” [Vollzuge “aufgehen”] in them. And when we are absorbed in them (in ways that must be further specified) we are noticing the objects of those acts. We are turning to them primarily or secondarily. It is by them that we are thematically preoccupied. 4

What does it mean to “go fully in,” or be absorbed in an act of consciousness?, i.e., be “thematically preoccupied” by its object? This is nothing more nor less than the familiar phenomenon of being “wrapped up” in everyday life. Consider a moment when you have been “sucked in” by a piece of fiction, or when you were “immersed” in your work. In those circumstances you momentarily “lived” in that fictional world, or in the task at hand. These are all metaphors, of course, a mobile army of them. But philosophers may not shy away from phenomena first grasped only metaphorically, let alone dismiss them out of hand. We must try to analyze and explain (if not “unpack”) these metaphors, especially when they describe phenomena that the sciences themselves have only begun to touch. 3. ‘Absorption’ is a term that has also been used by Hubert Dreyfus, as a synonym for his technical notion of skilled-coping. For criticism and further discussion see Simon Høffding, “What is Skilled Coping?: Experts on Expertise,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 21, no. 9–10 (2014): 49–73. I am deeply indebted to Dreyfus and Dreyfusians, but I do not use ‘aborption’ to mean either unthinking or expert performances. 4. Logical Investigations V, §19 (HUA XIX/1, 423; LI II, 584–85).

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The most widely discussed phenomenological analyses of absorption, thusfar, have been related to expertise and the acquisition of skills. 5 The expert practitioner, someone “in the zone” when skillfully performing expert activity, mostly does so as a result of specialized training. An important part of this training, perhaps as important as any sculpting of the physical or bodily activity, is learning not to over-think what one is doing. The performance of skill, whether bodily or lessbodily, frequently requires absorption, and the theory of skill development has been an important topic of phenomenological investigation. However, as Husserl identified the primary phenomenon (and as I will discuss it below), absorption is not merely the result of skillful practice. It is instead a broader possibility for any conscious or attentive activity, i.e., a feature of consciousness or attention as experienced in everyday (i.e., frequently non-expert, non-skilled) life. After all, one need not be expert to be absorbed in reading a novel, or in watching a movie. One might be quite absorbed, perhaps dangerously so, in nondriving activities while operating a motor vehicle. But that kind of distraction requires neither expertise in driving, nor expertise in the nondriving distraction. So absorption, at least as Husserl identified it above, and unless we mean to be willfully obtuse or innovative about the meaning of “expert,” is not restricted to experts. It is instead a broader phenomenon of consciousness or attention itself. My major claim here will be that for absorption to be adequately accounted for (a prerequisite for its eventual scientific study), a distinction is necessary between the focal center of consciousness and the periphery of consciousness. Because what we attend to is frequently conceived as the center of consciousness, that difference might also be captured, equally well I propose, by a distinction of the center of attention from the periphery of attention. 6 What we fail to attend to (but are nevertheless still in some qualitatively different way aware of) is what we find in the margins of consciousness or attention. For my purposes

5. For example, see any of the essays now collected as Hubert Dreyfus, Skillful Coping: Essays on the Phenomenology of Everyday Perception and Action, ed. Mark A. Wrathall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 6. N.b., I mean to say that it is the CENTER vs. PERIPHERY distinction that is necessary here, which can be accomplished either in a theory of consciousness (in which case what we are distinguishing is the center of consciousness from the periphery of consciousness) or in a theory of attention (in which case what we are distinguishing is the center of attention from the periphery of attention).

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here “margins” will be just as good as saying “periphery,” but I will insist that one or the other of them be said. The CENTER vs. PERIPHERY distinction is also a metaphor, of course. But it is a special kind of metaphor. It is a spatial metaphor used to describe the subjective experience of consciousness or attention. Meant metaphorically, typically, it is not a literal space. Nevertheless, the “space” at the center of attention is intimately related to the central 1.5–2° of our visual field, i.e., associated with that very important literal space on which our eyes’ foveate. If you will permit me one small bit of naturalism at this point: the commonness of the CENTER vs. PERIPHERY distinction, as the traditional metaphor for describing phenomena of consciousness/ attention, is so because of the anatomical structure of our eyeballs. It is not a mere metaphor; it is one of the metaphors that we live by. 7 The orientational center and periphery are not completely ubiquitous in contemporary discussions of consciousness or attention. They are nevertheless quite traditional concepts. 8 The distinction has been discussed in a variety of different contexts, but perhaps never more colorfully than by John Searle. Within the field of consciousness, we need to distinguish between those things that are at the center of our attention and those that are at the periphery. We are conscious of a very large number of things that we are not attending to or focusing our attention upon. For example, up to this moment I have been focusing my attention on the philosophical problem of describing consciousness, and I have not been paying any attention to the feeling of the chair against my back, the tightness of my shoes, or the slight headache I have from drinking too much wine last night. Nonetheless, all of these phenomena are part of my conscious awareness. In colloquial speech, we often talk of such features of our conscious life as being unconscious, but it is a mistake to say that, for example, I am unconscious of the 7. It is an “orientational metaphor.” See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), especially 14–21. 8. In psychology the distinction can be traced back to Wilhelm Wundt, which is to say, all the way back. See Wilhelm Wundt, Outlines of Psychology [1897], trans. Charles Hubbard Judd (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1902), 228–29. It is the basis of the so-called “spotlight theory” of attention, often attributed to William James. See POP 1, 249 for the FRINGE, and POP 1, 380–433 for James’ actual theory of attention. An usually good analysis of James in this context can be found in David Galin, “The Structure of Subjective Experience: Sharpen the Concepts and Terminology,” in Toward a Science of Consciousness: The First Tucson Discussions and Debates, eds. Stuart R. Hameroff, Alfred W. Kaszniak, and Alwyn C. Scott (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), 121–40.

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feeling of my shirt against my skin in the sense in which I am unconscious of the growth of my toenails. In short, we need to distinguish the conscious/unconscious distinction from the center of attention/ periphery distinction. 9

From this passage, with its lovely list of examples, Searle proceeds in characteristic style, to a discussion of driving. His subsequent driving story relates the unsettling experience of suddenly discovering that one has just driven oneself a considerable distance down a highway without having paid much “attention” to the road. It is an experience that makes clear the necessity of theorizing different levels of attention, and makes salient our cognitive ability to smoothly shift from lower to higher levels, and back down again, as attention is intermittently required for parts of the extended cognitive task, i.e., as the demands of that task are periodically tightened and relaxed. All of that can happen below the level of focal consciousness (i.e., outside the center of consciousness or attention.) Hopefully, it was the traffic conditions that elicited Searle’s (exogenous) attention at crucial moments, e.g., whenever a car or truck suddenly braked or swerved ahead of him, and then relaxed again into long stretches of monotony. To be clear, absorption as thus far described does not merely involve shifting consciousness or attention from one focal object to another. That shift, alone, merely comprises the phenomenon of change in attention, or what psychologists now frequently refer to as the capture of attention. That is also a very real thing, of course, but it is important to distinguish it from what I mean to be talking about here. A mere change in what one is conscious of (or attending to) does not necessarily implicate absorption, because the subject may simply be changing one object of consciousness/attention for another, and perhaps the new object is something he or she was previously entirely unconscious of and/or inattentive to. The phenomenon of absorption, as I mean to describe it, additionally requires that there be an experience not only of the center, but also of the periphery of one’s attention or consciousness. Somewhat ironically, it is that merely peripheral, yet still conscious content, i.e., the experience of something having gone unnoticed even though it is still

9. John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), 137–38. Note that Searle presumes a traditional definition for attention here, i.e., center of consciousness. See my discussion below.

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consciously experienced, that defines absorption. Salience, in this phenomenological sense, always requires obliviousness. Once understood, this insight into the nature of consciousness/attention strikes some of us as trivially true, and others of us as absurd and paradoxical. How could something be a content of consciousness or attention if that thing went completely unnoticed? So any phenomenologist must be scrupulously clear about what he or she means to hang upon the point: we are often conscious of things that are not at the center of our consciousness or attention. Nevertheless, those non-focal elements remain contents of our consciousness/attention, i.e., they are still seen, or heard, or felt, etc., albeit in a way that is qualitatively different from the way the objects of focal attention or consciousness are experienced. The contents of the periphery of consciousness/attention are not the same as what one has no consciousness of, or paid no attention to, i.e., to those things completely outside of consciousness/ attention. Searle already made this important point above, when he drew his distinction between the feeling of the shirt he was wearing, as opposed to the growth of his toenails. The former is typically unnoticed by Searle (i.e., it is instead a part of what Searle calls “the background” and what I am here calling the periphery of consciousness/attention.) The latter, one would presume, is not typically the content of Searle’s conscious or attentive experience at all. To further underscore the distinction I will call the contents of consciousness or attention that go unattended/unnoticed (but which remain in the periphery of consciousness or attention) those things to which we are oblivious. Things to which we are oblivious are nevertheless still things we are conscious of/attending to, even though they are not the focal objects at the center of that consciousness/attention. The things we are completely unconscious of /inattentive to, simply by ter-

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minological stipulation now, are things to which we are not even oblivious. 10 So much for the rudiments of the concept. The phenomenological depiction of the phenomenon I have just given is, of course, wholly consistent with the underlying psychology, as best we know it today. Psychologists traditionally distinguish two types of attention: endogenous, or “top-down” attention, and exogenous, or “bottom-up” attention. 11 Roughly, the former is task-dependent and oriented toward objects or properties of objects; it is neurologically affiliated with (though quite distinct from) eye gaze. 12 The latter is transient and involuntarily activated, a response to significant features in the perceptual environment. The former is commonly conceived as volitional; the latter as

10. An important first step is noticing that the phenomenon of absorption is not equivalent to a host of other phenomena of attention. For example, it is not equivalent to The Cocktail Party Effect, i.e., the phenomenon of having one’s attention captured from across a noisy room (for example a cocktail party) by mention of one’s name. That can happen despite inattention to (and perhaps even the inability to discriminate) other elements of an eavesdropped conversation. That is to say, absorption is a phenomenon of attention, but it is not attention itself, nor any of the other myriad phenomena of attention. To get a bit closer to absorption, consider instead what might be called The Domestic Partner Effect. After one’s name has been called multiple times by one’s domestic partner (at a cocktail party or in a variety of other settings), the partner might eventually demand to know, “Didn’t you hear me calling you?” And frequently it happens that one has “heard” (retrospectively it may even be possible to identify the precise number of times one’s name has been called) if only peripherally. That is to say: being oblivious to something has its own phenomenological character. It is not equivalent to being simply unconscious of something. And while obliviousness may or may not come in a variety of degrees, clearly there are degrees of sincerity and bad faith with respect to it. One may pretend, and not merely to one’s domestic partner but also to oneself, to have been oblivious when one was actually focally attentive and/or conscious. Undoubtedly, we will eventually discover the conditions for this sincerity or bad faith in the degree to which the attention/consciousness was volitional. 11. There remains some dispute (of course) about the amount (and stage) of information processing required for exogenous attention, i.e., just how “bottom-up” it really is. See Jan Theeuwes, “Top-down and Bottom-up Control of Visual Selection,” Acta Psychologica 135, no. 20 (2010): 77–99. 12. Shifting attention to objects that are not being looked at is commonly called covert orienting. Overt orienting is attending to the objects that one has trained one’s eyes upon, or looked at reflexively. A classic paper here is Michael I. Posner, “Orienting of Attention,” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 32, no. 1 (1980): 3–25.

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non-volitional. 13 Searle’s driving example clearly requires both types of attention. Remaining focused on one’s work involves at least the former type, typically, but I would suggest also the latter. Being startled by an unexpected noise involves the latter, typically. Endogenous attention is also sometimes called “sustained attention,” and exogenous attention is also sometimes called “transient attention,” because of the very different amounts of time each takes to activate (or be activated, respectively) and because of the different amounts of time each is usefully employed. These timings have been precisely measured. As reported by Carrasco: “It takes ~300 ms for observers to deploy endogenous attention, and they can sustain it voluntarily for as long as is needed to perform a task; the involuntary deployment of attention is transient: it rises and decays quickly, peaking at about 100–120 ms.” 14 Some people, not to mention some objects, sustain an endogenous attention quite a bit longer than others. The effort it takes to do so has also been rigorously studied. 15 The deeper point that Carrasco means to be making is that there seem to be two quite different attentional systems employed in human cognition: one that enhances the performance of a wide variety of tasks, and another that quickly redirects us to important or unexpected stimuli. Psychologists believe that the exogenous attentional system is phylogenetically older, having evolved in organisms simpler than ourselves in order to prompt basic behavioral necessities. 16 It is still early days for their research, but neuroscientists have begun to map out what seem to be two quite different neural pathways 13. If endogenous and exogenous attention were strictly defined, i.e., as internally generated vs. externally generated, then problems would emerge in the common practice of treating the former as volitional and the latter as non-volitional. Not everything generated internally is voluntary, and what is environmentally significant depends, not-insignificantly, upon an organism’s motivations. What captures attention “externally” and “involuntarily” does so in part because of goals and activities, not all of which are themselves entirely involuntary (or external). Many papers reporting on what the psychologists now call the “cueing” of attention are relevant here. Various theories have managed these not quite perfectly aligned concepts in various ways. Nevertheless, the treatment of endogenous attention as voluntary (if not exclusively voluntary) and exogenous attention as involuntary (if not exclusively involuntary) is standard now in the literature. Because further differentiation is not necessary for my own argument below, I simply follow the usage of the psychologists here. 14. This is a report of a report. Carrasco cites a number of empirical studies. See Marisa Carrasco, “Spatial Covert Attention: Perceptual Modulation,” in The Oxford Handbook of Attention, eds. Anna C. Nobre and Sabine Kastner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 185. Hereafter Carrasco, 2014. 15. See Effortless Attention: A New Perspective in the Cognitive Science of Attention and Action, ed. Brian Bruya (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010). 16. Carrasco, “Spatial Covert Attention,” 186.

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for these two attentional systems, more commonly referring to them as “top-down attention” and “bottom-up” attention. 17 I will henceforth follow a standard practice in the psychological literature, equating the distinction TOP-DOWN vs. BOTTOM-UP with ENDOGENOUS vs. EXOGENOUS. Now let’s put the rudimentary phenomenology together with the rudimentary psychology. Absorption, as I described it, is particularly a phenomenon of endogenous attention. It may also be a part of exogenous attention, so long as the contents of peripheral consciousness or attention (i.e., contents toward which someone is oblivious) are admitted. However, that is somewhat more questionable, and difficult to know introspectively, given the quickness of the latter system. Phenomenological evidence for absorption in endogenous attention, however, is manifest. For example, one can be absorbed in a task like driving, while still being peripherally aware of a song playing on the car radio. Contrariwise, one can be absorbed in a song on the car radio, and only peripherally aware of one’s driving. One’s attention may then be captured exogenously by events on the roadway (or in the music.) But whether one can remain absorbed at the moment exogenous attention is captured is a bit more questionable. More clearly, one can be absorbed in a task requiring a great deal of endogenous attention, a task like writing a book, for example, while still being oblivious to a dog barking in the yard. Indeed, preventing an exciting stimulus from fully capturing attention is often experienced as a struggle. (And this is not just my individual report. Discussion and measurement of the effort necessary for maintaining attention is a staple of the psychological literature.) This consciously perceived struggle does not require the possibility of preventing capture by exogenous attention. Nevertheless, I would humbly suggest, it does require some stimuli that are peripheral contents of an endogenous consciousness/attention. Like the game of spotting unusual license plates, once one has begun to attend (endogenously, I may now add) to absorption one begins to find it everywhere. As in that game, the ubiquity of the newly discovered phenomenon may lead one to suspect some sort of focusing bias in one’s perceptions. If we did not possess good evidence for judging the frequency of absorption (like the frequency of the license plates in the 17. A nice discussion of some of this work can be found in Jesse Prinz, The Conscious Brain: How Attention Engenders Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 133–40. Hereafter Prinz, 2012.

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game) to be independent of its observation, then we might come to doubt our own newly opened eyes. Nevertheless, some things really are ubiquitous, and they really have been hiding from us in plain sight. 18 One of the principal tasks of phenomenology, as I conceive it, is opening our eyes to these sorts of things “hiding in plain sight” due to the unusual nature of consciousness/attention itself. Absorption is somewhat unique, in being both one of the hidden things, but also one of the hiding mechanisms.

LIMITED METAPHYSICAL NEUTRALITY No claim can be completely metaphysically neutral, including a phenomenological claim. Acknowledging this, I make a break with one of the most famous doctrines of Husserl, i.e., his doctrine that phenomenological claims have a privileged epistemic status, insofar as they are “presuppositionless [voraussetzungslos]. ” 19 But pace Husserl, everything that we think or say, or feel, contains some metaphysical presupposition or another, even if those presuppositions remain implicit or otherwise hidden from us. Absorption itself suggests that not all the contents of experience are immediately given, at least not given to attentive consciousness. An important suspicion, at an earlier stage of this book, was of a Cartesian criterion for truth; we might have similar worries about Husserl’s doctrine of the Voraussetzungslosigkeit. Rejection of presuppositionlessness would be tantamount to rejecting a similar idea that phenomenological claims can have an indefeasible epistemic status. I have not proved that they do not, of course. I am merely registering redoubled skepticism: pace Husserl, phenomenological claims, in virtue 18. Cf. a quite different sort of “hiding in plain sight,” wherein the visual system clearly contains information about a perceptual object, because some subject is foveating on that object at close distance, in adequate light, etc., but the object nevertheless remains completely outside of the subject’s consciousness/attention. This is the sort of “hiddenness” that Dennett discusses in relation to his game “hide the thimble.” See Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1999), 333–38. It should not be confused with obliviousness, which is peripherally experienced consciousness/attention. 19. Husserl stakes this claim for transcendental phenomenology in a variety of places, but one clear expression is Ideas I, §63 (HUA III/1, 136; CW 2, 148). For discussion of the various ways it has been interpreted see Teresa Reed-Downing, “Husserl’s Presuppositionless Philosophy,” Research in Phenomenology 20 (1990): 136–51. I have already registered my skepticism of it elsewhere, in a somewhat different context. See Ryan Hickerson, “Neglecting the Question of Being: Heidegger’s Argument Against Husserl,” Inquiry 52, no. 6 (2009): 586–91.

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of their special content, cannot lay greater claim to knowledge than other sorts of claims. Nevertheless, if one is careful one may try to maintain a studious, limited metaphysical neutrality with respect to some (or some small number of) explicitly articulated metaphysical presuppositions. The methodological practice of identifying a potential metaphysical posit and bending over backwards to avoid that one, is something philosophers (and not merely Husserlians) attempt all the time. It is a practice we perform more or less successfully, on a case-by-case basis, through careful choice of language. When that practice is reflected upon and elevated to a methodological technique, and in particular when that technique is applied to phenomenological claims specifically, then it comes to resemble yet another characteristic doctrine of Husserlian phenomenology. 20 To be clear, and here again pace Husserl, the kind of limited metaphysical neutrality that I favor, i.e., a kind on which one is at pains to avoid some particular metaphysical presupposition for some particular phenomenological claim, does not require the carte blanche epistemic privilege for all phenomenological claims. Indeed, it does not require any epistemic privilege for any of them. Let’s turn our attention for a moment to this technique, as attempted in my descriptions of absorption above, and then return to the business of assessing the CENTER vs. PERIPHERY distinction. What is the relationship between consciousness and attention? To be clear, and hopefully this will become clearer below, my claims above did not venture an answer to that particular metaphysical question. My claims above, strictly read, have only been that absorption is a phenomenon of consciousness, or attention, or both, depending upon how the relation between them is ultimately conceived. The careful reader will have noticed that I tortured my language, in not a few places, in order to remain scrupulously neutral with respect to which of the two I meant 20. I am referring now to the famed epoché, particularly the phenomenological reduction, as opposed to the eidetic or transcendental reductions. For discussion, see Steven Crowell, “Heidegger and Husserl: The Matter and Method of Philosophy” [2005], reprinted in Steven Crowell, Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), particularly 72–77. For a more detailed discussion of metaphysical neutrality in the more strictly Husserlian sense, i.e., a sense stronger than the one that I have appealed to here, see Dan Zahavi, “Metaphysical Neutrality in Logical Investigations,” in One Hundred Years of Phenomenology: Husserl’s Logical Investigations Revisited, eds. Dan Zahavi and Frederik Stjernfelt (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2002), 93–108.

