Epistemic Values: Collected Papers in Epistemology 0197529178, 9780197529171

Citation preview

Epistemic Values

Epistemic Values Collected Papers in Epistemology L I N DA T R I N KAU S Z AG Z E B SK I

1

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Zagzebski, Linda Trinkaus, 1946– author. Title: Epistemic values : collected papers in epistemology / Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski. Description: New York, NY, United States of America : Oxford University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020018286 (print) | LCCN 2020018287 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197529171 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197529195 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Knowledge, Theory of. Classification: LCC BD161 .Z335 2021 (print) | LCC BD161 (ebook) | DDC 121—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020018286 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020018287 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America

Dedicated to the memory of William P. Alston friend, mentor, and exemplary philosopher

Contents Acknowledgements 

ix

Introduction 

1

I .   K N OW L E D G E A N D U N D E R S TA N D I N G 1. What Is Knowledge? 

11

2. Must Knowers Be Agents? 

39

3. Recovering Understanding 

57

4. Toward a Theory of Understanding 

78

I I .   I N T E L L E C T UA L   V I RT U E 5. Intellectual Virtues: Admirable Traits of Character 

93

6. Trust 

108

7. Intellectual Virtue Terms and the Division of Linguistic Labor 

124

I I I .   E P I S T E M IC   VA LU E 8. From Reliabilism to Virtue Epistemology 

141

9. The Search for the Source of Epistemic Good 

152

10. Intellectual Motivation and the Good of Truth 

168

11. Epistemic Value and the Primacy of What We Care About 

186

I V.   V I RT U E I N R E L IG IO U S E P I S T E M O L O G Y 12. Religious Knowledge and the Virtues of the Mind 

207

13. Phronesis and Religious Belief 

228

14. Religious Trust, Anti-​Trust, and Reasons for Religious Belief 

245

viii Contents

V.   I N T E L L E C T UA L AU T O N OM Y A N D AU T HO R I T Y 15. Ethical and Epistemic Egoism and the Ideal of Autonomy 

263

16. A Defense of Epistemic Authority 

275

17. Intellectual Autonomy 

289

V I .   SK E P T IC I SM A N D T H E G E T T I E R P R O B L E M 18. The Inescapability of Gettier Problems 

311

19. First Person and Third Person Reasons and the Regress Problem 

320

20. The Moral Transcendental Argument against Skepticism 

333

Index 

353

Acknowledgements I am grateful for the generous and very capable work of my Research Assistant, Zach Reimer, and for encouragement in collecting these papers from my Department Chair, Wayne Riggs. The papers themselves owe a tremendous amount to the many philosophers mentioned in these chapters and to many more whose work has inspired me over the decades. I am dedicating the volume to the memory of Bill Alston, who became a mentor and friend from the first time I gave a public talk in philosophy in 1984.

Introduction Many paths in life occur by accident, and my entrance into epistemology is one of them. In the early 1980s I joined the Society of Christian Philosophers, a vibrant and supportive philosophical community that immersed me in exciting philosophy at small regional meetings across the United States. My graduate school work was in philosophy of language, but I was rapidly drawn into philosophy of religion, and the first paper I ever presented was on divine foreknowledge and human freedom, the topic of my first book, The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1991). However, the majority of papers at the meetings were on religious epistemology. I did not take to epistemology right away and found the prevailing disputes over internalism versus externalism, foundationalism versus coherentism, the nature of justification and the rise of reliabilism, and the constant worries about Gettier problems tedious. But I found the application to religious belief stimulating and was profoundly interested in Reformed Epistemology, led by Alvin Plantinga, whose work influenced a generation of analytic Christian philosophers and brought religious philosophy into the mainstream. Much of what Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, George Mavrodes, and other Calvinist philosophers wrote was compatible with Catholic theology, but the philosophical approach was quite different, and I decided to put together a book of Catholic reactions to Reformed Epistemology, Rational Faith:  Catholic Responses to Reformed Epistemology, which was published by the University of Notre Dame Press (Notre Dame, Indiana) in 1993. My essay in that book, “Religious Knowledge and the Virtues of the Mind,” is Chapter 12 in this collection. My initial purpose in writing epistemology in the late 1980s was both to make it more interesting to myself, and hopefully to some others, and more congenial to Catholic philosophers whose training was usually not analytic. I began preparing Virtues of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) right away. I was struck by the many parallels between epistemology and ethics, but I  noticed a significant gap in the way epistemological theories were modeled on ethical theories. Deontological epistemology was modeled on deontological ethics and reliabilism was modeled on consequentialism, but there was not yet a fully formed virtue epistemology modeled on virtue ethics in which an intellectual virtue is a virtue of character, as much a component of a good life as a moral virtue. In the last twenty-​five years there have been many works on intellectual Epistemic Values. Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197529171.001.0001.

2 Introduction virtues, some of which use virtue in an account of knowledge and some of which do not. Works on understanding and epistemic values and their application to education have proliferated. I  have been influenced by many epistemologists and moral philosophers both before and after I wrote Virtues of the Mind, and I cannot hope to list them all, but I want to mention especially Ernie Sosa, John Greco, Heather Battaly, Jason Baehr, Wayne Riggs, and many students whose papers and dissertations opened up new directions. I am dedicating this work to the memory of Bill Alston, who was a mentor for me at the beginning of my career and who was an exemplar of the virtuous man and the brilliant philosopher. The twenty chapters in this collection include most of my essays in epistemology, divided into six topical categories: (1) knowledge and understanding, (2) intellectual virtue, (3) epistemic value, (4) virtue in religious epistemology, (5) intellectual autonomy and authority, (6) skepticism and the Gettier problem. Part I  is Knowledge and Understanding. The first chapter, “What Is Knowledge?” was published in the Blackwell Guide to Epistemology, edited by John Greco and Ernest Sosa in 1998 (Oxford: Blackwell). It was written soon after the publication of Virtues of the Mind. It proposes that knowledge must be a good epistemic state and argues that problems in defining knowledge arise in part from the fact that the good of knowledge has been treated differently in different historical periods. In Plato and much of philosophy until the modern period, knowledge was treated as a lofty state, one of the supreme human goods, but the focus of contemporary philosophy on simple empirical knowledge has led to a weakening of the normative component of knowledge. An account of knowledge must avoid both Gettier problems and the value problem, but it should also be the result of reflection on the broader philosophical context of human goods. I defend the position that getting the truth must be included in the value component of knowledge, but that component can be hard or easy to achieve, depending on the way we think of the good of the human grasp of reality. The second chapter, “Must Knowers Be Agents?” was originally published in a book I co-​edited with Abrol Fairweather called Virtue Epistemology: Essays on Epistemic Virtue and Responsibility (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). It explores agency as it applies to epistemic evaluation, using epistemic analogues of the well-​known Frankfurt cases against the Principle of Alternate Possibilities in arguing that the satisfaction of manipulable counterfactual conditions is neither necessary nor sufficient for either moral or epistemic responsibility, nor is it necessary for knowledge. But what a person does in counterfactual circumstances is a sign of the presence of agency, and I argue that agency is necessary for epistemic responsibility and for knowledge. “Recovering Understanding” was published in Knowledge, Truth, and Obligation, edited by Matthias Steup (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). In this chapter I argue that understanding and certainty are two fundamental

Introduction  3 epistemic values that have dominated epistemological writing at different periods of history, and knowledge has been associated with one of them but not both at the same time. We are nearing the end of a period dominated by the ideal of certainty and the related notion of justification, and it is time to bring back the ideal of understanding. I propose that understanding is a state of grasping nonpropositional structures of reality such as the structure of an automobile, the structure of a work of art or literature, or the structure of a human mind. I believe that understanding is a higher level epistemic state than propositional knowledge. “Toward a Theory of Understanding” is from Varieties of Understanding, edited by Stephen Grimm (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). This chapter returns to my idea that understanding is a grasp of structure except that I argue that the grasp of propositional structure is a special case of understanding. Knowledge and true belief are therefore forms of understanding. Knowledge and the grasp of nonpropositional structures in the same domain are checks on the veridicality of each other and show that we are in touch with the same world. I also argue that the grasp of repeating structures in different domains is an important skill that supports a strong form of argument by analogy and should be encouraged in educational settings. Part II is Intellectual Virtue. The first chapter in this section, “Intellectual Virtues:  Admirable Traits of Character,” appeared in the Routledge Handbook of Virtue Epistemology, edited by Heather Battaly (London:  Routledge, 2018). It defends my view that intellectual virtues are deep and enduring acquired intellectual excellences, supported by the underlying idea in Exemplarist Moral Theory that excellences are admirable traits and admirable traits are those we admire on reflection and which have features identified in empirical studies. The intellectual virtues require both admirable intellectual motivations and reliable success in reaching the truth, and the defense of this claim is that that is what we admire on reflection. The connection of intellectual virtue with moral virtue also explains admirable states like wisdom that are recently getting attention in philosophy and psychology after a long period of neglect. The second chapter in this section is “Trust,” from Virtues and Their Vices, edited by Kevin Timpe and Craig Boyd (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). This essay offers an account of trust and its relation to the intellectual virtues. I argue that trust has both practical and epistemic forms, but both forms include elements of belief, feeling, and behavior. Epistemic self-​trust and trust in others is prereflective and rationally inescapable. Epistemic self-​trust is not an intellectual virtue, but it is closely connected to a host of such virtues. Many of the intellectual virtues would not be virtues at all were it not for the reasonableness of epistemic self-​trust or trust in others. Some virtues are enhancements of epistemic trust and some are constraints on it. The connection also goes in the other

4 Introduction direction because there are ways in which intellectual virtues prevent trust from becoming either excessive or deficient. “Intellectual Virtue Terms and the Division of Linguistic Labor,” is the most recent paper I have published. It appears in Virtue and Voice: Habits of Mind for a Return to Civil Discourse, edited by Gregg Ten Elshof and Evan Rosa (Abilene, TX: Abilene Christian University Press, 2019). As Chapter 7 in this volume, it picks up a theme of Chapter 7 of my book, Exemplarist Moral Theory, on what I call the Division of Moral Linguistic Labor, an application to moral terms of Putnam’s idea of the Division of Linguistic Labor in his version of the theory of Direct Reference. The semantical part of the theory of that book is a form of direct reference for moral terms, and it includes the idea that our semantic success depends upon our attachment to a social linguistic network. The chapter focuses on the semantics of intellectual virtue terms and I argue that these terms lose meaning and eventually die due to malfunctioning in the network of users. A well-​functioning semantic network is a necessary condition for getting agreement and we need to attend to the way our linguistic networks operate, including attention to the “stereotype” of virtue terms and the way different experts contribute to its functioning—​philosophers, theologians, storytellers, empirical scientists. Part III of the collection is Epistemic Value. “From Reliabilism to Virtue Epistemology” originally appeared in the Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy (Boston 1998), volume 5 (Epistemology), edited by Richard Cobb-​Stevens, 2000, and was expanded and reprinted in Knowledge, Belief, and Character, edited by Guy Axtell (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). This marks the first time I discuss what I call “the value problem,” or the problem that an account of knowledge must identify what makes knowledge epistemically better than mere true belief. In it I argue that several versions of reliabilism cannot satisfy this restriction, and that the problem pushes us toward a definition of knowledge in which intellectual virtue or virtuous believing is a component of knowing. “The Search for the Source of Epistemic Good” was first published in Metaphilosophy 34, no.  1/​2 (January 2003), and reprinted the same year in Moral and Epistemic Virtues, edited by Duncan Pritchard and Michael Brady (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). Chapter 9 in this volume, it extends my argument that many theories of knowledge fall prey to the value problem, arguing that not only reliabilism but also a number of other theories have the same problem, including some forms of internalism. I argue that the machine-​product model of knowing is to blame, and I defend the position that in a state of knowing the knower gets credit for getting a truth, and that in the best kinds of knowing, the knower gets credit for getting a desirable truth.

Introduction  5 “Intellectual Motivation and the Good of Truth” originally appeared in a collection of new papers I  co-​edited with Michael De Paul called Intellectual Virtue:  Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 2003). In this chapter I examine four ways a belief can be related to the truth in a good way, and I defend the position that a state of believing, like a moral act, is made better by internal, motivational features of the belief state. A comparison of the good of believing with the good of overt acts illuminates the problem of explaining intuitions about the greater value of knowing over mere true believing. “Epistemic Value and the Primacy of What We Care About” appeared first in “Immoral Believing,” a special issue of Philosophical Papers 25, no. 2 (2005) edited by Ward Jones. Here I  argue that epistemic values always arise from something we care about and that it is caring that gives rise to the demand to be epistemically conscientious. I argue further that epistemic values enjoy a privileged place in the panorama of what we care about because they are entailed by anything we care about. That means that we cannot resolve a conflict between the value of truth and something else we care about by following the one we care about the most because caring about truth in any domain is entailed by caring about any other domain. Part IV consists of essays on the topic of Virtue in Religious Epistemology. The first one, “Religious Knowledge and the Virtues of the Mind,” appeared in a book of papers I edited in 1993 with Notre Dame Press, Rational Faith: Catholic Responses to Reformed Epistemology (Notre Dame, IN) and mentioned above. This early writing objects to three features of Reformed Epistemology, two of which are connected with its Calvinist inspiration and one of which was a feature of most contemporary epistemology at the time. Reformed epistemology is externalist and nonvoluntarist; it is individualistic rather than communally based; and it makes the element of belief that converts it into knowledge a property of the belief rather than of the believer. My approach is Aristotelian in spirit and differs from the Reformers in all three respects. “Phronesis and Religious Belief ” is a revision of “Phronesis and Christian Belief,” published in The Rationality of Theism, edited by Godehard Bruntrup (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer, 1999). The revised version reprinted here appeared in Knowledge, Belief, and Character, edited by Guy Axtell (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). In this chapter I outline a theory of rationality integral to virtue theory and suggested by a remark by Hilary Putnam that reason is both immanent and transcendent. I propose three corollaries of the immanence and transcendence of reason and some constraints we should respect in defining a rational belief. My proposals are intended to help us settle disputes about the rationality or epistemic praiseworthiness of culture-​specific beliefs, including beliefs distinctive of a particular religion. My discussion is at

6 Introduction odds with the approach of Plantinga on the defense of the epistemic status of Christian belief. “Religious Trust, Anti-​Trust, and Reasons for Religious Belief ” was originally published in Religious Faith and Intellectual Virtue, edited by Laura Frances Callahan and Timothy O’Connor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). This chapter begins by distinguishing two kinds of epistemic reasons, one irreducibly first personal, and the other third personal. Epistemic self-​trust is an irreducibly first personal epistemic reason, and it is the most basic reason of either kind that we have. Attacks on religious belief are sometimes third personal, but sometimes they are first personal attacks on self-​trust or trust in religious communities. Attacks on self-​trust require a different kind of response than attacks on third person reasons. Part V of the book is Intellectual Autonomy and Authority. “Ethical and Epistemic Egoism and the Ideal of Autonomy” was published in Epistēmē:  A Journal of Social Epistemology 4, no. 3 (2007). In this chapter I distinguish three degrees of epistemic egoism, each of which has an ethical analogue, and I argue that all three are incoherent. Since epistemic autonomy is frequently identified with one of these forms of epistemic egoism, it follows that epistemic autonomy as commonly understood is incoherent. I end with a brief discussion of the idea of moral autonomy and suggest that its component of epistemic autonomy in the realm of the moral is problematic. “A Defense of Epistemic Authority,” published in Res Philosophica 90, no. 2 (2013), is a summary of a central argument of my book, Epistemic Authority (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) in which I argue that under the assumption that the ultimate authority over the self is the self, we are committed to accepting a strong form of epistemic authority in all those cases in which we rationally judge that following the directions of another person/​community will do a better job of getting us to our ends than if we act on our own. The argument adapts Joseph Raz’s well-​known theses of authority in his defense of political authority to the epistemic domain. “Intellectual Autonomy” originally appeared in Philosophical Issues: Epistemic Agency, vol. 23, edited by Baron Reed, 2013. Here I describe a view of the self according to which autonomy properly applies in the intellectual domain on the same grounds as it applies in the practical domain. I explain why I believe that the power of reflective self-​consciousness is more basic than any epistemic reasons—​ anything that indicates to a reasonable person that some proposition is true. The argument is epistemological, not moral. The conclusion is that what we mean by reason in its theoretical sense derives from reflective self-​consciousness. The authority of the self over the self is the natural right of the self to reflect, which is to say, the natural right of the self to be a self. The authority of reason over a person’s belief-​forming activities, like the authority of reason over a person’s

Introduction  7 practical action, is derivative from the natural authority of the self. My account of autonomy, then, has nothing to do with the rejection of authority. The final part of the book is Skepticism and the Gettier Problem. “The Inescapability of Gettier Problems” was published while I was working on Virtues of the Mind. It appeared in Philosophical Quarterly 44, no. 174 (January 1994). I had not intended to write a paper on Gettier, but Alvin Plantinga advised me to do so if I intended my virtue epistemology to be a competitor to other theories. It was my first paper in epistemology with the exception of my paper in Rational Faith. I argue that any definition of knowledge as true belief + x will be subject to Gettier-​style counterexamples as long as the connection between x (justification, reliability, proper function, etc.) and getting the truth is close but not inviolable. My recipe for generating a counterexample uses the idea of double luck. The idea is that we start with an instance of bad luck (A belief is false but has component x) which is canceled out by an instance of good luck (Make the belief true after all for reasons that have nothing to do with the believer). “First Person and Third Person Reasons and the Regress Problem” is from Ad Infinitum:  New Essays on Epistemological Infinitism, edited by John Turri and Peter Klein (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2014). In this chapter I  distinguish two kinds of reasons for a belief (a distinction that also appears in essay 14, “Religious Trust, Anti-​trust, and Reasons for Religious Belief ”). First person reasons are unique to the person who has them. They include other mental states than beliefs and they do not aggregate with theoretical reasons, or third person reasons which can be laid out on the table for all to consider. Foundationalism, coherentism, and infinitism are all views on the structure of third person (theoretical) reasons. But the chain of theoretical reasons bottoms out in a first person reason, epistemic self-​trust, which is also the foundation of other first person reasons. The rationality of epistemic self-​trust is a condition for the rationality of everything else. The final chapter in the volume is a recent essay, “The Moral Transcendental Argument against Skepticism,” in Themes from Klein: Knowledge, Skepticism, and Justification, edited by Branden Fitelson, Rodrigo Borges, and Cherie Braden (New  York:  Springer, 2019). In this chapter I  offer a series of arguments that the skeptic’s hypothesis needs to presuppose the moral or practical rationality of the subject, requiring either the existence of an external world with certain features (strongest arguments), the falsehood of the skeptical hypothesis (strong arguments), or the subject’s belief in such a world (weak arguments). In all of the proposed transcendental arguments, the states of the agent requiring the falsehood or unbelievability of the skeptical hypothesis are states of a rational agent that are not representational states such as the beliefs the skeptic asks the subject to doubt.

8 Introduction Not included is a paper called “Ideal Agents and Ideal Observers in Epistemology” that appeared in Epistemology Futures, edited by Stephen Hetherington (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2006), 131–​47. This paper in meta-​epistemology argues that the epistemological analogue of an Ideal Observer Theory or an Ideal Agent Theory (later called exemplarism) can be used to anchor the normative concepts of epistemology and resolve disputes over foundationalism, contextualism, and the problem of the alignment of rationality and truth. Another paper I have left out because it overlaps my first Gettier paper too much is “The Lesson of Gettier,” in Explaining Knowledge: New Essays on the Gettier Problem, edited by Rodrigo Borges and Claudio de Almeida (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2018), 179–​90. This chapter revisits my “double-​luck” analysis of Gettier problems, explains why closing the gap between warrant and truth solves the problem, gives examples of definitions that succeed in closing the gap (some of which are in the contemporary literature), and argues that the real importance of Gettier’s little paper is in the problem it reveals in the methodology of epistemology. I have also not included papers in religious epistemology that I thought would fit better in a collection of essays in philosophy of religion, and I am not including most papers in reference books or papers that primarily summarize previously published work such as “Self-​Profile” in the Blackwell Companion to Epistemology (2nd edition), edited by Jonathan Dancy, Ernest Sosa, and Matthias Steup (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), and an interview essay in Epistemology: 5 Questions, edited by B. Hendriks and D. Pritchard (New York: Automatic Press, 2008). In the past I have found it a benefit to have a philosopher’s papers collected in a few volumes, and I hope that readers will find this collection useful in their teaching and for their own research. Linda Zagzebski Norman, Oklahoma December 12, 2019

PART I

KNOWL E D GE A ND U N DE R STA NDI NG

1

What Is Knowledge?* 1.1  Introduction: The Object of Knowledge and the Components of Knowledge Knowledge is a highly valued state in which a person is in cognitive contact with reality. It is, therefore, a relation. On one side of the relation is a conscious subject, and on the other side is a portion of reality to which the knower is directly or indirectly related. While directness is a matter of degree, it is convenient to think of knowledge of things as a direct form of knowledge in comparison to which knowledge about things is indirect. The former has often been called knowledge by acquaintance since the subject is in experiential contact with the portion of reality known, whereas the latter is propositional knowledge since what the subject knows is a true proposition about the world. Knowing Roger is an example of knowledge by acquaintance, while knowing that Roger is a philosopher is an example of propositional knowledge.1 Knowledge by acquaintance includes not only knowledge of persons and things but also knowledge of my own mental states. In fact, the knower’s own mental states are often thought to be the most directly knowable portion of reality. Propositional knowledge has been much more exhaustively discussed than knowledge by acquaintance for at least two reasons. For one thing, the proposition is the form in which knowledge is communicated, so propositional knowledge can be transferred from one person to another, whereas knowledge by acquaintance cannot be, at least not in any straightforward way.2 A related reason is the common assumption that reality has a propositional structure or, at least, that the proposition is the principal form in which reality becomes understandable to the human mind. So even though my experience of Roger leads me to know Roger, and my experience of my own emotions leads me to know what it is like to have such emotions, as a theorist I am hard put to answer the question “What is knowledge?” about either of them. The object of knowledge is more easily explained when it is a proposition. In this chapter I will follow the usual * The chapter is reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. 1 Some philosophers have tried to reduce one of these forms of knowledge to the other. 2 See Kierkegaard’s notion of indirect communication for his view on the way to communicate truth or subjectivity, which he believes is nonpropositional. This idea appears throughout his writings, but particularly in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, e.g, 79 and 325.

Epistemic Values. Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197529171.001.0001.