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to be discussing, i.e., I attempted to remain scrupulously neutral with respect to their ultimate metaphysical relation. Perhaps all attention requires conscious. 21 Perhaps all consciousness requires attention. 22 Perhaps both. 23 Perhaps neither. 24 I honestly don’t know yet. But time will eventually tell someone. My claim above was merely meant to be that it is no accident that attempts to theorize either consciousness or attention in a phenomenologically realistic manner (i.e., one including absorption) must invoke the traditional CENTER vs. PERIPHERY distinction. 25 That is because a CENTER vs. PERIPHERY is ABSORPTION’s conceptual requirement. So now in the spirit (if not to the letter) of Husserlian phenomenology, I declare that I do not take myself to have established that either absorption or obliviousness are real, i.e., that either has an ontological status independent of subjective experience. This is one of the advantages of calling them “phenomena” in the first place. Nevertheless, even if absorption and obliviousness proved part of a grand illusion, i.e., 21. On the definition of ‘attention’ as the center of consciousness, what I also call “the traditional definition,” this would be the case. See, for example, the passage from Searle quoted above. Or see Carolyn Dicey Jennings, “Consciousness Without Attention,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1, no. 2 (2015): 276–95. 22. Michael A. Cohen, Patrick Cavanagh, Marvin M. Chun, and Ken Nakayama, “The Attentional Requirements of Consciousness,” Trends in Cognitive Science 16, no. 8 (2012): 411–17, argue that attention is necessary but insufficient for consciousness. Another important study reaching this same conclusion is Liam J. Norman, Charles A. Heywood, and Robert W. Kentridge, “Object-Based Attention Without Awareness,” Psychological Science 25, no. 6 (2013): 836–43. See also Christopher Mole, “Attention to Unseen Objects,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 21, no. 11–12 (2014): 41–56. Andreas Keller, “Attention and Olfactory Consciousness,” Frontiers in Psychology 2, no. 380 (2011): 1–13, makes this case even for our consciousness of smells. 23. Prinz, 2012, 80–90, argues that attention is both necessary and sufficient for consciousness. See also Rik Hine, “Paying Attention to Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 22, no. 5–6 (2015): 52–69. 24. Compelling argument regarding a variety of attentive processes that do not rise to the level of consciousness is made by Carlos Montemayor and Harry Haroutioun Haladjian, Consciousness, Attention, and Conscious Attention (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2015). Hereafter Montemayor and Haladjian (2015). They canvass: feature-based (28–32), spatial (32–36), object-based (36–43), bottom-up vs. top-down (43–52), and effortless vs. effortful (52–54). Nevertheless, various kinds of conscious attention are their subject in chapter 4 (141–76.) Their thesis of “strong dissociation,” i.e., that consciousness cannot be identical to attention, made on the basis of “basic considerations about the evolution of different types of attention” (177), is highly plausible, but their claim that this is so regardless of how ‘consciousness’ or ‘attention’ are defined is less plausible. 25. The notion of the periphery of consciousness (or the periphery of attention) is old, but I owe my appreciation to Jason Ford, “Attention and the New Sceptics,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 15, no. 3 (2008): 59–86. Hereafter Ford (2008). Ford’s paper taught me how to think about phenomenology in relation to inattentional blindness, and my core insight about the necessity of PERIPHERY is lifted straight from Ford.

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because attention or consciousness (or both) were revealed to have neural or psychological correlates readily explainable without the distinction of CENTER from PERIPHERY, my description above would remain intact. This is because what I claimed above is merely that absorption, illusory or not, is a commonplace experience, and that the CENTER vs. PERIPHERY (or something like it) is conceptually necessary in order to adequately describe that experience. That claim was not meant to be about the reality underlying the phenomenon. It does not require that things be as they seem, because it is merely a claim about the conceptual resources necessary for accounting for the seeming, viz. a claim about the seeming itself. Another way to put this same point, i.e., about limited metaphysical neutrality for this quite specific phenomenological claim, would be in terms of empirical explanation. My roughly Husserlian approach has been to say that one key phenomenological distinction is neutral with respect to one important metaphysical question, viz. the question regarding the relation of consciousness to attention. Nevertheless, it is a claim that remains relatively strong insofar as it says that CENTER vs. PERIPHERY is the sine qua non of the phenomenologically adequate explanation of consciousness or attention. It remains relatively weak insofar as it merely states that without such a distinction absorption cannot be accounted for. That is the case because, a fortiori, without such a distinction absorption cannot be identified and described. Admittedly, this makes it a very peculiar sort of claim, viz. a claim about a conceptual necessity for an explanation of a particular phenomenon of consciousness/attention. Such a claim stands across a variety of possible relations of consciousness to attention (including the actual one, whichever it may turn out to be.) It fails across a variety of quite different possible relations of “consciousness” to “attention” (not including the actual one, whichever it may turn out to be.) It is merely a claim that none of those in the second set would be experienced by anyone, i.e., seem to be to anyone, like our experience. Imagine for the moment an advanced psychological science. Imagine psychologists of the far future, who in addition to being able to predict and explain our every move, also possess full and convincing empirical proofs that absorption is illusory. What’s really happening in our brains, they tell us (for the sake of argument, let us suppose that they genuinely know this), is not at all like that. We might even imagine

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the future psychologists eventually reach a consensus: there is no absorption or obliviousness, at least not in the psychological or neurobiological correlates of consciousness or attention. Still, for them, the following explanatory question arises: “Why did consciousness (or attention) appear to be describable by CENTER and PERIPHERY? What explains the pervasiveness of (what to them is now merely a quaint illusion of) being “sucked into” a bit of work or a piece of fiction? I.e., what explains our (present) seemingly characteristic experience of being absorbed in some things and oblivious to others?” If there were no such thing, really, then the mystery of our experience of it would only deepen. I say “mystery” here, but readers should note that I have been at pains to be neither optimistic nor pessimistic with respect to the ultimate scientific explanation of the phenomenon, including its potential ontological or theoretic reduction. Maybe it is one of those “mysteries” that the future psychology will completely unravel. I have tried to remain scrupulously neutral about that. The important explanatory questions may be perfectly answerable not only by the far-future science, but perhaps by not-so-far-future ones. My point is merely pessimistic with respect to the CENTER vs. PERIPHERY’s conceptual elimination. 26 The reason that we ought to be pessimistic about conceptual elimination, for this particular case, is not just because the future explanations of the phenomenon, if only to debunk it as illusory, would themselves still require the conceptual resource, 27 it is also because of the orientational metaphor’s naturalistic bona fides. 26. The reason that this is mere pessimism and not proof is because conceptual elimination remains possible, even if those future psychologists simply refused to talk about, and a fortiori refused to explain, absorption. The goal of thought experiments like this one, which appeal to a “future science,” is typically to pump intuitions about the ability of future scientists to eventually explain phenomena we are currently curious about. Nevertheless it’s possible, as disappointing as it would be, that they would simply tell us to stop asking our most burning empirical questions, insofar as they are conceptually ill-posed. Hopefully, in that circumstance, they would explain to us why the concepts we have been using are so misleading. 27. The thought experiment is meant to highlight the claim here as conceptual, i.e., a claim about the concept ABSORPTION and the distinction CENTER vs. PERIPHERY. Because it is meant to be about an inference holding not merely in our actual world, but also across other possible worlds, viz. that set that would satisfy the propositions licensing the inference, it is meant to be only weakly empirical: it holds even in counterfactual scenarios where the psychological and neuroscientific facts are quite different. But because of its modality, i.e., a claim about a conceptual necessity, it is also a claim that any cases consistent with conscious/ attentive experiences like our own (i.e., including absorption) will require the distinction. So, it is weak in one (empirical) respect, but strong in another (conceptual) one, i.e., a claim about what would be required to explain either the illusion or reality of consciousness or attention like our own, viz. a transcendental claim.

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INATTENTIONAL BLINDNESS AND THE ANTI-PERIPHERY ARGUMENT If we were to wait for all of the philosophers to be on board with our distinction, requisite for identifying and describing absorption, let alone its baggage of limited metaphysical neutrality and/or transcendental phenomenology, we might end up waiting quite some time. So I propose that we not wait for them. More pressing is some contemporary psychological research concerning a related phenomenon of attention, one that appears to present a worrisome challenge for even the modest conceptual/explanatory claim that I have just ventured, however limited I attempted to make its scope. So I propose that we focus instead, and for the remainder of this chapter, on the psychologists. Because of the popularity and profundity (not to mention reproducibility) of recent findings concerning inattentional blindness, and because a desideratum of this book has been an account of the history of doxastic sentiments that could interpret such sentiments in a manner that is psychologically realistic (i.e., naturalizable, if not naturalized) this is a challenge that I must face down rather than simply wave away or postpone. In this section I will make the case that the phenomenon of absorption/obliviousness (described above) is consistent with what cognitive scientists have begun calling inattentional blindness. Only then will I be able to proceed to my final task of supporting my claim that we are capable of attending to (or failing to attend to) beliefy feelings. The breakthrough paradigm for studying attention was understanding it as a kind of information filtering. That insight raised a crucial experimental question: at what stage in the perceptual process does attention have its filtering effect? By all accounts the locus classicus here is Cherry, 1953. 28 Since that study a large literature has grown up around what is now called “selective attention,” so named to emphasize the basic function of attention as an information filter. By all accounts Broadbent proposed another important early theory, called the “Early

28. E. Colin Cherry, “Some Experiments on the Recognition of Speech, with One and with Two Ears,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 25, no. 5 (1953): 975–79. Hereafter Cherry (1953). For a nice summary and account of the impact Cherry, 1953 had on the development of the selective attention literature see Michael W. Eysenck, “Attention: Beyond Cherry’s (1953) Cocktail Party Problem,” in Cognitive Psychology: Revisiting the Classic Studies, ed. Michael W. Eysenck and David Groome (London: Sage Publications, 2015), 13–23.

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Selection Theory” (in reference to Broadbent’s conclusions about the stage at which attention organizes perceptual information.) 29 Under criticism from a variety of quarters, in part because Broadbent was not able to fully explain the so-called “Cocktail Party Effect,” that theory eventually gave way to various versions of “Late Selection Theories,” 30 the so-called Feature Integration Theory, 31 and a host of others. Kahneman, in another landmark study, proposed a multi-step process first dividing the stimulus field into “figural units,” with allocation of attentional capacity at a further stage wherein those units are given “perceptual interpretation” and selected for response. 32 The list here is of course a mere sketch of the historically important theories. 33 Each has been consistent with the phenomenon of absorption though none has (yet, to my knowledge) attempted to explain it. It was out of this work on attention, beginning with attempts to measure when attention is engaged in the neural processing of visual information, that Arien Mack and Irvin Rock made their discovery of inattentional blindness. 34 This discovery was made while trying to answer a question about whether Gestalt groupings happen pre-attentively or post-attentively. Mack and Rock were suspicious of a claim, accepted by earlier psychologists, that Gestalt groupings are perceived pre-attentively. They were also unsatisfied with the then-reigning experimental paradigm that could not adequately isolate conditions of attention from conditions of inattention. So they developed an experiment that involved asking subjects to fixate on a small cross. They then quickly flashed (for 200ms, less time than it takes for the eye to saccade) a larger cross in the same position. Sometimes the larger cross was accompanied by a critical stimulus in one of its four quadrants, the position of which was selected randomly. But the critical stimulus was 29. See Donald E. Broadbent, Perception and Communication (London: Pergamon Press, 1958), 297–316. 30. E.g., J. A. Deutsch and D. Deutsch, “Attention: Some Theoretical Considerations,” Psychological Review 70, no. 1 (1963): 80–90. 31. Anne M. Treisman, “Contextual Cues in Selective Listening,” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 12, no. 4 (1960): 242–48; and Anne M. Treisman and Garry Gelade, “A Feature-Integration Theory of Attention,” Cognitive Psychology 12, no. 1 (1980): 97–136. 32. See Daniel Kahneman, Attention and Effort (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 66–97. 33. For a more detailed and comprehensive account of the recent history of the study of attention see Montemayor and Haladjian, 2015, 25–83. 34. See Arien Mack and Irvin Rock, Inattentional Blindness (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998). Hereafter Mack and Rock (1998).

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always presented unexpectedly in the parafovea, i.e., within 2 degrees of fixation, fairly close to where subjects had trained their gaze. In order to measure an inattention condition, some subjects were placed in a group that was also given a distracting task. Those subjects were asked to report the length of the arms of the quickly-flashed cross (which varied from 2.7 degrees to 4.5 degrees), and were not told about the critical stimulus that might also be appearing in one of its four quadrants. Afterwards those subjects were asked if they had seen anything else, in addition to the cross, and asked to describe what they had seen if they had (or to match it to a description from a list.) The control group was told not only where to fixate, but also to look for whatever else might appear on screen at the same time the cross flashed. Tipped off to the critical stimulus, the control group was told to ignore the varying lengths of the cross arms. The initial goal of Mack and Rock, in comparing these two groups of subjects, was to determine the contributions (if any) attention might play in the perception of various stimuli used as a critical stimulus. 35 What they discovered instead was (and still is) rather startling. In the inattention condition, as opposed to control, 25 percent of subjects failed to detect the critical stimulus at all. When subsequently asked to pick it from a list of possibilities, subjects performed no better than chance. This result holds across a variety of different types of stimuli: shapes, groups of shapes, colors, outlines, motion, luminance, almost anything under the sun. 36 Even more surprising, the closer the stimulus is moved toward the point of fixation the greater its invisibility. And “invisibility” here is not too strong a word. Mack and Rock report that a colored dot presented at fixation from 76cm away, brightly illuminated, but under conditions of inattention, i.e., when subjects have had their attention directed elsewhere, goes unseen 85 percent of the time. 37 The phenomenon was aptly named by them, and has come to be called, inattentional blindness. The point is not merely that we do not see what we are not looking for. It is more precisely that we frequently and reliably do not see what is right in front of our noses when we are looking for something else. 35. See Mack and Rock, 1998, for this overview 5–17, and for their specific experiments 53–68. 36. Mack and Rock, 1998, 13, 56–68. 37. See Mack and Rock, 1998, for this overview 15, and results of individual experiments 69, 73.

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This same phenomenon, i.e., a kind of functional blindness to unexpected things popping up front and center in the visual field, has since been illustrated in even more striking fashion, for even larger objects, and in conditions considerably less controlled than those typical in a psychology laboratory. A dramatic demonstration, conceived by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, as part of Simons’ undergraduate course on research methods, enlisted students in the production of a video featuring a half dozen figures, three wearing white T-shirts and three wearing black T-shirts. 38 They move about and pass two basketballs back and forth amongst them. Spoken instructions prompt the viewer of the video to count the number of times the students wearing the white shirts pass the basketball. Then, in the middle of the 30 second video someone dressed in a gorilla suit walks across the frame, pauses in the very center and waves briefly at the camera. As reported in Simons and Chabris, 58 percent of viewers completely fail to notice the person dressed as a gorilla. 39 So the inattentional blindness phenomenon holds for objects considerably larger than colored squares, persisting considerably longer than 200 milliseconds, and in conditions considerably less controlled. A description of the famous experiment and its implications has now been made into a popular book: Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us. (New York: Broadway Paperbacks, 2009). And not only that. The phenomenon of inattentional blindness holds across a variety of sense modalities. For example, only 62 percent of trained musicians, listening to Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra, when given a distracting task like counting the number of timpani beats, will notice an unexpected electric guitar solo. 40 The phenomenon is even more pronounced when people without musical training are given the same task. 41 38. Daniel J. Simons and Christopher F. Chabris, “Gorillas in our Midst: Sustained Inattentional Blindness for Dynamic Events,” Perception 28 (1999): 1059–74. Hereafter Simons and Chabris (1999). 39. See Simons and Chabris, 1999, 1068–69. At my time of writing their video was still up on YouTube, https://youtu.be/vJG698U2Mvo (or easily found by searching “invisible gorilla” or “selective attention test”). Unfortunately, I have probably now spoiled its effect for you. But I encourage you to test it on your unsuspecting friends. 40. See Sabrina Koreimann, Bartosz Gula, and Oliver Vitouch, “Inattentional Deafness in Music,” Psychological Research 78 (2014): 304–12. Hereafter Koreimann, Gula, and Vitouch (2014). Prinz, 2012, 87, cites similar research. 41. See Koreimann, Gula and Vitouch (2014), 308–10.

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So, if the distinction of the center of consciousness from its periphery, and our conscious experiences of peripheral things, i.e., those things to which we are oblivious, were to run afoul of these inattentional blindness results, that would spell trouble. And indeed, the phenomena of absorption and obliviousness seem, at first glance, to do just that, i.e., to be inconsistent with the conclusions of Mack and Rock, 1998. To see why this might appear to be so, simply consider Mack and Rock’s own formulation of their main conclusion: “The single most important lesson is that there seems to be no conscious perception without attention.” 42 As Mack makes perfectly clear, “perception here refers to explicit conscious awareness and is to be distinguished from what is referred to as subliminal, unconscious, or implicit perception, that is, perception without awareness. Thus the hypothesis that we believe the evidence presented in this book supports is that there is no conscious perception without attention.” 43 But if there is no conscious perception without attention, then how could there be peripherally perceived contents of consciousness? i.e., those that are not at the center of conscious experience? How could all of the colorful examples, afforded by Searle, above, be correct if the conclusion of Mack and Rock, 1998 is true? One is tempted here to abandon Searle (the philosopher) in favor of Mack and Rock (the psychologists.) But before doing so, let us formulate the apparent conflict more crisply. Consider the following syllogism: The Anti-Periphery Argument: (P1) There is no conscious perception without attention. (P2) Attention is the center of consciousness. (C) There is no conscious perception of anything outside the center of consciousness.

Notice that the first premise of this little argument is verbatim the conclusion of Mack and Rock 1998. Unlike my account of absorption above, they have not been shy about the metaphysical import of their work on inattentional blindness, i.e., they do not attempt to remain metaphysically neutral with respect to the relationship between consciousness and attention. Is attention necessary for consciousness? Yes! 42. Mack and Rock, 1998, ix. Cf. 14 where their working hypothesis is instead stated, “there is no perception without attention.” 43. Mack and Rock (1998), 14.

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They say so, quite definitively. It is one of their main conclusions. Notice also that if the conclusion of The Anti-Periphery Argument is true, then there is no such thing as an experience in the periphery of one’s consciousness/attention, and hence no such thing as obliviousness in the ways illustrated above. That is to say, I take the conclusion of The AntiPeriphery Argument to be about the subjective experience of consciousness, and not merely a claim about whatever is going on behind the scenes psychologically or neurobiologically. The conclusion of the AntiPeriphery Argument is a phenomenological claim that consciousness is all center, and no periphery. On this point compare Ford, 2008, who does not read the result of Mack and Rock, 1998 as a challenge to the phenomenology of attention, but instead concludes that Mack and Rock have provided empirical evidence for the periphery of attention. 44 While I agree with Ford’s conclusions about the importance of PERIPHERY, I do not follow his strong claim that the research into inattentional blindness provides empirical corroboration. So far as I can tell, Mack and Rock discuss absorption and obliviousness only once, calling absorption “absorption” and obliviousness “looking without seeing,” “functional blindness,” and “sighted blindness.” 45 Otherwise, the phenomenology of attention does not appear to be their topic. Nevertheless, and despite the Anti-Periphery Argument, the phenomena of absorption and obliviousness are experienced by us. We needn’t say that they are “real” if that makes anybody squeamish. But we should at least admit that something is getting described here, whatever it may actually be. While these phenomena have not yet been so heavily studied as others of attention, they are equally pervasive. And as has been amply demonstrated, inattentional blindness is real, i.e., established now not only in the laboratory but also on YouTube by psychology students wearing gorilla-suits. So the various phenomena of attention must, really, be consistent with one another. How are they to be reconciled? I.e., what has gone wrong with the Anti-Periphery Argument?