12  Knowledge and Understanding procedure of concentrating on propositional knowledge, but in doing so I recognize that the theoretical convenience of propositional knowledge does not necessarily imply its greater importance. Propositions are either true or false, but only true propositions link the knower with reality in the desired manner. So the object of knowledge in the sense of most interest to philosophers is usually taken to be a true proposition. The nature of truth, propositions, and reality are all metaphysical questions. For this reason, epistemologists generally do not direct their major effort to these questions when writing as epistemologists, and so discussions of knowledge normally do not center on the object of knowledge but rather on the properties of the state itself that make it a state of knowing. Accounts of knowledge, then, direct their attention to the knowing relation and focus more on the subject side of the relation than on the object side. So far we have seen that knowledge is a relation between a conscious subject and some portion of reality, usually understood to be mediated through a true proposition, and the majority of epistemological attention has been devoted to the subject side of that relation. In the state of knowledge the knower is related to a true proposition. The most general way of characterizing the relation between the knower and the proposition known is that she takes it to be true, and this relation is standardly called the state of belief. The idea that the knowing state is a species of the belief state undergirds the almost universal practice in epistemology of defining knowledge as true belief plus something else. But this view can be disputed since the history of epistemic concepts shows that belief and knowledge were sometimes regarded as mutually exclusive epistemic states. This was either because it was thought that knowledge and belief have distinct objects, or because it was thought appropriate to restrict the range of belief to epistemic states evaluatively inferior to the state of knowledge.3 The first worry has been settled to the satisfaction of almost all contemporary epistemologists by the adoption of the widespread view that propositions are the objects of belief as well as of knowledge and, in fact, the same proposition can be either known or believed. So a person may know today what he only believed yesterday—​say, that his favorite team would win the game today. If this is right, there is no objection to the idea that knowledge is a form of belief on the grounds of a difference in their objects. The second worry can be settled by stipulating that to believe is to think with assent, a definition that comes from Augustine.4 Since 3 Plato used both reasons for his view that the objects of knowledge (epistēmē) and belief (doxa) differ. See particularly the line analogy in the Republic 509d–​511e, and the famous Allegory of the Cave 514a–​518d. 4 Augustine, Predestination of the Saints, 5, trans. Dods, reprinted in Whitney Oats, Basic Writings of St. Augustine, 2 vols. (New York: Random House, 1948). The definition of believing as thinking with assent seems to make beliefs conscious occurrences and so to rule out belief in the dispositional sense, the sense in which we sometimes attribute beliefs to a person even when he is not thinking

What Is Knowledge?  13 it is indisputable that to know propositionally is, among other things, to take a proposition to be true, and if to assent to a proposition just is to take it to be true, then on the Augustinian definition of belief it follows that knowing is a form of believing.5 It is reasonable, then, to maintain that knowledge is a form of belief, but this is not necessarily helpful to a quest for a definition of knowledge since the concept of belief is itself in need of definition, and there are some philosophers who maintain that the concept has outlived its usefulness.6 Still, it is widely assumed that the concept of belief is clearer and less controversial than the concept of knowledge. And this has to be the case if the common practice of defining knowledge as a form of belief is to be not only true, but illuminating. I think the assumption is correct but I will not defend it. From what has been said so far, it follows that knowledge is a form of believing a true proposition. At this point in the process of defining knowledge it becomes much more difficult and more open to debate. All parties agree that knowledge is a good state, good at least in the sense of desirable, and perhaps also good in the sense of praiseworthy. But there are different kinds of praiseworthiness. Good looks, wit, and strength are desirable qualities and we praise others for having them, but we typically do not blame them when they lack such qualities. In contrast, we praise persons for having qualities like courage, kindness, or fairness, and we also blame them for their absence. This suggests that it is a requirement of the moral sense of the praiseworthy that it is a quality whose presence is praised and whose absence is blamed. But this is only roughly right since blame for absence is also missing at the high end of moral praiseworthiness. We praise persons for being noble or saintly, but we do not blame them when they are not. Now it is indisputably true that knowledge is desirable, but is it praiseworthy, and if so, in what sense? Is its praiseworthiness closer to the praiseworthiness of good looks, the praiseworthiness of kindness, or the praiseworthiness of saintliness? It is significant that knowledge has not traditionally been treated as a moral concept, yet it has had many of the trappings of the moral—​for example, the connection with epistemic duty and responsibility, as when we criticize a person by saying she ought to know better, a criticism that is often accompanied by the type of distaste characteristic of of them. But the Augustinian definition of believing can be extended to include a dispositional sense. Believing p dispositionally would be defined as having the disposition to assent to p when thinking of it. 5 But see H. A. Prichard for the view that knowledge and belief are mutually exclusive states and that we can tell the difference by introspection. Prichard says: “We must recognize that whenever we know something we either do, or at least can, by reflecting, directly know that we are knowing it, and that whenever we believe something, we similarly either do or can directly know that we are believing it and not knowing it” (Knowledge and Perception [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950]: 86). 6 Stephen Stich, The Fragmentation of Reason (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).

14  Knowledge and Understanding the moral. Particular failings in knowledge are often attributed to qualities that have a decidedly moral tone, as when we say that a person is not fair to his intellectual opponents or is intellectually cowardly or is dogmatic. In each case the failing may be the explanation for the subject’s lack of knowledge and he may be blamed for lacking knowledge because of this failing. Unfairness and cowardice are clearly qualities that have a moral sense, and dogmatism does also, although it is perhaps less obvious. A distinguishing feature of the dogmatic person is that he refuses to seriously entertain any evidence that might shake his belief; that is, nothing counts against it. But when we criticize a person for being dogmatic, it is often very close to criticizing him for being a bigot. The response is akin to moral revulsion. In each of these cases, then, the failing is perceived to be like a moral one and if the subject lacks knowledge because of it, the lack of knowledge itself is perceived to be like a moral failing. So sometimes the good of knowledge is treated like a moral good. A person is praised for its presence and blamed for its absence. But there are also instances of knowledge the lack of which is outside the realm of the blameworthy, and this indicates that moral concepts are not applicable. Obvious examples include perceptual and memory knowledge. It is usual these days to think that I know that I am looking at a yellow daffodil in ordinary circumstances in which I am looking at a yellow daffodil and form the belief that I am doing so, and all agree that that is a desirable state. It would be a stretch to say there is anything praiseworthy about it because it is so ordinary, and certainly the lack of perceptual knowledge in such circumstances due to a visual abnormality is pitied rather than blamed. Of course, cases of knowledge by extraordinary perceptual acuity are praised and deserving of it, but the lack of perceptual knowledge in such cases is surely not blamed. So certain kinds of knowledge seem to be far removed from the moral realm. One problem for the theorist is to reconcile these different senses in which knowledge can be good. Sometimes the good of knowledge is like natural goods, sometimes it is similar to moral goods, and sometimes it may even be thought to be like the noble. Major disputes over the definition of knowledge may turn on contrasting senses in which knowledge is good. According to the contemporary theory of reliabilism, knowledge is true belief arising from a reliable truth-​ producing mechanism. This proposal makes the good of knowledge a natural good like that of beauty, wit, or strength. The traditional proposal that knowledge is true belief based upon good reasons is associated with the ethical concepts of responsibility, praise, and blame. One is praised for believing the truth upon good reasons and blamed for not doing so. The idea that knowledge is noble comes from Plato.7 In my judgment no definition of knowledge can succeed if 7 Plato calls knowledge the most important element in life (Protagoras 352d) and says that the only thing truly evil is to be deprived of it (345b). (See Cooper edition 2009).

What Is Knowledge?  15 it does not incorporate or at least adjudicate the senses of good used in these opposing types of theory.

1.2  Desiderata in Defining Knowledge In section 1.1, I have given a general characterization of knowledge as a state of believing a true proposition in a good way. This much is widely accepted, although some of the deepest disputes over the definition of knowledge turn on the sense of good intended in this loose, preliminary definition. But more has to be settled before proceeding. The question “What is knowledge?” is not a question with a single clear purpose. To ask the question and to give an answer are human activities that arise out of a variety of human needs. If the question is a request for a definition, what sort of definition is wanted? In this section I want to address this issue since some of the differences in accounts of knowledge arise from different aims in asking the question. A definition can serve a number of different purposes, some practical, some theoretical. When we are defining knowledge, one purpose might be the practical one of giving us directions for finding instances of knowledge in ourselves and in others, perhaps with the further aim of helping us to get it. A quite different purpose is the theoretical one of understanding where the concept of knowledge should be placed on a conceptual map that philosophers have already partially charted. This theoretical aim is intended to issue in a definition that is a necessary truth, whereas the practical aim may be satisfied by a contingent definition. Theoretical and practical purposes can sometimes be at odds. A common theoretical purpose is to give what Locke called a real definition, a necessary truth that elucidates the nature of the kind of thing defined. Not all concepts defined by necessary truths have real definitions. For example, bachelor is defined as an unmarried man, and this is presumably a necessary truth, but no one thinks that bachelors constitute an independent kind of thing whose nature we want to investigate. In contrast, natural kinds like human being, gold, and water are thought to be good candidates for real definitions. In spite of the obvious dissimilarities between knowledge and these natural substances, it is common for philosophers to aim for a real definition of knowledge, although this is often not stated explicitly. I believe it is an aim that deserves attention, however, since it presupposes some disputable semantical and metaphysical views. Perhaps knowledge is not in an ontological category for which a real definition is possible. For example, no one would attempt a real definition of rich, candy, or large plant, and only some theorists would attempt a real definition

16  Knowledge and Understanding of food, intelligence, or virtue. In some of these cases a contingent definition is probably sufficient, and it will be at least to some extent conventional. It is feasible to aim for a real definition of knowledge only if the concept of knowledge is not like the concept of a large plant. And even if it is closer to the concept of intelligence or of virtue, it is still undecided whether a real definition is attainable. In raising these questions about the purposes of definition, my point is not to settle these matters but to indicate how they prescribe what is wanted in an answer to the question “What is knowledge?” The purpose of a definition might be reached by more than one method, so to criticize the method is not the same as to criticize the purpose.8 The widespread purpose of giving a Lockian real definition issuing in a necessary truth can be attempted by more than one method. For decades, the preferred method has been the method of truth condition analysis according to which putative necessary and sufficient conditions for being an instance of knowledge are proposed and tested by the method of counterexample. Recently this method has been under attack in general9 and in the particular case of knowledge. For example, the recent theory of contextualism does not treat knowledge as a natural kind nor does it aim for a set of necessary and sufficient conditions.10 Edward Craig seems to reject not only the method of truth condition analysis, but the purpose behind the method as well.11 Craig aims to identify the distinguishing features of knowledge by examining its pragmatic purpose in a community of informants. He seems to think of knowledge as closer to an artifact than a natural kind. He does not aim at a necessary truth and it does not bother him that not all knowers are good informants. The procedure of revising a definition by examining counterexamples is not part of his method.12 Hilary Kornblith also rejects the method of truth condition analysis but not the purpose of giving a real definition. He sees knowledge as a natural kind, but he believes empirical investigation can result in a necessary truth about it just as empirical investigation can lead us to discover necessary truths about physical or biological kinds like gold

8 For an interesting discussion of the purposes and methods of definition, see Richard Robinson, Definition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950). 9 See John Pollock, “A Theory of Moral Reasoning,” Ethics 96 (April 1986):  506–​23. Pollock argues that concepts are not individuated by truth condition analysis but by what he calls their conceptual roles. 10 For examples of contextualism, see David Annis, “A Contextualist Theory of Epistemic Justification,” American Philosophical Quarterly 15 (1978): 213–​19; Keith De Rose, “Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (1992): 913–​29; David Lewis, “Elusive Knowledge,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74, no. 4 (December 1996): 549–​67. 11 Edward Craig, Knowledge and the State of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). 12 I  am not sure that Craig sees himself as offering a definition of knowledge in his book. Nonetheless, he is attempting to answer the question, “What is knowledge?” So the striking difference between his purposes and methods and those that are more common in contemporary epistemology is directly related to the topic of this chapter.

What Is Knowledge?  17 or water. Alvin Goldman uses truth condition analysis of the concept of knowledge, but he sees empirical methods as applicable to it since he believes concepts are psychological structures the contents of which are subject to empirical test. He doubts that the resulting definition will be a necessary truth and he does not aim for a real definition.13 Goldman therefore retains the method but not the purpose. Aristotle identifies a kind of definition that is “a formula exhibiting the cause of a thing’s existence.” As an example he cites defining thunder by its efficient cause as what occurs “because fire is quenched in the clouds.”14 Aristotle contrasts this with the kind of definition that purports to give the essential nature of a thing, its formal cause, and he suggests that the same thing can be defined both ways. It is interesting to compare Alvin Goldman’s early causal theory of knowledge and more recent forms of reliabilism with the Aristotelian procedure of defining a thing through its causes.15 Unlike Aristotle, these philosophers take their definitions to be rivals to definitions such as justified true belief (JTB) that aim to elucidate the nature of the knowing state itself. Goldman suggests that sometimes the nature of a thing just is to be (efficiently) caused a certain way, e.g., sunburn, and he thinks of knowledge as like sunburn. But the essential nature or formal cause of most things is distinct from their efficient cause, so if knowledge is like most things, it could be defined either through its nature or through its efficient cause, and the two definitions would not compete. I do not know of anyone who has pursued this possibility. There is much to be said for each of the theoretical and practical purposes mentioned above, but reflection might show us that some purposes do not make good philosophical sense. At any rate, conscious consideration of the purpose and method of definition in general can lead us to see alternatives that might otherwise slip by us when we are attempting to define knowledge. It is particularly desirable to question whether we should aim for a real definition since it is hard to determine whether knowledge is a single kind of thing for which a real definition is possible. Epistemologists almost always have the aim Plato had in the Theaetetus, where he says he is setting out to “bring the many sorts of knowledge under one definition” (148e). But do we know this aim is attainable? The attempt to give a real definition of knowledge can be challenged by the fact that the concept of knowledge has been treated in many different ways in different periods of philosophical history. Is there really a single target of analysis about which all these accounts differ, or are some of them simply talking

13 In personal correspondence. 14 Posterior Analytics II, 94a1–​5 (Barnes, 1994). 15 Goldman, “A Causal Theory of Knowing,” Journal of Philosophy 64 (1967): 357-​72; Epistemology and Cognition (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press,1986).

18  Knowledge and Understanding about different things? This question is particularly striking when we look at the differences in the rigor of the requirements for knowledge throughout philosophical history. According to some theories the conditions for knowledge are narrow and strict, whereas in others they are broad and loose. The philosophical tradition leans to the rigorist side, although the contemporary trend is in the opposing direction. It is now widely held that ordinary cases of perception and memory yield knowledge and that small children and possibly even animals have knowledge in these ways. But it is worth noticing how much this differs from a long line of rigorist accounts starting with that of Plato in the Phaedo and the Republic. Plato made knowledge a much loftier state than the ordinary, and the difference between his rigorist conception and the more lenient contemporary one may make us doubt that a real definition of knowledge is possible. These same worries also arise when we examine the sense in which knowledge is good, addressed in section 1.1. We saw there that perceptual knowledge seems initially to be good in a different sense from the good of the knowledge that requires reasons. Is it plausible to think that both phenomena are instances of the same kind of thing? Some philosophers have consciously divided the kinds of knowledge to reflect these differences.16 The same problem arises with the treatment of skepticism. When the global skeptic says he does not know that he inhabits the planet Earth and I say he does know that he inhabits the planet Earth, is it clear that we are disagreeing about something? Are we debating about the implications of a single concept or is there more than one concept that at times has gone by or has been translated by the term “knowledge”?17 All of these worries may lead us to ask to what extent knowledge is a single phenomenon rather than a set of distinct phenomena, to what extent the boundaries of the kind are natural rather than set by convention, and to what extent “knowledge” is a term of philosophical art. I believe we should begin by assuming that there is a single concept of knowledge about which philosophers have been debating for millennia and that we should aim for a necessary truth in our definition until forced to give up by continual failure in reaching the goal. I am less confident that knowledge is a single natural kind on a par with water or gold, but it is tempting to hope that that is the case. In any event, if knowledge is not a natural kind it is unlikely we will discover that unless we attempt to treat it as one. I will therefore tentatively accept the traditional aim of aspiring to a real definition of knowledge. 16 Ernest Sosa distinguishes between animal knowledge and reflective knowledge in “Intellectual Virtue in Perspective” and in “Reliabilism and Intellectual Virtue,” in his Knowledge in Perspective: Selected Essays in Epistemology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 17 William P. Alston has raised these same worries about the concept of justification in “Epistemic Desiderata,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (September 1993): 527–​51. But he says that he believes there is more commonality in the concept of knowledge (n. 15).

What Is Knowledge?  19 In addition to purposes and methods of definition, there are some common criteria for good definition that put limits on what will be acceptable, among them that a definition should not be ad hoc, that it should not be negative when it can be positive, that it should be brief, that it should not be circular, that it should utilize only concepts that are less obscure than the concept to be defined, and many others. I believe these criteria are good ones, although I will not examine them closely. Some of them serve the purpose of making a definition informative, a purpose that clearly goes beyond the aim of accuracy. The idea is that a definition is supposed to tell us something we didn’t already know. We want a definition because of our failure to clearly grasp the concept to be defined. A circular definition does not do that since it uses the concept to be defined in the definiens, nor does one that uses other concepts as much in need of definition as the definiendum. Negative definitions fail in a more subtle way. They tell us what something is not, not what it is.18 Of course, there are cases in which there is nothing more in a concept than the negation of another one. For instance, it is common to define right act as an act that is not wrong. In such cases we say that the negated concept in the definiens is conceptually more basic. I know of no reason to think that the concept of knowledge is like the concept of a right act, the negation of some other, more basic concept, so a negative definition of knowledge will probably be insufficiently informative. The criterion that the concepts in the definiens should be less obscure than the definiendum may be one of the motives of those epistemologists who maintain that there should be no normative concept in the definition of knowledge. To be sure, they recognize that knowledge is good, but their aim is to define the sense in which knowledge is good in nonmoral and even nonnormative terms because of an assumption that nonnormative concepts are better understood than normative ones. This is often accompanied by worries about the ontological status of normative features of the universe. Normative facts and properties are thought to be puzzling in a way that descriptive facts and properties are not. I do not find this view plausible, but it is not a matter that can be settled without a deep investigation into the nature of normativity, and that would take us well outside the domain of epistemology. It is worth noting, however, that this criterion may be at odds with one of the theoretical purposes of a definition already mentioned. If we want a definition to connect the concept to be defined with other key concepts in well-​developed philosophical theories, the concepts that have a central place in such theories might 18 Plato uses this criterion for a good definition in the Theaetetus where Socrates says: “But the original aim of our discussion was to find out rather what knowledge is than what it is not; at the same time we have made some progress, for we no longer seek for knowledge in perception at all” (187a) trans. Jowett.

20  Knowledge and Understanding turn out to be normative ones. And since knowledge is a normative concept, that is just what we would expect. If so, it might actually be an advantage to use these concepts in the definition. If ultimately it turns out that normative concepts are reducible to nonnormative ones, the demonstration that that is the case would be work for a further project. One of the requirements for a good definition I  have mentioned is that it not be ad hoc. This requirement is particularly telling when the method used is that of truth condition analysis. That method aims to make a definition counterexample-​free, but the procedure of proposing a definition and then repeatedly repairing it in response to counterexamples can sometimes lead to a definition that is too obviously a response to problems in some other definition. This is one way a definition can fail to be either theoretically illuminating or practically useful. In my view there is nothing wrong with there being a number of different definitions of knowledge of differing sorts, and it is helpful to keep their different purposes and methods in mind when one is compared with another. It is also a good idea to be sensitive to the difficulty in satisfying all the desiderata in a single definition. One may have to be sacrificed for the sake of another. For example, precision is clearly better than vagueness, but sometimes precision results in a definition of knowledge that is so long, cumbersome, and hard to remember that it serves neither the purpose of giving us theoretical understanding nor the practical one of giving us guidance in achieving it. In section 1.3 we will look at an important set of counterexamples that attacked a long-​standing definition of knowledge. It will be helpful to keep in mind the various desiderata in a definition of knowledge while addressing that problem, since one moral that might be drawn from it is that there is a problem with the method of counterexample itself.

1.3  The Traditional Definition of Knowledge and Gettier Objections So far, we have concluded that knowledge is good true belief. Nobody would consider this an acceptable definition, however, because it adequately serves neither a theoretical nor a practical purpose. The concept of good is at least as much in need of analysis as the concept of knowledge. The definition does not specify what sense of good is intended, and even if it did, it does not provide us with the means to apply it to cases. On the other hand, it is brief, it is noncircular, and within the bounds of extreme vagueness, it is accurate. Since believing is something a person does, beliefs have customarily been treated as analogous to acts, so beliefs are good in the sense in which acts are

What Is Knowledge?  21 right. Right believing has traditionally been identified with justified believing. So knowledge is justified true belief.19 Sometimes, but not always, this has been understood to mean true belief for the right reasons. For several decades the concept of justification has received an enormous amount of attention since it was assumed that the JTB definition of knowledge was more or less accurate and that the concept of justification was the weak link in the definition. For the most part these discussions proceeded under the assumption that the aim was to arrive at a necessary truth and that the method to be used in doing so was that of truth condition analysis. An important set of counterexamples to the JTB definition of knowledge were proposed by Edmund Gettier and led to many attempts at refining the definition without questioning either the purpose or the method of definition.20 In this section we will look at the moral of Gettier’s objection. Gettier’s examples are cases in which a belief is true and justified, but it is not an instance of knowledge because it is only by chance that the belief is true. Writers on Gettier normally do not say what they think is wrong with chance, but Aristotle does when he says, “To leave the greatest and noblest of things to chance would hardly be right.”21 Aristotle is here referring to eudaimonia or happiness, but his point is a general one about goods, at least great goods, and knowledge is surely a great good. It is incompatible with the value of knowledge that the aim of the knower, namely, getting the truth, occurs by chance. This much has rarely been disputed even though, as we have seen, the sense of good intended has certainly been disputed. In one standard Gettier example we are to imagine that Smith gives you plenty of evidence that he owns a Ford and you have no evidence against it. You then quite justifiably form the belief Smith owns a Ford. From that you infer its disjunction with Brown is in Barcelona, where Brown is an acquaintance whom you have no reason to believe is in Barcelona. Since the inference is justified, your belief Smith owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona is also justified. (Never mind what would possess you to form such a belief.) As it turns out, Smith is lying; he owns no Ford. But Brown is by chance in Barcelona. Your belief Smith owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona is therefore true and justified, but it is hardly something you know. Many examples of this kind have been proposed.22

19 Sometimes the JTB definition of knowledge has been compared with that of Plato in Theaetetus 201d in which Socrates considers and then rejects the proposal that knowledge is true belief (doxa) with an account (logos). It seems unlikely, though, that what Plato meant by a logos is very close to what contemporary philosophers mean by justification. In addition, Plato is not discussing propositional knowledge in that dialogue, but rather knowledge of persons or things. 20 Edmund Gettier, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Analysis 23 (1963): 121–​123. 21 Nicomachean Ethics 1099b25. Trans. Ostwald. 22 Bertrand Russell proposes an example of a stopped clock that is similar to Gettier cases in Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1948), p. 154. But Russell uses it as a counterexample to the proposal that knowledge is true belief. He does not seem to notice that if I have no reason to distrust my clock, my belief might be justified as well as true. This point was

22  Knowledge and Understanding As remarked above, it has often been noted that the problem in a Gettier case is that the truth is reached by chance; it is a kind of luck. But the structure of this case reveals that it is actually a case of double luck. It is mere bad luck that you are the unwitting victim of Smith’s lies, and so it is only an accident that the kind of evidence that usually leads you to the truth instead leads you to form the false belief Smith owns a Ford. You end up with a true belief anyway because of a second accidental feature of the situation, a feature that has nothing to do with your cognitive activity. So an element of good luck cancels out the bad. Some writers on Gettier have thought that the problem arises only for a restricted range of definitions, those according to which JTB means true belief based upon good reasons.23 Since “justified” has sometimes meant “for the right reasons,” this is understandable. Unfortunately, however, the problem is much more extensive than that. Given a couple of plausible assumptions already mentioned about what is required in an acceptable definition, it can be shown that Gettier problems arise for any definition in which knowledge is true belief plus something else that is closely connected with truth but does not entail it. It does not matter if the something else is a matter of believing for the right reasons or even if it is captured by the concept of justification. It need not even be anything accessible to the consciousness of the believer; for example, it may simply specify that the belief is produced by a reliable epistemic process or properly functioning faculties. All that is necessary is that there be a small gap between truth and the component of knowledge in addition to true belief in the definition. Call this component Q. In any such case a counterexample to the definition can be constructed according to the following recipe: Start with a belief in the gap—​that is, a belief that is false but is Q in as strong a sense of Q as is needed for knowledge. The falsity of the belief will not be due to any systematically describable element in the situation for if it were, such a feature could be used in the analysis of Q and then truth would be entailed by Q, contrary to the hypothesis. We may say that the falsity of the belief is due to some element of luck. Now amend the case by adding another element of luck, only this time one that makes the belief true after all. This second element must be independent of Q so that Q is unchanged. We now have an example of a belief that is Q in a sense strong enough for knowledge and that is true, but that is not knowledge. The conclusion is that as long as the concept of knowledge closely connects the component Q and the component of truth but permits some degree

noticed by Israel Scheffler and is discussed by Robert Shope in The Analysis of Knowing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983): 19–​20.