44. See particularly, Ford (2008), 74. 45. Mack and Rock (1998), 1.

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I propose that there is a basic ambiguity in the concept ATTENTION that fouls our thinking through that argument. 46 The problem with the Anti-Periphery Argument is that it equivocates upon the word ‘attention.’ This might come as a bit of a surprise. After all, the concept CONSCIOUSNESS is the one that has been notorious for being slippery and polysemous. ATTENTION, by comparison, has a reputation for being wellmannered and upstanding; the past century’s psychology attests to that, doesn’t it? It most certainly does not. A byproduct of the progress in psychology, indeed a consequence of that progress, has been the fracturing and reformulation of the pre-scientific concept ATTENTION. ‘Attention’ no longer means what it did at the dawn of the twentieth century. Its traditional meaning was something like the center of consciousness. But that meaning has now splintered. Various shards have been honed by the psychologists into a number of different, specialized technical concepts. These new technical notions cover a variety of psychological mechanisms, rather than the center of consciousness as experienced by us subjectively. That has been all to the good; it has, in fact, been necessary for there to have been such admirable progress. But it also raises new possibilities for ambiguity and confusion. I shall not digress here into the history of ATTENTION. Instead let me confine myself to two comments on the way the concept has served Mack and Rock. Focus for a moment on their use of the word ‘attention’ in the first premise of the Anti-Periphery Argument, and then compare it to the use of the word ‘attention’ in the second. Those are not the same senses. The meaning of ‘attention’ in the second premise is the more-traditional, less-technical sense of ‘attention,’ typically employed by non-specialists in our everyday lives. 47 ‘Attention’ in the second premise is a reference to a quality of consciousness as experienced, i.e., the “focus” of that experience, or the “place” in which one momentarily dwells. It is what I called above the center of consciousness/attention. To substantiate my claim that this usage is “more-traditional,” I’ll 46. I am not the first to notice ambiguities in ‘attention,’ and their import in this particular regard. Cf. John H. Taylor, “Is Attention Necessary and Sufficient for Phenomenal Consciousness?” Journal of Consciousness Studies 20, no. 11–12 (2013): 173–94. Taylor diagnoses a somewhat different ambiguity in Prinz’s 2012 definition of attention as “availability to working memory.” 47. A point like this one is also made by Sebastian Watzl, “The Nature of Attention,” Philosophy Compass 6, no. 11 (2011): 842–53. Hereafter Watzl, 2011.

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simply quote the famous definition of attention given by James in 1890: “It is the taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.” 48 James was an important early psychologist. But this is now how non-psychologists still employ the term. It is the way that psychologists employed the term before Cherry, 1953 and the christening of the selective attention literature. Compare that general, less-technical definition with the more precise definition of ‘attention’ motivating the first premise. What is meant by ‘attention’ in the first premise is what is meant by twenty-first-century psychologists and cognitive scientists (and some philosophers). Rather than survey them I will simply take at face value the definition offered by Arien Mack: “In this book [i.e., Mack and Rock, 1998] the term attention is used to refer to the process that brings a stimulus into consciousness. It is, in other words, the process that permits us to notice something.” 49 As Mack herself notes, it is on this particular definition that attention becomes necessary for consciousness. I merely add that it is only on a definition like this one that it does. It is important for us to notice now, that by definition, the psychologists no longer conceive attention as a quality of consciousness. They stipulate, instead, (and here again I mean to take no stand on this assumption; I merely point it out) that the cognitive processes bringing a stimulus to consciousness can transpire unconsciously. I am able to make this point about the meaning of ATTENTION for Mack and Rock, 1998 because of Mack’s own perspicacity in the formulation of their definitions. Because that work has been so influential, I may hazard my own additional claim that this is the sense of ‘attention’ that is now widely circulating, at least in the professional literatures of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. And that is only one ambiguity. Another lurks. As the psychologists themselves know well, and as I’ve already mentioned briefly above, there is a big difference in whether we are discussing endogenous attention or exogenous attention. Any attention to the meaning of ‘attention’ in the first premise of the Anti-Periphery Argument, or in the conclusions of Mack and Rock, 1998, reveals that what is meant there is 48. POP 1, 381–82. 49. Mack and Rock, 1998, 25.

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exogenous attention. The 200ms measurement window of the experiments makes that plain. But it is considerably less clear that ‘attention’ in the second premise means exogenous attention, as opposed to endogenous attention. (In common parlance we typically don’t distinguish the two.) Notice that at one point in James’ definition he used the passive construction “taking possession,” suggesting exogenous capture of attention, but that he also uses the phrase “focalization, concentration,” suggesting the more-sustained, endogenous attention. So it is not clear which of the two James meant either. Consider his claim elsewhere in the Principles of Psychology that, “Effort of attention is thus the essential phenomenon of will.” 50 To conceive of attention as volitional (let alone as volition itself) is to conceive it as endogenous. But let us simply conclude that “it is considerably less clear” which is being employed in the second premise of the Anti-Periphery Argument. If the second premise is taken to mean endogenous attention, then the Anti-Periphery Argument not only equivocates in one dimension, but also in a second. In lieu of a fuller conceptual history of ATTENTION, we have caught a glimpse here of the concept’s shifting sense in the twentieth century. Crudely, we see a discrepancy between the traditional concept of a conscious attention, and Mack and Rock’s more recent definition of an unconscious attention. The former is almost certainly not meant to be strictly exogenous. But the latter must be. And that is a real difference, measurable with a stopwatch. The point here is not that one or the other of the two definitions is the “correct definition” (as if there could be such a thing.) The point instead is that the two meanings are distinct from one another, and target two quite different things. If the meaning of the word ‘attention’ were held fixed, then the Anti-Periphery Argument would not equivocate. But then it would be obvious that either its first premise is false, or its second premise is false. As it stands, the Anti-Periphery Argument appears to equivocate in multiple dimensions. So it provides no genuine support for its phenomenological conclusion. I haven’t proved anything positive here. I’ve merely eliminated one support for judgment that absorption and obliviousness are inconsistent with the phenomenon of inattentional blindness. While the latter phe-

50. POP 2, 1167.

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nomenon has led notable psychologists to draw important conclusions about the relationship of attention to consciousness, the former need not. Absorption and obliviousness may characterize the subjective experience of consciousness, or attention, or both, so long as the CENTER vs. PERIPHERY distinction is respected. Those phenomena may appear to be inconsistent with inattentional blindness, at first glance. But the illusion of that inconsistency will last only so long as one does not take some second and more penetrating looks. Once we draw the relevant distinctions, and stop conflating the two (at least) different concepts of attention, the illusion is dispelled, and the apparent discrepancy melts away in the sunshine.

MANUFACTURED PLEASURES So forget about the Anti-Periphery Argument. Return instead to the idea that feelings (including a feeling characteristic of believing) can go unnoticed by us. Put another way: we are not attentive to everything that we feel. 51 It would be useful for my defense of this claim, at this late stage of this book, if I could now cite some snappy psychological work done on attention to feelings. Because I would like to make the case that feelings now too, and not merely colored squares and persons dressed in gorilla-suits, can be objects of focal attention. Even more to the point: feelings can fail to be attended to by us. I should caution readers again, as I did in chapter 3, that what follows will not be a systematic survey of the psychological literature, let alone a “meta-study.” I am not a psychologist, and the literature on this topic is again voluminous. For a more professional review I recommend Robinson and Clore, 2002. 52 For a more-comprehensive account of attention’s philosophical significance, see Watzl, 2011. My cherry picking here would be methodologically foolish were I at all interested in a generalization. But my goal presently is not to devise any new empirical theory of attention or feeling; it is merely to report on work already 51. I’ve foresworn discussion of philosophers for the remainder of this chapter, but I should note that this claim has precedent in Michael Slote, A Sentimentalist Theory of the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 20. 52. Michael D. Robinson and Gerald L. Clore, “Belief and Feeling: Evidence for an Accessibility Model of Emotional Self-Report,” Psychological Bulletin 128, no. 6 (2002) 934–60.

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accomplished. The sampling below is not meant to be representative, but instead suggestive for philosophical reflection and a little bit of light analogizing. We should beware strong feelings in the present context. I am merely trying to share the tastiest cherries. One such is a recent study by Schwarz and Xu. 53 This study again concerns attention in relation to automobiles, a fraught topic in our era of “smartphones” and cars that do not yet drive themselves. Schwarz and Xu are particularly interested in the psychology of consumer behavior, and they have asked the following question: “Do people feel more pleasure when driving a luxury automobile, as opposed to an economy car?” This burning question of our time, perhaps surprisingly, is more difficult to answer than it at first appears. Most of us believe that we feel more pleasure when driving luxury automobiles (or, rather, we believe that we would feel more pleasure were we ever to get the chance to drive one.) Otherwise, why do we buy (or lust after) those luxury automobiles? But the question whether people in fact feel more pleasure when they are driving luxury cars? That is a question that has captured attention. Recall the mild methodological criticism I made about the classical overconfidence literature in chapter 3: that somewhat older methodology does not distinguish subjects’ feelings of confidence from their judgments of confidence. Schwarz and Xu, 2011 do not have a complete solution to that methodological riddle, but their (very simple) experimental design nimbly goes a distance toward addressing the issue. They are aware that our beliefs about how we would feel, and our memories of how we usually feel, not to mention our subsequent reconstructions (more or less reliable) of how we actually felt in any particular instance, are all typically conflated with one another. As they put this point themselves, the three different things are all, “based upon the same inputs – our general knowledge and intuitions.” 54 The consequence is that the results of attempts to measure these three different things, i.e., the

53. Norbert Schwarz and Jing Xu, “Why Don’t We Learn From Poor Choices?: The Consistency of Expectation, Choice, and Memory Clouds the Lessons of Experience,” Journal of Consumer Psychology 21 (2011): 142–45. Hereafter Schwarz and Xu, 2011. 54. Schwarz and Xu (2011), 143.

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prediction of feeling, the memory of feeling, and a global judgment of feeling, all tend to converge. 55 So if one hoped to tease out a measure of how some subject actually felt at a particular moment, independent of that subject’s beliefs about how she will feel, or memories of how she felt, or judgments regarding how she generally feels, one must employ the following rather elegant device. Ask that subject to fill out a survey of how intensely she will feel pleasure (her expectation) at driving three different classes of automobile: a BMW, a Honda Accord, or a Ford Escort. And then ask her to rank the intensity of those expected feelings of pleasure on a scale from 1 to 10. The results turn out to be about what you would expect, averaging 4.53, 3.10, 1.91, respectively. 56 Next ask a sampling of people in the study to recall how they actually felt (in general) when driving automobiles of those three different classes. (Here one can use Kelly Bluebook values to classify cars that they have actually driven from “luxury” to “economy”). The results of the general memory survey roughly confirm those of the question about expected feelings, averaging 4.99, 4.21, 3.38, respectively. But now ask instead a general sample of your population to rank the pleasurableness of their driving experience while they were driving on their way to work this particular morning, without first asking them what kind of car they drive. And then subsequently ask what kind of car they drive, and then use the Kelly Bluebook values to correlate their scores with the three basic classes of automobiles. The results reported by Schwarz and Xu, 2011, are averages of 2.67, 2.53, 2.31, respectively. In a web-based survey using the same questions the results were even more striking: averaging 2.16, 2.29, 2.42, respectively. 57 What does this show? Perhaps it shows that we merely believe we are feeling more pleasure when we are driving luxury cars, when in fact we are just as pissed off about the traffic as the rest of the hoi polloi driving their cheap economy cars. I think that it additionally shows, even when we remain restricted to self-reporting, how a clever psychological design can tease out the intensity of episodic feeling, indepen55. Here they also cite Norbert Schwarz, Daniel Kahneman, and Jing Xu, “Global and Episodic Reports of Hedonic Experience,” in Calendar and Time Diary: Methods in Life Course Research, ed. Robert F. Beli, Frank P. Stafford, and Duane F. Alwin (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2009), 157–74. 56. Schwarz and Xu (2011), 143. 57. Schwarz and Xu (2011), 143.

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dent of the cognitive biases of memory and expectation. This has, of course, not been accomplished entirely: even Schwarz and Xu must still rely on the self-reporting of feelings, which (as I argued above) confounds the feelings with judgments about them. But with a little bit of experimental ingenuity they have also discovered how we report we feel at some particular moment of driving, and discovered that this does not comport with what we believe (and report) we generally feel when driving, either before or after the fact, at least when it comes to pleasure and luxury cars. One thing is our actual feelings of pleasure or displeasure. Quite a different thing is what Volkswagen in the 1990s sold to us as Fahrvergnügen, i.e., our beliefs about our feelings, so easily manipulated by advertisers. We ought to be careful about drawing general conclusions here. Schwarz and Xu themselves merely draw the conclusion that “our chance to learn from experience is impaired because hedonic experiences are fleeting . . . and not accessible to introspection once some time has passed. As a result, we usually rely on our general knowledge to reconstruct what the experience must have been, as we do in other domains of autobiographical memory.” 58 Clore and Robinson, as a result of this work but also after similar research of their own, draw a few more conclusions: [1] . . . reports of experience based on the kinds of self-views captured on self-report personality scales may not coincide with actual experience. [2] . . . retrospective and trait-based reports of emotion, while they may be either accurate or inaccurate in themselves, may fail to capture life as it is lived. [3] A primary implication is that when people answer questions about their emotions to themselves or others, it may be unclear when beliefs are filling in for actual experience. [4. Self-knowledge] . . . can be improved to the extent that individuals attend to events as they occur. 59

58. Schwarz and Xu (2011), 144. 59. Gerald L. Clore and Michael D. Robinson, “Knowing Our Emotions: How Do We Know What We Feel?,” in Handbook of Self-Knowledge, ed. Simine Vazire and Timothy D. Wilson (New York: The Guilford Press, 2012), 205. Hereafter Clore and Robinson (2012).

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As Clore and Robinson, 2012 suggest, the result that our beliefs about our feelings of pleasure might not track our actual feelings of pleasure, holds more generally than for simple driving pleasures. The result also holds for what we classify more broadly as emotional states. For example, psychologists have discovered that a similar result holds for happiness itself (or at least “life-satisfaction”) in its relationship to wealth. Are people “happier” when they are richer? We definitely report that we are, or that we would be. And we have no reason to doubt the sincerity of those reports. It is an unpopular opinion, but don’t we all secretly believe we would at least be a little bit happier if we were richer? Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, and Stone cite a correlation between household income and reports of general life satisfaction, something they alternately call a “global judgment of life satisfaction” or “overall happiness.” 60 On a numeric scale, when asked “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?” the numbers reported correlate with household income, at least for samples of people in the US, with a correlation ranging from 0.15 to 0.30. 61 But what happens when a methodologically more sophisticated measure of subjective well-being is employed, e.g., one that attempts to measure the feeling of well-being from moment to moment, as opposed to subjects’ global reports? Kahneman et al. (2006) employ two different techniques to try to tease out that feeling, one called “The Ecological Momentary Assessment” (EMA), and a second called the “Day Reconstruction Method” (DRM). The EMA was first proposed by Stone and Shiffman. 62 Confronting a traditional problem for behavioral assessment, Stone and Shiffman (1994) began with a particular focus on medical assessments, and the observation that experiences of everyday life are not neatly reproducible in the laboratory or examination room (wherein assessment has traditionally taken place). That setting requires subjects’ selfreporting of “average experiences” or individual episodes far-removed 60. Daniel Kahneman, Alan B. Krueger, David Schkade, Norbert Schwarz, and Arthur A. Stone, “Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer? A Focusing Illusion,” Science 312 (2006): 1909. Hereafter Kahneman et al. (2006). 61. Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener, “Will Money Increase Subjective Well-Being?: A Literature Review and Guide to Needed Research,” Social Indicators Research 57, no. 2 (2002): 119–69. 62. Arthur A. Stone and Saul Shiffman, “Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) in Behavioral Medicine,” Annals of Behavioral Medicine 16, no. 3 (1994): 199–202. Hereafter Stone and Shiffman (1994).

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from the time and place of the assessment. So the proposed methodological solution was to prompt subjects for a report on their experience at the moment it is happening, in whatever environment it takes place. Researchers schedule many such assessments (typically between 10–100), in ways specifically designed to avoid unrepresentative sampling, and to correct for subjects’ recall bias. The mechanism for such reporting has proliferated significantly since 1994, but began with: “Electronic pagers, with “beeps” processed through a paging company service; specialized digital watches; pocket electronic schedulers; and palmtop computers, with varying degrees of programmability and connectivity to desktop computers.” 63 The DRM was developed by Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, and Stone. 64 This technique involves subjects constructing a diary of events experienced during the previous day, and answering questions about feelings experienced in relation to those events. So, for example, I might write down that I made my morning commute to the university yesterday, and then when prompted to report how much pleasure I took in it, I might try to express my precise degree of displeasure numerically. The sentiment diarists are then asked to make a record of an entire day as a series of discrete episodes (people typically pick events lasting from 15 minutes to 2 hours, but the average number of episodes chosen is 14.1.) 65 The technique is designed to reduce recall bias by prompting subjects to remember (and thereby focally attend to) specific recent episodes, reporting affect in relation to them as opposed to relying upon global judgments. While this method produces “close correspondences” with yet another technique called the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), it has an advantage over ESM because it does not require subjects be interrupted in order to answer pesky questions from a pesky psychologist. (Typically accomplished, like in EMA, with an electronic device periodically alarming and prompting participants to record how they are presently feeling.) Psychologists frequently describe ESM as the “gold standard” in contemporary research, but its attempts to get at episodic feeling create a collateral problem: the unnaturalness of interruptions that can influence affect. (Think about 63. Stone and Shiffman (1994), 201. 64. Daniel Kahneman, Alan B. Krueger, David Schkade, Norbert Schwarz, and Arthur A. Stone, “A Survey Method for Characterizing Daily Life Experience: The Day Reconstruction Method,” Science 306, no. 5702 (2004): 1776–80. Hereafter Kahneman et al. (2004). 65. See Kahneman et al. (2004).

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how annoyed you might be if you were participating in one of these studies; it would perhaps be even more annoying than your typical dayto-day level of annoyance.) So DRM can perform a function that produces results similar to ESM, but without its methodological problem. And what are the results? When either EMA or DRM are used to isolate and aggregate reports of episodic feeling (as opposed to asking subjects for a general report of life-satisfaction, i.e., the “global judgment” in the less-methodologically-savvy surveys) the correlation with household income drops from 0.20 (with p < .001) to as low as 0.06. 66 So, once again, how satisfied we believe we are feeling with our lives (which can be correlated somewhat with how wealthy we are) is quite different from how satisfied we are actually feeling from moment to moment (which cannot be correlated with wealth to nearly the same degree.) Another way to think about this: we are not attending very well to how we actually feel. My own explanation of the results, given my claims above, is that they are largely the result of our having peripheral pleasures. We are, proximally and for the most part, oblivious to how we are feeling. Kahneman et al. (2006) explains the results in a somewhat similar way, by appeal to what they call a “focusing illusion.” The particular focusing illusion (also sometimes called “priming bias”) appealed to at the beginning of Kahneman et al. (2006) was originally reported in a paper by Strack, Martin, and Schwarz. 67 In that work the psychologists asked college freshmen and sophomores from the 1980s, “How happy are you with your life in general?” They scored the results, and then asked those same college students a follow-up question: “How many dates did you have in the previous month?” The correlation between the two answers was reported to have been, on average, -0.012. Basically zero, totally negligible, not correlated at all. But if you first ask college students (a different randomly selected group, of course) “how many dates did you have last month?” and then ask them “how happy are you with your life in general?” the correlation between their answers shoots up to 0.66. Why? The explanation provided by Kahneman et al. (2006) is that the first question “primes the pump,” by surrepti66. Kahneman, et al. (2006), 1909. 67. Fritz Strack, Leonard L. Martin, and Norbert Schwarz, “Priming and Communication: Social Determinants of Information Use in Judgments of Life Satisfaction,” European Journal of Social Psychology 18, no. 5 (1988): 429–42.

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tiously focusing attention on the number of dates in a way that then influences answers to the second question. 68 In directing respondents’ attention to the number of dates, the questioner subtly invites assessment of life satisfaction on those terms particularly. Kahneman et al. believe that, in a similar way, standard surveys of life satisfaction bias their responses by surreptitiously focusing us on a single factor as the determinant of over-all well-being (when in fact there are many.) This, of course, is done in a variety of different ways with different survey instruments. But focusing on any single factor (not merely household income) prompts a skewed judgment. The original explanation provided by Strack, Martin, and Schwarz was considerably more Gricean: information from the more specific question about dating is used to answer the more general question about life-satisfaction, because that more specific information is judged relevant for the second question (and because we typically follow the Gricean maxim of quantity.) Let’s now take stock. Feelings too, and not merely beliefs about them, can be the objects of peripheral or focal attention. The case made above is that peripheral objects of attention can include driving pleasures and general feelings of life-satisfaction, and that psychologists have begun to tease these apart from global “judgments of happiness.” Searle already supplied us with several other good examples of peripheral attention to feelings, citing instances of the “feeling of the chair against my back, the tightness of my shoes, or the slight headache.” Similarly, the “shirt against my skin.” We should follow Searle by noting down these good examples, but also add to our list now feelings of pleasure that we may not be attending to while driving, or the sounds of a guitar solo out of place in the middle of a performance of Strauss, or the pain of remembering the number of dates we’ve been on in the previous year. Of course, that only scratches the surface. FEELING is sufficiently general to cover both sensations and emotions/moods. It should be obvious from the examples above that even PLEASURE contains a similar range. We tend to focus on the somatosensory states, paradigmatically, when thinking of “pleasures.” But bodily pleasures, as J. S. Mill already knew, by no means exhaust the concept. Were we to open up the list of examples of attentively centered or peripheral feelings to emotions

68. Kahneman, et. al., 2006, 1908.

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more generally, we would encounter yet more psychological literature concerning the modulation of emotion or mood via attention. Lest we think it impossible to be similarly absorbed in or oblivious to our own emotional states or moods, even the briefest of glances in that literature’s direction corrects the misapprehension. Recent studies suggest that the effectiveness of (at least some degree of) voluntary control over affective responses depends upon the effectiveness of distractors. 69 For discussion of the roll attention plays in emotion regulation more generally see Gross and Thompson (2007). 70 For a meta-study (albeit grown a bit old now by the clock of psychology) see Mor and Winquist (2002). 71 For discussion of advances in the relatively new practice of Metacognitive Therapy, much of which builds on the emotion-regulation literature, see Matthews (2015). 72

ATTENUATED PAINS In conclusion I would like to cite one last, somewhat less pleasant, psychological literature. While it may involve a bit of discomfort, there is a plethora of evidence (dating back decades) regarding the relationship of attention to the experience of pain. 73 Very roughly, it can be thought of as growing out of the old idea that one can ameliorate pains via distraction, i.e., by shifting attention away from them. (This is something that you might test out at home: the next time that you stub your toe or hit your thumb with a hammer, distract yourself by reciting the Gettysburg Address.) Parents the world-over know the technique (if not the Gettysburg Address) as tried-and-true. Nurses the world over use 69. Julia Vogt and Jan De Houwer, “Emotion Regulation Meets Emotional Attention: The Influence of Emotion Suppression on Emotional Attention Depends on the Nature of the Distracters,” Emotion 14, no. 5 (2014): 840–45. 70. James J. Gross and Ross A. Thompson, “Emotion Regulation: Conceptual Foundations,” in Handbook of Emotion Regulation, ed. James J. Gross (New York and London: The Guilford Press, 2007), 3–24. 71. Nilly Mor and Jennifer Winquist, “Self-Focused Attention and Negative Affect: A Meta-Analysis,” Psychological Bulletin 128, no. 4 (2002): 638–62. 72. Gerald Matthews, “Advancing the Theory and Practice of Metacognitive Therapy: A Commentary on the Special Issue,” Cognitive Therapy & Research 39, no. 1 (2015): 81–87. 73. I’ve foresworn philosophers for the remainder of this chapter, but there are also important philosophical theories of pain. See, e.g., Michael Tye, “The Nature of Pain and the Appearance/Reality Distinction,” in Phenomenal Qualities: Sense, Perception, and Consciousness, eds. Paul Coates and Sam Coleman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 298–321.

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distraction more than any other analgesic. Experiments have even been done on the effectiveness of swear words at doing this job. 74 To cut the decades-old research story scandalously short, for purposes of this already over-stuffed chapter: the trick of refocusing attention really does help reduce the felt intensity of pains. Take as confirmation one recent fMRI study. An experiment by Ploner, Lee, Wiech, Bingel, and Tracey, 75 not only bears out earlier results demonstrating the effectiveness of distraction, but begins to add evidence of a relatively new kind: correlating the modulations of attention with modulations in blood flow (and hence oxygen, and hence neural activity) in specific regions of the brain. Ploner et al. (2011) begins with the past decade’s conclusions, i.e., that “attentional and emotional state can substantially shape the perception of pain.” 76 They then proceed to an experiment of their own, in which (I am sorry to say) they inflict a small amount of pain on some of their research subjects while in the MRI scanner, particularly to their subjects’ feet. To inflict foot pain they shot the tops of their subjects’ feet with a high intensity laser beam. Still, this must be considered an advance over the older experimental design, which involved paying people to immerse their hand and forearm in ice water for as long as they could possibly stand it. While the type of pain is different, the results are relatively consistent with those from the earlier cold pressor studies. 77 This despite the fact that documentation of the earlier results is neither uncomplicated, nor universally accepted. McCaul, Monson, and Maki, 78 for example, found distraction ineffective, and hypothesized that the type of distraction was significant for its analgesic effect, and especially insofar as it does or does not involve positive emotion. See also McCaul and Haugt-

74. Richard Stephens and Claudia Umland, “Swearing as a Response to Pain—Effect of Daily Swearing Frequency,” The Journal of Pain 12, no. 12 (2011): 1274–81. 75. Markus Ploner, Michael C. Lee, Katja Wiech, Ulrike Bingel, and Irene Tracey, “Flexible Cerebral Connectivity Patterns Subserve Contextual Modulations of Pain,” Cerebral Cortex 21, no. 3 (2011): 719–26. Hereafter Ploner et al. (2011). 76. Ploner et al. (2011), 719. For review of the literature see Chantal Villemure and M. Catherine Bushnell, “Cognitive Modulation of Pain: How do Attention and Emotion Influence Pain Processing?,” Pain 95 (2002): 195–99. 77. See, for example of these, Robert L. Hodes, Eric W. Howland, Nancy Lightfoot and Charles S. Cleeland, “The Effects of Distraction on Responses to Cold Pressor Pain,” Pain 41 (1990): 109–14. 78. Kevin D. McCaul, Nancy Monson, and Ruth H. Maki, “Does Distraction Reduce Pain-Produced Distress Among College Students?,” Health Psychology 11, no. 4 (1992): 210–17.

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vedt, 79 who conclude effectiveness may depend upon pain’s duration, and that for prolonged endurance of pain attention may have the opposite effect. The newer experimental design, however, i.e., the one including the 1.34 µm laser, producing 3.5–4.5 J of stimulus intensity, is notable for being capable of selectively activating only nociceptive fibers (i.e., only the nerve fibers most directly responsible for the feeling of pain) without also activating tactile fibers. 80 It is designed to evoke a “moderately painful sensation with an intensity of 5 on a visual analogue scale.” 81 Ploner, et al. gave their subjects two different tasks, one designed for “low attention,” asking them to count and report the number of times they felt the laser pain on the top of the foot. A second task, designed for “high-attention,” asked a different group of subjects to additionally report on which side of the top of his foot he felt the painful stimulus (all subjects were male and each had a line drawn down the center of his right foot; the 6mm laser dot applied 1–2 cm to either side of the medial line.) Honestly, the results are even more interesting than the laser. When asked to attend to which side of the top of his foot his pain was on, and how intense that pain was, the men reported feeling their pain as more intense than another group who merely counted the number of times that they felt the pain. The idea is that merely counting doesn’t require as much attention as counting and attending to the precise location of the stimulus. On average, the more intense pain was reported by the “high attention” group, despite the fact that the intensity of the stimulus for both groups was totally identical. There was no change in the intensity of the laser beam; there was only a change in the reported (and presumably felt) pain, correlated with attention to its location, p = 0.029. Still, that was not meant to be the news of this particular study. Ploner et al. (2011) additionally recorded greater felt pain in the high attention condition as covarying with increased neural activity in both the bilateral frontal eye fields and intraparietal sulci, but also in the 79. Kevin D. McCaul and Curt Haugtvedt, “Attention, Distraction, and Cold-Pressor Pain,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 43, no. 1 (1982): 154–62. 80. The technique is described by L. Plaghki and A. Mouraux, “How Do We Selectively Activate Skin Nociceptors with a High Power Infrared Laser? Physiology and Biophysics of Laser Stimulation,” Neurophsiologie Clinique 33 (2003): 269–77. 81. Ploner et al. (2011), 721.

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anterior insula. They report that activity in the left anterior insula was significant (P < 0.05, small volume corrected.) 82 The former are “well known to represent essential parts of a distributed network that controls attention and exerts attentional modulations of sensory processing.” Their working hypothesis is that the anterior insula “integrates sensory and contextual information to generate a predictive model and a higher order representation of interoception that is the subjective state of the body.” 83 I am, frankly, not professionally qualified to appraise the significance of the neurological conclusions, i.e., the association of endogenous attention with particular regions of the brain. I am merely interested in the study for two much more pedestrian reasons: The first has to do with its ingenious experimental design. Note that an important feature of the experiment is that it does not require the conceptualization of attention in a binary upon which attention is either completely present or completely absent. 84 That conceptual dichotomy will eventually be exploded, I am confident, as biologically unrealistic. Instead Ploner et al. (2011) defines “high attention” and “low attention” conditions, which merely require attention vary in degree. Their experimental design is consistent with attention having a center and a periphery that varies in degree. That, I think, remains an underappreciated methodological breakthrough. The second, interestingly related, reason I have been interested in Ploner et al. (2011) is not unique to this particular fMRI study, but instead is a more general feature of the literature to which it belongs, viz. the literature measuring the relationship between attention and pain. A particular insight of that research is that (and the measurement of the degree to which) pains are capable of being intensified or attenuated by attention. This may or may not generalize to other feelings. But we are in a position now to at least say this about pains (even if we should be cautious about drawing general conclusions for other feelings): they are capable of being felt at different levels of intensity, depending upon how attention is allocated. Correlative results regarding attenuation have been discovered in attention’s relation to other feelings. Psychologists have also measured 82. Ploner et al. (2011), 720. 83. Ploner et al. (2011), 721 and 724, respectively. 84. See Ploner et al. (2011), especially 723.

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attention’s attenuating effect on negative emotions. For example, Thompson, Mata, Jaeggi, Buschkuehl, Jonides, and Gotlib, 85 use experience sampling and report a decrease in “negative affect” (NA) under conditions of attention. “As we hypothesized, attention to emotion prospectively predicted a decrease in levels of NA, even after controlling for previous levels of NA. The results of our prospective analyses suggest that the association between attention to emotion and levels of NA over a period of a few minutes to a few hours is unidirectional. That is, we found that higher levels of attention to emotion were associated with decreases in NA over time, but did not find a significant relation between these two constructs in the opposite direction: higher levels of NA were not associated with changes in attention to emotion.” 86 These results are philosophically suggestive. Review of recent literature suggests that attention exerts effects in pain processing at a variety of different levels of the nervous system (or as the psychologists like to say, “at all levels of the neuraxis”), 87 from relatively simple processing happening in the spinal cord, all the way up to more complex goings on in the cerebral cortex. But the relationship between attention and feeling discovered is dynamic and bilateral: it is not merely that the former broadens, narrows, or refocuses the latter. Important qualities (like intensity) of the feelings themselves can be substantively changed by the application of attention. But attention can also be captured by the feelings. The current state of the art is to distinguish two qualitative characteristics in the experience of pain, its intensity and its unpleasantness. And some psychologists have begun to conclude that there are distinct neural pathways responsible for the modulation of these two distinct characteristics of pain, at least one circuit whereby emotions (and placebo) activate the anterior cingulated cortex, prefrontal cortex and periaqueductal grey, and another for attention active in the superior parietal lobe to the primary somatosenso-

85. Renee J. Thompson, Jutta Mata, Susanne M. Jaeggi, Martin Buschkuehl, John Jonides, and Ian H. Gotlib, “Concurrent and Prospective Relations between Attention to Emotion and Affect Intensity: An Experience Sampling Study,” Emotion 11, no. 6 (2011): 1489–94. Hereafter Thompson et al. (2011). 86. Thompson et al. (2011), 1493. 87. Mathieu Roy, “Cerebral and Spinal Modulation of Pain by Emotions and Attention,” in Pain, Emotion and Cognition: A Complex Nexus, ed. Gisèle Pickering and Stephen Gibson (New York: Springer, 2015), 35.

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ry cortex and insula. 88 Again, I simply have to take the psychologists and neurophysiologists at their word on these points, in order to observe and report upon a much more basic insight about the relationship of attention and a particular sentiment’s intensification. The practical, therapeutic consequences of the basic insight are potentially immense. A recent study by Hollins and Walters demonstrates the phenomenon in relation to hypervigilance. 89 First observed in fibromyalgia patients by Chapman (1978), this is a phenomenon wherein patients suffering from chronic pain develop a lower tolerance level for pains of any kind. 90 An unfortunate consequence of the already debilitating condition, horrendously, seems to be greater sensitivity to pain of all types and degrees. Upon reviewing the clinical literature on fibromyalgia, Rollman and Lautenbacher already concluded in 1993 that the hypervigilance phenomenon “is not a psychiatric disturbance. Rather, fibromyalgia reflects an altered perceptual style.” 91 Hollins and Walters (2016) are able to demonstrate that this is related to attention specifically (i.e., to the attentional phenomenon that I have been highlighting immediately above, viz. sentimental intensification/attenuation.) They take two groups of healthy, young college students, ask the people in one group to write about the flu and count the number of times they themselves have been blinking, breathing, and feeling their own heartbeats, thus directing respondents’ attention to their own sensations. A control group instead writes about their morning routine and counts “innocuous” lights and sounds. Both groups are then subjected (unfortunately, once again, for the sake of science) to a small measure of pain, in this case having a “weighted rod” pressed into their forearms. The result, reported by Hollins and Walters (2016), are an increase in the ratio of perceived intensity to unpleasantness of the pain, for pains of

88. M. Catherine Bushnell, Marta Ceko, and Lucie A. Low, “Cognitive and Emotional Control of Pain and Its Disruption in Chronic Pain, “Nature Reviews Neuroscience 14, no. 7 (2013): 502–11, especially fig. 3 on 506. 89. Mark Hollins and Sloan Walters, “Experimental Hypervigilance Changes the Intensity/Unpleasantness Ratio of Pressure Sensations: Evidence for the Generalized Hypervigilance Hypothesis,” Experimental Brain Research 234 (2016): 1377–84. Hereafter Hollins and Walters (2016). 90. C. Richard Chapman, “Pain: The Perception of Noxious Events,” in The Psychology of Pain, ed. Richard A. Sternbach (New York: Raven Press, 1978), 169–203. 91. Gary B. Rollman and Stefan Lautenbacher, “Hypervigilance Effects in Fibromyalgia: Pain Experience and Pain Perception,” in Pain Research and Clinical Management, Vol. 6, ed. H. Værøy, and H. Merskey (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1993), 156.

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varying intensity, a result that they attribute to “inducing a transient state of hypervigilance.” 92 It is important to remember that one of pain’s values, hijacked in cases of fibromyalgia, is the way it commandeers exogenous attention. Pain is useful (in the non-pathological cases), not principally because of the endogenous effects I have just been describing, e.g., our ability to intensify/attenuate it, or to adjust its ratio of intensity to unpleasantness, but rather because it is so good at leaping to the center of consciousness/attention in the first place. This simpler insight, about the natural function of pain, i.e., an insight about exogenous capture, dates all the way back to Descartes, at least: in the non-pathological cases, pain is nature’s way of telling us when to stop doing something harmful with/to our bodies. In the contemporary context Eccleston and Crombez (1999) have posited that chronic pain is better understood as a kind of chronic interruption. 93 So in addition to the suggestive points above about intensification/attenuation, we should also not forget this older one about capture and significance. Eccleston and Crombez focus almost exclusively upon pains, and have contributed their model to a large literature on pain and attention. But Eccleston and Crombez also clearly recognize that pain is not the only feeling with the power to capture (exogenous) attention. Like them, we are interested in this power of feelings more generally. Because they are scientists, they have been careful with their conclusions. But the epigraph of their 1999 paper also hints at the broader implications of their results. Even if the scientists are too canny and cagey to speculate professionally and in print, our project here has been a more philosophical one; we can hazard a somewhat bolder conclusion in their place. Like so many other papers in psychology, they began with a quotation from William James: “A faint tap per se is not an interesting sound; it may well escape being discriminated from the general rumor of the world. But when it is a signal, as that of a lover on the windowpane, hardly will it go unperceived.” 94 Their thinking (let us not attribute it to them as a scientific conclusion, but simply claim it for ourselves, under the banner of their inspiration) is that pains are not the 92. Hollins and Walters (2016), 1382. 93. Chris Eccleston and Geert Crombez, “Pain Demands Attention: A Cognitive-Affective Model of the Interruptive Function of Pain,” Psychological Bulletin 125, no. 3 (1999): 356–66. Hereafter Eccleston and Crombez (1999). 94. William James, as quoted by Eccleston and Crombez (1999), 356.

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only feelings capable of capturing or failing to capture attention. Other feelings too, may capture it or fail to, as the result of their varying degrees of significance in the dynamics of the affective-motivational economy. Varying significance, i.e., the fact that pains (or in James’s case that sound of the faint tap upon the window) can signal, is what moves them to discrimination “from the general rumor of the world.” So let us say in conclusion that at least pains, but also perhaps other feelings too, capture exogenous attention for the benefit of the organism (or the lover), whether or not that attention is held endogenously, and perhaps even intensified.

CONCLUSIONS FROM ATTENTION Searle’s examples, the examples of pleasure, and now the examples of pain, establish that feelings too, and not merely medium-sized dry goods, can be perceptual objects of attention/consciousness. If this is the case, and if it is also the case that the CENTER vs. PERIPHERY distinction holds for attention to feelings too, and if it is also the case that the claims interpreted in the previous chapters as about doxastic sentiments were in fact about feelings, then I propose that the claim that a doxastic sentiment can (or fail to) be the object of focal attention has not inconsiderable support. Feelings can go unnoticed too, even as they are consciously experienced. Perhaps even feelings of believing. That feelings may (or may not) be the focus of attention is a basic assumption of the psychological literature, dating all the way back to (at least) Titchener. 95 Psychologists today, and throughout the past century, working in a variety of different research paradigms, standardly assume that we are capable of attending to feeling. It is then a simple phenomenological inference to the conclusion that we are capable of feeling while not attending. Of course, the feelings that the psychologists have typically been concerned with are quite different from those 95. “Attention to a sensation means always that the sensation becomes clear; attention to an affection is impossible. If it is attempted, the pleasantness or unpleasantness at once eludes us and disappears, and we find ourselves attending to some obtrusive sensation or idea that we had not the slightest desire to observe.” Edward Titchener, Lectures on the Elementary Psychology of Feeling and Attention (New York: Macmillan, 1908), 69. See also his review of Pillsbury, “Discussion and Reports: The Relations of Feeling and Attention,” Psychological Review 9, no. 5 (1902): 481–83.

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feelings characteristic of believing, as discussed in my previous chapters. But many of the feelings that psychology studies, pleasures and pains among them, are affiliated with believing. Of course, it has been no less an assumption for having been made by our best scientists of the mind. The mere fact that they have believed it possible to attend to feeling does not make it so. And I would be particularly remiss, here in conclusion, if I did not point that out too. I only insist upon the important corollary of the assumption: we frequently fail to focus on feelings, be they pleasures, pains, or other doxastic sentiments. Nevertheless, these are feelings that are still felt, albeit peripherally. The variety of different research paradigms on attention provide voluminous, if circumstantial, support for the claim that feelings can go unnoticed. Given the phenomenological distinction of CENTER vs. PERIPHERY, I have interpreted that literature as evidence that we are not focally attentive/conscious to everything that we peripherally feel. But the evidence from one corner of the literature demonstrated something even more suggestive: not only pain but also “negative affect” is capable of intensification or attenuation by attention or distraction. A few words of caution are in order, here in conclusion. There is strong evidence that attention changes the felt intensity of pain. But pain may be unique. It is an exemplary instance of a somatosensory feeling associated with specialized parts of the nervous system (nociceptors and the anterolateral system) and we should be careful about generalizing to disparate cases. No matter how well-documented and rigorously studied one or the other feeling may be, FEELING itself is a motley lot. In particular, the proposition proffered by this book, that there are feelings of believing that may or may not be noticed by us, and the suggestion that they too might be amplified or attenuated when focally attended to, is a wholly different proposition. Of course, I do not expect such feelings of (or affiliated with) belief to have neural or psychological correlates similar to the neural correlates of pains. (Unless we are talking about pain itself as an affiliated feeling.) Nor should anyone expect that all feelings will be discovered to function in ways similar in relation to attention. Bridges too far, in each case. Various types of pleasures and pains, whether somatosensory or emotional, have various functions. Let alone other types of more sophisticated feelings. And pains are unique, not only in the architecture of the nervous system, but also

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phenomenologically. There is no guarantee, e.g., that Evidenz, if there were such a thing, would possess a similar qualitative difference in intensity or unpleasantness. One may only hope that Evidenz does not match the unpleasantness of pain, whatever its felt intensity. So what reason have we to judge now that any feeling of believing would have any relation to attention? What have I been playing at? I have been trying to tempt you to an association by citing the research from several different programs in psychology: including the measurement of pleasure for controlling consumer behavior and gauge of “life satisfaction,” 96 and attention to and distraction from pain for analgesic effect. But my argument in this chapter has been neither strictly nor merely analogical. The claim that I have been suggesting follows from the preceding psychological evidence insofar (but only insofar) as some feeling of believing has been shown (as I attempted in the previous chapters) to be a genuine feeling. Were that accomplished, then a further argumentative step would be the defense of the idea that members of the family (however heterogeneous) share characteristic properties: susceptibility to intensification by attention, for example, or the ability to capture attention, or even just the fact that we are capable of being oblivious to them. That all feelings would possess all such properties, i.e., that all would be similar in their relation to all types of attention discussed above, strikes me as highly implausible. Even the briefest foray into the literature of psychology proves edifying in its own right. But it is particularly edifying when taken together with excurses into the history of philosophy. My broader goal in this chapter has been to attune us to some of the empirical consequences of claims made in those previous chapters, viz. particularly to my classification of feelings of believing as feelings. We have now, hopefully, a better understanding of what I intended to mean by such a classification. A genuine risk is that you will feel quite a bit less sympathetic now with my earlier interpretations, i.e., quite a bit less sympathetic to my take on the history of philosophy than you might have been without the aid of this chapter. But I am willing to hazard that risk. If beliefyfeelings are genuine feelings then we should expect eventual discoveries of their neural correlates and psychological mechanisms, heretofore hidden from us. If they are not genuine feelings, then such expectations

96. This is not happiness, by the way.

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will be dashed. We are living at an exciting moment, with so much cognitive science still ahead of us. It is for that reason one of the most fruitful moments for the philosophy of mind. The history of our attention to feelings has only just begun.