23

See Alvin Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993): 36.

What Is Knowledge?  23 of independence between them, no definition of knowledge as true belief plus Q will succeed. A well-​known attempt to avoid Gettier problems without giving up the essence of the JTB definition is to add defeasibility conditions to the definition. This idea was proposed when it was noticed that in typical Gettier cases the justified belief depends upon or otherwise “goes through” a false belief. In any event there is a fact unknown to the subject which would defeat her justification should she discover it. In our example it is the fact that Smith does not own a Ford. With this observation in mind, defeasibility theories add to the components of true belief and justifiedness the requirement that there are no truths, qualified in various ways, which when added to the reasons justifying the belief would make it no longer justified. In the strong defeasibility theory, a belief is not knowledge unless there is no truth which when added to the reasons justifying the belief make it no longer justified. But that, of course, makes Q entail truth, so it is not a case in which there is a small gap between truth and the other conditions for knowledge. Weaker defeasibility theories do not close the gap between Q and truth, and they are still vulnerable to Gettier-​style problems using the recipe I  have proposed. That procedure allows us to produce counterexamples even when the belief does not depend upon a false belief and even when there is no false belief in the neighborhood. The nature of induction allows us to produce examples of this kind. Suppose that Dr. Jones, a physician, has very good inductive evidence that her patient, Smith, is suffering from virus X.  Smith exhibits all of the symptoms of this virus, and laboratory tests are consistent with the presence of virus X and no other known virus. Let us also suppose that all of the evidence upon which Jones bases her diagnosis is true, and there is no evidence accessible to her that counts against the diagnosis. The conclusion that Smith is suffering from virus X really is extremely probable on the evidence. But even the strongest inductive evidence does not entail the conclusion and so it is possible to make a mistake. Let us suppose that this is one of those cases. Smith is suffering from a distinct and unknown virus Y. Dr. Jones’s belief that Smith is presently suffering from virus X is false, but it is justified and undefeated by any evidence accessible to her. Now the recipe for generating a Gettier-​style example tells us to add an additional feature of the situation that makes the belief true after all but without altering the other features of the situation. Let us say that besides suffering from virus Y, Smith has very recently contracted virus X, but so recently that he does not yet exhibit symptoms caused by X, nor is the laboratory evidence upon which Jones bases her diagnosis produced by X.  So while the evidence upon which Dr. Jones bases her diagnosis does make it highly probable that Smith has X, the fact that Smith has X has nothing to do with that evidence. In this case

24  Knowledge and Understanding Dr. Jones’s belief that Smith has virus X is true, justified, and undefeated, but it is not knowledge. This same example can be used to generate counterexamples to a host of other theories. Since even the strongest inductive inference can lead to a false belief, that false inductive belief will satisfy any requirement for the normative element of knowledge that is not necessarily connected to truth. But then we can always describe a situation that is identical except that the belief turns out to be true after all due to some extraneous aspect of the situation. In such a case the subject will not have knowledge but will satisfy the conditions of the definition. We may conclude that the prevalent method of defining knowledge as true belief plus something else cannot withstand counterexample as long as there is a small degree of independence between truth and that something else. It follows that there must be a necessary connection between truth and the other conditions of knowledge in addition to truth, whatever they may be. In section 1.1, we saw that these other conditions can be loosely defined as believing in a good way. So the sense in which knowledge is believing in a good way must entail truth.24 It must be observed, however, that the conclusion of this section is correct only if we accept some plausible assumptions mentioned in section 1.2 about desired features in a definition. That is because the problem can be avoided by giving a definition that is either ad hoc or is too vague to be useful. For example, the definition knowledge is justified true belief that is not a Gettier case is obviously not susceptible to Gettier-​style examples, nor is the very general definition we started with: Knowledge is good true belief. The first definition is clearly ad hoc as well as negative, and we have already said that the second is not only much too vague, but it uses a concept in the definiens that is at least as obscure as the concept of knowledge. Since Gettier cases are those in which accidentality or luck is involved, it has often been suggested that knowledge is non-​accidentally true belief. This definition also is vague as well as negative and it has little practical import. It is not a counterexample to the point of this section, though, since nonaccidental truth entails truth. However, it has been shown by the Howard-​Snyders that the component of knowledge in addition to true belief can be defined in a way that uses the concept of nonaccidentality but does not entail truth. Their definition is this: Knowledge is true belief which is such that if it were true it would be non-​ accidentally true.25 The idea behind this definition is the observation that the 24 The argument of this section is taken from Zagzebski, “The Inescapability of Gettier Problems,” Philosophical Quarterly (1994): 65-​73, and Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Part III, Section 3. 25 Frances and Daniel Howard-​Snyder, “The Gettier Problem and Infallibilism,” paper delivered at the Central Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association, May 1996. Sharon Ryan makes a similar proposal in “Does Warrant Entail Truth?” Philosophy and Phenomenological

What Is Knowledge?  25 nonaccidental connection between the way in which knowledge is good and the truth need only obtain in the cases in which the belief is true since false beliefs are not candidates for knowledge. A false belief can have the property of being such that if it were true it would be nonaccidentally true and, hence, this property does not entail truth. This definition highlights an assumption I have made in my recipe for generating Gettier-​style counterexamples, the assumption that if a false belief has the property that converts true belief into knowledge—​the property Q—​it is always possible that there be a belief that has Q but that is accidentally true. The Howard-​Snyders’ idea is to rule out that possibility in the definition of property Q. The resulting definition combines the defects of the previous ones. Like the definition nonaccidentally true belief it is vague, negative, lacks practical import, and has little to recommend it theoretically. Like the definition justified true belief that is not a Gettier case, it is ad hoc. In addition, it has the problems that come with interpreting the truth conditions of the subjunctive conditional If it were true, it would be nonaccidentally true. On the other hand, it at least appears to be nonnormative, a feature that ought to please those philosophers who aim for a definition of knowledge that contains no normative element. Nonaccidentality is not a desirable element in a definition of knowledge, but it shows us something interesting about the process of defining knowledge. Nonaccidentality has been suggested as a component of knowledge not because it has been identified as a feature of paradigm cases of knowledge, but because accidentality is a feature of certain well-​known cases of nonknowledge. The trouble is that the observation that an accidental connection between truth and component Q is insufficient for knowledge does not tell us what is sufficient for knowledge. Of course, the connection between truth and component Q must be nonaccidental, but that is only the weakest thing we can say about it. Counterexamples are generally situations in which a defect in a definition is highlighted in an extreme form. But we should not conclude from that that anything less than the extreme defect is good enough. In this section we have seen that the connection between truth and the element of knowledge in addition to truth must be not only nonaccidental, but there must be no possibility at all of a gap between them. Closing the gap can be done in a variety of ways, not all of which require entailment, and I suggest that we should choose a way that respects the other desired features in a definition.26 To avoid a definition that is ad hoc it Research 56 (March 1996):  183–​92, but she puts the conditional in the indicative mood. This is at least misleading since it suggests she intends a material conditional. 26 I have argued here that there must be a necessary connection between the component Q and truth. As I have stated my conclusion, however, Q must entail truth, although I have not argued that the connection must be as strong as entailment. Peter Klein has pointed out to me that a relationship of nomic

26  Knowledge and Understanding is preferable that there be a conceptual connection between truth and the other element of knowledge. That is, knowledge is not only a good way of cognitively grasping the truth, but it is also one in which the truth and the good way in which it is achieved are intrinsically related. That intrinsic relation ought to be explicit in the definition. Theories that have this feature have been proposed, although they have usually not recognized that the moral of Gettier demands it.27 In this section we have seen that if we accept some plausible requirements for an acceptable definition, Gettier cases arise whenever there is a gap between the truth and the other conditions for knowledge. This means that knowledge is not merely a summation of the component of truth and the other components. I have drawn the conclusion that we want a definition that makes a conceptual connection between truth and the sense in which knowledge is good. However, our analysis might support a more radical conclusion. The discussion of Gettier cases arises within the context of certain assumptions about the purpose and method of the definition. The aim is to get a necessary truth, perhaps also to get to a real definition, and the method used is that of truth condition analysis. But as we saw in section 1.2, it is not obvious that these assumptions are warranted. In particular, the method of truth condition analysis can be and has been disputed. The Gettier problem might be interpreted as exhibiting the defects of such a method, thereby supporting the move to a different method altogether. As I have already stated, however,28 my own preference is the more conservative one of retaining the method of truth condition analysis but without letting the aim to make the definition counterexample-​free dominate the list of desiderata adopted in section 1.2. necessity between Q and truth might be sufficient to avoid the double luck problem. That is, it might be sufficient that the gap between Q and truth is closed in every possible world with our causal laws. I will not pursue this approach here, however, since the relationship of entailment is the most straightforward way to make the required connection of necessity between the two components of knowledge, and I do not see any reason to think that theories vulnerable to the double luck formula I have outlined here would be any better off with a requirement of nomic necessity instead of entailment. 27 Three examples are Roderick Chisholm’s early theory, Goldman’s causal theory, and the strong defeasibility theory, already mentioned. Chisholm used the concept of making p evident in the definition of knowledge he proposes in the first edition of Theory of Knowledge (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-​Hall, 1966), and he says there that whatever makes p evident must not also make evident a false proposition. This precludes the falsehood of p. Goldman’s causal theory of knowledge (1967) had the truth condition built into the causal condition because he required that the subject does not know p unless the state of affairs p is appropriately causally connected to the belief p. This puts the truth of p in the causal condition. Since Goldman’s later reliabilism (1986) does not build in the truth in this way, I assume that he was not motivated by the considerations I am giving here. In the strong defeasibility theory as expressed by Klein a belief is an instance of knowledge only if there is no true proposition which when added to the reasons that justify the belief makes the belief no longer justified. This condition entails the truth of the belief since if a belief p is false, not p is true, so there is a true proposition which if added to the subject’s reasons for p entails the falsehood of p, namely, not p. 28 Peter Klein, “A Proposed Definition of Propositional Knowledge,” Journal of Philosophy 67 (1971): 471–482.

What Is Knowledge?  27

1.4  A Definition of Knowledge The conclusions of the first three sections of this chapter give us a program for defining knowledge. Let us review them. In section 1.1, I gave a rough definition of knowledge as believing a true proposition in a good way, and we saw that the sense of good intended in the concept of knowledge is a stumbling block to reaching a definition that encompasses both the cases of knowledge by perception or memory and the cases of knowledge that involve higher human abilities. The good of the former is similar to natural goods, whereas the latter are good in a sense that is close to the moral. The good of knowledge may sometimes even be like the most noble goods. In section 1.2, I reviewed a number of different purposes and methods of defining knowledge and proposed that we try to satisfy as many of them as possible. But I will not try to satisfy the common purpose of eliminating all normative concepts from the definition. Since we know that the concept of knowledge is normative, it is a theoretical advantage if it can be related to central concepts in ethics since ethicists already have proposed theoretical structures in which these concepts have been analyzed. If it turns out that normative concepts are reducible to or supervene on nonnormative concepts, the demonstration that that is the case would be an independent project. Meanwhile, one of my purposes will be to integrate the concept of knowledge into a background ethical theory. In section 1.3, we looked at the moral of Gettier examples and concluded that the normative component of knowledge, the component that makes knowledge good, must entail the truth. Success in reaching the truth must be an intrinsic part of the sense in which each instance of knowledge is good. I will propose a definition that attempts to meet all of these criteria. It should be clear from what has been said, however, that there is no unique way of doing so. In particular, the successful attainment of the theoretical purpose of locating the concept of knowledge on a background conceptual map depends upon what concepts are thought to be most theoretically salient, and that, in turn, depends upon which background theories have the most importance in the eyes of those asking the question, “What is knowledge?” But that, in turn, depends upon the resolution of deep issues in metaphilosophy. Should we try to embed the concept of knowledge in a background normative theory because it is a normative concept? Should we instead embed it in a background metaphysical theory on the assumption that metaphysics is more basic than epistemology? Or should we embed it in a scientific theory on the grounds that knowledge is a natural phenomenon? I have already said that I will take the first of these alternatives, but I have not argued for it and I can see many advantages in defining knowledge in terms of very different concepts from the one I have chosen. In fact, even if the purpose is to embed the concept of knowledge in a background ethical theory,

28  Knowledge and Understanding the choice of theory will obviously depend upon one’s position regarding the kind of ethical theory most likely to serve our theoretical and practical purposes. The definition I will propose arises from a virtue theory of ethics. The complete theory includes intellectual as well as moral virtues within the same theory and aims to give a unified account of the morality of believing as well as of acting, but I will discuss only that part of the theory that underlies the normative concept I use in defining knowledge.29 This is the concept of an act of intellectual virtue. The concept of a virtue has a number of theoretical and practical advantages. Its proposed advantages in ethics are well known and I argued in Virtues of the Mind that there are parallel advantages in epistemology. In section 1.3e saw that the definition of knowledge must make success in reaching the truth an intrinsic aspect of that which makes knowledge good. The traditional concept of justification cannot serve this purpose, nor can any concept of a property of a belief. That is because no normative property of a belief guarantees its truth, at least no property the concept of which already has a history. But in Aristotle the concept of a virtue combines that of an admirable internal state with external success. At least, that is one way of interpreting Aristotle, and in any event, the concept of a virtue as used in ethics can be adapted to our need for a concept that makes an intrinsic relation between the good of a person’s internal state—​in this case, belief—​and its success—​in this case, the truth. So I suggest that it will be beneficial to move back a step from properties of beliefs to properties of persons in our search for a concept that attaches the good of knowledge to its truth.30 Virtues are properties of persons. Intellectual virtues are properties of persons that aim at intellectual goods, most especially truth. Moral virtues are properties of persons that aim at distinctively moral goods such as the well-​being of others. Since the concept of a virtue already has a rich history, if we can connect knowledge to virtue, that would be a theoretical advantage. In addition, the concept of a virtue has practical uses. Ordinary people speak of such individual virtues as kindness, fairness, courage, open-​mindedness, perseverance, generosity, discretion, and trust, and sometimes the same names are used for both moral and intellectual virtues. Furthermore, the evaluation of acts is often made in terms of the virtues or vices they express. The price of the practical usefulness of the concept of virtue and of the individual virtues may be a certain degree of conventionality in the application of the concept, although I will not discuss this aspect of the concept here. Virtue is not a technical concept, although it can be technically 29 I have outlined a background ethical virtue theory in part II of Virtues of the Mind (1996). 30 The move to properties of persons rather than properties of beliefs had already been made by reliabilists and earlier virtue epistemologists for different reasons. See my entry, “Virtue Epistemology,” in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy for a brief history of the development of virtue epistemology and its background in reliabilism.

What Is Knowledge?  29 refined. I believe it is a virtue of the concept of virtue that it has both an extensive history in the philosophical literature and a wide use in ordinary discourse. There are many accounts of the structure of a virtue. I will briefly summarize my own without argument. A virtue has two components. The first is a motivational component and the second is a component of success in reaching the end of the motivational component. The motivational component of a virtue is a disposition to have an emotion that directs action toward an end. Each virtue has a distinctive motivational component with a distinctive end, but groups of virtues can be categorized by their ultimate ends. Most intellectual virtues have truth as their ultimate end.31 Moral virtues have other ultimate ends. The success component of a virtue is a component of reliability in bringing about the end of the virtuous motivation. To take a few examples, the virtues of compassion, trust, and open-​mindedness can be roughly defined as follows: The virtue of compassion is a trait that includes the emotion-​disposition to alleviate the suffering of others and reliable success in doing so. The virtue of trust is the trait that includes the emotion-​disposition to trust those and only those who are trustworthy, and reliable success in doing so. The virtue of open-​mindedness is the trait that includes the emotion-​disposition to be open to the views of others even when they conflict with one’s own and reliable success in doing so. I suggest that the structure of all or, at least, most of the virtues can be defined by this pattern. The concept of a virtue is important for character evaluation. When we say a person has a virtue, we mean that she has a disposition to be motivated a certain way and to act a certain way in relevant circumstances, and in addition, is reliably successful in bringing about the end of her virtuous motive. But having a disposition to a motive does not mean she always has the motive in the relevant circumstances, and being reliably successful does not mean she is always successful. So the fact that she is virtuous does not entail that her individual acts and beliefs should be evaluated positively. At the same time, someone who is not virtuous may nonetheless be able to perform acts and have beliefs that are valuationally positive. The evaluation of acts and beliefs, then, requires further conditions. Sometimes an act or belief has positive value simply because it is what a virtuous person would typically do in the circumstances, whether or not it is virtuously motivated. There is a sense of right in which we say a person has done the right thing in giving the correct change to a buyer even though he is not at all motivated by moral concerns. Similarly, there is a sense of justified in which we say a person has a justified belief in believing that the earth is a round even if he



31

There may be a few exceptions. Some virtues may aim at understanding rather than truth.

30  Knowledge and Understanding has not made the reasons for believing it his own. We also evaluate beliefs and acts from the aspect of the agent’s motivation. An act or belief that is virtuously motivated deserves credit, although we almost always qualify it if it does not also involve doing/​believing the right thing. An act may be evaluated positively on both of these grounds and still not have everything we want morally in an act. So even when it is motivated properly and is what a virtuous person would do in the circumstances, it may fail in the aim of the act. When this happens, the act lacks something morally desirable. Moral success is evaluated positively even though that is to some extent out of the hands of the agent. It is one of the ways in which we are all victims of moral luck. So, for example, a person might be motivated by generosity and act in a way characteristic of generous persons in some particular circumstances, say, by giving money to a beggar on the street, but if it turns out that the beggar is really rich and is playing the part of a beggar to win a bet, we would think that there is something morally lacking in the act. This is not, of course, to suggest that we would withhold praise of the agent, but her act would not merit the degree of praise due it if the beggar really were deserving. The same point applies to intellectual acts. A person may be motivated by intellectual virtues and act in a way intellectually virtuous persons act in attempting to get knowledge, but if she fails to get the truth, her epistemic state is lacking something praiseworthy. This means there is a kind of epistemic luck analogous to moral luck. As Thomas Nagel has remarked, the Nobel Prize is not given to people who are wrong.32 Getting knowledge itself is a kind of prize, and it is in part the prize of being right. In addition, mere success in reaching the end of the virtuous motive in the particular case is not sufficient for the highest praise of an act or belief even if it also has the other praiseworthy features just identified. It is important that success in reaching the end is due to the other praiseworthy features of the act. The end must be reached because of these other features. This is because there are ethical analogues to Gettier cases, although as far as I know, ethicists have not noticed this. Let me describe one such case. Suppose a judge, weighing the evidence against an accused killer, determines by an impeccable procedure and motivated by justice that the man is guilty. We may assume that the judge not only does everything he ought to do, but he exhibits all the virtues appropriate in this situation. Nonetheless, even the most virtuous can make a mistake, just as we saw that even the most intellectually admirable can fail in an inductive conclusion in the case of Dr. Jones. Suppose this is one of those times. The accused is the wrong man. The fact that the judge makes a mistake is not due to any defect in him, whether moral or intellectual; 32 Thomas Nagel, “Moral Luck,” in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), n. 11.

What Is Knowledge?  31 it is simply bad luck. Obviously, things have gone wrong, wrong enough that we would call the act a miscarriage of justice. The judge’s act is not an act of justice even though we would not blame him for the error and would even praise him for acting justly. Nonetheless, the act itself is not deserving of the highest praise. It is lacking something morally important. To get a Gettier-​style problem we added an additional element of luck, a feature of good luck that cancels out the bad, and we can use the same procedure here. Suppose that the actual killer is secretly switched with the man the judge thinks he is sentencing so that the judge ends up accidentally sentencing the right man. One accident cancels out the other so that the end result is the desired one of punishing the culprit. In this situation I believe we would not give the judge’s act the praise that would be due it if he had found the right man guilty in the first place. Of course we are relieved that the innocent man is not punished, but even though the end result is the one at which the judge was aiming and he was praiseworthy in both his motive and his actions, that is not sufficient to make his act the kind of act that deserves the highest moral praise. The foregoing considerations show us that we need the concept of an act that gets everything right, an act that is good in every respect. And we have seen the elements that must be right or good in order to merit that evaluation. I call the concept that of an act of virtue. The definition is as follows: An act is an act of virtue A if and only if it arises from the motivational component of A, is an act that persons with virtue A characteristically do in the circumstances, and is successful in bringing about the end of virtue A because of these features of the act.

The motivational component of A is a disposition. An act that arises from that disposition need not be consciously motivated by A, but it must be such that the explanation for the act would refer to it. An act that is characteristic of virtue A is an act that is not only what persons with virtue A would probably do in the circumstances, but it is an act that is a mark of the behavior of persons with that virtue.33 The third component specifies that success in reaching the end must be because of the other two components. This needs further analysis. I know of no account of the because of relation that fully captures it, but I will have a bit more to say about it in section 1.5. It is important to notice that on this definition it is not necessary that the agent possess virtue A in order to perform an act of virtue A. One of Aristotle’s conditions for virtue possession is that the trait must be 33 In Virtues of the Mind I expressed the second component of the definition as follows: “it is something a person with virtue A would (probably) do in the circumstances” (248). But what a virtuous person would probably do may not have anything to do with the virtue in question.