BELIEFY FEELINGS, WHENCE AND WHITHER

DOXASTIC SENTIMENTS, WHENCE

In conclusion, let’s review where we’ve been, and peek ahead at what attention to feeling might reveal. I began with a call to retrieve an unrecognized tradition, i.e., doxastic sentimentalism, in the history of philosophy and psychology. Hume was the clearest representative; in a variety of places he proclaimed that believing simply is the feeling of force and vivacity. I demurred from Hume’s thesis at the end of chapter 1, not as a non-starter (I began with it, after all), but as too strong. It itself lacked requisite force and vivacity to attract the believing of other modern epistemologists. I floated instead Even More Modest Sentimentalism, the thesis that a feeling is necessary for believing, if not sufficient for it. That thesis, I argued, is not an appropriate interpretation of Hume (because it does not maintain his identity thesis) but might have attracted believing more widely. And indeed it did. The second chapter, on Descartes, focused on a quite different doxastic sentiment, albeit one secretly similar to Hume’s, viz. Cartesian clarity. Descartes was, clearly, not a sentimentalist in either of Hume’s two senses. Nor was he a doxastic sentimentalist in the Even More Modest sense identified at the conclusion of chapter 1. But I argued that clarity (and hence distinctness) ought to be interpreted phenomenologically, viz. as feelings, despite the serious complications this has for reinterpreting his Clarity and Distinctness 265

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Principle. The Clarity and Distinctness Principle, even on its best possible interpretation, is far too strong. It leaves us with the Problem of the Criterion, if not the problem of The Circle. But there was another important consequence: The Clarity and Distinctness Principle, if interpreted sentimentally, looks much more like an empirical principle. That’s not the way Descartes himself interpreted it, of course. But interpreting it that way leads straight into modern psychology, and particularly its attempts to measure overconfidence. Any doubts about whether something like the Clarity and Distinctness Principle is true, i.e., whether the Problem of the Criterion can be solved, are hardened by a look at the psychology of overconfidence in chapter 3. In that chapter I looked at the “classical” overconfidence literature from the 1970s, but also some more-recent criticisms of it, and a newer pair of research programs regarding retrieval of reasons and placement. Psychologists today measure a wide variety of overconfidence phenomena, and it is not currently clear, I observed, whether they are measuring feelings or judgments (or some combination of the two.) The general sense one gets from the last half-century’s psychological literature is that overconfidence is robust, whether or not it results from a cognitive bias. But the real lesson of studying that literature is appreciation of the need to detangle metacognitive feelings from metacognitive judgments. Chapter 4, which began with Audi and ended with Husserl, introduced SELF-EVIDENCE as a successor concept to CLARITY. I argued that Husserl should be read as advancing a successor principle to the Clarity and Distinctness Principle. Husserl’s Evidenzprinzip claims that the degree to which experiences are perceived with Evidenz is the degree to which they are taken to be true, i.e., believed. That is a relatively weak interpretation of Husserl, given his many other commitments. But it is not completely novel; I followed Ströker in arguing Husserl did not treat Evidenz as requiring a “veracity condition.” Whether the phenomenological task is then interpreted as descriptive or transcendental, an immanent guarantor of transcendent truths will not be forthcoming. This won’t have satisfied those still seeking experiential guarantors of veracity. And it won’t have satisfied Husserlians, who will demand a greater fidelity to Husserl’s own epistemological designs. An important point of chapter 4 was establishing that Evidenz can be conceived as feeling, despite Husserl’s commitments to treating it as the self-given-

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ness of the object, and despite Husserl’s own protestations to the contrary. Husserl was an Even More Modest Doxastic Sentimentalist. Chapter 5 turned to the father of modern psychology, himself a crackerjack philosopher. Our insights about overconfidence must be taken back to James’ famous criticisms of Evidentialism. One may believe, willfully or not, that scientific psychology since James’ day has completely vindicated Clifford and undermined James’ infamous willto-believe doctrine. It has not, I argued, at least not on an appropriate (i.e., restricted by the available evidence) construal of James’ doctrine, viz. that live hypotheses are bounded by sentiments that track subjects’ tacit assessments of probabilities. James was more amenable to an Even More Modest sentimentalist reading than either Descartes or Husserl. My own modest contribution to our understanding of James was only to detangle his argument that we must believe (pragmatically or otherwise) from his Permissibility Argument, which instead merely requires the analysis of the “live hypothesis,” and can be successful against the strongest version of Evidentialism even without appeal to James’ broader pragmatism. If phenomenology cannot provide us with a criterion, then what is its business? In chapter 6 I argued that it should be sensitizing us to feelings like the feeling of Evidenz. In that chapter I was forced to defend an idea not yet adequately established (or articulated) in the more historical portions of this book, viz. that feelings of believing can go unnoticed. Defending that phenomenological claim (which becomes a premise in my Concluding Argument, below) required a foray into yet another voluminous literature of psychology. The argument that we can be oblivious to, or attend to, feelings of believing can ultimately only be established analogically. The analogy with the intensification and attenuation of pleasures and pains was meant to be suggestive for conclusions about doxastic sentiments more generally.

THE CONCLUDING ARGUMENT The preceding chapters may be read and judged (if not believed!) individually, by the standards of each particular case. But there has also been, I hope, a detectable theme amongst them: doxastic sentimentalism, viz. various conceptualizations of feeling not merely affiliated with

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believing but characteristic of believing, in the history of modern epistemology. My hope has been to showcase, if not sentimentalism’s neglect in the standardly told history of philosophy, its centrality for that tradition’s most influential figures. In conclusion now, I would like to also make the case for a more directly philosophical significance of this historical endeavor. One way to make such a case would be to try to argue that the theoretical commonality in these figures constitutes a lineage. We might make that case for the complicated relationship between Husserl and Descartes, for example, or perhaps even between Husserl and James. However, there was no sentimentalist “school,” at least not for beliefy-feelings, let alone one that could tie these figures of the past to our contemporary philosophers of mind. What I propose instead, here in conclusion, is that the insight about the variety and ubiquity of conceptualizations of feeling be construed by us as one ground for a concluding inference. When read together the previous chapters comprise the beginnings of an argument. The Concluding Argument: (P1) Beliefs may be accompanied by feeling. (P2) A feeling characteristic of believing has been conceptualized in a variety of different ways. (Hume treated it as force and vivacity. Descartes called it clarity. Contemporary psychologists call it a metacognitive feeling. Husserl conceived it as Evidenz. James thought of it as the sentiment of rationality.) (P3) These conceptualizations ought not be confused for one another. (THE SENTIMENT OF RATIONALITY is not EVIDENZ , e.g., which is not in turn CLARITY, etc.) (P4) Such feelings can go unnoticed. I.e., we are not always focally attentive to everything that we feel. (P5) Noticing or attending to a doxastic sentiment is epistemically virtuous, even if the mere feeling of it is not. (C) We ought to attend to our own feelings of believing.

I do not take the conclusion of this argument, construed at this quite general level, to be innovative or particularly controversial. Instead it counsels a rather staid and sensible epistemic attitude, modeled by so many (if not quite all) of history’s great philosophers. It encourages reflection on convictions, and on the evidence one may or may not

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possess for one’s own convictions. It is the first and most important line of defense against prejudice and bias: the conscientious desire to root out one’s own prejudice and bias. And it expresses a basic value of the Enlightenment, viz. the underpinnings of at least moderate Evidentialism, akin to the sort discussed in chapter 5, albeit here with a slight phenomenological twist. That too, should not be surprising. Each of the philosophers discussed above was working within that Enlightenment tradition, and the form of Evidentialism extolled here is expressed by all of them in one way or another. I hope that the first premise of the Concluding Argument has been sufficiently established by chapter 1. Just to repeat, in that chapter I argued that the strongest thesis of Doxastic Sentimentalism, viz. that believing simply is feeling (in Hume’s case the feeling of force and vivacity), is implausible, but that a more modest version of Hume’s thesis has better prospects. If the subsequent four chapters did not demonstrate those prospects, even in cases where they might otherwise have seemed dim, then I must give up the remainder of the argument now. I will not be able to motivate sentimentalism any further than I have already with this book’s chapters on Hume and Descartes, Husserl and James. Similarly for the second premise. It is only after engaging some of the work in the history of philosophy that one is in a position to reasonably assess that premise’s truth or falsity. Those details are required in order to make a judgment. But that is exactly the position that I have attempted to put us in presently, by walking us through several, if not all, pertinent cases. I hope for us to be judgers about this particular premise rather than mere believers. Were any of the historical chapters read singly that would remain insufficient warrant for the second premise of the Concluding Argument. But taken together, they jointly support at least provisional judgment in its favor. My claim here is of course not to have deduced the premise. I have merely drawn your attention to the highly suggestive, available evidence. The third premise is a normative claim that I have not defended. Frankly, I am not at all clear about how to defend it, other than by identifying it as one of my own basic beliefs (and not merely for purposes of this book) and inviting you to believe it too. I cannot say “judge” in this context, because I have not provided any evidence for us to consider. Perhaps it is an instance of some more general instrumental

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principle? For example: if one wants to understand something, then one ought to treat that something’s parts as discrete? That would still only capture one sort of analytical understanding. But I think that such a principle would be sufficient for purposes of grounding the third premise, were it true. Still, what would recommend that more general principle itself? Is its justification practical or theoretical? I have nothing more to say about the third premise, beyond identifying it as one of my guiding convictions. 1 The task of the previous chapter was arguing for the fourth premise. Since at least Huxley and Clifford, Evidentialists have claimed that we ought to believe on the basis of evidence. We saw in chapter 5 James’ criticism of the strong, second clause of that Evidentialist doctrine, viz. that we ought only to believe on the basis evidence. We also encountered that Jamesian criticism’s limits. Indeed, there are cases where belief beyond evidence is permissible, but I argued that those are restricted to cases where more definitive evidence is unavailable, i.e., they must be bounded by a sentiment for the available evidence. In the previous chapter my goal was to put a phenomenological twist on that traditional Evidentialist doctrine. A more phenomenological conclusion would be that we ought to believe (if not only believe) on the basis of noticing our experience of Evidenz, i.e., we ought to attend to doxastic sentiments in order to intensify or attenuate them, or otherwise make believing more rational as a motivator of our action. And that is to say: we ought to raise our feelings to judgments. In order to begin making this final case I first had to argue for the distinction necessary for any phenomenologically adequate account of consciousness or attention: feelings in the center vs. feelings on the periphery.

1. Well, I guess I do have at least one alternative: We might be tempted to subsume the third premise under a somewhat different principle. Consider a “Principle of Accuracy:” cognition is true (or accurate) when it represents differences in the world as differences, and false (inaccurate) when it does not represent worldly differences as differences. That would be an injunction to “carve nature at its joints,” i.e., construe those worldly differences as real and not as mere artifacts of cognition. But there is such a thing as a distinction without a difference, and it is quite possible, especially in the history of philosophy, to represent a state-of-affairs such that “two” things appear distinct when in fact they are not. If I have done anything like that in the preceding chapters I would consider it damning reproach, if not a wholesale indictment of this “Principle of Accuracy” itself, or of the Concluding Argument’s third premise. Regardless, and despite the third premise’s indispensability for the Concluding Argument, I will not attempt to justify it further. I simply invite you to believe it with me.

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TACIT BELIEFS, WHAT That leaves only the fifth premise to consider. But before that final consideration, let us return to the Skeptical Challenges beginning this book. In the Introduction I proposed three Skeptical Challenges, the second of which was that there are no such things as feelings characteristic of believing. A distinction invoked in the Introduction proves quite important here, because few would deny that feelings may be affiliated with believing, but the interpretive theses offered in the previous chapters were stronger: in each case that a philosopher posited a feeling characteristic of believing. 2 It is worthwhile, now in conclusion, to remind ourselves that skepticism of that stronger claim is alive and well in our contemporary philosophy of mind. For example: When believing or intending something, there isn’t anything distinctively phenomenological about the act. True, one’s occurrent beliefs may be accompanied by an image, sensation, or pseudo-linguistic or auditory appearance, but they are regularly not. There does not seem to be a phenomenological type that, through introspection, enables us to distinguish a belief from an intention, judgment or supposition. 3

Our recognition of distinctively cognitive phenomenology is waxing rather than waning, but Gunther here expresses a reigning orthodoxy, if not a consensus: feeling has nothing particularly to do with believing. In our time such an understanding is neither unreasonable nor uncom-

2. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for Lexington Books, for pushing me to emphasize this point. 3. York H. Gunther, “The Phenomenology and Intentionality of Emotion,” Philosophical Studies 117 (2004): 44.

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mon. 4 A small subset of our total number of beliefs may, at any moment, be reflected upon, but the vast majority of believing happens “behind our backs,” so to speak, in the sense that we do not seem to be consciously aware of it. Hence the traditional distinction, hinted at in Gunther’s passage above, of occurrent beliefs from tacit beliefs. An example of tacit believing, appealed to in my Introduction, was the belief that “the roof is not about to collapse.” Everyone calmly located in a particular room at a particular moment believes something of the sort, but few explicitly reflect upon their belief, i.e., are “conscious of” it in the most direct sense, at least not until the contrary possibility arises. If there are such things as tacit beliefs, and if the vast majority of believing is in fact this kind of tacit believing, then how can even the most modest version of doxastic sentimentalism be true? Here we should be careful: “do not seem to be consciously aware,” and “conscious of it in the most direct sense,” i.e., are not focally attentive to. One traditional philosophical analysis of tacit believing, the analysis leading to the discussion of Gilbert Ryle in the Introduction, is the analysis of believing as fundamentally dispositional. On that account beliefs are nothing but dispositions to behave in particular ways under particular (actual or counterfactual) circumstances. Traditionally, sets of conditional statements were appealed to, the antecedents of which were supposed to describe those circumstances, i.e., the believer’s desires or preferences conjoined with various possible environments af-

4. Another example, from a recent book review: “Aristotle insisted that the best acts are not just performed reliably and for the right reasons, but also with the right kinds of emotional affect. The best act of generosity, for example, is performed warm-heartedly. The epistemologist does not have this kind of consideration to appeal to; whatever its plausibility in the ethical domain, affect is irrelevant in epistemology.” Mohan Matthen, review of Knowledge, Dexterity, and Attention: A Theory of Epistemic Agency, by Abrol Fairweather and Carlos Montemayor, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews: An Electronic Journal, December 23, 2017, https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/knowledge-dexterity-and-attention-a-theory-of-epistemicagency/ Yet another expression of the orthodoxy can be found in Michael Tye, Tense Bees and Shell-Shocked Crabs: Are Animals Conscious? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), xiv, xvi, 4–5, etc. Yet another is Pascal Engel, “Sosa on the Normativity of Belief,” Philosophical Studies 166 (2013): 619. Explicit argument for the orthodox view can be found in William S. Robinson, “Thoughts Without Distinctive Non-Imagistic Phenomenology,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 70, no. 3 (2005): 534–61. A defense of the treatment of propositional attitudes as phenomenal is Søren Harnow Klausen, “The Phenomenology of Propositional Attitudes,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7, no. 4 (2008): 445–62, but beliefs are excluded from Klausen’s defense on grounds that they “can be unconscious and purely dispositional” (Ibid., 447). A notable exception to the orthodoxy is Eric Schwitzgebel, “A Phenomenal, Dispositional Account of Belief,” Noûs 36, no. 2 (2002): 249–75.

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fording or thwarting them. The believer’s putative behaviors were supposedly expressed by the consequents of such conditionals. It is important to notice that a worked out set of such statements, i.e., a complete set of subjunctive conditionals specifying the set of behaviors possibly produced by a particular belief, in all of its counterfactual glory, would thereby reduce the belief to those (possible) behaviors. Such a set has never been produced. It is a philosophical fiction. A complete set of such conditionals has not been produced for even one single belief for even one single person. It is difficult not to conclude that a purely dispositional account of believing, thereby, and much like the supposed phenomenal reduction of perceptual statements to statements about “sense data,” is refuted. Nevertheless, it has remained a powerful fantasy. The main difference between this dispositionalist fantasy and the phenomenalist fantasy is that many philosophers today still remain residual dispositionalists, albeit of some weaker sort or another. We are still in the grip of that theory. The power of the fantasy comes from the fact that, in broad outline, at least some of our desires/preferences, e.g., our most basic desires, are easily enough surmised. My belief that the building I occupy is structurally sound, for example, on the purely dispositional analysis is nothing but my propensity to remain inside and not flee. We can easily know that this is my belief because we can obviously know that I would not desire to have a roof collapse on me. But the power of the fantasy also derives from the fact that beliefs are tightly wedded to actions (it has even been supposed, e.g., by William James, that they are well-nigh the same.) The analysis of believing as exclusively dispositional survives today in part due to the transparency of our most basic desires, but also in part due to the closeness of the connection with doings. Consider, however, that it would be equally logical to reverse the order of explanation and define actions as expressive of beliefs, given the appropriate circumstances of desire or preference. Why have there been far fewer defenders of this alternative order of explanation? In a word: “measurability.” (Given the current state of the art in the cognitive sciences.) We have not completely, for all of our contemporary cognitivism, fully escaped the shadow of our behaviorist forebears. Ryle, that crypto-behaviorist, took actions to be theoretically basic because they are the sorts of things (supposedly) most measurable (and certainly more easily measurable), and he defined believing in their

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terms. We have been enthralled ever since. An equally plausible, if less attractive, position would be to treat believing as basic, and to define behavior as what is put onto doxastic display. What is it to flee a building, if not express one’s belief that it is crumbling? Running away says something about what the believer believes is happening. There are, of course, insuperable difficulties in neatly correlating beliefs with actions. Merely watching the behaviors of the building’s former occupants, how does one know they believe the building is collapsing rather than, say, caught on fire? How does one know they are not all simultaneously venturing out for a jog? There could be clues in their micro-behaviors, e.g., furtive glances at walls and ceilings or foundations, as opposed to testing doors for heat, or pauses to lace up running shoes. But it is important to notice that these practical difficulties of belief attribution remain, whether we define belief in terms of behavior or behavior in terms of belief. Such difficulties support neither the traditional dispositional theory nor the less-attractive expressivist one. It is also important to notice that such difficulties of belief attribution, i.e., of reading behaviors to discover underlying beliefs, and then using belief attributions to predict future behaviors, etc., are exactly those practical difficulties every social creature engages in every day, in our myriad and innumerable dealings with our fellow creatures. We have evolved to do this job surprisingly well. (Some of us better than others, it is true, but let us say “surprisingly well” on aggregate.) Presumably, there are evolutionary and developmental reasons that we are good at belief attribution. But that sort of naturalism has not been my business. No one knew better than Ryle that we do the task, more or less well, on the basis of nothing but the evidence in others’ behaviors. But from this Rylean truism it does not follow that beliefs are nothing but dispositions. Ryle was right that others’ beliefs are principally

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known through evidence in their behaviors, but wrong if he concluded that believing is nothing but behavioral disposition. 5 Let’s assume for a moment (only a philosopher would deny this) that it is possible to misattribute beliefs, i.e., attribute a belief to someone and get that attribution wrong. 6 It is profitable for philosophers, even now, to think about what would be required for belief misattributions to be real. For one thing, belief attribution would have to be different from believing itself. In particular, for a belief to be misattributed, it must be the case that the attribution is insufficient for it. 7 Whether or not the intentionality of a mental state is wholly reducible to a so-called “intentional stance,” the mental state itself could not be wholly reducible to its attribution. 8 But for another, if reductive behaviorism is false, then there is a bit more happening in the believer than the exter5. So the word ‘belief’ is not merely, in Ryle’s idiom, a “tendency verb” or a “motive word,” but also, pace Ryle, a report upon feelings. Cf. Ryle, Concept of Mind, 133–35. Ryle was certainly a dispositionalist, but it is difficult to ascertain whether he was additionally a reductive dispositionalist, i.e., whether he treated believing as nothing but behavioral dispositions. For a good discussion see Schwitzgebel, “A Phenomenal, Dispositional Account of Belief,” 259–60. For the reasons Schwitzgebel mentions there, I will refrain here from attributing the reductive doctrine to Ryle, despite the passage I’ve just quoted. An example of a reductive dispositional analysis can be found in Ruth Barcan Marcus, “Some Revisionary Proposals About Belief and Believing,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 50, Supplement (1990): 140. 6. Eliminativists, though they do not always face this challenge forthrightly, encounter a significant difficulty here. Their theory owes an account of belief attribution error, but on their theory there are no such things as beliefs, really. BELIEF is merely a posit of “folk psychology,” used for purposes of explaining behavior (taken to be theoretically more basic, an assumption they share with the dispositionalists). On their account all belief attributions are strictly speaking false, and so too the misattributions, a fortiori. But that means distinguishing the attribution of “belief” that does a relatively better explanatory job from the attribution of “belief” that does a relatively worse explanatory job cannot be a difference between correct attribution and misattribution, strictly speaking. On the Eliminativists’ account, that difference must merely be explanatory power, rather than any real psychological or neurobiological difference. But in that case whence, i.e., from what corner of the real world, that explanatory power? Eliminativists cannot say, on pain of abandoning Eliminativism in favor of some weaker form of reductionism. 7. A consequence is, at least, what Dennett describes as a “milder form of realism.” Cf. Daniel C. Dennett, The Intentional Stance (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1987), 28. “On the milder sort of realism I am advocating, there is no fact of the matter of exactly which beliefs and desires a person has in these degenerate cases [i.e., cases where people hold contradictory beliefs or are self-deceived], but this is not a surrender to relativism or subjectivism, for when and why there is no fact of the matter is itself a matter of objective fact” (28–29). Unlike Dennett, sentimentalists advocate stronger realism than this. My point here is merely that at least Dennett’s “milder form of realism” follows. 8. I have Dennett in mind now because, while he stakes a middle ground between Eliminativist and so-called “strong realist” (ibid., 28) theories, his “interpretivism” still takes behavior as explanatorily basic; the intentional stance comes down to its predictive power. Dennett remains one of the chief spokesmen for the Rylean legacy.