32  Knowledge and Understanding deeply entrenched. If so, persons who are virtuous-​in-​training do not possess a given virtue, yet I see no reason to think they cannot perform acts of virtue, that is, acts that are as praiseworthy as an act can be with respect to the virtue in question. There are acts of moral virtue and acts of intellectual virtue. We are concerned here with the latter. An act of intellectual virtue A is one that arises from the motivational component of an intellectual virtue A, is an act that persons with virtue A characteristically do in those circumstances, and is successful in reaching the truth because of these other features of the act. The definition of knowledge I propose is as follows: Knowledge is belief arising out of acts of intellectual virtue.

At the beginning of this chapter I mentioned that the common practice of concentrating on propositional knowledge in philosophical accounts of knowledge does not necessarily reflect its greater importance. All forms of knowledge involve contact of the mind with reality, however, and so a more comprehensive definition of knowledge that includes knowledge by acquaintance as well as propositional knowledge would be as follows: Knowledge is cognitive contact with reality arising out of acts of intellectual virtue

Knowledge is generally not reached through a single act but through a combination of acts of one’s own, as well as through the acts of others and cooperating circumstances. We tend to think of knowledge as our own accomplishment, but this is rarely the case. The fact that our knowledge depends upon the knowledge and intellectual virtue of a host of other persons in our intellectual community, as well as a cooperating universe, makes it clear that we cannot expect to isolate the conditions for knowledge in some set of independent properties of the knower, much less a set of properties over which the knower has control. Epistemic luck permeates the human condition whether for good or for ill.

1.5  Assessment of the Definition 1.5.1  Resolving the Sense in Which Knowledge Is Good At the end of section 1.1, I said that no definition of knowledge can succeed unless it can resolve the different senses in which knowledge is good. Ordinary perceptual and memory knowledge seem to be good in a sense close to that of

What Is Knowledge?  33 natural goods like beauty, wit, and strength. But sometimes knowledge is treated as a more elevated state, requiring effort and skill. In these cases, it seems to be good in a sense close to the moral. If so, it might turn out that knowledge is not a natural kind for which a real definition is possible. Perhaps investigation will reveal that there really are two distinct kinds of knowledge, just as investigation into the nature of jade revealed that what is called “jade” is really two distinct substances: jadeite and nephrite. I have not eliminated the possibility that ultimately this may happen, but I do not think we yet have a reason to bifurcate knowledge into two distinct kinds with separate analyses. The definition proposed in section 1.4 can cover both kinds. In fact, I think it can even cover the highest sort of knowledge that is arguably in the realm of the noble. An act of intellectual virtue has been defined within a background of ethical theory in which virtue is the primary concept. “Virtue” is a term flexible enough to apply to more than moral traits, although the moral sense is no doubt the paradigm.34 The definition of “an act of virtue” stretches the moral sense of the term in another way. An act of virtue is an act in which there is an imitation of the behavior of virtuous persons and success in reaching the end for that reason. More important for our present interest in interpreting the concept of an act of intellectual virtue, there is nothing in the definition that precludes that property from attaching to acts that are more or less automatic, as typically happens in perception and memory. The virtuous motivation from which an act of virtue arises need not be either conscious or strong, so ordinary epistemic motives will often be sufficient. In fact, nothing in the definition prevents the motivational component from applying to motives that are almost universal in some situations. The second component specifies that the act must be something that a person with the virtue in question would typically do insofar as he is expressing the virtue. But virtuous persons do not necessarily act in a way that is out of the ordinary, although, of course, they certainly do so in some circumstances. A person who has the virtue of attentiveness is as attentive as is necessary in situations of a given kind in order to reach the truth. A person who has the virtue of thoroughness examines the evidence as thoroughly as is necessary for the particular circumstances, and so on. Suppose a person with all the intellectual virtues is looking at a white wall in ordinary circumstances. Does she stare for a long time before forming the belief that there is a white wall in front of her? Does she undertake an investigation of the possibility that she is hallucinating or under the influence of drugs? Does she question trustworthy authorities on the subject of the color of walls? Of course not. To do so would exhibit a degree of intellectual scrupulosity tantamount to paranoia. But she is sensitive to any evidence 34 In Virtues of the Mind I argue that intellectual virtues are best treated as forms of moral virtue. The definition of knowledge does not depend upon this point, however.

34  Knowledge and Understanding that would lead her to suspect a defect in her perceptual ability or any peculiarities of the circumstances that would suggest a noncooperating environment. Fortunately, most of the time she need not follow up on these possibilities. So, to act like a person with intellectual virtue acts when judging the color of a wall is not a very difficult thing to do. And the same point applies to ordinary cases of belief based on clear memory. Typical true beliefs by perception or memory, then, satisfy my definition of knowledge. It is even possible that young children satisfy the definition as soon as they are old enough to know there is a difference between truth and falsehood and to be motivated to get the former. So, the definition can handle cases on the low end of knowledge. Its real advantage over other accounts, however, is at the upper end of knowledge. Stunning intellectual discoveries yield knowledge in a way that needs to be captured by any acceptable definition of the knowing state. Such knowledge is not merely the result of reliable processes or properly functioning faculties or epistemic procedures that have no flaw, as some epistemologists have suggested. They are the result of epistemic activities that go well beyond the nondefective. They are, in fact, exceptionally laudatory. The concept of an intellectual virtue is well suited to the purpose of identifying knowledge in cases of this sort. A virtue is an admirable quality that goes beyond the minimum for being epistemically respectable. Some virtues go far enough beyond the minimum to reach the status of the highest goods. Creativity and originality of intellect are among those qualities associated with the high end of epistemic value, and an act of the virtue of originality is praiseworthy in the same way that acts of supreme generosity are praiseworthy. Such acts are truly exceptional. The definition of knowledge I have proposed, then, covers a range of cases from that of low-​grade perceptual knowledge whose goodness is like natural goodness, to cases of beliefs based on evidence that are praised and blamed in the way we associate with the moral, to truly stellar intellectual achievements whose goodness is close to the noble.

1.5.2  How It Escapes Gettier Problems In section 1.3, I showed that unless we are willing to live with a very uninformative definition, Gettier problems result from any definition in which the sense in which knowledge is good does not entail truth. The concept of an act of intellectual virtue does entail truth, and so my definition is not guaranteed to fail in the way I have outlined for those theories susceptible to the double luck strategy. In the two cases we examined, that of the belief, Smith owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona, and the case of Dr. Jones and her diagnosis that Smith has virus X, the believer reaches the truth because of the feature of double luck I identified

What Is Knowledge?  35 in these cases.35 You and Dr. Jones do reach your respective beliefs because of your intellectually virtuous motivations and activities, but you do not reach the truth because of these features of the situation. This means that the concept of reaching A because of B is a key element of the definition. We all have intuitions about what it means for something to happen because of something else, but this concept is in need of further analysis and I do not know of one that is adequate. Some epistemologists have attempted counterfactual accounts of the component of knowledge in addition to true belief and, up to a point, whether the believer would arrive at the truth in close counterfactual circumstances can be used as a way of determining whether the truth is reached in the actual circumstances because of virtuous activity. So, for example, we might defend our claim that you do not get to the truth in the Ford and Barcelona case because of your virtuous motives and acts since in very similar circumstances you would have had the same motives and performed the same acts and failed to get to the truth. That would have been the case if Brown had not happened to be in Barcelona. Similarly, Dr. Jones would have reached a false belief in very similar circumstances even with her virtuous motives and acts. That would have happened if Smith had not happened to contract virus X just before she made her diagnosis. But looking at whether the believer reaches the truth in relevantly similar counterfactual circumstances is only a rough way of determining whether the truth is reached because of designated features of the act. It is certainly not a way of explaining what is meant by saying that the truth is reached because of these features. For example, there are no counterfactual circumstances in which a bachelor is not unmarried, but it would not be true to say that he is a bachelor because he is unmarried. The concept A because of B is not reducible to these counterfactual conditions. At best any such definition of because of will be a nominal definition.

1.6  Issues for Further Inquiry In the method of truth condition analysis, the principal question is whether the definition is too broad (weak) or too narrow (strong). John Greco has objected to me that the definition might be too weak in that it does not require the actual possession of intellectual virtue as a condition for knowledge. Since acts of intellectual virtue can be performed by agents whose virtuous behavior does not arise out of an entrenched habit, these agents cannot be trusted to act virtuously

35 Not all counterexamples in the Gettier literature have the double luck feature, although, of course, I have argued that cases with this feature can always be produced whenever there is a gap between truth and the other component of knowledge. But in every Gettier case there is some element of chance or luck.

36  Knowledge and Understanding in similar circumstances in the future. Is it appropriate to attribute knowledge to them if they would not do the same thing in relevantly similar circumstances? I have said that to make the possession of the fully entrenched virtue a condition for knowledge is too strong since it rules out knowledge in children and unsophisticated adults, but Greco’s point deserves further attention. It is likely that it would lead us into an investigation of the psychology of habit formation and the stability of the behavior of persons at early stages of acquiring intellectual traits. It also brings up the question of the extent to which we think an otherwise unreliable person can have knowledge because her behavior depends upon the reliability of other persons in her epistemic community. It may also be objected that the definition is too strong. This is most likely to be raised against the motivational component of an act of intellectual virtue. Why think that the subject’s motives have anything to do with whether she gets knowledge? This question highlights the differences between those who tend to think of knowledge as procedural and mechanical, and those who think of it as something for which we are responsible. My sympathies, of course, are with those in the latter category, but underlying the issue of whether responsibility extends to the cognitive sphere is a disagreement about the extent to which cognitive activity is voluntary. This suggests that deeper questions about human nature are at issue here.36 The definition as I have proposed it here meets many of the criteria for a good definition given in section 1.2, but it is vague and it clearly needs more extensive analysis. We have already seen the need for an account of the because of relation in the third component of the definition of an act of virtue. It also needs an account of motivation, as well as an account of acting in a way that is characteristic of a virtue, the first and second components of the definition. If an agent is doing what virtuous persons characteristically do in some circumstances, does that include having the relevant knowledge of the circumstances that virtuous persons have when they act? How far does that knowledge go? And if knowledge of circumstances is included in the account of the second component of an act of virtue, aren’t we left with a circular definition since the concept of knowledge has been smuggled into the definiens?37 There is also the matter of identifying and individuating the intellectual virtues. This is important not only because differing lists of the individual virtues and their analyses can result in accounts of knowledge that differ greatly in plausibility, but because it is possible that some of the virtues conflict. Virtue theories of ethics have this same problem. Aristotle’s solution was to tie together the different virtues in the concept of phronesis, or 36 I  have discussed the issue of the voluntariness of cognitive activity in Virtues of the Mind: 58–​69. 37 This potential problem has been pointed out to me by Peter Klein.

What Is Knowledge?  37 practical wisdom, and I have attempted to use the same move with respect to the intellectual virtues.38 But this move will not succeed unless it can be demonstrated that making every virtue relative to the judgment of a person with practical wisdom yields applications of the virtues to cases that are recognizably the same as the ones we have been using intuitively. Many of these problems would have to be addressed by a detailed virtue theory of ethics anyway. There are, therefore, other motives in answering these questions besides the motive to define knowledge. A successful answer to them would serve a purpose in ethics as well as in epistemology. Other definitions of knowledge that meet the criteria I have described here would need to do the same thing, only they would refer to a different background theory in ethics, metaphysics, or cognitive psychology. The most detailed and advanced of such theories will always have the advantage in providing a theoretical background for the definition of knowledge.

Bibliography Alston, William P. 1989. Epistemic Justification. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Annis, David. 1978. “A Contextualist Theory of Epistemic Justification.” American Philosophical Quarterly 15: 213–​219. Aristotle. 1999. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Martin Ostwald. New York: Library of Liberal Arts (Pearson). Aristotle. 2004. Posterior Analytics. Translated by G. R. G. Mure. (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2004). Augustine. 1948. “Predestination of the Saints, 5.” In Basic Writings of St. Augustine, 2, edited  by Whitney Oats, translated by Marcus Dods. New York: Random House. BonJour, Laurence. 1985. The Structures of Empirical Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chisholm, Roderick. 1989. Theory of Knowledge. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-​Hall, 3rd Edition. Craig, Edward. 1990. Knowledge and the State of Nature. Oxford: Clarendon Press. DeRose, Keith. 1992. “Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions.” Philosophy and      Phenomenological Research 52: 913–​929. Fogelin, Robert. 1994. Pyrrhonian Reflections on Knowledge and Justification. New York: Oxford University Press. Gettier, Edmund. 1963. “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Analysis 23: 121-​123. Goldman, Alvin. 1967. “A Causal Theory of Knowing.” Journal of Philosophy 64: 357-​372. _​_​_​_​_​. 1986. Epistemology and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Howard-​Snyder, Daniel. 1996. “The Gettier Problem and Infallibilism.” Paper Delivered at the Central Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association (May).



38 Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind, part II, section 5.

38  Knowledge and Understanding Kierkegaard, Søren. 1992. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. Translated by Howard Hong and Edna Hong. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Klein, Peter. 1971. “A Proposed Definition of Propositional Knowledge.” Journal of Philosophy 67: 471-​82. _​_​_​_​_ N ​ aturalizing Epistemology, 1994, 2nd Edition. Edited by Hilary Kornblith. Camrbridge, MA:  MIT Press. Lehrer, Keith. 1990. Theory of Knowledge. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Lewis, David. 1996. “Elusive Knowledge.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (4)  (December): 549–​567. Moser, Paul K. 1989. Knowledge and Evidence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nagel, Thomas. 1979. “Moral Luck.” In Mortal Questions. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press. Plantinga, Alvin. 1993. Warrant and Proper Function. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Plato. 2009. Complete Works. Edited by John M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett. Pollock, John. 1986. “A Theory of Moral Reasoning.” Ethics 96 (April): 506–​523. Plato. 1949. Theaetetus. Translated by Benjamin Jowett with an Introduction by Irving M. Copi (York: Liberal Arts Press). _​_​_​_​_​ 1986. Contemporary Theories of Knowledge. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield.  Prichard, H. 1950. Knowledge and Perception. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Robinson, Richard. 1950. Definition. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Russell, Bertrand. 1948. Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits. New York, NY: Simon &   Schuster.        Ryan, Sharon. 1996. “Does Warrant Entail Truth?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 56 (March): 183–​189 Shope, Robert. 1983. The Analysis of Knowing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sosa, Ernest. 1991. Knowledge in Perspective:  Selected Essays in Epistemology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zagzebski, Linda T. 1994. “The Inescapability of Gettier Problems.” Philosophy Quarterly 44 (174): 65–​73. _​_​_​_​_​. 2005. “Virtue epistemology.” In the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol 9. New York: Routledge. _​_​_​_​_​. 1996. Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2

Must Knowers Be Agents?* 2.1  Act and Agency Acts are performed only by certain kinds of beings—​agents (from the Latin agens: that which is acting), although that tells us neither what an act is nor what an agent is, only that “act” and “agent” are defined correlatively. Ethics is a field primarily concerned with the evaluation of human agents, their acts, and the consequences of their acts, but again, this does not tell us what ethics does, only that certain things it does are connected to certain other things it does. In particular, it does not tell us what the scope of ethics is, which might turn out to be greater or smaller than we think. I assume that most human beings are agents at a fairly early age, and it is possible that some other animals are agents also, although I will not discuss animal agency here. An agent is the kind of being that acts. To act is to exert power and, at least typically, to bring about a certain kind of effect through the exercise of that power. I say “at least typically” because successfully bringing about an effect of a certain kind might be treated as constitutive of agency—​presumably, a power is not a power unless it is reliably effective. But we are somewhat forgiving about the degree of efficacy required of human agents since human power is obviously not infallibly efficacious, yet no one takes that fact to be incompatible with the existence of human agency. An agent is still an agent if she occasionally is ­ineffective in bringing about the effect associated with her power, and she is exercising her agency even on such occasions. The extent to which she can be ineffective and remain an agent will be one of the issues addressed in this chapter. An agent, then, is a being that brings about certain kinds of effects through the exercise of a power. But to do so is not sufficient for acting since many artifacts and inanimate substances bring about similar effects, but they do not act. We may even say they have “powers,” although it is likely that a chemical agent (note the term) has a power only in an extended sense. In the strict sense only conscious beings have powers. It is interesting to consider why that should be the case. What difference does it make if a being with the capacity to produce effects is a conscious agent? That is, what difference does it make if a causal capacity is a power in the sense I am using rather than a mere capacity? If all that counts is the causal connection itself, it should not matter. Clearly, it does matter to ethics, but it is not clear * The chapter is reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

Epistemic Values. Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197529171.001.0001.

40  Knowledge and Understanding why it does since the class of all acts includes more than the class of acts subject to moral evaluation. The issue I want to begin investigating here is whether it matters to epistemology. An important way to classify acts in order to bring out their susceptibility to moral evaluation is to classify them according to degree of conscious awareness and/​or control. In such a classification, one extreme would consist of fully deliberate acts, acts preceded by conscious deliberation and choice. These acts fall within a larger class of intentional acts that includes some that are not preceded by deliberation and choice, and a still larger class of acts that are nonintentional but are nonetheless subject to moral evaluation. Aristotle called this larger class the voluntary [hēkō n]. Nonvoluntary acts are acts that are not subject to moral evaluation, at least not in the sense that the agent of such an act is praiseworthy or blameworthy for doing it. But a nonvoluntary act is still an act. It is not like the event of a chemical agent producing the effect it produces. There is still a difference between an act, whether voluntary or not, which must be performed by a conscious agent, and the nonacts of nonagents that also bring about effects in the world.1 The nature of that difference is another matter I want to begin investigating here. Some philosophers have distinguished agent causation from event causation to mark this difference in the way effects are related to their causes. A chemical reaction is said to be fully explained by the sequence of events leading up to it; the concept of event causation is sufficient to give an account of a chemical event. In contrast, the acts of agents are a kind of event that allegedly cannot be fully explained by relations between events. The concept of the agent is critical in explaining why and how events of this kind occur. If event causation is to be distinguished from agent causation, that is because it is maintained that the cause of an act is not an event, not even the event of an agent’s performing the act; it is the agent herself.2 The causal relation is notoriously resistant to analysis, but attempts to analyze it often construe it in terms of counterfactual conditionals. This attempt is problematic, but even some of the theorists who would not reduce causation to counterfactuals maintain that causal propositions entail counterfactuals. Counterfactual conditionals may therefore be helpful in illuminating the causal relation. If so, agent causation would have implications concerning what the agent would do in counterfactual circumstances. And since agent causation is 1 To complicate matters further, it is likely that not everything an agent “does” is an act, although it is difficult to draw a systematic distinction between a nonvoluntary act and a nonact done by an agent. I will not pursue this distinction here. See Jonathan Bennett, The Act Itself (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), beginning of c­ hapter 2. 2 Agent causation is sometimes even thought to be necessary to explain event causation since the latter generates a regress ending in a nonevent: an agent.

Must Knowers Be Agents?  41 connected to the idea of a power, that is probably what we would expect since power no doubt implies the production of the same type of effect in a range of circumstances, including many that are nonactual. But are the relevant counterfactuals entailed by the possession of a power, or are they merely the sign of it? In addressing the issue of what determines the degree of causal efficacy required to be an agent, I will investigate the relevance of counterfactual conditions to agency. The term “agent causation” was popularized in contemporary discourse by Roderick Chisholm, who attributes the idea to Thomas Reid, although a form of the idea exists much earlier, perhaps even in Aristotle.3 Reid proposed that agent causation is a more basic notion than causation simpliciter since an understanding of causation presupposes an understanding of power. Our notion of active power is more conceptually basic than that of causation, Reid claimed; it is presupposed by our knowledge of ourselves as rational and moral agents.4 The idea of causation is derived from the idea of agency and responsibility. Presumably, we would not have acquired the idea of causation if we were merely witnesses to nature. Reid maintained that agency even appears in the operation of our intellectual powers, including those operative during perception. The faculty of perception is an original power of the mind. The true cause of perception is the agent exerting this power to produce an effect. Sensations and impressions are not the real causes, much less the objects perceived. I mention Reid’s strong view on the place of agency in perception not to endorse it but to highlight a question that I think deserves more attention in epistemology: What is the place of acts and agency in the acquisition of epistemic states, particularly those that are evaluatively positive, such as justified belief, responsible belief, and knowledge? In this chapter I am particularly interested in the relevance of agency to the acquisition of knowledge. It is uncontroversial that processes and events of some kind lead up to a human being’s coming to know something. Coming to know is an event, and the issue of what causes that event

3 Susan Sauvé Meyer denies that Aristotle contrasted agent causation with event causation since on Aristotle’s view, every efficient cause is a substance, whether or not it is an agent and, in fact, the effect is a substance also. See “Self Movement and External Causation,” in Self-​Motion, ed. Mary Louise Gill and James Lennox (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). But for the purposes of this chapter it is worth pointing out that whether or not Aristotle had a notion of event causation, his notion of efficient causation was more like what we mean by agent causation than event causation. The causation due to human agents is a subclass of the substance causation found in nature. A broader definition of agent causation is given by William Rowe, who defines “agent causation” as “the idea that the primary cause of an event is a substance.” Rowe claims that Reid used “agent causation” in a narrower sense (The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Robert Audi, ed., 1995: 13). On Rowe’s definition, Aristotle’s notion of causation would qualify as agent causation. 4 See Thomas Reid, “Of the Liberty of Moral Agents,” c­ hapter 2, and “Of the Words Cause and Effect, Action and Active Power,” in Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind (Cambridge,MA.: MIT Press, 1969): 267ff.

42  Knowledge and Understanding is important, not only because some form of the causal theory of knowledge might be true, but because understanding the cause of something almost always helps us to understand it better. Is knowledge best understood on the model of event causation or on the model of agent causation? That is another question I want to begin investigating in this chapter. While knowledge and justification are often connected with causation in the contemporary literature, agent causation is rarely mentioned. Although Aristotle and Aquinas referred to the “act of knowing,” nowadays knowing is more commonly construed as a state rather than as an act.5 This may be due in part to the fact that perceptual knowledge is commonly taken to be the paradigm and perception is usually understood as a relatively passive state, or at any rate, as a state one acquires prior to the exercise of one’s agency. It may also be partly due to the fact that the range of acts and the corresponding range of agency has narrowed significantly in modern philosophy for reasons that derive from ethics rather than the philosophy of perception. The importance of the act in Kant was gained at the price of narrowing its scope to a single tightly circumscribed deliverance of will. The mind itself is now often viewed as a passive information processor rather than as an active agent. This view has led to a shift in the prototype of the act in modern philosophy. We no doubt find it curious that in Aquinas the act par excellence is a mental act since in contemporary discussions the prime example typically given of a basic act is the raising of one’s arm. So these days when we think of an act we usually think either of an act of will or of a willed bodily movement. Cognitive and perceptual acts only make sense on this view if preceded by acts of will. The broader Aristotelian category of the voluntary and the even broader category of acts both voluntary and nonvoluntary have generally disappeared from discussion. Granted, the fully intentional act is in many ways the most interesting kind of act, but that does not mean that there are no interesting differences between acts and nonacts. If there are such differences, the epistemic arena is one place in which we would expect them to appear. So far I have identified three sets of questions about agency that I want to begin investigating: 1. What are the conditions for being an effective agent? What determines that an agent is effectively exercising her agency on a particular occasion? Must she be reliable? Is her efficacy determined by what she is able to do in counterfactual circumstances?

5 Not only did Aquinas place a great deal of importance on the cognitive act, but Eleonore Stump argues that he believed most acts of intellect are not causally determined. See “Aquinas’s Account of the Mechanisms of Intellective Cognition,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 21 (1998): 287–​307.

Must Knowers Be Agents?  43 2. Is there any important difference between an effect arising from the act of an agent, whether voluntary or nonvoluntary, and events brought about by a nonagent? In particular, does it make any significant difference to epistemology? 3. Is knowledge best understood on the model of event causation or on the model of agent causation?

2.2  Agency and Counterfactual Conditions What are the conditions for being an effective agent? If I am right in my conjecture that effectiveness is part of the concept of an agent, then the conditions for being an effective agent are the conditions for being an agent. An effective agent is one whose acts are successful in reaching their end.6 Presumably effectiveness comes in degrees, and so my degree of effectiveness as an agent is partly a matter of the proportion of my successes to failures in achieving the ends of my acts. But my effectiveness as an agent is also a matter of the extent to which my successes can be credited to me rather than to something else. An effective agent is one who reaches her end because of her act, the exercise of her power. This rules out both accidental success and success that is nonaccidental but due to something other than the agent.7 An effective cook produces a high proportion of good dishes over mediocre ones and does so because of what she does in exercising her cooking ability rather than by chance or because someone else is guiding her every step of the way. An effective cook gets the credit for her culinary successes. An effective teacher produces a high proportion of students knowledgeable or skillful in the subject of his course, and he does so because of what he does in exercising his teaching ability rather than by chance or because his students are simply bright enough to learn on their own or for some other reason. An effective teacher gets the credit for his students’ success in learning. The same point applies to our effectiveness as moral agents. An effectively compassionate agent is one who produces a high proportion of successes at alleviating suffering and who does so because of the exercise of his own power in reducing suffering. He gets the credit for the alleviation of suffering that follows from his efforts. In fact, any end an agent has is something he can be effective or ineffective at bringing about. His effectiveness is both a matter of reliably producing the intended effect and of doing so because of the exercise of his own power 6 There is more than one sense of ends used in the history of ethics and sometimes they are not clearly distinguished. For the purposes of this chapter, ends can be those at which the agent consciously aims, or they can be natural ends. Either interpretation is permissible. 7 These two senses of chance are distinguished by Wayne Riggs in “What Are the ‘Chances’ of Being Justified?” The Monist 81, no. 3 (July 1998): 452–​72.

44  Knowledge and Understanding rather than because of the many other conditions that are also operative. An effective agent gets the credit for the effect.8 One of the ends agents have is to get to the truth. Getting truth is probably the primary epistemic end of agents, or at least a very important end. It is also arguably a “natural” end of belief formation. Epistemically effective agents therefore have a high proportion of successes in reaching truth and avoiding falsehood. And their successes must be credited to themselves rather than to something else.9 Must an agent satisfy counterfactual conditions for effective agency? If so, must she satisfy them on each occasion in which she is exercising agency? Reid maintained that in the case of the active powers (as opposed to the intellective powers), an agent does not have the power to do something unless he has the power not to do it. This is strikingly similar to the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP) often proposed by nondeterminists as a condition for moral responsibility: A person is not responsible for her act unless she could have done otherwise. According to PAP, a counterfactual condition is necessary for the attribution of moral responsibility to an agent’s act. Reid’s principle is stronger since he proposes that alternate possibilities are necessary for the power an agent must have to act as an agent, not just for the subset of acts for which he is responsible. Therefore, if PAP fails, Reid’s principle fails also. Thirty years ago Harry Frankfurt presented a famous thought experiment that arguably leads to the conclusion that PAP is false. In this section I want to look at Frankfurt-​style cases, but not for the usual purpose; moral responsibility is not the focus of this chapter. But the moral of Frankfurt cases, I believe, is important because it can be generalized to apply to many principles that offer counterfactual conditions for the application of some property. Knowledge is often defined in a way that includes counterfactual conditions. Many philosophers who propose such accounts intend these conditions to specify what it takes for the knower to get credit for her belief. Since the idea of credit is similar to that of responsibility, we might expect criteria for responsibility to have an analogue in criteria for epistemic credit, and we might also expect that any problems in the former may be reflected in problems in the latter. Other proponents of counterfactual accounts of knowledge separate epistemic credit from knowledge. But I think that even these accounts can be illuminated by examining epistemic

8 Of course, no effect is brought about by a single cause, whether the cause is an event or an agent exercising a power. But some causes are much more salient than others, and that leads us in many of the most interesting situations to designate one or a small number of causes as “the” cause. As far as I can see, the vagueness of this usage does not affect the argument of this chapter. 9 Wayne Riggs addresses the issue of the need for the knower to get credit for her belief in “Reliability and the Value of Knowledge,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64, no.  1 (2002): 79–​96.

Must Knowers Be Agents?  45 parallels to Frankfurt cases. That is because I believe that Frankfurt has identified a very general problem in counterfactual conditions for any property, whether or not it has anything to do with responsibility. My intention, then, is to see how epistemic Frankfurt-​style cases can illuminate both the connection between counterfactual conditions and epistemic credit, and the broader issue of the extent to which counterfactual conditions are necessary for knowledge. My hope is that these thought experiments will make it easier to answer the questions posed at the end of section 2.1.

Case 1: Standard Frankfurt Case Black, an evil neurosurgeon, wishes to see White dead but is unwilling to do the deed himself. Knowing that Mary Jones also despises White and will have a single good opportunity to kill him, Black inserts a mechanism into Jones’s brain that enables Black to monitor and to control Jones’s neurological activity. If the activity in Jones’s brain indicates that she is on the verge of deciding not to kill White when the opportunity arises, Black’s mechanism will intervene and cause Jones to decide to commit the murder. On the other hand, if Jones decides to murder White on her own, the mechanism will not intervene. It will merely monitor but will not affect her neurological function. Now suppose that when the occasion arises, Jones decides to kill White without any “help” from Black’s mechanism. In the judgment of Frankfurt and most others, Jones is morally responsible for her act. Nonetheless, she seems to be unable to do otherwise since if she had attempted to do so, she would have been thwarted by Black’s device.10 Discussion of cases like this has generated a large literature. Nondeterminist defenders of PAP have argued that Frankfurt’s thought experiment fails to demonstrate the falsehood of PAP,11 while many determinists have argued that these cases successfully falsify PAP.12 I have argued that Frankfurt cases are successful in demonstrating the falsehood of PAP, but they are unsuccessful in supporting

10 This adaptation of Frankfurt’s example using a neurological device is similar to some of the cases described by John Martin Fischer. An early use of this type of example appears in “Responsibility and Control,” Journal of Philosophy 89 (January 1982): 24–​40 11 Some of the recent essays taking this position are David Widerker, “Libertarianism and Frankfurt’s Attack on the Principle of Alternate Possibilities,” Philosophical Review 104 (April 1995); Robert Kane, The Significance of Free Will (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1996); Michael McKenna, “Alternate Possibilities and the Failure of the Counterexample Strategy,” Journal of Social Philosophy 28, no. 3 (Winter 1997); and Michael Otsuka, “Incompatibilism and the Avoidability of Blame,” Ethics 108 (July 1998): 685–​701. 12 The most extensive deterministic defense of the success of Frankfurt’s counterexamples to PAP has been given in a number of places by John Martin Fischer. See Metaphysics of Free Will (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994), c­ hapter 7.

46  Knowledge and Understanding determinism.13 Frankfurt cases succeed in showing that principles that offer counterfactual conditions for the application of some property can fail because of the possibility of a counterfactual manipulator, and so the counterfactual condition is not strictly necessary for the application of the property in question. But it would be too hasty to conclude, as Frankfurt does, that the counterfactual condition can fail systematically, much less that it is irrelevant. The reason for this might be that counterfactual conditions are usually proposed not because actual conditions are literally inadequate but because it aids our understanding of conceptually abstruse properties such as responsibility, power, causality, and knowledge to think of them in terms of what happens in nonactual circumstances. If I am right about this, counterfactual conditions can fail even when they are relevant and perhaps even when their failure must be selective. To make the point, let me give a harder Frankfurt case (F case) that changes nothing in the standard case except background conditions.

Case 2: Altered Frankfurt Case In the standard F cases the device is set to go into operation a maximum of once, but it is not needed in the case in question because Jones makes what Black considers the “right” choice on her own. But suppose that Black has been systematically manipulating Jones’s choices all along. Every time Jones is about to make a choice, if it is the one Black wants, the device does nothing, but if it is not the one Black wants, the device makes Jones choose the way Black wants her to. And let us suppose that Jones has been living with this device for many years. A multitude of her choices have been manipulated and changed by Black, unknown to Jones. And suppose this is one of those times that Jones makes the choice Black wants and so the device does not go into operation. Is Jones responsible in this case? Perhaps she is; I am not going to argue that she is not. My point is that the case is harder and it can be made harder still. This could be the only time in her life that Jones has made a choice on her own without the intervention of the machine. If so, we might worry that the counterfactual manipulator is not only manipulating the circumstances; he may be manipulating the person. If we hesitate in ascribing responsibility, I suspect that 13 I first argued for this position in The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) and most recently in “Does Libertarian Freedom Require Alternate Possibilities?,” in Philosophical Perspectives, vol. 14, ed. James Tomberlin, 2000. The same position has been argued by Eleonore Stump in “Intellect, Will, and the Principle of Alternate Possibilities,” in Christian Theism and the Problems of Philosophy, ed. Michael D. Beaty (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990); by David Hunt in several places, most recently “Moral Responsibility and Unavoidable Action,” Philosophical Topics 97, no. 2 (January 2000):195–​227; and by Derk Pereboom in “Alternative Possibilities and Causal Histories,” Philosophical Perspectives 14 (2000):119–​37.

Must Knowers Be Agents?  47 that is because we think that Jones’s lack of responsibility for all her other choices can infect her responsibility for the choice the one time the device is not needed. A person who never satisfies PAP might be a different kind of being than one who usually does. She is arguably not an agent, the kind of being who can be morally responsible. Perhaps moral agency, like virtue, is the sort of thing that takes practice. But whether or not we ultimately decide that Jones is responsible in case 2, the fact that this case is harder suggests that the counterfactual condition can still be a good sign of the presence of the target property even if it is not necessary that it ever be satisfied. If so, what is really essential to responsibility needs to be extracted from a story that explains why we sometimes think the property obtains even when the counterfactual condition is not satisfied. This is important because the wrong moral to draw from these cases is that the counterfactual condition is irrelevant. Frankfurt was right that he had described a case in which alternate possibilities are not necessary for responsibility, but then he leaped to the conclusion that therefore there is nothing blocking the acceptance of determinism. In my view, what Frankfurt cases show is that whereas alternate possibilities are not strictly necessary, they are usually associated with responsibility because they are a sign of something that really is necessary—​the presence of agency. Agency is a necessary condition for responsibility. If it is lacking, so is responsibility.14 If I am right about this, we can apply the same point to properties other than moral responsibility for which there are allegedly counterfactual conditions. Epistemic credit is a property that is closely allied to responsibility and in addition to being interesting in its own right, it may be an ingredient in knowledge. Can we use epistemic Frankfurt-​style cases to test the need for something like PAP in cases of epistemic credit and/​or knowledge?

Case 3: Epistemic Frankfurt Case Suppose that Jones is very good at identifying vintages of Bordeaux. In particular, she has no trouble distinguishing a ’94 Chateaux Margaux from very similar wines. Black knows that Jones is going to be tasting different vintages of Margaux

14 It would be fair to point out that in drawing this conclusion I have moved backward in the order of explanation. Agency is a vague concept, just as vague as responsibility. It does not help us understand what responsibility is to be told that it requires agency. In contrast, PAP at least has the virtue of being clear and reasonably precise. I agree with this point, but deny that it is an objection. I am not offering any part of an account of responsibility here. My point is that we should not worry excessively about the failure of PAP. Its failure permits us to look more deeply at the property PAP was aiming to elucidate.

48  Knowledge and Understanding without knowing in advance the year of the vintage she is tasting. He has installed a device in her head that can make Jones believe that the next wine she tastes is a ’94 Margaux whether it is or not. (Never mind why Black would want to do such a thing.) When Jones tastes the next wine, if she appears about to judge that it is a ’94 Margaux, the device does nothing. But if Jones is about to judge that it is anything else, the device will interfere with her tasting sensations and will lead her to think it is a ’94 Margaux. Now suppose that she tastes a ’94 anyway and believes it is a ’94, and Black’s device does nothing but monitor what is going on in Jones’s nervous system. Jones’s tasting faculties and taste memory are working fine and she comes to have a true belief in the normal way. My intuition in this case is that Jones gets epistemic credit, and for the same reason that she is morally responsible in the standard Frankfurt case. Furthermore, I am willing to say that she has knowledge. She knows she is tasting a ’94 Margaux. The device does not operate and its very existence is an accidental feature of Jones’s epistemic situation. As in the standard F case, the counterfactual manipulator has no effect on our inclination to judge that Jones has the property we are inspecting. But notice that she not only fails the test of alternate possibilities, but she also fails some well-​known counterfactual conditions for knowledge. For example, she may fail the Nozick conditions since she would have had the same belief even if it had been false.15 We can make up a harder epistemic F case, parallel to the harder regular F case as well.

Case 4: Altered Epistemic Frankfurt Case Suppose that it will serve Black’s sinister purposes if Jones forms a specific set of beliefs. Some of these beliefs are true, but many of them are false; their truth or falsehood is irrelevant to Black’s purposes. Jones’s beliefs are systematically manipulated by the device Black has installed in her head. Many times the device has forced Jones to form a false belief that she would not have formed on her own. Other times it forces her to form a true belief that she would not have formed on her own. Still other times it permits her to form a true belief on her own in such a way that in the absence of the device we would not hesitate to say

15 Perhaps she does not fail the Nozick conditions since he requires that the method of belief formation must be kept constant. She might, therefore, satisfy the following condition: If the belief p had been false and she had used the same way of arriving at whether p, she would not have believed that p. Arguably, in the epistemic F case, if p had been false she would not have used the same way of arriving at whether p.

Must Knowers Be Agents?  49 that Jones is credited with getting the truth and knows the proposition in question. Now suppose Jones forms the true belief that she is tasting a ’94 Margaux in this way. My reaction to the altered epistemic F case is the same as to the altered F case. While I do not propose that Jones does not know the identity of the wine she is sipping, I find it a more difficult case. Perhaps believing on her own, like acting on her own, is something that at least in many cases requires a background of practice in believing/​acting on her own. Perhaps very simple sorts of perceptual knowledge do not require such a background, and I will have more to say about the simplest perceptual knowledge in section 2.3, but believing out of an acquired power of taste discrimination does seem to be the sort of perceptual knowledge that may require such a background, or it least the possibility that it is required is enough to make some of us worry that Jones does not know in case 4. Epistemic Frankfurt cases have something in common with the standard evil demon scenarios, but there is an important difference. The F cases involve manipulation of agency in a way that does not appear in the skeptical scenarios. The evil demon gives the agent misleading sensory inputs that inevitably result in false beliefs, but the agent’s control over her reasoning process is not altered. This is like deception, whereas the F cases are cases of coercion. Extended manipulation of the reasoning process itself undermines our ability to initiate our own cognitive projects. The counterfactual manipulator in epistemic F cases therefore attacks the agent’s epistemic responsibility, whereas the evil demon does not.16 I conclude that the moral of the epistemic F cases is the same as the F cases. Cases 1 and 3 show that the counterfactual condition is not strictly necessary for the target property, but cases 2 and 4 show that it is not irrelevant. It is a sign of something deeper: The agent gets credit for reaching the end. The agent must be an agent, and the fact that she gets a true belief must be due to her. Whether or not her belief is voluntary, her agency is central to acquisition of the belief. Causal processes that bypass her agency take away her epistemic credit, and they also take away her knowledge. Notice that the application of epistemic F cases to knowledge need not go through the concept of epistemic credit. Some accounts of knowledge analyze it in terms of counterfactual conditions, and some of those conditions fail in the epistemic F cases whether or not the reason is that the agent lacks epistemic credit. I have already remarked that case 3 might fail Nozick’s conditions even though it is intuitively a case of knowledge, and it no doubt fails the conditions of other theories as well. The conditions for reliabilism are a special and interesting case because they are tied to effectiveness, but not to the “agent gets the



16

I thank Abrol Fairweather for this point.

50  Knowledge and Understanding credit” aspect of effectiveness. Instead, they are tied to the first condition for effective agency mentioned earlier—​that the agent must have a high proportion of successes over failures. However, the counterfactual manipulator can arguably make the agent unreliable when we think she has knowledge and reliable when we think she does not have knowledge. In case 3 where the device is set to operate a maximum of once, Jones is arguably still reliable and she does have knowledge, as the theory predicts.17 In case 4 she is unreliable and, as the theory predicts, we hesitate to say she has knowledge because of the worry that the machine has tampered with her agency. But my experience with proposing this case to others leads me to think that the intuitive judgment here is unclear. If Jones is able to form true beliefs in the normal way through the exercise of her own power when the machine is not operating, perhaps it is reasonable to say that she has knowledge even if the machine has made her unreliable. Furthermore, consider the case of the benign manipulator (Case 5), who makes Jones believe only truths.18 In such a case Jones is both highly reliable and satisfies some counterfactual conditions for knowledge, but it is doubtful that she has knowledge when she acquires a machine-​produced true belief.19 An agent reliabilist who shares this intuition might say that the problem here is that Jones is not reliable. What is reliable is the machine operating in her. If so, the problem I am raising is not a problem for agent reliabilism itself, but for the view that reliability entails counterfactual conditions that are subject to Frankfurt-​style manipulation. A careful agent reliabilist could therefore accommodate the intuition I have about case 5 and perhaps case 4 as well. In the latter case, the agent reliabilist could say that the agent herself is not unreliable. What is unreliable is the complex of agent plus machine. Similarly, the process reliabilist could say that what is unreliable in case 4 is the process used by the complex of agent plus machine. In case 5, if we assume that the benign manipulator does not generate the belief directly, but makes the process the agent is using or her faculty reliable, there is no problem in concluding that she has knowledge. After all, even ordinary knowledge often makes use of aids to our faculties: eyeglasses, hearing aids, and one day, perhaps, computer chips installed in our brains to aid our memory. These devices make it easier for us to get knowledge; they surely do not take it away. So if the benign manipulator in case 5 installs a device that is comparable to these aids, only better, there is no difficulty. But there are ways the benign manipulator could operate that 17 In fact, she may not be reliable on some ways of construing reliability, in which case our basic epistemic F case is a counterexample to such theories. 18 Of course, unless the benign manipulator is omniscient, he will not be able to fully accomplish this, but we need only assume that the benign manipulator has far greater knowledge than Jones. 19 Compare what we would say about the parallel moral case. If the benevolent manipulator makes Jones do only right acts, a right machine–​produced act does not earn Jones any moral credit.

Must Knowers Be Agents?  51 would threaten Jones’s epistemic agency or even eliminate it. The device could bypass Jones’s perceptual and cognitive functions entirely. Suppose it implants true beliefs in her head overnight, counteracting any false beliefs she unhappily acquired during the day and adding many other true beliefs besides. The process is as reliable as a human-​generated process can be. Does Jones have knowledge? Here I think our agreement on the target property we are trying to analyze breaks down. Some philosophers will probably be willing to say that Jones has knowledge in this amendation of case 5. But if so, they are not treating knowledge as something we earn or even something we contribute to through our own powers; it is something we are blessed with. I recognize that it is not obvious that knowledge is a unitary concept, and it may be a flexible enough concept to include instances of knowledge as a gift rather than as something we merit. But I think we should try to see how far we can get with a unitary concept, and if we are going to aim for a unitary concept, it should be one of merit, not blessedness. If so, Jones does not have knowledge when her true beliefs are produced wholly through the action of a benign manipulator. I conclude that we should be wary of making manipulable counterfactual conditions necessary for either epistemic credit or knowledge (case 3), nor are they sufficient for knowledge (case 5). But neither should we ignore the importance of the close association that ordinarily obtains between those conditions and knowledge.

2.3  Knowledge, Agency, and Virtue Let us now go back to giving a partial answer to the three sets of questions posed at the end of section2.1. I have already answered the general question of what it takes to be an effective agent. An effective agent is reliably successful in reaching her ends and she does so through the exercise of her own power. Frankfurt-​style cases show that efficacy is associated with the satisfaction of counterfactuals, but cases 1 and 3 show that their satisfaction is not necessary on every occasion in which agency is operative, and case 5 shows that it is not sufficient. The satisfaction of appropriate counterfactuals is not constitutive of agency, but is a sign of it. For the same reason, it is not strictly necessary that I be reliably effective in order to effectively exercise agency on a particular occasion. In cases 2 and 4 the agent is unreliable but she is arguably successful in exercising her agency, although some of us hesitate. Our hesitation, however, does not stem from her lack of reliability per se, but from the worry that the counterfactual manipulator has interfered with her power to be an agent. And case 5 shows that reliability is not sufficient. Again, I think that the fact that an act/​belief is that of a reliable agent is

52  Knowledge and Understanding a sign of what we are looking for—​that the act/​belief really belongs to the agent; that she gets credit for it. What difference does it make to epistemology if a causal process is brought about by the exercise of agency? Since getting the truth is one of my ends, I am an effective epistemic agent to the extent that I am reliably successful in reaching the truth and do so because of the exercise of my epistemic powers. My epistemic success is due to me. In case 5 the benign manipulator makes Jones believe only truths, and we considered a causal process that bypasses Jones’s perceptual and cognitive faculties completely. My intuition is that Jones neither gets epistemic credit nor has knowledge in this case. So it matters epistemically that her agency is not operative. It also matters epistemically that her agency is operative in cases 3 and 4. In case 4 the intuition that she knows and gets epistemic credit is weaker than in case 3, but that is because of doubts about her agency. If she really is acting as an agent, the intuition that she knows is fairly strong even though it is clear that she is unreliable. Agency seems to be enough to make up for the lack of reliability, whereas even the presence of reliability cannot make up for the lack of agency. In stressing the importance of agency in getting epistemic credit and knowledge, it must be admitted that human agents are not pure agents and it is unreasonable to expect otherwise. Our beliefs, like our desires, often come unexpectedly as the result of causal processes that are largely external to ourselves, and there is nothing abnormal about that. Many philosophers are willing to say that some of these beliefs constitute knowledge. In particular, some perceptual knowledge may be in this category. The examples of acquired wine discrimination show that not all perceptual beliefs can be in this category, and probably most perceptual beliefs utilize some degree of learned discrimination. But perhaps the simplest cases of perception do not require the operation of agency. What should we say about these cases? I have argued elsewhere that agency operates counterfactually even in simple perceptual cases: If an intellectually virtuous agent had indications that her perceptual ability or her perceptual situation was in some way deviant, she would withhold or withdraw perceptual judgment until she could investigate.20 If this is right, agency operates even in the simple cases of automatic perceptual belief formation at the second-​order level, the level of reflectiveness. But let us look once again at the Frankfurt cases since I think we can use them to illuminate the place of agency in evaluating simple perceptual beliefs.