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nal evidence on which the belief attribution is based, i.e., believing is more than the mere (possible) behaviors witnessed and interpreted by others. I raise this general point, here in conclusion, merely to highlight what I have been suggesting all along plays the role of that “bit more:” feelings, instantiated in (ways yet to be fully explained, but eminently explainable) interactions between the believer, its nervous system, and its environment. We can formulate, within the context of psychology’s investigation of various phenomena of attention (a psychology now advanced quite a bit beyond behaviorism), rivals to the older philosophical account of believing as nothing but behavioral disposition. A rival analysis of occurrent beliefs is that they are truth-takings felt because attended to, i.e., beliefs noticed by some subject at some particular moment in time. On this analysis tacit beliefs are simply characteristic or affiliated feelings that lie within the periphery of the subject’s consciousness or attention. This is not to say that believing is not also dispositional. Doxastic sentimentalism is quite consistent with treating belief as dispositionally expressed, described, or attributed. It merely rivals the overweening dispositionalist claim that beliefs are nothing but dispositions. Doxastic sentimentalism is inconsistent merely with what is sometimes labeled reductive behaviorism, or what is now sometimes called “traditional” (i.e., reductive) dispositionalism. 9 An important, underappreciated, part of this rival analysis is that tacit beliefs do not go completely unfelt. For example, there may or may not be a characteristic feeling of believing that the building one occupies is structurally sound. But in addition to its characteristic Evidenz (or what have you) that belief is certainly affiliated with a variety of more mundane feelings. One of those affiliated feelings, particularly important for the example I’ve chosen, is a feeling of security. What is it like to feel that a roof is not about to collapse on one’s head? It is not like nothing. It feels like safety, and that is not nothing. People who say there is no such thing as the feeling of safety are, of course, privileged in a certain way. Their own feeling of safety has grown invisible to them; it has become so constant in their experience that they are able (let us say 9. For differentiation of more recent “liberal dispositionalisms” from this “traditional dispositionalism” see Eric Schwitzgebel, “Belief,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta, ed., Summer 2019 Edition, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2019/ entries/belief/.

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in good conscience) to deny it exists. But that does not make it nonexistent. It merely means the person is oblivious to their own feeling of safety. When such a feeling becomes suddenly absent, that same person will be the first to notice. The sudden absence of an otherwise constant feeling makes the feeling salient again (i.e., captures attention). One would hope that when such feelings jump back from the periphery into the center of attention, with them would also jump a richer insight into what it was like to have been feeling them (peripherally) all along. Alas, that is not universally the case. Correlatively, the moment we begin to feel the roof is no longer in danger of collapse, after a period in which we suspected it might, is that moment the belief is not merely felt again but attended to, and perhaps felt as much as anything can be. Affiliated feelings of believing may fade, and the feeling of security may slowly slip back out of the center of consciousness/attention and into the periphery. But that is just to say that our belief is experienced in the characteristic manner of tacit believing, which is really the most basic phenomenology of believing simpliciter. So unlike the First Skeptical Challenge, the Second Skeptical Challenge has a direct reply (if not a complete solution). My reply to the Second Skeptical Challenge is this analysis of tacit believing, not as something completely unconscious or un-attended-to, but as lying in the periphery of consciousness or attention. The last chapter’s foray into the psychology of attention uncovered components of believing that went unnoticed even by Gilbert Ryle. The fresher psychology of believing is more phenomenological, i.e., the psychology that treats belief-states (and/or their affiliated or characteristic feelings) as capable of being fore-grounded or back-grounded by attention, just like any other object. This reply (if not complete solution) to the Second Skeptical challenge suggests an analogous response to the Third Skeptical Challenge. The reason that feelings appear to have such different temporal profiles than the beliefs with which they affiliate, or are characteristically about, is because they frequently do. In particular, a belief may be attended to for a period significantly shorter than the feeling of that belief itself. Perhaps there is a duration of explicit feeling that neatly indexes the duration of attention, rather than the duration of belief. But that does not preclude a significantly longer duration of implicit feeling in the periphery of consciousness or attention. Feelings themselves (and not

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merely their beliefs) may also occupy focal attention or be relegated to the periphery, at one time or another. Readers who have lasted all the way from the Introduction through chapter 1 and chapter 6 now to this conclusion, will observe that this response to the Third Skeptical Challenge requires not only the claims about attention from chapter 6, but also the distinction made at the end of chapter 1, viz. between Hume’s versions of sentimentalism and the weaker versions of that doctrine. Feelings either affiliated with or characteristic of believing could not have a temporal profile distinct from the beliefs that they accompany (or are about) if those beliefs were simply those feelings. But in the same way that my headache can last significantly longer than my attention to my headache (and the intensity of my feeling of headache with it), my belief about the building can last significantly longer than my attention to it. It is that shift in attention that frequently accompanies the shift in feeling. But that is not the only possible response to the Third Skeptical Challenge. Unlike the great philosophers discussed above, I myself have been a bit bashful about implying that beliefs never slip entirely from consciousness. Such a claim would not be required for many of the points already made, e.g., that so long as I retain some feeling of security, however subtle and un-attended-to, my belief about the structural integrity of my roof does not. The Even More Modest Doxastic Sentimentalist might argue that his or her preferred feeling characteristic of belief always remains, if not in the center of consciousness then at least in its periphery. But the weaker forms of sentimentalism need not. 10 If I did not myself, anywhere in this book, in my own voice, stake that even more modest claim, that would make me considerably more timorous than Hume, or Descartes, or Husserl, or James, who each claimed not only that there are feelings affiliated with believing, but also that there is a particular feeling characteristic of belief. Let us say that they were all wrong, and that there is no single thing that it feels like to believe something. Still, who would deny there are many feelings affiliated with belief? The dynamic relationship between such feelings and their truth-takings is not no relationship at all. And for this reason, and because of its complexity, belief is a topic particularly 10. Consider one final kind of sentimentalism. Less Modally Modest Doxastic Sentimentalism: For all x, if x is believed, then the manner of x’s conception is sufficient for a possible feeling, made actual in either the center or periphery of consciousness/attention.

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amenable to phenomenological analysis. It might initially seem as if belief were a particularly poor topic for phenomenology, because there might not seem to be any feelings associated with believing. But that is an illusion characteristic of consciousness. It is because beliefs are so often invisible to their believers that the reverse is actually the case.

ATTENTION AND VIRTUE, BELIEVING WHITHER Nevertheless, that leaves the fifth premise of the Concluding Argument undefended. I would like to make at least some desultory remarks about its provenance, here in conclusion, and hint at its prospects, though I will not claim to have defended it in this book. First recall its formulation above: “(P5) Noticing or attending to a doxastic sentiment is epistemically virtuous, even if the mere feeling of it is not.” Imagine that we instantiated “a doxastic sentiment” here with one of the sentiments discussed in a previous chapter, e.g., Husserl’s feeling of imperfect Evidenz. There would then still remain two quite distinct claims packed into the premise, each requiring further support: (P5H1) Attending to imperfect Evidenz is epistemically virtuous, and (P5H2) the mere feeling of it is not. In addition, each of those two claims would have a normative and an empirical aspect. The empirical aspect of a claim of the form (P52) was discussed in some detail in chapter 3. The psychology of overconfidence remains incomplete, of course, and one might hope for a more precise definition of what is meant by “epistemically virtuous.” But there is already significant evidence, at least as concerns feelings of confidence, that they are not themselves particularly virtuous, epistemically speaking. Attend instead to something like (P5H1). It would require that there is such a thing as the feeling of imperfect Evidenz. Let us take Husserl at his word for the moment. We would then require some further argument that there is such a thing as the peripheral feeling of Evidenz, and a focally attentive/conscious feeling of it. You might not think I did a good enough job motivating that possibility in the previous chapter. Fair enough. But grant that point too, for the nonce. Then ask the following question: if there were such a thing as Evidenz, why would focally attentive/consciousness of it be epistemically virtuous, i.e., why

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would attending to something like Evidenz be particularly good for a knower? There would be several different ways to go about making this final normative step in the Concluding Argument. A variety of different possibilities spring up, corresponding to the variety of different paths taken by traditional ethics, i.e., ways of thinking about the relationship of actions to the good, and about the good itself. We are only just beginning to understand how centrally involved attention is in the attributions of moral virtue. 11 But the kind of good that attention to doxastic sentiment might engender would almost certainly be an epistemic good. 12 And attention to epistemic goods is even younger as a discipline. Though I have not defended the claim, in conclusion let me confess that I do not believe that we should allow something like Evidenz (if there be such a thing) to languish in the periphery of consciousnesses; we ought instead to bring it to the center of attention. Perhaps it is too strong to say that we are obligated to always attend to feelings of the sort, i.e., to fixate upon them in quite the way I have in preceding pages. And I am aware that there is nothing quite so obnoxious as someone who tells you that you must pay more attention to your own feelings. Nevertheless, I appear to be that guy. We should attend to Evidenz quite a bit more carefully than we typically do, because reflection on it may reveal whether such a feeling is (or is not) justified, i.e., may engage us in the processes of rational deliberation that has the potential to raise a belief to a judgment. My hope is that someday each of us will feel as shocked and foolish when we catch ourselves oblivious to doxastic sentiments as we do now when we fail to notice a psychologist walking across camera in a gorilla-suit. Of course, that is not currently our situation. Currently, philosophers are able to debate whether doxas11. See, for example, Richard Yetter Chappell and Helen Yetter-Chappell, “Virtue and Salience,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94, no. 3 (2016): 449–63. 12. Recent work on this topic, particularly related to the capture and consumption of attention by emotion is Michael S. Brady, Emotional Insight: The Epistemic Role of Emotional Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Brady footnotes (ibid., 159) Thomas Reid as father of the idea that properly directed attention is an epistemic virtue. See also the discussion he cites by Terence Cuneo, “Signs of Value: Reid on the Evidential Role of Feelings in Moral Judgement,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 41, no. 1 (2006): 69–91. Brady’s approach differs from my own, insofar as he is concerned with emotion’s role (epistemically good or bad) in directing attention, as opposed to the epistemic value of having a feeling as attention’s target. He traces his approach to Peter Goldie, “Emotion, Reason and Virtue,” in Emotion, Evolution, and Rationality, eds. Dylan Evans and Pierre Cruse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004): 249–67, and criticizes Goldie as wedded too tightly to a perceptual model. See Brady, Emotional Insight, 170–75.

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tic sentiments even exist. I have been at pains to argue, not merely that they do, but for their ubiquity in the periphery of attention/consciousness. If a world came to pass where people were scandalized by their obliviousness to Evidenz, why would that world be considerably better than our own? What kind of normativity is packed into the concluding claim? The first part of the fifth premise of the Concluding Argument is that attention to doxastic sentiment is epistemically virtuous. But that should not be confused for the argument’s conclusion, viz. that we ought to attend. It is commitment to the conclusion that prompts hunting for explicit premises for our beliefs. This process is typically retrospective, we typically seek justifications for beliefs that we already possess. This may make us prone to “cognitive bias,” but it also does not reduce the value of searching for them. In conclusion a few words of caution are in order, even as I try to encourage imagination of various counterfactual sentimental scenarios: the conclusion of the Concluding Argument follows neatly from its fifth premise, but not vice versa. Neither should the fifth premise be confused for the more general thesis that the mere experience of Evidenz (peripheral or at the center of attention/consciousness) is epistemically virtuous. In the previous chapter I might have suggested something akin to that latter inference, i.e., from the epistemic virtuousness of an experience to the virtuousness of attention to it. But, upon reflection, that cannot be correct. I cannot say, on Husserl’s behalf, that attention to Evidenz is good simply because Evidenz is good (even on the presumption that the simple feeling of it would be good.) The previous chapter’s analogy with pain’s intensification/attenuation was suggestive, but here in the axiology such analogizing becomes especially strained. An inference from a peripheral feeling being good, to the conclusion that intensification of that feeling would be better (even on the presumption that attention would intensify it), is a bridge too far. Because even if someone had, by this point in my argument, firmly established that there is such a thing as a peripheral feeling of Evidenz, as opposed to a centrally attentive/conscious feeling of Evidenz, the relationship of the goodness of that feeling at the center to the goodness of that feeling on the periphery would still need substantially more careful treatment than I have provided. Attention to certainties, if not Evidenz particularly, may instead be especially important for mitigating them.

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All of this is merely to say that I think (P5) of the Concluding Argument, however instantiated, puts us within the ambit of the (relatively) new program of virtue epistemology. 13 And while this does not take my argument all the way home, I conclude simply by suggesting that the proper place for any further investigation of affective sensitivities to belief and evidence, including that phenomenologically inflected sensitivity suggested by Husserl, viz. attention to Evidenz, would be virtue epistemology. That newly opened territory is commonly divided between so-called virtue reliabilists, and virtue responsibilists. Roughly, the former treat epistemic virtues as cognitive faculties or competences; 14 the latter treat epistemic virtues as virtues of character, and/or capable of cultivation or habituation. 15 Attention, including attention to feeling, has particular potential in this regard, because, while attention is clearly an “intellectual faculty” it is also one that can be cultivated in

13. The territory is considered to have been opened by Ernest Sosa, “The Raft and the Pyramid: Coherence versus Foundations in the Theory of Knowledge,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 5, no. 1 (1980): 3–26, and the trail then blazed by Linda Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 14. In addition to Sosa, the list of reliabilists also typically includes John Greco, “Skepticism, Reliabilism, and Virtue Epistemology,” in The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 5 (2000): 139–47, and Achieving Knowledge: A Virtue-Theoretic Account of Epistemic Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Alvin Goldman. For example: “I shall assume that the virtues include belief formation based on sight, hearing, memory, reasoning in certain “approved” ways, and so forth. The vices include intellectual processes like forming beliefs by guesswork, wishful thinking, and ignoring contrary evidence.” Alvin I. Goldman, Liasons: Philosophy Meets the Cognitive and Social Sciences (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), 158. Also Peter J. Graham, “The Function of Perception,” in Virtue Epistemology Naturalized: Bridges Between Virtue Epistemology and Philosophy of Science, ed. Abrol Fairweather (New York: Springer, 2014), 13–31. Of particular interest for me, because they treat attentional states as the fundamental units of analysis, are Abrol Fairweather and Carlos Montemayor, Knowledge, Dexterity, and Attention: A Theory of Epistemic Agency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 15. In addition to Zagzebski the list of responsibilists typically includes Lorraine Code, Epistemic Responsibility (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1987), and “Toward a ‘Responsibilist’ Epistemology,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 45, no. 1 (1984): 29–50, Jason Baehr, The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtues and Virtue Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), James A. Montmarquet, Epistemic Virtue and Doxastic Responsibility (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993), and Christopher Hookway, “How to be a Virtue Epistemologist,” in Intellectual Virtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology, eds. Michael DePaul and Linda Zagzebski (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 183–202.

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ways more typically associated with character traits. 16 Whether attention to a sentiment like Evidenz should be construed as an intellectual faculty or competence, as opposed to a trait of character, I will myself not pre-judge. I simply conclude here that, as Husserl’s claim about imperfect Evidenz rises or falls with the (relatively) new psychology of attention, so too the goodness or badness of such a feeling, and attention to it, plunges directly into the (relatively) new territory of virtue epistemology.

THREE PLATITUDES As a final word, I would like to distinguish my conclusion from a trio of platitudes, each of which is quite true in its own right (apropos so far as platitudes go), but none of which were meant as the conclusion of this book or its final argument. The three platitudes, despite being anodyne, should leave us all a bit cold. I have hopes that we have been given reasons for feeling a bit warmer. The first platitude is that we ought to distrust feelings of certainty. That is a fact. The mere certainty of something is not enough to establish its truth. One of the great virtues of philosophy is inculcation of this conviction in our young, from a tender age. Philosophers tend to believe this first platitude to their bones. Descartes himself believed it, despite the Clarity and Distinctness Principle. Belief in the first platitude may even be an important part of what attracts us to philosophy in the first place: the mere fact that we feel certain is no guarantee. In addition, we must have evidence and we must have some deliberations upon that evidence. Philosophy demands reflection, which at a minimum requires attention to evidence, but also often requires attention to the antecedent feelings for conclusions that may or may not be following from them. In the pages of this book, in order to focus on the simpler doxastic state, I bracketed all discussion of deliberation, i.e., the

16. Cf. Hookway, “Reasons for Belief,” 47–70, especially 62–70. Hookway discusses various roles for “being observant,” but does not classify being observant as a “full-blooded epistemic virtue” because he understands the latter to require “awareness of the relevance of what we observe to our cognitive needs” (67). An account of the difference between intellectual virtues of character, as opposed to intellectual faculties, talents, temperaments, or skills, has already been given by Baehr, The Inquiring Mind, 22–32.

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cognitive processes needed to raise beliefs to judgments. But there is no substitute for deliberation. While the platitude is correct, so far as it goes, and while belief in it may not be quite so commonplace as one would wish, nevertheless the first platitude is not equivalent to the conclusion of the Concluding Argument, though they belong in much the same family. 1st Platitude: We ought to distrust feelings of certainty. Conclusion of Concluding Arg.: We ought to attend to our own feelings of believing.

The first platitude is distinct from my conclusion, not only through appeal to certainty (rather than to a feeling under one of the more specific conceptualizations discussed above) but also in two other, interestingly related, ways. Both have to do with why distrusting certainties is so much more easily said than done. It is easy enough to diagnosis certainties in other people, and then proceed to distrust their certainties, especially when the certainties are not shared by oneself. It is considerably more difficult to distrust one’s own certainties. Indeed, on the strictest readings of the Evidenzprinzip (i.e., for the limit case of perfect Evidenz) that may not even be psychologically possible. The contrapositive of the Evidenzprinzip is that the degree to which something is not believed is the degree to which we do not feel Evidenz. Certainties work in a similar way: the greater a certainty, the more one feels it must be true, i.e., the more difficult distrust in it becomes. Insofar as one distrusts a certainty (i.e., does not assess it as having a high degree of subjective probability/credence), one already does not possess the feeling characteristic of (if not identical to) it. The more distrust, the less one’s own belief. It is true that we are sometimes able to perform the activity Descartes somewhat blithely referred to as “suspending judgment.” 17 But we do that only with a great degree of diligence and effort, and only for those certainties that we do not ourselves maximally feel. Distrusting one’s own certainties is much more easily said than done. But the first platitude is also weak for another, even more telling, reason: it is not at all obvious to us what our own certainties are. One 17. Cf. James on this point: “The greatest proof that a man is sui compos is his ability to suspend belief in presence of an emotionally exciting idea. To give this power is the highest result of education” (POP 2, 936).