20 Linda Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996): 280, and in the “Reply to Alston” in the Symposium on Virtues of the Mind, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (January 2000). Careful readers will no doubt notice that this is a counterfactual condition and perhaps it also can fail due to the action of a counterfactual manipulator.

Must Knowers Be Agents?  53 So far I  have said nothing about what happens from the agent’s viewpoint when the Frankfurt device operates. Although we can only guess at the phenomenology of the device during operation, I imagine that the victim has the experience of impulsively deciding/​believing something unexpected. She is about to decide not to kill White when she suddenly decides to kill him after all. Or she is about to believe that the wine she is sipping is a ’95 when she abruptly decides it’s a ’94 instead. Since all of us are subject to changes of mind and sudden impulses, this will not necessarily seem peculiar unless it happens very often or if the decision/​belief seems to the agent to be out of character, something she can hardly imagine herself doing/​believing. But when an agent suddenly acquires a belief or suddenly makes a decision, she should subsequently reflect about her own belief/​decision. I think that agency requires this. One of the central features of agency is self-​reflectiveness, and since one of the aspects of self-​reflectiveness is the second-​order desire for self-​integration, agents need to tell themselves some story about the unexpected act or belief. I am not suggesting that this is something we should do constantly, and certainly not obsessively. But at some point we should assess our sudden beliefs and decisions, at least those that have any important consequences or implications for our view of ourselves. A sudden belief that comes out of nowhere, like a sudden urge, ought to be either endorsed or repudiated. Agency does not require that we do one rather than the other, but it does require that we do one or the other, probably not for every sudden belief and impetuous act, but certainly for some of them. I suggest that when the machine operates in cases 2 and 4, a test of whether the machine has eliminated Jones’s agency is whether she reflectively endorses or repudiates her machine-​ produced beliefs/​acts after the fact. But, you will ask, cannot the device also operate on the second level, the level of endorsement? Yes, of course it can, and if it does, and if there is no higher level of reflectiveness at which the machine does not operate, then it is likely that Jones has indeed lost her agency. In some respects our simplest perceptual beliefs are like the beliefs produced by the counterfactual manipulator. They come upon us without warning and without any effort on our part. In normal situations there is nothing suspicious about them and we have learned to expect to have perceptual impressions almost all the time, so the beliefs formed from these impressions are not like suddenly acquiring the urge to kill. If I am normal, these beliefs are easy to integrate into my view of myself and my environment, unlike the urge to kill or the sudden belief that airplanes are following me. Perceptual beliefs are typically unimportant, and there is no great need for reflective endorsement in many cases. But when the consequences of believing them are serious, reflective endorsement is called for. If Jones is a professional wine taster she should reflect about the grounds of her belief when tasting wine, at least when something of importance hinges on

54  Knowledge and Understanding her judgment. If some of her beliefs are unknowingly machine-​produced, she should reflect about them if she has reason to suspect that there is something out of the ordinary in the way she got them. Since reflectiveness preserves her agency, she can get epistemic credit even when the belief is machine-​produced. It is even possible that she gets credit for her beliefs in case 5 if she later endorses them when the machine is not operating. For the same reason, she can get epistemic credit for nonvoluntary perceptual beliefs. An agent reflects about her beliefs from time to time, particularly when they are either suspicious in their origin or of special importance. And this includes perceptual beliefs. True perceptual beliefs earn the believer epistemic credit when the agent exercises her agency over them at the level of reflective endorsement. The view I am proposing on the place of agency in belief is similar to Christine Korsgaard’s interpretation of autonomy in desire. Korsgaard argues that according to Kant, autonomy is compatible with acting out of desire as long as the reflective mind endorses the bidding of desire. In this way we are self-​ determining even when we act instinctually.21 Similarly, I  am suggesting that we can be autonomous agents even in the simplest perceptual knowledge by endorsing the bidding of our prereflective minds. The connection between the reflective endorsement of belief and the second-​order endorsement of desire has been explored in some detail by Keith Lehrer. Lehrer calls the positive evaluation or endorsement of desire “preference” and the positive evaluation or endorsement of belief “acceptance.”22 I am not suggesting that the place of agency in knowledge and responsible belief is limited to such second-​order endorsements, but it is a way in which agency can extend even to those parts of the self that are initially acquired nonvoluntarily. Since it is likely that some perceptual beliefs—​ those requiring the most meager conceptual resources—​are in this category, it means that agency can extend even to such perceptual beliefs. I suspect, then, that self-​determination, autonomy, and agency operate on a much wider scale than is included in intentional action or even the broader class of voluntary action. If I am right about this, not only is it a mistake to focus on the voluntary/​nonvoluntary distinction in analyzing epistemic responsibility, but it is also a mistake in the analysis of moral responsibility as well. This position obviously needs considerable refinement and a number of objections need to be answered. The scope of the self is a difficult matter, and the Kantian view of the self is notoriously narrow. Why think that our first-​order desires and beliefs are any less a part of our selves than our will or second-​order

21 Korsgaard discusses reflective endorsement in a number of places in Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). See in particular the section entitled “The Status of Desire,” in her reply to Geuss: 238–​42. 22 See Keith Lehrer, Self-​Trust (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).

Must Knowers Be Agents?  55 endorsements? Why does the latter have authority over the former? It is far too facile to identify the self only with those desires/​beliefs with which we identify at the second level. After all, a person who has numerous first-​order desires or beliefs with which he does not identify has a different self than he would have had if he had not had them. He has, we would say, a fragmented self. And there may even be a sense in which he is responsible for the desires/​beliefs with which he does not identify or even explicitly repudiates. That might explain why even such desires/​beliefs are in some sense his own. Some epistemologists wish to extend the scope of knowledge to include many such beliefs. I’ve already said that knowledge may not be a unitary concept and there may not be any way to resolve some of the disputes about the application of “knowledge” to cases in which agency clearly does not apply, but I am suggesting that we need not assume that agency does not apply when an epistemic state is initially acquired nonvoluntarily. Furthermore, I suggest that part of the reason it is hard to decide whether knowledge or epistemic responsibility applies to beliefs about which agency does not apply is the vagueness of the boundaries of the self. We can now answer the second question posed at the end of Part I: Is there any important difference between an effect arising from the act of an agent, whether voluntary or nonvoluntary, and events brought about by a nonagent? In particular, does it make any significant difference to epistemology? We have seen that the nonvoluntary acts and beliefs of agents can differ in important ways from events that are produced by nonagents. If it is the act or belief of an agent, the agent’s subsequent reflectiveness makes it voluntary on the second level. The agent either does or does not make the belief her own.23 Even nonvoluntary acts/​ beliefs can therefore earn the agent credit (or blame), and in the case of beliefs, they may constitute knowledge. This brings us to question (3): Is knowledge best understood on the model of event causation or on the model of agent causation? I have already suggested that epistemic credit is earned by an agent only when her agency is operative, either in the initial acquisition of the belief, or in her later reflective endorsement of the belief or beliefs like it. Since on my view epistemic credit is a component of knowledge, I  am also willing to say that knowledge requires the operation of agency. But throughout this chapter I have not rested my case that the agent does or does not have knowledge in the various Frankfurt cases on the fact that she does or does not have epistemic credit. In case 3, for example, it seems to me that the agent has knowledge. It also seems to me that she gets epistemic credit. But I am not suggesting that she has knowledge because she gets credit. Those epistemologists who separate epistemic credit, either in the form of 23 This naturally raises the question of whether alternate possibilities are necessary at the second level. I will leave that question aside for this chapter.

56  Knowledge and Understanding justifiedness or responsibility, from knowledge will no doubt have more complicated responses to these cases. They might say, for instance, that agent causation need not be operative in knowledge, but it does need to be operative in generating justified or responsible belief. But I will not try to sort out here the various possibilities that emerge when various forms of epistemic credit are separated from knowledge. My position is that the fact that an agent has knowledge is “up to her,” to use Reid’s words. She need not be responsible in the sense that requires alternate possibilities or even voluntariness, but she needs to be exercising her agency either at the first-​or second-​order level. Aquinas defines virtue as the perfection of a power.24 Within the context of this chapter that would mean that virtue is a property that makes agents effective. In a broad sense of virtue there can be physical virtues, culinary virtues, teaching virtues, and so on. Epistemic virtues make us effective epistemic agents. An effective epistemic agent is one who reliably reaches her epistemic end and who reaches her epistemic end because of her, not by chance or because of something outside of her. Need she be exercising a virtue in getting knowledge? I have said elsewhere that that is too strong a requirement.25 She does need to be exercising a power and she needs to get to her end because of her power; she must be exercising her agency. She need not intentionally aim at her end, however. She need not even be acting voluntarily. In fact, it might turn out that she need not even be generally reliable in reaching her end, assuming that in case 4 we ultimately judge that she knows. But she needs to be an agent. Her agency is critical in explaining how it is that she ends up with her true belief. A causal sequence that leaves out her agency is not good enough. At the beginning of this chapter I remarked that ethics is concerned with the evaluation of agents and their acts, but that does not tell us the full range of ethics since both agency and act could be more or less extensive than we think. I have argued that agency is operative in getting epistemic credit and knowledge. The scope of agency includes those evaluative aspects of belief investigated by epistemology. In other work I have argued that it is artificial to separate epistemology from ethics. The role of agency in beliefs as well as in acts further supports this position.



24

Summa Theologiae I–​II, q. 55.

25 Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind, Part III, sec. 2.

3

Recovering Understanding* 3.1  The Neglect of Understanding There have been radical changes in epistemology in recent years, although not always in the same direction. The naturalistic epistemologists treat it as a branch of psychology, whereas I treat it as a branch of ethics. Still others gleefully pronounce the field dead on the grounds that the central epistemological questions are based on defective assumptions. In the first part of this chapter I want to look at what we can learn from the death-​of-​epistemology camp because I think that the lesson of their argument is that epistemology ought to be reoriented in a direction I believe is desirable for many other reasons. In particular, I want to focus on the neglect of the epistemic value of understanding. Recovering understanding requires an approach like the virtue approach I have endorsed elsewhere. It also may alter the way we respond to skepticism. The death-​of-​epistemology theorists claim that epistemology is primarily concerned with demonstrating that knowledge is possible, and that project arises only if we take the threat of radical skepticism seriously. But the peril of skepticism is not perennial. It is only because of certain historical contingencies that it has assumed so much importance in the last three hundred years. And the danger arises only within the context of a certain set of theoretical ideas—​ideas that can and must be challenged. Beyond this, the death-​of-​epistemology theorists do not agree on the particular set of ideas that are at fault. Richard Rorty1 blames skepticism on the “representational” conception of belief and the correspondence theory of truth, while Michael Williams2 blames foundationalism. But they agree that the demise of the presuppositions behind the skeptical challenge undermines its danger and makes the attempt to answer it pointless. Since answering skepticism is reputedly the major job of epistemology, it makes epistemology pointless as well, and to the extent to which the test of philosophy is built on epistemology, philosophy itself is allegedly in danger of collapse. I have no interest in pointing out the many defects in this line of reasoning. Instead, I want to start with what I think is a worthwhile contribution * The chapter is reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. 1 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. 2 Williams, Unnatural Doubts.

Epistemic Values. Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197529171.001.0001.

58  Knowledge and Understanding to philosophy from this argument, and that is the way it reminds us how the questions that we consider central to epistemology change over time and are not presented for our reflection singly, but in clusters. An important way in which questions bunch together is around the issue of skepticism. There have been significant periods of philosophical history in which skepticism was thought to be a serious threat, and other periods in which it was not. In those eras in which it was, philosophers gave preeminence to the epistemic value of certainty and focused on the nature of justified belief. In those eras in which it was not, the questions that assumed most importance were quite different. Philosophers gave most of their attention to the value of understanding and focused on the nature of explanation rather than on the nature of justification. We may be ending a period in which radical skepticism is taken in full seriousness, but whether or not that is the case, we should admit that the questions of most significance to epistemology in the askeptical periods have been neglected. It is time we cease the obsession with justification and recover the investigation of understanding. At least, that is what I intend to propose. My position is that (1) the death-​of-​epistemology theorists are right that the danger of skepticism has been perceived quite differently in different periods of philosophical history, and one reasonable conclusion to draw from that (but not the only one) is that skepticism does not arise from the pure a priori use of presuppositionless reason, but only within a context of certain substantive philosophical positions.3 But (2)  the death-​of-​epistemology theorists are mistaken if they think the seriousness of skepticism is a peculiarly modern phenomenon. There are, in fact, revealing similarities between the modern skeptical period and the post-​ Aristotelian skeptical period, both of which are significantly different from the askeptical periods that make up most of the rest of philosophical history. But I  am not interested in the theoretical presuppositions of skepticism for the purposes of this chapter. My point is just that many epistemologists are ready to put skeptical worries aside, although not all for the same reasons. This is not to say that most of them accept the claims of the death-​of-​epistemology theorists. In fact, they clearly do not. But many now agree that epistemology is stultified if the issue of skepticism is allowed to dominate epistemological inquiry. It is perfectly legitimate to pursue epistemological issues that leave the skeptical challenge to one side. But what are the questions that should then capture our attention? A good way to answer that, I propose, is to look at the questions that dominated epistemology 3 The reason I say this is not the only possible response is that it is still possible that there is progress in philosophy, and the lack of concern for skepticism in some previous eras might just be a mistake destroyed once and for all by Descartes. I believe this is Richard Foley’s view.

Recovering Understanding  59 during askeptical periods. Since I believe this opens up an important range of neglected issues involving the epistemic value of understanding, I conclude that (3) the death-​of-​epistemology theorists are quite wrong that there is nothing left for epistemology to do. In what follows I will look at the work of some historians of philosophy for interpretations of the epistemological enterprise in previous eras. This will lead to some suggestions for the future of epistemology. But, unfortunately, it is not enough to announce that skepticism should be treated independently and then continue to use the approaches that are most common in Anglophone epistemology. Most of the dominant theories make it almost impossible to undertake an investigation of understanding. I will then argue that virtue epistemology has the greatest promise of giving us a new and useful way to approach the neglected value of understanding.

3.2  Understanding versus Certainty Understanding and certainty are etwo epistemic values each of which has enjoyed pride of place for long periods in the history of epistemology, but rarely, if ever, at the same time. In Hellenistic philosophy and much post-​Cartesian philosophy, certainty was given more attention than understanding, while in Plato and Aristotle, in the long medieval period, and even in some of the major modern philosophers such as Spinoza, it was the reverse. Usually whichever one of the two concepts dominated was the one connected with the concept of knowledge, so Plato comes very close to identifying knowledge with understanding, while Descartes comes very close to identifying knowledge with certainty.4 Historians have attributed this difference in focus to differences in the way skepticism has been handled. The rise of skepticism is accompanied by the concern for certainty, and that brings with it a batch of questions, most of which focus on propositional belief and the process of justifying belief, since justification is what is needed to defend the right to be sure. In contrast, the askeptical periods have been mostly concerned with understanding, and the questions accompanying it show little concern for justification, often not even much interest in propositional belief, but instead, an interest in the process of explanation, since explanation is what is needed to defend a claim to understand. The understanding/​explanation orientation is much less atomistic and more social than the certainty/​justification orientation. This is noteworthy in the present climate of opinion, since these 4 Roger Florka has argued that even though Descartes was interested in certainty, his concerns were more metaphysical than epistemological. In Descartes’ Metaphysical Reasoning, Florka addresses Descartes’s view of reasoning according to which the reasoning faculty attempts to follow the metaphysical structure of the universe. He claims that what Descartes wanted to achieve in gaining certainty was close to what I mean by understanding.

60  Knowledge and Understanding features of the understanding approach are the very things that would meet some recent criticisms of contemporary work in epistemology.5 So the rise of skepticism led to a move from a concern with understanding and explanation to a concern with certainty and justification in ancient epistemology. As Stephen Everson points out in the introduction to his book on ancient epistemology,6 “It has become generally accepted . . . that what marks off post-​Aristotelian epistemology from what went before is a novel concern with justification . . . and that this concern was elicited by the onset of scepticism.” In contrast, the central epistemological aim of Plato, as Julius Moravcsik has argued, was the delineation of what it means to understand something.7 Propositional knowledge was of secondary interest (p. 55) and derivative from it: The only propositional knowledge that will be of interest will be that which is derived from the kind of theoretical understanding that Plato envisages. Mere knowledge of truths is of no interest to Plato; propositional knowledge figures in the dialogues only insofar as this may be, in some contexts, evidence for understanding, and needed for practical activity. (60)

Gail Fine has a similar interpretation:8 On the account [of Plato] I have proposed, one knows more to the extent that one can explain more; knowledge requires, not a vision, and not some special sort of certainty or infallibility, but sufficiently rich, mutually supporting, explanatory accounts. Knowledge, for Plato, does not proceedpiecemal; to know, one must master a whole field, by interrelating and explaining its diverse elements. (114)

Gail Fine translates the word epistēmē in Plato as “knowledge,” but in a sense that includes understanding, whereas Moravscik translates it simply as “understanding.”9 Either way, understanding is a central epistemic value in Plato. But not justification. Occasionally, a contemporary philosopher such as Chisholm (1966) will claim to find the origin of the idea of epistemic justification in Plato’s Theaeterus (201c–​210b), where Socrates proposes and then rejects the suggestion that knowledge is true belief plus a logos. But both Burnyeat10 and Fine11 5 See especially, Kvanvig, The Intellectual Virtues and the Life of the Mind: 181–​82, and Code, Epistemic Responsibility, for the complaint that contemporary epistemology is too atomistic and insufficiently social. 6 Everson, Epistemology: 7. 7 Moravcsik, “Understanding and Knowledge in Plato’s Philosophy.” 8 Fine, “Knowledge and Belief.” 9 See also Everson, Epistemology:  4–​5. 10 Burnyeat, “Aristotle on Understanding Knowledge:” 134ff. 11 Fine, “Knowledge and Belief:” 107.

Recovering Understanding  61 have disputed the idea that Plato’s notion of a logos can be identified with justification, maintaining that a logos is an account or an explanation, and as already mentioned, Everson says that the historians agree that the concept of justification was a new idea in Hellenistic philosophy, associated with the rise of skepticism. In examining Plato’s early theory of knowledge, Paul Woodruff argues that Plato distinguished expert from non-​expert knowledge,12 where he indicates expert knowledge by technē (skill) and its cognates, and, in many contexts, also by epistēmē (knowledge in the sense of understanding) and sophia (wisdom). To be expert at a technē is therefore associated both with knowledge/​understanding and with wisdom. The expert, Woodruff says, is a person on whom others may rely in difficult or highly technical matters.13 What makes the expert reliable is that he knows the essential nature of his product.14 Whether he has that knowledge is revealed in his ability to give a Socratic definition of the good produced by his technē.15 Woodruff then argues that it turns out that the same basic knowledge is essential to even technē—​knowledge of the good. It follows that the person who is the most reliable source of knowledge for other people is someone who has mastered a skill and in doing so has a basic knowledge of the good shared by all experts. Aristotle’s notion of epistēmē is also one that is far removed from a concern with justification arising out of the threat of skepticism, and for that reason, I  have heard some scholars remark that they have trouble finding his epistemology at all. But that reveals more about the contemporary philosopher than about Aristotle. Consider what C.C.W. Taylor says at the beginning of a paper on Aristotle’s epistemology: While Aristotle was certainly aware of sceptical challenges to claims to knowledge, whether in general or in specific areas, the justification of knowledge claims in response to such challenges, which has been central to most epistemology since Descartes, is at best peripheral to Aristotle’s concerns. On the whole, he does not seek to argue that knowledge is possible, but, assuming its possibility, he seeks to understand how it is realised in different fields of mental activity and how the states in which it is realised relate to other cognitive states of the agent. In particular, the central problem of post-​Cartesian epistemology, that of showing how our experience may reasonably be held to be experience of an objective world, is hardly a problem for Aristotle. The problem 12 The distinction between expert and non-​expert knowledge is important for the consistency of Socrates’s position since, according to Woodruff (1990), it is only expert knowledge that Socrates says he lacks. 13 Woodruff, “Plato’s Early Theory of Knowledge:” 68. 14 Woodruff, “Plato’s Early Theory of Knowledge:” 76. 15 Woodruff, “Plato’s Early Theory of Knowledge:” 74.

62  Knowledge and Understanding for the post-​Cartesian philosopher is how, once having retreated in the face of Cartesian doubt to the stronghold of private experience, he or she can advance sufficiently far beyond that experience to recover the objective world. Aristotle, never having made the retreat, does not have the problem of the advance.16

And Burnyeat: All through the Hellenistic period, both positive philosophy and the negative attacks of scepticism take their starting point to be the problem of perceptual certainty. Aristotle does not. But not because he is unacquainted with sceptical arguments for conclusions which would undermine his enterprise, nor because he does not think (some of) them worth extended discussion. He is simply very firm that he is not going to let them structure his inquiries or dictate his choice of starting-​points.17

Like Plato, Aristotle was particularly interested in understanding, either as a form of knowledge or as a special cognitive state.18 The dispute about the connection between understanding and knowledge in Aristotle is reflected in the fact that epistēmē in Aristotle is variously translated “science,” “scientific knowledge,” or “scientific understanding,” but sometimes nous is translated as “understanding” instead. I will not investigate Aristotle’s rather complicated notion of understanding, as it has been discussed in the literature. My point is merely that Aristotle’s epistemological interests were quite different from ours, concerned with a complex of ideas associated with understanding rather than with justification, and that those concerns can be explained in part by his lack of interest in skepticism. So the practice of epistemology in the ancient world was quite different when menaced by skepticism than when no such peril was perceived. The rise of skepticism in Hellenistic philosophy is both the source of and the explanation for the shift from the Platonic/​Aristotelian concern for understanding to the post-​Aristotelian concern for certainty, and that shift was associated with the emerging dominance of the concept of justification. It would be interesting to investigate how philosophers went about the return to the askeptical epistemic values of understanding and wisdom in the early medieval period, since our situation is similar. We also live at a time in which the focus of epistemological investigation is the individual belief state. For decades, epistemologists have concentrated on justification, and scarcely a word is said about understanding. There

16

Taylor, “Aristotle’s Epistemology:” 116–​17. Burnyeat, “Aristotle on Understanding Knowledge:” 138. 18 Taylor, “Aristotle’s Epistemology:” 116. 17

Recovering Understanding  63 is not even an entry for “understanding” in the new Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy nor in the recent Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, and rarely is there an entry for “understanding” in the indices of scholarly books in epistemology.19 On the other hand, justification is given even more attention than knowledge, notwithstanding the fact that the term “justification” may sometimes be explicitly rejected, as in Plantinga’s recent work on warrant. In Plantinga’s case, he rejects it because of the ambiguities he finds in the concept of justification. Notice that this means that justification can direct the inquiry, even when the theorist refuses to use the word “justification,”20 But if I am right that the concept of justification is associated both historically and conceptually with the perceived danger of skepticism, and if I am also right that epistemologists are now prepared not to let skeptical worries direct their inquiry, it follows that it is advisable to give up the preoccupation with justification and perhaps even with the prepositional belief and to turn instead to an investigation of understanding.

3.3  The Nature of Understanding So far we have only hints about the nature of understanding from its use in ancient epistemology, particularly by Plato. But we need much more than hints if we are to have reason to attempt to recover it. If understanding is a notion peculiar to Plato’s philosophy, it is unlikely that very many contemporary philosophers believe it exists at all. It is always problematic to use a single term to apply to the object of study of philosophers from completely different historical periods and with completely different background theories. This occurs whether we are talking about knowledge, freedom, causation, the human person, justice, the good, or many others. So when we discuss Plato’s theory of knowledge, can we be sure that it is a theory of the same thing as Chisholm’s theory? Are they giving two different accounts of the same thing or accounts of two different things? I am not convinced that this question has a determinate answer, but it can be finessed to some extent if we find a common ground between us and Plato. What I will try to do in this section is to find the common ground in the concept of understanding.

19 See the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward Craig and Luciano Floridi, Oxford: Routledge 1998, and the Companion to Epistemology, edited by Jonathan Dancy and Ernest Sosa. Oxford: Blackwell 1992. Even when the term “understanding” is used in the title of a work on epistemology, that often means nothing when it comes to an account of the nature of understanding. I am pleased to find that one recent book on epistemology does not neglect understanding and is even concerned to reclaim it. See Elgin Considered Judgment. 20 Note that in “Justification in the Twentieth Century,” Plantinga’s use of the word “warrant” is a replacement for one of the meanings for “justification” that he says he has identified. Large sections of this chapter appear in his Warrant: The Current Debate. 

64  Knowledge and Understanding There is another problem that makes it hard to find our target. A consequence of the neglect of understanding as an object of philosophical investigation is that the word “understanding” is used loosely, with a wide variety of meanings, and usually without any notice of ambiguity. When Alston21 and Plantinga22 detected ambiguities in the concept of justification, they both treated that as a serious problem and concluded that the concept must be disambiguated before there could be further epistemological progress. In contrast, even when people notice that “understanding” is ambiguous, they do not consider that a real problem, since they assume that all they have to do is to stipulate the meaning they want before proceeding. The fact that so little contemporary literature depends on any given sense of understanding seems to make the choice inconsequential. This situation makes it very difficult to even identify the value that needs recovering. One of the consequences of scholarly neglect is fragmentation of meaning. And the more that meaning is fragmented, the more reason there seems to be to neglect it since there no longer seems to be any “it” that is being ignored. This vicious circle of neglect has probably occurred before in philosophical history with other concepts.23 Let us see, then, if we can find some commonality between us and Plato’s notion of epistēmē. From Moravscik’s and Woodruff ’s work, we see that understanding (epistēmē) in Plato has something to do with technē—​practical human arts or skills. These include such complex activities as medicine, hunting, and shipbuilding, two of which are no longer widely practiced, but they also include more-​specific practical skills, such as cooking or even pastry-​making. Understanding is a cognitive state that arises from technē, and since technē includes certain practical activities that are by no means wholly cognitive, it follows that understanding in Plato is a state that arises from practices that are not purely cognitive. The person who has mastered a technē understands the nature of the product of the technē and is able to explain it. She also knows the good in a sense that gives her a common understanding with the practitioners of other technai. This seems to be the case even when the technē in question is an academic field. Fine says in the passage quoted above that to have epistēmē one must have mastered an entire field. One does not have epistēmē of an astronomical fact24 without interrelating and explaining its relation to diverse elements within the field of astronomy. And one can do that only by mastering the technē of being 21 Alston, “Epistemic Desiderata.” 22 Plantinga, “Justification in the Twentieth Century.” 23 I suspect that this happened for a time with the concept of virtue and the concepts of some of the individual virtues. 24 I  am using the word “fact” as a placeholder, since we have not yet identified the object of epistēmē.

Recovering Understanding  65 an astronomer. In other words, one does not understand a part of a field without the ability to explain its place within a much larger theoretical framework, and one acquires the ability to do that by mastering a skill. Similarly, one does not have epistēmē of some feature of human psychology without the ability to explain how that feature fits into the larger framework of human psychology, and that requires having mastered the technē of the psychologist. Assuming that epistemology is also a technē, it follows that one does not have epistēmē of some object of epistemology, such as having epistēmē of what knowledge is, without the ability to explain how knowledge fits the other objects of study in the field, and one cannot do that without having mastered the skills of the epistemologist. So far, two ideas about understanding have emerged from the Platonic notion of epistēmē that are live options in the contemporary milieu. One is that understanding is a state gained by learning an art or skill, a technē. One gains understanding by knowing how to do something well, and this makes one a reliable person to consult in matters pertaining to the skill in question. This way of looking at understanding makes it unlikely that understanding is achieved by a single mode of reasoning, but it involves more-​complex processes, including, perhaps, processes that are noncognitive. This leads to the second idea, which is that understanding is not directed toward a discrete object, but involves seeing the relation of parts to other parts and perhaps even the relation of part to a whole. It follows that the object of understanding is not a discrete proposition. One’s mental representation of what one understands is likely to include such things as maps, graphs, diagrams, and three-​dimensional models in addition to, or even in place of, the acceptance of a series of propositions. The formal structure of some states of this kind have been examined by John Etchemendy and John Barwise.25 They have investigated the complex reasoning involved in problem solving that they call heterogeneous reasoning. This form of reasoning would be used in such situations as planning the layout of a group of offices that meet certain requirements, designing a cellular telephone, a computer, or an airplane, or figuring out a food distribution system that maximizes utility. In the cases Barwise and Etchemendy consider, there is no unique solution to the problem, but the goal is to find any solution that meets the requirements, and these could include cost, efficiency, safety, style, aesthetic quality, as well as probabilistic considerations. The reasoning involved is not only complex, but often collaborative. The process uses diagrams, graphics, and other representational forms in addition to sentential reasoning. People who make discoveries or solve problems often do so by a process of visualization, sometimes even in dreams. One of the most famous examples of this 25 Etchemendy and Barwise have a number of papers on this. For a good overview and bibliography, see Hammer, Logic and Visual Information.

66  Knowledge and Understanding was the discovery of the structure of the benzene molecule by Auguste Kekulé. While working on the problem, he dreamed of a snake biting its own tail. Upon awakening he realized that the benzene molecule had a ring structure. There are many other examples of this in science. The American mathematical geneticist, Sewall Wright, used the metaphor of a landscape with hills and valleys as a way of explaining adaptive genetic mechanisms. Selection drives populations up the slopes, he argued. Scientists who think that populations seek the closest lowest level have suggested turning the image upside down. Either way, people find that the image gives them an understanding they would not have had otherwise and it has become well known. We now have identified three features of understanding: It is acquired through mastering a technē; its object is not a discrete proposition but involves the grasp of part/​whole relations; and it involves representing some portion of the world non-​propositionally. Let us look more closely at this last feature. I take it for granted that reality has a structure or structures and that the comprehension of these structures is an important epistemic goal. I also take it that it is unlikely that propositional structure exhausts the structure of reality. This point raises deep metaphysical questions about the relation between mind and reality. Whether or not propositions exist independent of the mind, and whether or not something sentential in form is the bearer of truth value, we can all probably agree that there is a form of knowledge that is mediated through a sentential structure, leaving aside the question of whether the mind imposes such a structure or whether it is there—​independent of the mind. But I think it is consistent with theoretical neutrality to maintain that reality has a propositional structure as long as we are not committed to the position that propositional structure is the only structure it has. In fact. I want to claim now that it is very unlikely that propositional structure exhausts the structure of reality, and it is even unlikely that propositional structure exhausts the structure of what is intelligible to us. I propose that understanding is the state of comprehension of non-​propositional structures of reality. In this sense of understanding, we can understand such things as an automobile engine, a piece of music, a work of art, the character of a human person, the layout of a city, a causal nexus, a teleological structure, or reality itself—​this last being the object of the science of metaphysics. There is no reason to think that any of these things has an exclusively propositional structure, if indeed it has a propositional structure at all. I am not denying the possibility that all of reality can be represented propositionally, but I am denying that the proposition is the only form in which reality can be made intelligible to the human mind. The structures of music include harmonic structures and rhythmic structures extended in time as well as formal patterns, such as the sonata form and structures that blend ingredients simultaneously to produce a sound with a certain color,

Recovering Understanding  67 such as the simultaneous blending of many distinct instruments in the creation of a single note in a musical composition. The structure of works of art is also quite obviously non-​propositional, and for this reason it is very difficult for interpreters of art to translate their understanding of that structure into a propositional form. Understanding literary figures is probably easier to achieve than the understanding of paintings or sculpture, since it is probable that the aesthetic sense of many persons is not very well developed, whereas understanding a literary character is an extension of understanding oneself and one’s friend, something that is presumably more common. Some, but not all, literature has a narrative structure. The pieces are propositional, but the structure of the whole is not. Narrative structure is relatively easy to understand because it is the same as the structure of our own lives. The technai of art, music, and literature can produce a state that has epistemic value. The arts enable us to penetrate reality more deeply than we could without them. Understanding works of art and literature is probably one step removed from understanding basic features of reality, since the arts are in part an attempt to understand reality. That is, to understand a work of art is to understand something that is itself the product of an attempt to understand something else, although this is, of course, arguable. But it is much less arguable that the state we get from the successful creation or appreciation of works of art is understanding, and it has much in common with the epistēmē discussed by Plato. I have said that I think it is likely that academic fields are technai also, although that is more controversial. But it is uncontroversial that one can have understanding of an academic field and only somewhat more controversial that understanding some part of an academic field may require understanding how that part relates to other parts of it. Philosophy aims to understand the whole of reality, not simply that portion of it or aspect of it that is successfully represented by propositions and their constituent concepts. An enormous advantage of language is that we have rules codifying the logical relations among propositions, and these are very useful in comprehending a certain kind of structure. What we do not have is a set of rules codifying the relations among pieces of the structures that make up an artwork or a piece of music or the motivational structure of a person, although metaphysicians have sometimes proposed rules of a sort for the deepest structures of reality, as in Plato’s theory of Forms. Of course, there is little chance that we can reach agreement on any of these matters, and that is no doubt one of the reasons that so few people attempt to figure things out in these areas. It is probably also a reason for the lack of prestige of the attempt. There is one form of understanding that epistemologists have not given up, and that is the understanding we get from a theory. Philosophical theories these days are considerably less grandiose than Plato’s, of course, but despite

68  Knowledge and Understanding their modest pretensions, they often attempt to do what Plato did in the respect we have been considering: to represent the objects of epistemological inquiry nonpropositionally. For example, the two main models of justified doxastic structures for some time were the coherentist raft and the foundationalist pyramid.26 Even though many epistemologists have given up these models, they look for alternatives that serve the purpose of the raft and the pyramid—​to represent the structure of an entire system of beliefs when it is epistemically good. So even when one way of attempting to give us understanding of the whole of a good belief system is unsuccessful, nobody rejects the point of the attempt.

3.4  Understanding and Knowledge What is the relationship between understanding and knowledge? As we have seen, understanding in Plato is closely connected with knowledge, since epistēmē is a state in which the two are not clearly distinguishable, and the same word is variously translated as “knowledge” or “understanding.” But since knowledge these days almost always means propositional knowledge, and since I have proposed that understanding has a non-​propositional object, understanding differs from knowledge as it is normally understood. I argue elsewhere27 that we should not assume that propositional knowledge is the only kind of knowledge. Nonetheless, I think that knowledge and understanding differ. We can have both understanding and knowledge about the same part of reality. Understanding deepens our cognitive grasp of that which is already known. So a person can know the individual propositions that make up some body of knowledge without understanding them. Understanding involves seeing how the parts of that body of knowledge fit together, where the fitting together is not itself propositional in form. Moravscik uses the example of understanding a mathematical theorem to make the same point. A proof of a mathematical theorem is a sequence of propositions, but understanding the proof involves seeing the relations between the propositions, and that is not itself the knowledge of a proposition.28 It is possible that understanding a theorem is just a different kind of knowledge, but it differs from knowledge in the usual sense and it often cannot he attained until after

26 See Sosa, “The Raft and the Pyramid,” for these analogies. 27 Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind. 28 Moravscik, “Understanding and Knowledge in Plato’s Philosophy: 55. This is also the moral of Lewis Carroll’s famous paper, “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles” (1895). The tortoise keeps trying to turn a logical inference of the form of modus ponens into another premise. The effort leads to an infinite regress.

Recovering Understanding  69 knowledge in the usual sense is reached. In some cases, then, understanding is a stronger state than knowledge. On the other hand, understanding does not always build on a base of knowledge. It may be achieved in more than one way about the same portion of reality. More than one alternative theory may give understanding of the same subject matter. This makes sense if we think of a theory as a representation of reality, where alternative representations can be better or worse, more or less accurate. But more than one may be equally good, equally accurate.29 This form of understanding does not presuppose knowledge or even true belief, and if we assume that two competing representations of the same part of reality cannot both constitute knowledge, it cannot be a form of knowledge.30 Another reason for thinking that understanding is not a form of knowledge is that in some cases, truth can actually be an impediment to understanding, as Catherine Elgin has pointed out. Her example is propositional. “Objects in a vacuum fall toward the Earth at a rate of 32 ft/​sec2” is not strictly true, since it ignores the gravitational attraction of everything except the earth, yet it gives more understanding for most purposes than the vastly more complicated truth.31 She says the same applies to Boyle’s Law, the law that the pressure of a gas increases as the volume of the container decreases, (Elgin, p. 124). The strictly true (that is, accurate) law can be grasped, but only at high cognitive cost. These considerations suggest that understanding is achieved partly by simplifying what is understood, highlighting certain features and ignoring others. This process compensates for our cognitive limitations. Understanding aims at comprehensiveness, not exactness, and we usually need to sacrifice one for the sake of the other. As van Fraassen has noted in a different context, a more informative theory is less likely to be true, but I would say it is more likely to produce understanding.32 In each of these instances, understanding aims in a different direction than knowledge, and yet it does not necessarily have a lesser status. At the beginning of this chapter, I  observed that many epistemologists are willing to put the skeptical threat aside, but that is not because they all agree that knowledge can be taken for granted. Some do think that, of course, but many 29 This way of looking at it forces us to make a decision about an issue I left up in the air earlier. There I wanted to be neutral on the question of whether understanding gives us a grasp of non-​ propositional structures that are actually there in reality, or whether it gives us a way of representing reality non-​propositionally, where there is no commitment to the idea that the structure of reality and the structure of the theory are isomorphic. A  theory seems to give us understanding in the latter sense. 30 This point raises deep metaphysical questions that I cannot address here. For those who disagree with me, I can only say that nothing of importance in this chapter hinges on the point. If it turns out that all forms of understanding are forms of knowledge, that actually strengthens my main point, which is that understanding has been neglected and ought to be investigated. 31 Catherine Elgin, Considered Judgment: 123. 32 van Fraassen, Quantum Mechanics: 3.

70  Knowledge and Understanding others merely think that the need to answer skepticism should not direct all epistemological projects, but that skepticism can be put aside while other questions are addressed. In proposing that the value of understanding ought to be recovered, I do not mean to imply that we can take for granted that the object of understanding is also something known or even that it is true. We can leave aside questions of knowledge and threats to knowledge in addressing understanding, but as we will see in section 3.5, a form of skepticism arises anyway. Truth is a thin epistemic goal, and knowledge is derivative from it, since believing the truth is a component of knowing. Understanding is a thicker goal, and its connection with truth is often indirect. When we want an expert about a problem, we consult a person who has understanding of the subject matter, since such a person is likely to be a reliable problem solver. A reliable problem solver ordinarily will also be a reliable source of propositional information, but her reliability is not limited to being a reliable truth-​hearer. The problem solver may use something like the complex process of heterogeneous reasoning investigated by Etchemendy and Barwise, but whether she does or not, what enables her to figure out the solution to the problem is her understanding of a complex chunk of the world, not simply her knowledge or true beliefs about that portion of the world. This suggests another feature of understanding that links it with a technē: Understanding makes its bearer reliable in carrying out the goals of the technē, some of which are not epistemic goals. It enables him to produce a flaky pastry, repair an automobile, design a bridge that will not collapse, or figure out why the vintner failed this year. This means that understanding is a property of persons. It is not carried by propositions or states of belief. This consequence is important because so many contemporary theories in epistemology focus exclusively on the proposition or the state of believing a proposition. We will get to that in section 3.6. If understanding is a goal worth pursuing, there ought to be criteria for success in reaching it. We do have such criteria, but they are not as clear as we would want. We expect students to demonstrate their understanding of a text or a conceptual point by reconstructing it in their own words. Understanding in some areas may be displayed by drawing a diagram. We attempt to give understanding to others by constructing models of what we want them to understand. If they can construct their own models, we take that as a sign of their understanding. In Plato, understanding is demonstrated by successfully passing the elenchus test, the Socratic method of submission to question and answer.33 A  person demonstrates epistēmē of the product of the relevant technē by giving a definition 33 The method of elenchus was usually used by Socrates in Plato’s dialogues as a way of demonstrating the falsehood of a person’s assertion. A series of questions from Socrates and answers from his interlocutor usually showed that the assertion was unbelievable or even inconsistent.

Recovering Understanding  71 of its essential nature that withstands attack. Problem solving of the sort examined by Etchemendy and Barwise is an attempt to understand the relations among a given set of requirements. Finding a solution is a matter of figuring out how to make them all compossible. So more than one solution is permitted. Any solution that meets the specifications is successful.

3.5  Skepticism about Understanding Once we bring up success, we implicitly bring up failure, and that means there is a danger of skepticism. Skepticism about understanding is as real as skepticism about truth. Skepticism threatens whenever there is a goal that is such that we cannot tell for sure whether we have attained it even after we think we have done so. It is a threat to our motivation because motivation to reach X requires both the belief that reaching X is possible and some way of telling how well we have done after we have made the attempt. So skepticism about our ability to get knowledge or true beliefs is not unique. It arises for understanding because success in gaining understanding may be illusory. It may seem to me that I clearly understand something even when I do not. It might even appear to me that I have demonstrated my understanding by passing the elenchus test or constructing a model or producing a solution to a problem even when I have not. But unlike truth skepticism, understanding skepticism has never had a significant hold on the philosophical imagination. That is because the test for success is largely within the practice, the technē, itself. Reliably carrying out the goals of a technē can be verified within the technē One’s understanding of an art work can be proven by successfully giving that understanding to others by teaching it in an art history class. and success in teaching is defined within the practice of teaching. Success in problem solving is proven by the workability of the solution produced. Again, success is defined within the confines of the technē that gives rise to the problem to be solved. In each of these cases, of course, the test for success is not infallible. It is still possible that failure has occurred. But skepticism about infallibility is not the most serious form of skepticism. As we have seen, justification is associated with the response to skepticism because it is the state we want to defend our right to be certain we believe the truth, but the justification test was never an infallible test for certainty. In recent epistemology, foundationalism and coherentism have been treated as alternative ways of answering the challenge of truth skepticism by describing the conditions for having a justified belief structure. But there are many ways fallibility creeps into both kinds of structure, and certainty is never guaranteed. There always has been considerable slippage between justification and certainty. So the fact that there is also slippage between explanation

72  Knowledge and Understanding and understanding is not a special problem. Skepticism at the level of infallibility arises within any epistemological framework. The most threatening form of skepticism occurs when it takes away the motive to even try to reach an epistemic goal—​at the level of motivation. At this level, understanding skepticism is less serious than truth skepticism. That is because, as I have argued, success in understanding is demonstrated within a practice. Understanding has internalist conditions for success, whereas knowledge does not. Even when knowledge is defined as true justified belief and justification is construed internalistically, the truth condition for knowledge makes it fundamentally a concept whose application cannot be demonstrated from the inside.34 Understanding, in contrast, not only has internally accessible criteria, but it is a state that is constituted by a type of conscious transparency. It may be possible to know without knowing that one knows, but it is impossible to understand without understanding that one understands. To repeat this does not eliminate every form of skepticism. Skepticism can appear at the second-​order level. Nonetheless, there is less reason to doubt my understanding than there is to doubt other internally accessible states, such as the justifiability of my beliefs even on strong internalist theories of justification That is because for most of my beliefs, the belief is justified only if a long string of other beliefs is justified, and even if I have cognitive access to the entire string of beliefs. I cannot cognitively access them simultaneously and probably cannot consciously go through them one by one. In contrast, understanding is a state in which I am directly aware of the object of my understanding, and conscious transparency is a criterion for understanding. Those beleagured by skeptical doubts therefore can be more confident of the trustworthiness of putative understanding states than virtually any other epistemic state. Ironically, then, even though understanding dominated epistemology in askeptical periods, there is good reason for the skeptic to recover it as well.

3.6  Understanding in Virtue Epistemology The recent interest in virtue epistemology makes the recovery of understanding more likely, but it is difficult to reclaim it within the other theories that have the most influence. Epistemology is dominated by the information model of knowledge. This is even true of many theories that are commonly called forms of virtue epistemology, such as process and faculty reliabilism. Almost all contemporary theories agree that to know is to believe a true proposition plus something else. 34 A priori knowledge is an exception, of course, but most of our most interesting knowledge is not a priori.

Recovering Understanding  73 A true proposition is treated as a piece of information that can be passed from one person to another. One of the critical issues in this model is how the original informant obtains the information. Knowledge is akin to a physical object that is discovered in some basic way by one person and is then passed from person to person through the epistemic community. There is little attention in the contemporary literature to this part of the theory, since almost all of the competing theories agree with that part of it. The disagreement arises over the “plus something else” component of the definition. In evidentialist theories, a true belief is an instance of knowledge, just in case it is based on the appropriate evidence.35 Defeasibility theories maintain that to be knowledge, a true belief must also be justified in certain counterfactual circumstances—​if certain other pieces of information (defeaters) were also known.36 Process and faculty reliabilism and the proper function theory maintain that it is not a true belief ’s justificatory relations that make it knowledge, but instead, the epistemic process or faculty by which it was acquired. That process or faculty must be a reliable truth-​producer, or alternatively, a properly functioning faculty.37 The earlier causal theory maintains that to be knowledge, a true belief must be properly caused by the fact the belief is about.38 All of these theories focus on propositional objects, and none of them can he reinterpreted as theories about valuable epistemic states that have a nonpropositional object. That is, in each case, the “something else” that is a component of knowledge in addition to true belief is something about the proposition believed or the state of believing a proposition. The theory does not make sense when applied to anything other than a propositional object, and it has nothing to say about epistemic states that do not have propositional objects. Consequently, they have nothing to say about understanding. Epistemologists presumably think that their own theories have positive epistemic value, yet these theories generally do not meet the criteria for the epistemic concepts they address—​justification, warrant, or knowledge. In other words, most theories of justification are such that the theory itself does not pass its own criteria for justification, and similarly for warrant and knowledge. This is not an objection to these theories because most of them are couched in terms that make it clear the theory is not intended to be self-​referential. The theory aims at giving an account of justification or warrant for beliefs of a certain kind, often empirically based beliefs, and the account itself is not a belief in the 35 See, for example, Conee and Feldman, “Evidentialism.” 36 For the strong defeasibility theory, see Lehrer, Theory of Knowledge, and Klein, “A Proposed Definition of Propositional Knowledge:” 471–​82. 37 For reliabilist theories, see Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition, and Sosa, Knowledge in Perspective. Plantinga gives his theory of warrant as proper function in Warrant and Proper Function. 38 See Goldman, “A Causal Theory of Knowing.”