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can be certain about something even when one does not notice (i.e., attend to) that certainty. This I take to be one of the main lessons of the previous chapter. But if that is the case, then attending to one’s own feelings of certainty is itself a cognitive, not to mention epistemic, achievement. What I offer here is merely the beginnings of an explanation of why it is so much easier to distrust others’ certainties, i.e., precisely because one does not have similar affect in relation to their content. Others’ certainties are not believed, i.e., not felt to be true. The interesting phenomenological insight here is that we frequently do not “feel,” i.e., are not focally attentive to, our own certainties even as we remain in their grip. Our own certainties, ironically, are often what are most hidden from us, insofar as they are tacit. The strongest feelings are the most unfelt. They are “unfelt” in the sense that they lie in the periphery of consciousness or attention. Typically, to be sure about something is not to have that certainty at the center of one’s consciousness/attention. That this is our situation is one of the important phenomenological conclusions on offer. Whether you have or have not been made as confident of it as I am, I hope that you will at least admit that it takes us a bit beyond the first platitude. It does so not by showing that the first platitude is false, but instead by staking a claim about why it must be true. Our conclusion here should not merely be that something like the Clarity and Distinctness Principle is false, but also that certainty is a feeling, and that it is a feeling that can go unnoticed by its possessor, despite the possibility that noticing would be good (epistemically speaking). A second platitude is that we should have the courage of our convictions. A striking thing about this second platitude and an interesting feature of pairs of platitudes more generally, I suppose, is that this one counsels almost exactly the opposite action. Whereas the first platitude counsels healthy skepticism with respect to one’s own beliefs, the second counsels trust in one’s beliefs, at least insofar as that trust is necessary for decisive action, the benefits of which might otherwise be lost. We should all strive to be decisive, and not dither like Hamlet. Both of the two platitudes are true, despite their (merely apparent) contradiction. As James reminded us, there are, of course, some circumstances in which one must leave off second-guessing in favor of faith. Timely, socially-coordinated actions (not to mention religious convic-

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tions, at least according to James) frequently demand this. Some actions are demanded rather immediately. But that does not mean that one must both trust and distrust one’s very same belief, in exactly the same respect, to exactly the same degree, at exactly the same time. The apparent contradiction only appears when the platitudes are applied rather more strictly than any prudential principle has a right to be. To reconcile them one need only notice the limits of the second. James was well aware of the advantages of courage in the domain of believing; better aware than most. But if there is such a thing as doxastic courage then there must also be doxastic foolhardiness. And, like the moral cases, the boundary between the courage and the foolhardiness is delimited (fuzzily, but delimited) not only by degrees of objective evidence available, but also one’s native or cultivated sensitivity to that evidence. That evidence need not be explicitly considered or reflected upon by a courageous believer in her moment of courage. In that moment she cannot be the full judge. But in that moment she is still a believer, i.e., she acts on her doxastic instincts. And for her instincts to be good ones, her feelings must either have been favorably endowed by nature, or they must have been tutored and cultivated, precisely to the degree that they are now tracking the objective probabilities and providing what in more leisurely circumstances would be a rational assessment of their thresholds. It is in part because those boundaries, too, are a bit fuzzy, not to mention felt, that there is such a thing as genuine courage. The domain of human possibility lies between what can reasonably be expected will come to pass and what can reasonably be expected will not, i.e., the domain of a permissible belief. A third platitude is that judging based upon mere sentiment is wrong. We are frequently told that we should not believe based merely upon how we feel, but instead believe on the basis of evidence. There is more than a kernel of truth to this. But it also presents us with another false dichotomy. (Readers by now will be able to guess that this last platitude is my least favorite of the three.) Merely believing something is so, even believing it vehemently, or as we sometimes like to say “with the very fiber of our being,” is not sufficient to make it so. If that were the case, then believing needn’t be guided by anything more than simply wishing really hard. And clearly that doesn’t work, at least not when the goal is believing truly. As we also like to say: “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”

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But from that it does not follow that feelings have no role in believing. Feeling ought not be sufficient for believing. But feelings often are. Feelings play quite a significant role in the beliefs we actually form, i.e., they are a key part of the actual psychological mechanisms that produce believing. Since James’ time, and increasingly, psychology teaches us that we do not believe exclusively on the basis of evidence. Perhaps we should. But any reasonable account of how we ought to believe must also take into consideration those mechanisms by which we naturally believe, even if only to school them or cultivate them, i.e., even if only to make them more rational via resistance or endorsement, or otherwise raise them to the level of judgment. But it also does not follow that feeling has no role in how we ought to believe, and not merely because believers like us can never be perfectly rational. It is also because feeling is necessary for gauging the limits of what would be rational. James argued that we must believe, in some cases. I argued on his behalf that we may believe, given that our feelings about what counts as a “live hypothesis” are already evidencesensitive. But where does that leave us? I have taken a step further by suggesting not only that feeling’s role in belief formation constrains how we ought to believe (not just for the normative demand to be psychologically realistic, and not just for it to be epistemically appropriate), but also that it ought to be the object of attention. Were such feelings to track evidence they would already be virtuous. Attention to them then has the potential to make them more so. And were they not, attention to them might aid the resistance. So while it is true that judging based on nothing but sentiment would be wrong, we must also remember that believing is always sentimental. And judging based on a carefully attended-to and cultivated doxastic sentiment is something quite different from believing based on sentiments that remain wild and unschooled. In a famous aphorism about “enemies of truth” [Feinde der Wahrheit], Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “Ueberzeugungen sind gefährlichere Feinde der Wahrheit, als Lügen.” 18 But I humbly suggest that what Nietzsche was really talking about there, when he was referring to “con18. “Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, IV/2, Hrsg. Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1967), 329. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale, Human, All Too Human [1886] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 179.

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victions” [Ueberzeugungen], was believing. I suggest this because, humbly again, and now pace Nietzsche, the truth itself has no enemies. Nothing harms the truth. But Nietzsche’s aphorism was not meant to be about the “mobile army of metaphors,” let alone the transcendent Truth, so much as about the human virtue of believing truly. 19 And that is not an easy virtue to possess. It is a virtue that does have a lot of enemies: a lot of enemies. An individual, trying to believe truly, encounters a bewildering variety of obstacles: limited information, misinformation, propaganda, non-ideal perceptual situations, fatigue or intoxication, the inexperience of youth, the doddering habits of old age, cognitive biases of every stripe, including overconfidence, but also an unholy host of others, inattention and inattentional blindness, prejudices, dreams, cowardice, irrational exuberance, confusion, perhaps even an evil demon. Sometimes people just baldly lie to us, straight to our faces! In our own times the lies only seem to proliferate. We believers, insofar as we are committed to believing truly, we have many enemies to our virtue. Amongst that host are the two Nietzsche singled out for comparison: convictions and lies. And that comparison is worthy of aphorizing. Convictions are dangerous. But isn’t that a strangely cautious proclamation, coming from the pen of Nietzsche? Wasn’t he the philosopher who told us to “live dangerously,” perhaps most especially when it comes to believing? We can imagine the ghost of Descartes nodding down in approval, or the ghost of William James scowling down in dissent. One of the great advantages of having read those philosophers carefully, I hope, is increased sensitivity to the details and difficulties of conviction, and to the difference between the feeling of certainty construed as force and vivacity, or clarity, or Evidenz, or the sentiment of rationality. Convictions may be even more dangerous enemies of believing truly than lies, but that is all the more reason to attend to them carefully, and to distinguish them from other closely related feelings. Insofar as we are men and women, and not mere children, our judgments are based upon reasons. But insofar as we are men and women, and not mere robots, our judgments are based upon felt experience. Both James and Husserl were wise to this, i.e., both Husserl and 19. For distinction of truth from yet another truth-related virtue see Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

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James were wise to the origins and limits of calculative deliberation. Deliberation is absolutely vital. But if all of our believing were merely its product, i.e., if all of our beliefs were full-blown judgments, then we would be quite a bit more rational than we in fact are. Perhaps we ought to be more rational. Perhaps all of our beliefs ought to be judgments. But for better or worse they are not. We possess beliefs and judgments both. We live for the most part (and proximally) in our certainties. The latter are closely affiliated with feelings, i.e., affects, and are not merely the conclusions of reasoned argument. Knowing when we have them, or when we have had a suspicion confirmed or refuted, or when a chance has allowed the hazarding of a risky venture, is as much a matter of guts and skill as careful planning and calculation. Not every impulse should be indulged, of course. Nothing said here should be taken to have suggested that careful deliberation is not the very best, the very most effective and appropriate, and the very most trustworthy tool in the knower’s toolbox. It certainly is. No true philosopher would say otherwise. But what is rationality for? Having a brain full of stuff is useful because we are not merely brains. We live in a world, and in our feelings. Our feelings are potentially useful too, if often ignored and neglected, for the training of our heads.

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INDEX

Index absorption, 222–224, 223n3, 226, 228n10, 230–236, 235n26–235n27, 240–241, 244, 252; skilled-coping, 223n3, 224, 224n5 Adams, Joe K., 109, 109n10 Adams, Pauline Austin, 109, 109n10 Aikin, Scott F., 190n5, 200n23, 202n27, 203n30, 217n55 Alicke, Mark D., 119n56, 138 Allison, Henry, 35, 35n5, 48n25, 50–52, 50n28, 51n30, 51n31, 52n33, 57, 59 Anderson, Cameron, 113, 113n27 Anti-Periphery Argument, The 240–245 Argument from Inductive Risk (AIR), 198n17 Ariely, Dan, 126 Aristotle, 168–169 armchair psychologizing, 9–11, 9n17, 14 Arnauld, Antoine, 62, 63, 64, 66, 100 assent. See propositional attitudes, assent attention, 14, 25, 56n38, 89–91, 93, 100, 106, 113–115, 221–223, 222n1, 224–231, 224n6, 225n8–231n18, 232–246, 233n21–233n25, 235n27–240n42, 242n46–242n47, 252–253, 253n69, 253n71, 254–262, 254n76, 255n79, 257n85, 257n87, 259n93, 260n95, 265, 270, 276–278, 278n10, 280–283, 280n12, 282n14,

283, 285, 287; bottom-up. See attention, exogenous; endogenous, 228–229, 229n13, 230, 243, 256, 259–260; exogenous, 226, 228–230, 228n11, 229n13, 243–244, 259–260; spotlight theory, 225n8; top-down; attention, endogenous Audi, Robert, 147, 150n9, 151–156, 152n12–154n18, 155n20, 157–158, 164, 166n42, 169, 266 Ayer, A. J., 184n75, 204n33 Baehr, Jason, 282n15, 283n16 Barlas, Sema, 119 Bayesianism, 120n58, 121–122, 193 behaviorism, 34n2, 176, 275–276; reductive, 275–276 belief: distinguished from judgment, 26–28, 26n41, 27n43, 211, 269, 280, 284, 286–287; doxastically efficacious. See beliefs, future-practical; futurepractical, 201–203, 202n27–202n28, 218; occurrent, 20–21, 23, 271–272, 276; self-verifying, 203, 203n30, 218; tacit, 20–22, 25, 27, 272, 276–277; traditional understanding of, 18; as takings-to-be-true, 18, 26–27, 49, 160, 182, 266, 276, 278; unshakeable, psychologically, 70–71 Bennett, Jonathan, 37n10, 39n14

309

310

The Better-Than-Average Effect, 119, 119n55–120n58. See also overconfidence, overplacement Beyssade, Jean-Marie, 79n37, 81n39 bias,. See also cognitive bias; overconfidence 112–113, 124 Bingel, Ulrike, 254, 254n75–254n76, 255–256, 255n81–256n84 Björkman, Mats, 115n38, 126 Bless, Herbert, 117n49, 128–132, 130n77, 132n78 Brandom, Robert, 7n13, 11n19 Brenner, Lyle A., 114n30, 117n48, 124, 126–128, 128n71–128n72, 139n92, 139n94 Brentano, Franz, 187, 222n1 Brion, Sebastien, 113, 113n27 Bricke, John, 37n10, 51n31 bridges, too far, 94, 262, 281 Broadbent, Donald E., 237, 237n29 Broughton, Janet, 63, 63n5, 73–74, 73n24, 82 Burson, K. A., 119, 119n55, 121n60 Buschkuehl, Martin, 256, 257n85 Bushnell, M. Catherine, 254n76, 258n88 Cairns, Dorian, 157n21, 166n43 Carnap, Rudolf, 185, 194n9 Carrasco, Marisa, 229, 229n14, 229n16 Cartesian Circle. See Problem of the Circle Carvalho, Gil B., 16, 16n26 center. See consciousness, center of certainty. See feelings characteristic of believing, certainty Chabris, Christopher, 238, 239n38–239n39 Chapman, C. Richard, 258, 258n90 Chappell, Vere, 81n40, 90n58, 95n66 Cherry, E. Colin, 236n28, 237, 243 Chisholm, Roderick, 61n1, 186n78 Churchland, Paul, 15n23, 28–29, 28n46 clarity. See feelings characteristic of believing, clarity Clarity and Distinctness Principle, 30, 61–64, 62n2, 65n10, 66–67, 67n12, 68–78, 77n33, 79, 80n38, 82, 82–83, 82n42, 88n51, 92, 97, 99–100, 99n69,

INDEX

103, 106, 141, 143, 160–161, 161n29, 184, 266, 283, 285 Clifford, W. K., 190, 198, 201n24, 202, 267, 270 Clore, Gerald L., 245n52, 246, 248–249, 248n59 Cocktail Party Effect, 228n10, 237 cognitive bias, 85, 106, 107, 112–114, 120, 120n58, 124, 126, 139–140, 189, 247, 266, 281, 288; confirmation bias, 113; directional bias, 113; focusing bias, 230, 251; motivating bias, 113; overconfidence bias, 112; priming bias. See cognitive bias, focusing bias; recall bias 250 Concluding Argument, 267–270, 270n1, 279–282, 284 confidence. See feelings characteristic of believing, confidence consciousness, 21, 27, 29, 34, 36, 41, 56n38, 88n50, 89–90, 157, 166n43, 174, 185, 194n9, 208, 211, 221–222, 223–227, 224n6–228n10, 230–231, 231n18, 232–236, 233n21–233n25, 235n27, 240–244, 242n46, 259–261, 270, 272, 276–278, 278n10, 279–281, 285; center of, 56n38, 89, 221–222, 224–227, 224n6–228n10, 230, 231n18, 232–236, 233n21, 235n27, 240, 242–245, 250, 252, 256, 259–262, 268, 270, 272, 277–281, 278n10, 285; peripheral, 21, 56n38, 222, 224–228, 224n6–228n10, 230, 231n18, 232–236, 233n25, 235n27, 240–245, 251–252, 256, 260–262, 267, 270, 272, 276–278, 278n10, 279, 280–281, 285 Cooper, Wesley, 213n47, 217n55 Copy Principle, 39, 40n15, 51 Cotard’s Syndrome, 164n35 Cottingham, John, 67, 67n13, 69, 74, 86n48 credence. See probability, subjective Crombez, Geert, 259, 259n93–259n94 Curley, E. M., 65n9, 68, 68n14, 83n45, 86n48 Damasio, Antonio, 16, 16n26, 26n40 Danthiir, Vanessa, 115n39, 115n42

I N DE X

Day Reconstruction Method (DRM), 249–251, 250n64–250n65 debiasing, 108, 113, 139–140, 189, 189n2 Della Rocca, Michael, 63, 63n5, 65n9, 69, 74–75, 74n25–75n28, 79n37, 82, 83, 85n47 Dennett, Daniel C., 231n18, 275n7–275n8 dependent truths. See beliefs, selfverifying Descartes, René, 3, 4, 5, 26n41, 30, 61–100, 103, 141, 143–144, 156, 160–161, 161n29, 162n32, 164, 166n42, 167, 169, 170–171, 170n53–171n54, 173, 182, 184, 185, 186, 187, 221, 259, 265–266, 267, 268, 269, 278, 283, 284, 288 dispositionalism, 21, 21n33, 23–24, 33, 34n2, 37n11, 218n58, 272–273, 272n4–275n6, 274–276, 276n9; reductive, 21, 24, 272–273, 272n4–275n6, 274–276, 276n9; residual, 273, 276n9. See also belief, tacit Domestic Partner Effect, The, 228n10 Doney, Willis, 62n3, 66–68 doubt. See feelings characteristic of believing, doubt Dreyfus, Hubert, 223n3, 224n5 DRM. See Day Reconstruction Method Dunlosky, John, 129n73, 137, 137n89 Dunning, David, 117n50, 132–138, 133n79–134n82, 136n85–136n86, 136n88, 140 Dunning-Kruger Effect, 117, 132–133 Eccleston, Chris, 259, 259n93–259n94 Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA), 249–250, 249n62–250n63 Edwards, Ward, 139–140, 140n95 Eliminativism: doxastic. See Skeptical Challenges, First: of CENTER/PERIPHERY, 234–236, 235n26 Elsenhans, Theodor, 176 EMA. See Ecological Momentary Assessment EMMDS. See Sentimentalism, doxastic, Even More Modest

311

emotion, 1, 2n3, 22–23, 27, 28n45, 92n59, 95, 175, 177, 248, 252–253, 253n69–253n70, 254, 254n76, 256, 257n85–257n87, 271n3–272n4, 280n12, 284n17 ESM. See Experience Sampling Method Euclid, 17, 145, 165 Evidentialism, 31, 189–191, 196, 198, 200, 200n23–201n24, 202–203, 218, 219, 267, 269, 270; strongest version of, 189–190, 196, 203, 218; Wood’s definition of, 196 Evidenz. See feelings characteristic of believing, Evidenz Evidenzprinzip , 160–161, 160n28–161n30, 167–168, 172, 173, 182, 187, 266, 284; defined, 160 Experimental Philosophy, 13, 13n21 Experience Sampling Method (ESM), 250–251 Fairweather, Abrol, 272n4, 282n14 False Consensus Effect, 135n83, 136 feelings, characteristic of believing: certainty, 3–4, 3n7, 8, 19, 23, 29, 66, 68, 71, 73–74, 74–75, 74n26, 78–79, 82, 91, 94, 100, 103, 105–106, 108, 111–112, 121, 137, 141, 169, 171, 171n54, 176, 182, 185; clarity, 3, 30, 61–62, 63–64, 65, 65n8, 65n10, 66, 67, 68, 69–70, 71, 72–73, 73–74, 75, 76, 77–78, 80–82, 81n40, 82–92, 88n50–88n51, 92–94, 93n61, 96, 96–97, 97–98, 98n67, 99–100, 99n69, 103, 143–144, 161, 161n29, 184, 265, 266, 268, 288; confidence, 3, 3n7, 104–107, 109–111, 114, 117–138, 141, 178–179, 202, 246, 279; defined, 19, 56; distinctness, 61–62, 65, 65n8, 65n10, 66–82, 81n40, 82–89, 88n50, 91, 92–94, 93n61, 96, 96–97, 98, 99n69, 100; distinguished from feelings affiliated with believing, 19, 19n30, 20, 23–24, 31, 56, 261–262, 268, 271, 276–278, 288; distinguished from judgments, 25–29, 104–106, 107, 266, 269–270, 280, 284, 287; doubt, 3, 5, 19, 29, 69, 70–71, 73, 75, 77, 88n51, 151n10, 169–171, 214–216, 216n54,

312

217, 217n56; Evidenz, 3, 30, 144, 147, 156–183, 158n25, 160n27–160n28, 164n35–164n36, 165n38, 166n43–167n44, 168n46–168n47, 170n52, 171n54, 172n56, 173n59, 177n66, 179n71, 184, 187, 188n85, 222, 262, 266–268, 270, 276, 279–284, 288; force and vivacity, 3, 30, 34, 36–38, 36n7, 37n9–37n11, 39–46, 40n15, 41, 46n23, 49, 49n26, 50–58, 58n40, 265, 268, 269, 288; metacognitive, 27, 104–105, 105n2, 107, 117n49, 128–129, 132, 137–138, 141, 266, 268; peripherally attended to, 21, 56n38, 67, 94, 221–222, 245, 251–252, 261; the sentiment of rationality, 31, 191, 213–214, 216, 216n54, 268; unattended to. See feelings characteristic of believing, peripherally attended to Feigl, Herbert, 185 Feldman, Richard, 200n23, 209n39 Fieser, James, 41n18–41n19 Findlay, J. N., 157–158 Fischhoff, Baruch, 108, 108n9, 111n19, 112, 112n20, 112n22, 116, 116n45, 139–140, 140n97 Flew, Antony, 37n10, 58 focusing illusion. See cognitive bias, focusing bias force and vivacity. See feelings characteristic of believing, force and vivacity forced. See genuine option, forced Ford, Jason, 233n25, 241, 241n44 Frankfurt, Harry, 68–70, 68n14–68n15, 70n17, 74n26, 75, 77n31, 79n37, 82, 86n48, 88, 88n50, 89n53, 93, 93n61, 98n67 Frege, Gottlob, 175 fulfillment relations, 179, 179n71, 182, 187 Gale, Richard M., 191n6, 198n17, 199n19, 200n21, 201n24, 203n30, 204n33, 210n41, 212n45, 213n47 Gassendi, Pierre, 63–64, 97–98, 99n69, 100 Geach, Peter, 51–52, 51n32

INDEX

The General Rules, 58, 58n40 genuine options, 196–203, 209–210, 209n39–210n41, 219; forced, 203, 206–209, 207n37, 209n39, 214; live, 3, 31, 191–195, 192n7, 195n13–195n14, 198, 200–207, 204n32–205n34, 209n39–210n41, 210–211, 216–219, 216n54, 217n56, 267, 287; momentous, 195n12, 203, 205–209, 206n35, 209n39–210n40 Geraci, Lisa, 136–138, 136n87, 137n90–210n40 Gewirth, Alan, 74, 74n25 Gigerenzer, Gerd, 114n35, 116n44, 117, 124–128, 124n65–126n67, 139–140, 140n95–140n96 givenness. See self-givenness Gödel, Kurt, 185 González-Vallejo, Claudia, 119 Gotlib, Ian H., 256, 257n85 Govorun, Olesya, 119n56, 138 Grice, Paul, 165, 252 Griffin, Dale, 114n34, 126, 127n69, 139n92, 139n94 Gross, James J., 253, 253n70 Grossman, Zachary, 122, 122n61 Gula, Bartosz, 239n40–239n41 Gunther, York H., 271–272, 271n3 Haack, Susan, 200–201, 201n24 Haladjian, Harry Haroutioun, 233n24, 237n33 Hardy, Lee, 160n28, 166n43, 170n52, 178n70 Haugtvedt, Curt, 254, 255n79 Healey, Paul, 117–128, 117n47, 118n51–119n54, 132, 135, 137–138 Heidegger, Martin, 20n31, 165n38 Heffernan, George, 163n34, 174, 174n60, 176–177 Hegel, G. W. F., 25, 25n38, 29, 207n36–207n37 Hickerson, Ryan, 58n40, 109n13, 231n19 Hoffrage, Ulrich, 114n35, 116n44, 117, 124–128, 124n65–126n67, 139n91, 139n93 Höfler, Alois, 176, 187 Hollins, Mark, 258–259, 258n89, 259n92

I N DE X

Hookway, Christopher, 24n37, 282n15, 283n16 Hopp, Walter, 167n44, 177–181, 178n67–178n69, 179n71–181n74 Horwicz, Adolf, 212 Hume, David, 5, 7n13, 16, 16n27, 26n41, 30, 30n47, 33–59, 61, 213, 221, 265, 268–269, 278 Husserl, Edmund, 5, 8, 26n41, 30, 89n54, 143–144, 147, 151, 151n10, 156–184, 157n21–161n31, 163n33–170n52, 171n54–179n71, 187, 188n85, 221–222, 222n2, 223, 223n4, 224, 231–232, 231n19–232n20, 233–234, 266–279, 281–283, 288 Hutcheson, Francis, 1 Huxley, T. H., 190, 195n11, 198, 201n24, 202, 270 hypervigilance, 258–259, 258n89, 258n91 inattention. See consciousness, periphery of inattentional blindness, 222, 233n25, 236, 237–240, 237n34–239n41, 240–242, 244 intentionality, 18, 30, 35, 45, 48–49, 51, 53, 162–163, 168, 180, 182, 223, 275 interpretation, textual, 6–14, 77, 193–194, 203, 216, 222; “charitable”, 17, 48, 51, 99n69, 209n39; de dicto, 7n13; de re, 7n13; dilemma for, 10–11; hermeneutics, 5n11; largest possible obstacle for, 163 intuitionism, 144, 154, 155 intuitively given. See self-givenness Jacquette, Dale, 65n8, 99n68 Jaeggi, Susanne M., 256, 257n85 James, William, 1n1, 5, 26n40–26n41, 30–31, 190–219, 190n3–194n10, 195n12–199n19, 200n21–218n58, 221, 225n8, 243, 243n48, 244n50, 259n94, 260, 267, 268, 268–270, 273, 278, 284n17, 285–288 Jefferson, Thomas, 144, 144n1 Johnson, Mark, 225, 225n7 Jonides, John, 256, 257n85 Judgment Rule, Descartes’, 76–77, 77n33, 83–85, 88n51, 97, 99, 161n29

313

Juslin, Peter, 114n33, 115n38, 115n40, 126, 126n68 Kahneman, Daniel, 106–107, 106n5, 106n7, 127, 127n70, 237, 237n32, 247n55, 249–252, 249n60, 250n64–251n66, 252n68 Kant, Immanuel, 8, 12, 12n20, 26n39, 28n44 Keleman, William L., 113, 113n25–113n26 Kelley, Colleen M., 106, 114, 129n76 Kemp Smith, Norman, 62n3, 65n10 Kennedy, Jessica A., 113, 113n27 Klausen, Søren Harnow, 146n5, 272n4 Klayman, Joshua, 119 Kleinbölting, Heinz, 114n35, 116n44, 117, 124–128, 124n65–126n67 Klumpp, Gisela, 129, 130n77 Koehler, Derek J., 117n48, 124–128, 128n71–128n72 Koopman, Colin, 190n4, 200n23, 211n42 Koreimann, Sabrina, 239n40–239n41 Koriat, Asher, 104n1–105n2, 105–107, 105n4, 112n24, 114n29, 115n41, 117n49, 128–132, 132n78 Krueger, Alan B., 249–252, 249n60, 250n64–251n66, 252n68 Kruger, Justin, 117n50, 132–138, 133n79–134n82, 136n85–136n86, 136n88, 140 Lakoff, George, 225, 225n7 Larrick, R. P., 119, 119n55, 121n60 Lautenbacher, Stefan, 258, 258n91 Law of the Excluded Middle, 207–208 Law of Non-Contradiction, 170 Lee, Michael C., 254–256, 254n75–254n76, 255n81–256n84 Leibniz’s Law, 212n45 Levy-Sadot, Ravit, 104n1–105n2, 105, 105n4, 106–107 Liberman, Varda, 117n48, 124, 126–128, 128n71–128n72 Lichtenstein, Sarah, 111n19, 112, 112n20, 112n22 Lindsay, D. Stephen, 106, 114, 129n76 live hypothesis. See genuine option, live

314

Loeb, Louis, 37n11, 62–63, 63n4, 70–71, 70n18–71n19, 82, 83n45 logical positivism, 185 MacGregor, Don, 116, 116n45, 139–140, 140n97 Mack, Arien, 237–244, 237n34–238n37, 240n42–240n43, 241n45, 243n49 Magnus, P. D., 190n4, 195n13, 198n17, 202n27 The Mahdi, 5.8 5n7 Maki, Ruth H., 254, 254n78 Martin, Leonard L., 251–252, 251n67 Martin, Wayne M., 7n13, 26n42, 109n13, 189n1 Marusic, Jennifer Smalligan, 37n11–37n12 Mata, Jutta, 256, 257n85 Matthews, Gerald 6.72 6n72 Matvey, Greg, 137, 137n89 Mavrodes, George I., 190, 195n14, 215n53 May, Regine S., 123, 123n63, 127n69 McCaul, Kevin D., 254, 254n78–255n79 Meehl, Paul E., 109, 109n11–109n13 Meinong, Alexius, 176 the Memory Reading, 66–69, 71, 74, 82. See also Doney, Willis Mersenne, Marin, 62, 63, 64, 66, 100 metacognitive feelings. See feelings, characteristic of believing, metacognitive Metacognitive Therapy, 253 metaphysical neutrality, 231–236, 231n19–232n20, 235n26, 240; limited, 232–236, 235n26, 240; presuppositionlessness, 231, 231n19–232n20, 232 Metcalfe, Janet, 114n32, 129n75 Mill, John Stuart, 7, 7n14, 176, 252 Miller, Dickinson S., 190, 190n3, 215n51 Miller, Tyler M., 136–138, 136n87, 137n90 momentous. See genuine option, momentous Monson, Nancy 6.76 6n78 Montemayor, Carlos, 233n24, 237n33, 272n4, 282n14

INDEX

Moore, Don A., 113, 113n27, 117, 117n47, 118–123, 118n51–119n54, 120n58–121n59, 122n62, 124, 132, 135, 137, 138 Moore, G. E., 147, 148–151, 149n7–151n11, 152–153, 154, 162, 164, 167, 168, 182–183 Moore’s Puzzle, 150–151, 151n11, 154–156, 164, 168, 176, 182–184 Mor, Nilly, 253, 253n71 Morony, Suzanne, 115n39, 115n42 Nadler, Steven, 88n50–88n52 Nansen, Fridtjof, 205–206 Narens, Louis, 105n3, 106, 114 Nathanson, Stephen, 204n33, 217n55 naturalizable, 16–17, 236; distinguished from naturalist, 16 the natural light, 64–65, 65n8, 65n9, 65n10 Necessitation Claim, Descartes’, 77n33, 80–85, 80n38, 81n40–82n42, 83n45, 87, 99; defined, 82; disambiguated, 82–83 Necessity Argument, James’, 197–200, 197n16, 209, 209n39, 213n47 Nelson, Alan, 73, 73n22–73n23 Nelson, Leonard, 187 Nelson, Thomas O., 105n3, 106, 114 Neurath, Otto, 185 Newman, Lex, 63, 63n5, 72–73, 72n21–73n23, 82 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 287–288, 287n18 Nussinson, Ravit, 117n49, 128–132, 132n78 obliviousness. See consciousness, periphery of Olsson, Henrik, 114n33, 115n38, 115n40, 126 Oskamp, Stuart, 110, 110n17–111n18 overconfidence, 8, 14, 30, 103–141, 144, 246, 266, 267, 279, 288; as a problem of calibration, 112, 118, 120, 139; as a problem of resolution, 112; as a problem of discrimination, 112; defined, 111; functional. See overconfidence, overestimation; functional overplacement, 137–138;

I N DE X

overestimation, 118, 119, 120–123, 132, 135–136, 137–138; overprecision, 118–120; overplacement, 119–121, 122–123, 132–136, 138; subjective, 137–138 Owen, David, 34n3, 40n17, 53–55, 53n34–54n37, 58 Owens, David, 122, 122n61 Pace, Michael, 198n17, 204n31 pain, 92–96, 93n60–93n62, 253n73–255n81, 254–262, 257n87–259n93 Pallier, Gerry, 115n39, 115n42 Parmenidean Principle, 51–52, 53, 57–59 Paton, H. J., 145–146, 145n4 Peirce, C. S., 98n67, 144n2 Pepper, Stephen C., 145–146, 145n3 periphery. See consciousness, peripheral Permissibility Argument, James’, 197–201, 197n16, 203, 203n30, 209, 209n39, 211, 213n47, 216, 219, 267 Perry, Ralph Barton, 192n8, 212n46 phenomenal condition, for a feeling of believing, 89–92, 94, 98–99; defined, 89 phenomenology, 4, 19–20, 43, 46, 55, 77, 88–91, 89n54, 94, 146–147, 146n5, 156, 159, 162, 165n38, 169–171, 178, 181, 182, 184, 187, 191–193, 195n12, 206n35, 210, 216, 222, 224, 226–234, 228n10, 231n19–232n20, 233n25, 236, 240–241, 244, 260–262, 265–267, 269–271, 271n3–272n4, 276–277, 279, 282, 285; cognitive, 4n10, 146, 146n5, 271, 271n3–272n4; transcendental, 161n30, 169, 171, 231n19–232n20, 236, 266 Phillips, Lawrence D., 111n19, 112 Plato, 52 pleasure, 2, 174–175, 177, 246–247, 249–250, 252, 260, 262 Ploner, Markus, 254, 254n75–254n76, 255–256, 255n81–256n84 PMM. See probabilistic mental models The Principle of Minimal Ordinance, 213n47 Prinz, Jesse J., 3n6, 4n10, 230n17, 233n23, 242n46

315

probabilistic mental models (PMM), 124–126 probability, subjective, 33, 111–112, 123n63, 124, 126, 193, 194n9, 195, 204n32, 205, 205n34, 214–217, 215n52, 215n53, 218, 218n58, 284; credence functions, 194, 194n9 Problem of the Circle, 30, 61–64, 62n3, 65n9–65n10, 66–67, 70, 73, 74, 75, 99–100, 99n69, 143, 266 Problem of the Criterion, 61, 61n1, 70, 98–99, 99n68–99n69, 100, 143–144, 151, 170n52, 185–187, 186n78, 266 propositional attitudes, 19–20, 33, 45, 88–89, 89n53, 89n55, 93, 93n61, 146, 152–155, 191–195, 191n6–192n7; adequate understanding, Audi’s theory of, 152–155, 166n42; assent, 44–45, 46, 77–78, 82, 85n47–86n48 Pryor, James, 178, 178n69 psychologism, 175–176, 176n62 Raiffa, Howard, 119 Rawson, Katherine A., 137, 137n89 Reid, Thomas, 34, 41–47, 48–50, 49n26, 52, 280n12; criticism of Hume’s sentimentalism, 34, 41–43, 47, 48, 49, 50–51, 52–53, 57, 59 Rittenauer-Schatka, Helga, 129, 130n77 Robinson, Michael D., 129n76, 245n52, 246, 248–249, 248n59 Rock, Irvin, 237–243, 237n34–238n37, 240n42–240n43, 241n45, 243n49 Rollman, Gary B., 258, 258n91 Ross, W. D., 153, 155 Russell, Bertrand, 5n12, 19, 19n29, 23n36, 190–191, 190n5, 214–215, 215n51–215n52, 221 Russell, Matheson, 163n34, 177n66 Ryle, Gilbert, 22–23, 22n34–22n35, 272–274, 275n5, 275n8, 277 Schkade, David, 249–252, 249n60, 250n64–251n66, 252n68 Schlick, Moritz, 184–187, 184n75–186n77, 187n79–187n84 The Schlick Circle, 185, 186n76, 187 Schwartz, Bennett L., 129n74–129n75

316

Schwarz, Norbert, 129, 130n77, 246–248, 246n53–248n58, 249–250, 249n60, 250n64–251n66, 251–252, 251n67–252n68 Schwitzgebel, Eric, 189n2, 272n4–275n5, 276n9 scientia, 67–68, 71, 75, 82, 99n69, 100 Searle, John, 225–226, 226n9, 233n21, 240, 252, 260 self-evidence, 2n3, 144–158, 144n2, 147n6, 149n8–150n9, 154n17, 165, 167, 169, 172, 183–184, 185–186, 186n77, 187, 266; the core idea, 147–148, 149, 183; Moore’s strong notion of, 150, 152, 167, 183. See also feelings characteristic of believing, Evidenz self-givenness, 30, 158–159, 172, 179, 179n71, 231, 267 Sellars, Wilfrid, 8, 8n16 sensation, 23, 27, 41–42, 49, 67, 90n56, 92n59, 93, 93n61, 94–96, 95n66, 252, 255, 258–259, 258n89, 260n95, 261–262, 271 sentimentalism, doxastic, 1–2, 2n3–2n4, 4n8, 5, 5n12, 16, 18–25, 19n30, 22n35, 30, 34–38, 35n5, 39, 41, 43, 45, 49, 50, 52, 53–59, 61, 82, 92, 96, 104, 147, 176–177, 182, 184, 191, 219, 221–222, 245n51, 265, 267, 268, 269, 272, 275n7, 276, 278, 278n10; crude thesis, 2; distinguished from moral, 1–3, 2n3–2n4; Even More Modest Doxastic Sentimentalism (EMMDS), 2n4, 22n35, 55–56, 57, 58–59, 92, 96, 182, 219, 265, 267, 272, 278; Hume’s main argument for, 34, 38–40; Hume’s Strong Doxastic Sentimentalism, 55–58, 265, 269, 278; Hume’s Weaker Doxastic Sentimentalism, 55–58, 265, 269, 278; Less Modally Modest Doxastic Sentimentalism, 278n10; slightly more sophisticated thesis, 2; Weakest Doxastic Sentimentalism, 19n30, 56–57, 92, 96, 278; sentiment, doxastic. See feelings, characteristic of believing Serra, Michael J., 137, 137n89 Shaked, Nira, 117n49, 128–132, 132n78

INDEX

Shiffman, Saul, 249–250, 249n62–250n63 Sigwart, Christoph, 176 Simons, Anette, 129, 130n77 Simons, Daniel, 238, 239n38–239n39 Skeptical Challenges, to doxastic sentimentalism, 14–25, 271, 277–278; First Skeptical Challenge, 15–18, 15n23–16n24, 24, 275n6, 275n8, 277; Second Skeptical Challenge, 18–22, 25, 271, 277; Third Skeptical Challenge, 23–25, 277–278 Slater, Michael R., 200n22, 203n30 Slote, Michael, 3n6, 4n8, 245n51 Soll, Jack B., 119, 119n55, 121n60 Sosa, Ernest, 8n15, 9n17, 27n43, 282n13–282n14 Spencer, Herbert, 187 Spiegelberg, Herbert, 164n36, 170n52, 172–173, 173n57 Stankov, Lazar, 114n31, 115n39, 115n42 Stanovich, Keith E., 106, 106n6 Stich, Stephen, 8n15, 11n19, 15n23 Stone, Arthur A., 249–252, 249n60, 249n62–250n63, 250n64–251n66, 252n68 Strack, Fritz, 129, 130n77, 251–252, 251n67 Ströker, Elisabeth, 159n26, 161n29, 163n34, 171n54, 266 Stroud, Barry, 35, 37n10, 44–47, 48, 48n25, 52, 57, 59 Talisse, Robert B., 190n5, 200n23, 202n27 Thompson, Renee J., 256, 257n85 Thompson, Ross A., 253, 253n70 threshold of credibility, 204n32, 205, 216, 216–217, 217n56; defined, 205 threshold of reasonable dubitability, 216–217, 217n56; defined, 216 Titchener, Edward, 260n95, 261 Tracey, Irene, 254, 254n75–254n76, 255–256, 255n81–256n84 Tropman, Elizabeth, 152n13, 154, 154n19 Tversky, Amos, 114n34, 117n48, 124, 126–128, 127n69–128n72 Tye, Michael, 253n73, 272n4 underconfidence, 115–116

I N DE X

Van Cleve, James, 63, 63n6, 99n68 veracity condition, for a feeling of believing, 90–92, 94, 98–99, 161, 161n31, 167, 170, 172–174, 172n56, 176, 178, 182, 184, 266; defined, 90 Vienna Circle. See The Schlick Circle Vitouch, Oliver, 239n40–239n41 voluntarism, doxastic, 80, 81n40, 204n32 von Winterfeldt, Detlof, 139–140, 140n95 Wallsten, Thomas S., 116n43, 126 Walters, Sloan, 258–259, 258n89, 259n92 Wason Selection Task, 136 Watzl, Sebastian, 242n47, 246 Weaver, Charles A., 113, 113n25–113n26 Wernham, James C. S., 194n10, 199n19, 209n39 West, Richard F., 106, 106n6 Wickes, Howard, 65n9, 83n43, 93n61 Wiech, Katja, 254, 254n75–254n76, 255–256, 255n81–256n84

317

will-to-believe doctrine, James’, 190–191, 190n5, 199n19, 203n30, 210n41–211n42, 214, 217n55, 267 Williams, Bernard, 77–78, 77n32–78n34, 86n48, 288n19 Winman, Anders, 115n38, 115n40 Winningham, Robert G., 113, 113n25–113n26 Winquist, Jennifer, 253, 253n71 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 69, 151n11 Wood, Allen, 190–191, 190n5, 196, 196n15, 200n23, 202, 202n29 Wundt, Wilhelm, 176, 225n8 Xu, Jing, 246–248, 246n53–248n58 Yates, J. Frank, 110n16, 112, 112n21, 112n23 Zagzebski, Linda, 282n13, 282n15 Zauberman, Gal, 126

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ryan Hickerson graduated from Carleton College (1995) and has a PhD in philosophy from the University of California, San Diego (2003). He worked as an editorial assistant for the journals Inquiry and Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy; he teaches philosophy at Western Oregon University, where he has been since 2005. His first book was The History of Intentionality: Theories of Consciousness from Brentano to Husserl (2007) and he has published papers on Twardowski, Heidegger, Hume, and the phenomenology of mental capacity.

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