74  Knowledge and Understanding category it addresses. Even so, epistemologists must think that their own theories are better than competing ones, which means that they must think, at least implicitly, that there are valuable epistemic states other than the ones they address in their theories. I propose that understanding is one of those goals and that most epistemologists tacitly aim at achieving understanding through the theories they advance. Since understanding is an epistemic state they implicitly value, it would be a good idea to investigate it. Virtue theories make the “something else” in the definition of knowledge a property of the knower.39 Since theories of this kind identify a property of the knower as the value-​conferring property of epistemic states, they not only have the advantage of not being committed to the view that justification, warrant, and knowledge have propositional objects, but they have the additional advantage of making a recovery of the investigation of understanding much easier to do. Valuable epistemic properties of agents produce valuable epistemic states of agents. The states produced need not be limited to justification or knowledge. Some of them may not have propositional objects. They may be states of understanding. In Virtues of the Mind, I propose two definitions of knowledge that differ only in the way the object of knowledge is identified. In both definitions, knowledge is a state that is the result of acts of intellectual virtue, where I define “act of intellectual virtue” in a way that is intended to capture the idea of an intellectual act that is good in every respect.40 The definition of an act of intellectual virtue is unimportant for my purposes here. My point is that I give two definitions, and they differ only in the way the object of knowledge is specified. That is because I do not address the issue of the object of knowledge in that book except in passing. The first definition is neutral on the issue of whether knowledge has a propositional object. To maintain neutrality I propose that knowledge is cognitive contact with reality plus something else. I take it that everyone can agree on that. The issue is what that entails and what else has to be added to it. I have proposed that the something else is that it is the result of an act of intellectual virtue, but, as I say, that is not important for the topic of this chapter. The second definition follows the contemporary convention of defining knowledge as true belief plus something else. That definition presupposes that the object of knowledge is a proposition. It is important to notice that this definition of knowledge can remain neutral about the object. In contrast, most other definitions do not make sense unless the object is a proposition. Since understanding has a nonpropositional

39 In addition to the virtue theory I endorse, John Greco’s agent reliabilism is a form of virtue epistemology in which properties of the knower are the focus of the theory. Sosa’s faculty reliabilism is arguably a form of agent reliabilism also. 40 Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind: 264–​73.

Recovering Understanding  75 object, it is easier to connect it with knowledge in the kind of virtue theory I propose than in those that define knowledge by looking at properties of propositional beliefs or the processes that produce them. I am not going to propose a definition of understanding in this chapter that is as specific as my definition of knowledge, but I think that a definition can be generated by looking at those intellectual virtues that aim not at truth, but at understanding. The virtues I have previously examined were in the former category. An investigation into the latter would be very interesting. I suspect that understanding arises from special and unanalyzed, even unrecognized, virtues. It follows from what I have said that we educate people in these virtues when we teach them a technē, but what we do, exactly, is very hard to pinpoint. I think there is a form of teaching that can produce these virtues so they are not simply natural talents—​but even their names are elusive. There is a difference between the kind of understanding a person has who acquires it from a teacher and the kind that a person has who has figured it out for herself. Good teachers learn how to give their students understanding of difficult subject matter by the use of diagrams, vivid examples, and explanations of the way the new subject matter connects to things the students already understand. Understanding can be taught, like knowledge, and like knowledge, there is probably a qualitative difference between the state one gets from another and the state one gets on one’s own. Recovering understanding as an object of epistemological investigation should include an investigation of these differences. What about wisdom? Is there any hope of recovering that also? I have claimed that the neglect of understanding is associated with the fixation on certainly and justification and the accompanying focus on the propositional belief, a complex of interests associated with pessimism about the possibility of knowledge. But unlike the neglect of understanding, the neglect of wisdom is probably the result of another kind of pessimism as well—​pessimism about the concept of the good life, the life a wise person understands. This pessimism is primarily an ethical one, and leaving aside radical skepticism will not be sufficient to make wisdom the object of inquiry. The task of recovering wisdom, then, will be more difficult than the task of recovering understanding, but I believe the latter is a necessary condition for the former.

3.7  Conclusion The epistemologist asks what knowledge is and how it can be acquired. The skeptic suspects that knowledge as the epistemologist defines it cannot be acquired at all. The two have been locked in a battle that has lasted many centuries. Paul Woodruff remarks in response to this situation: “Which came first,

76  Knowledge and Understanding the sceptic or the epistemologist? The answer is. ‘Neither: Plato came first.’ ”41 The philosophical inquiry into understanding came before the philosophical inquiry into propositional knowledge and doubts about the latter. Epistemology should not only make the investigation of understanding one of its aims, but if epistemology is itself a technē, it should aim to understand how understanding relates to knowledge and the other objects of epistemological study. And if Plato is also right that the ultimate object of a technē is some good and all the forms of good are related, we can deepen our understanding of understanding and other epistemic goods by inquiry into the good itself. With luck, that might give us a glimpse of what wisdom is.

References Alston, William. “Epistemic Desiderata.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53, no. 3 (1993): 527–​51. Burnyeat, Miles. “Aristotle on Understanding Knowledge.” In Aristotle on Science:  The Posterior Analytics, edited by E. Berti. Padua:  Editrice Antenoire, 1980. Reprinted in Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy vol 2, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2012: 115–​144. Carroll, Lewis. “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles.” Mind 10 1895: 691–​693. Chisholm, Roderick. Theory of Knowledge. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966. Code, Lorraine. Epistemie Responsibility. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Brown University Press, 1987. Conee, Earl, and Richard Feldman. “Evidentialism.” Philosophical Studies 48 (1985):  15–​34. Elgin, Catherine. Considered Judgment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. Everson, Stephen, ed. Epistemology. Vol. 1 of Companions to Ancient Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Fine, Gail. “Knowledge and Belief in Republic v–​vii.” In Everson 1990: 85–​115. Florka, Roger. Descartes’ Metaphysical Reasoning. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. Fraassen, Bas van. Quantum Mechanics: An Empiricist View. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991. Goldman, Alvin I. “A Causal Theory of Knowing.” Journal of Philosophy 64, no. 12 (1967): 357–​72. Goldman, Alvin I. Epistemology and Cognition. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1986. Greco, John. “Agent Reliabilism.” In Philosophical Perspectives, edited by James Tomberlin: 273–​296. Guerriere, Daniel. “The Aristotelian Conception of Episteme.” The Thomist 39, no. 2 (1975): 341–​48. Hammer, Eric M. Logic and Visual Information. CSLI (Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information. 1995.

41

Woodruff, “Plato’s Early Theory of Knowledge,” p. 61.

Recovering Understanding  77 Klein, Peter. “A Proposed Definition of Propositional Knowledge.” Journal of Philosophy 67, no. 16 (1971): 471–​82. Kvanvig, Jonathan. The Intellectual Virtues and the Life of the Mind. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1992. Lehrer, Keith. Theory of Knowledge. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1990. Moravscik, Julius. “Understanding and Knowledge in Plato’s Philosophy.” NeueHeftefürPhilosophie 15/​16 (1979): 53–​69. Plantinga, Alvin. “Justification in the Twentieth Century.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 50 suppl (Fall 1990): 45–​71. Plantinga, Alvin. Warrant: The Current Debate. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993a. Plantinga, Alvin. Warrant and Proper Function. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993b. Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979. Sosa, Ernest. “The Raft and the Pyramid.” In Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 5 of Studies in Epistemology. 1980. Reprinted in Sosa, Knowledge in Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991: 165–​191. Sosa, Ernest, and Jonathan Dancy. Companion to Epistemology. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Taylor, C. C. W. “Aristotle’s Epistemology.” In Everson 1990: 116–​42. Williams, Michael. Unnatural Doubts. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991. Woodruff, Paul. “Plato’s Early Theory of Knowledge.” In Everson 1990: 60–​84. Zagzebski, Linda. Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

4

Toward a Theory of Understanding* 4.1  Introduction One of the most important powers of the human mind is the ability to grasp simple structure in a complex array of phenomena. Some of the structures human beings see and hear occur in nature, such as the structure of a tree, the pattern of a birdsong, or the structure of the solar system, and some are created by us, such as the layout of a garden, or the structure of a fuel injection system. In the case of some structures, we may not know whether they are natural or whether they were humanly invented. I believe that to be the case with the structure of a proposition. Some structures are extended in time and some are not. If we take something that is not temporally extended and look at it over time, we might see a pattern—​e.g., the ideological leanings of Supreme Court justices over the last century, or the Dow Jones Industrial Average over the last ten years. Sometimes we see patterns when nothing is there to see, at least nothing interesting that will be repeated in the future. I have heard baseball statistics that are no doubt in that category, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average might be also. But whether structure is discovered or imposed, important or trivial, the urge to find structure and the ability to do so is a universal component of the human mind. Pythagoras produced some of the most impressive feats of the human ability to perceive structure. His discoveries in geometry led him to the view that the entire universe has a mathematical structure, and with that insight, he discovered the musical intervals, mapped the stars, and created a fascinating ethical system in which natural laws of harmony apply to the human soul and to the state. So the Pythagoreans had the ability to see recurring structures throughout the universe—​beyond the material world, and into the domains of musical harmony, morality, and human destiny. Few of the best philosophers today can boast of such an expansive ability to grasp repeating structures. But all of us perceive structure all the time, and in our more creative moments, we notice similarities of structure in one part of the world and another; for instance, the cross section of a tree trunk looks like expanding waves when a pebble is dropped into a pond. Neurons look like trees with main trunks (axons) and branches (dendrites). We can see the golden ratio in such widely different objects as the human face, the * The chapter is reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. Epistemic Values. Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197529171.001.0001.

Toward a Theory of Understanding  79 Parthenon, and Salvador Dalí’s Sacrament of the Last Supper. A structure is illuminating even when it does not repeat, but the ability to see the structure of one domain in an entirely different domain is an important extension of the human grasp of structure to which I will return in the last section of this chapter. Very roughly, I think of a structure as what gives an object unity. We want to grasp structure because we see an object as an object when we grasp its structure. The structure of a thing is typically what we have in our minds when we think about it or remember it, and it is what we keep in our minds when we want to study it or affect it in some way through our actions. I do not mean that we are not capable of grasping anything but structure. We can have mental images or ideas that constitute a detailed grasp of physical or nonphysical objects, but for cognitive economy, the structure is basic. We tend to put mental images or ideas into the structure we grasp, and the structure is what permits us to put the mental images or ideas in their proper place. The grasp of the structure of some phenomenon is the grasp of it as a whole. A human intentional act is a single act because it has a structure. World War II is a war, and not a series of random events, because it has structures, and the fact that it has multiple structures and to some extent, no structure at all, is perceived as a problem. It is a problem in understanding World War II. I propose, then, that understanding is the grasp of structure. When we grasp an object’s structure, we understand the object. The object of understanding can be anything that has structure: a living organism, an event, a narrative, a piece of music, a work of art, a metaphysical system, a philosophical argument, a causal relation, the stock market, human intentional action, a moral theory. I said that we sometimes impose structure on a phenomenon, and I think that we do that in order to understand it. In fact, that is almost always what moral theorists do. If we cannot discover structure in some phenomenon, we impose structure on it in order to make the pieces of it fit together. We do that because the pieces are too difficult to grasp together without a structure into which we can place them.1 Some objects of understanding are components of other objects of understanding. An event is a component of a narrative. A particular causal relation is a component of an event. An intentional act is a component of an event, and it is a component of a person’s motivational system. Our planet is a component of the solar system, which is a component of larger celestial systems, the largest of which is the physical universe. Understanding must simplify what it grasps, and the larger and more complex the object of understanding, the more we must simplify and leave out of the phenomenon components that may be important at different times or for different purposes. A map of a geographical area is a good illustration of this 1 I say explicitly that that is what I am doing in the moral theory I devise in Exemplarist Moral Theory, ­chapter 1.

80  Knowledge and Understanding point about understanding. A map leaves out a great deal of the physical region of the map. A map of a large region leaves out more detail than a map of a smaller region because the inclusion of too much detail would include more than the mind can grasp, and so it would not aid understanding. Simplification is therefore a cognitive advantage. We ignore parts of a phenomenon in order to grasp the whole. But sometimes we want to find something that is left off the map, and we will need to zoom into the map or find a more detailed map. What counts as a whole phenomenon will vary with our interests. I enjoy looking at a globe, but if all I want to do is to get from one building to another on my campus, I want a campus map, not a globe or a map of North America or even a city map. Simplifying also can distort what is there. For instance, the lines depicting roads on a street map may be straighter than the roads actually are. That usually does no harm, and can actually be beneficial. It would be distracting and perhaps confusing if the depiction of the layout of the region was more accurate. Similarly, as Catherine Elgin2 has argued, physical laws expressed in simple formulas are not quite accurate, but we get more understanding from the simpler formula that somewhat distorts what it is displaying. I have mentioned that structure can be depicted in various ways, and a map is one of them. Structure can also be depicted in sentences, diagrams, graphs, sketches, and mathematical models. Structures can be mentally grasped and depicted in a way that can be communicated to others. People who are unacquainted with some domain of the world or have trouble grasping its structure on their own can be led to see the structure of a thing through the help of others who are able to depict it. My idea of structure has historical roots in Aristotle’s idea that what we grasp when we know something is its form. Aristotle thought that in perception and in thought, the form of a thing is imprinted on our minds. The form of an object is what the mind grasps. What I mean by structure is related to what Aristotle means by form, only I  think of structure as extending far beyond material substances and artifacts, and I am not endorsing the matter/​form distinction as it functions in Aristotle’s theory of cognition. But I think that Aristotle is right that when we go beyond the simplest objects of perception or memory, what the mind grasps is the form of an object. What makes something a something is its form, or its structure. When we do not understand something, it is usually because either it has no structure, or we cannot figure out the structure. With this view of understanding, I propose and briefly support four claims: 1. Understanding is the basic positive epistemic state.



2 Elgin, Considered Judgment.

Toward a Theory of Understanding  81 2. True belief is the grasp of a propositional structure, and so it is a special case of understanding. Since knowledge is a special case of true belief, knowledge is a special case of understanding. 3. Knowledge and understanding of other structures in the same domain are checks on the veridicality of each other and show us that both states link us to the same world. 4. The grasp of a structure that repeats in different domains can lead to a strong form of discovery by analogy that is more powerful than its poor cousin, the inductive argument by analogy. It has been useful for innovation in physics, and is an important part of creativity that we should encourage in the education of students.

4.2  True Belief and Understanding One kind of structure is the structure of a proposition. When we have a true belief, we grasp a propositional structure that some part of the world has. Propositional structure is fine-​grained, and the syntactical structure of language permits endless variations in the sentences we can produce with the same general structure, so the grasp of true propositions allows us to have an enormously powerful type of understanding. The ability to discover (or impose) propositional structure on the world is one of the greatest achievements of the human mind. A proposition conveys a particular kind of structure of some part of the world, but there is always more in the world than is conveyed by any set of propositions, no matter how long and complex. Compare a description of a room by even a highly talented novelist with seeing the room in person. At best the writer’s description works by permitting the reader to form her own picture of the room which is more or less accurate (usually less). At best the set of propositions permits the formulation of an imaginative substitute for seeing the room, sight being our most advanced sense, but even sight does not convey everything in the room. There is always much more in reality than what we can grasp—​certainly much more than we can grasp at any one time. Propositional structure aids the mind by expressing something we can grasp, remember, and communicate to others in a way that comes as close as human minds can get to an exhaustive grasp of some part of reality. The grasp of propositional structure when combined with a large vocabulary is therefore an incredibly powerful way to capture what the world is like for beings like us. The virtue of propositional structure is also its vice. Propositional structure is fine-​grained, but it sometimes is too fine-​grained to illuminate for us the domain it is depicting, and when that happens, understanding is jeopardized. Fortunately, the phenomena depicted in a proposition or a set of propositions

82  Knowledge and Understanding often have more than one structure. In fact, they probably always do. There is no reason to think that propositional structure is all there is. Suppose, for example, I am interested in the layout of an ornamental garden. A sketch of the garden is far more useful to me than a list of propositions giving the appearance and dimensions of each plant in my garden and their relative positions. It is possible that a long list of propositions could convey an understanding of the garden’s design, but to read and grasp such a long set of propositions would be at best tedious, and it is unlikely to work anyway. For the same reason, if I wanted a friend to understand what the garden looks like, I would show her the sketch rather than to give her a verbal description. The same point applies to understanding any spatial structure. The layout of a city is best depicted on a map. The layout of the solar system is given on a drawing or a three-​dimensional model. Another kind of structure that is best depicted nonpropositionally is the pattern of a phenomenon that changes over time:  monthly rainfall, interest rates, public opinion of the president, life expectancy, percentage of women in philosophy, yards per game of a running back—​each of which can be most easily depicted on a simple line graph. That explains why newspapers often include graphs along with an article verbally describing the same phenomenon. Graphs are also better than words at depicting phenomena in which one feature varies with a second feature, such as the sway of a tall building as a function of wind speed. More complex variables can also be depicted using two-​or three-​ dimensional models such as climate change as a function of a set of variables. What this indicates is that any given part of the world has more than one structure. Propositional structure is a type of structure that every part of the world has, and we can grasp any part of the world we want by way of grasping it propositionally, but we can also grasp many parts of the world through the grasp of nonpropositional structures such as those depicted on maps, sketches, graphs, and three-​dimensional models. I am proposing that the grasp of a structure that some part of the world has given us understanding of that part of the world. Since true belief is a grasp of propositional structure, true belief is a special case of understanding. Assuming that knowledge is a special case of true belief, it follows that knowledge is a special case of understanding. Both propositional knowledge and understanding of nonpropositional structures can be transferred to others. Whether the structure is depicted in language, in graphs, or in some other way, the receiver needs to be tutored in the art of interpreting the written or spoken word, the graph, or the model used. It is possible that there are structures that one person can apprehend without the ability to communicate the structure to others, but in general, understanding of nonpropositional structures can be acquired by a process parallel to propositional testimony. I don’t know if the word “testimony” is generally used when

Toward a Theory of Understanding  83 person A shows B a map or a sketch, but I think that it is the same phenomenon that occurs when A tells B that p. This way of approaching understanding gives us a different way to think of the issue of whether understanding includes knowledge. According to the view I am proposing, knowledge is a form of understanding, so it trivially follows that one kind of understanding entails knowledge. But most philosophers who are concerned with this question are thinking of a different issue, which in my terms would be formulated as the question whether the understanding one has when grasping a nonpropositional structure of some part of the world entails grasping propositional structure as well. The object of knowledge is different from the object of understanding of nonpropositional structure, but the domain might be the same. Suppose you understand the layout of a university, or the motives of another person, or the way a fuel injection system works. In each case, if you have understanding of the object, you will normally believe a lot of true propositions about it, but you might believe some falsehoods without much damage to your understanding of the domain. So if I understand the layout of the University of Oklahoma, I will truly believe that the library is located between the North and South Ovals, that the administration building is on the North Oval, and much else. I might not know the location of certain buildings or the distance between one and another, and if so, my understanding of the layout of the campus is diminished. Greater understanding of the layout of the campus is normally accompanied by more true beliefs about the location of various buildings and the way they are related to each other spatially. But I can have some false beliefs without significantly diminishing my understanding. I may misremember the number of seats in the stadium or the exact location of many buildings, and some buildings I may not remember at all, yet I grasp the layout of the campus quite well. I grasp it well because I know or at least truly believe key features of the layout of the campus, but some features are less important than others, and that is no doubt why it sometimes appears that understanding is relative to our interests. It is important to me to know where Dale Hall Tower is because that is the location of the Philosophy Department, but it may be more important to you to know where the stadium is. That is obvious, but it is not obvious that what counts as success in grasping structure is relative to our interests. What is relative to our interests is the degree of detail we need to grasp, and the degree of distortion we can safely accept in the structure we grasp, but not the structure itself. Given this view of understanding, it follows that understanding is answerable to the understanding of a different structure in the same domain. I don’t understand the layout of the city of Norman without some true beliefs such as the belief that Main Street runs roughly east/​west, and I-​35 runs roughly north/​south through the west side of town. So the understanding I have nonpropositionally is answerable to certain propositional facts. But my grasp of propositions about

84  Knowledge and Understanding the layout of Norman is also answerable to the understanding I have from a map or from the image I have in my head that I get from driving around. When my map or the image in my head conflicts with my beliefs, I know that one of them is mistaken. A map can be a way for me to tell whether the propositions I believe about the domain of the map are true rather than false. So putative knowledge can be corrected by understanding of a different structure of the same thing. Conversely, the map may be the one that is mistaken. In some cases (but not all) I can refer to a different and more reliable method of grasping structure to correct one that is in dispute. Both the propositions I believe and my grasp of nonpropositional structures are correctable by perceptual experience. The same point applies in other domains. Historians have a particular interest in causal structures, and one of the most hotly debated series of events in Western history is the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the causes of which continue to fascinate historians as well as ordinary people. Kyle Harper3 has argued that there is a causal connection between climate change and disease and the fall of the empire. He says that most histories of Rome’s fall have been built on the assumption that the environment was a stable, invisible backdrop to the story. But given the advances in our ability to retrieve data about the paleoclimate and genomic history, this assumption has been proven wrong. To explain how the Roman Empire went from territorially dominant, populous, and prosperous to conquered, thinly populated, and impoverished requires the recognition of both human and environmental causes. Barbarians and social conflict were among the causes of decline, but climate and disease were causally important also, and climate change and disease were connected because change in climate stirred pathogen evolution. Two catastrophic epidemics stand out. In the third century, the empire was swept by the Plague of Cyprian, caused by a pathogen that is currently unknown or at least uncertain. Even more devastating was the Justinianic Plague, which DNA evidence now identifies as Yersinia pestis, the same bacterium responsible for the Black Death many centuries later.4 Histories often focus on military battles because they can be precisely dated and many of their effects are immediate and obvious. So the Battle of Adrianople in the late fourth century is sometimes credited with beginning the process that led to the fall of the Western Empire in the fifth century. That battle is reputedly the bloodiest in imperial history, when a desperate force of Gothic invaders overran the main body of the eastern army. But as Harper notes, at most twenty thousand Roman lives were lost that day, and while the fact that they were soldiers magnified the problem, his lesson is this: “germs are far deadlier than Germans.”5

3 Harper, The Fate of Rome.

4 Harper, The Fate of Rome: 18.

5 Harper, The Fate of Rome: 18.

Toward a Theory of Understanding  85 The grasp of a causal structure explaining the decline of the Roman Empire is different from believing a series of true propositions about climatological and historical events. I am arguing that both kinds of grasp are forms of understanding, and each kind is answerable to the other. The grasp of causal relationships and interlocking structures is answerable to certain propositional facts, such as the date of the appearance of certain pathogens, the rate at which they spread, death rates from disease, facts about the economy in different parts of the empire, the removal of Roman authority from certain areas, and so on. At the same time, historians devise nonpropositional models to explain a host of facts, and some of these putative facts need to be revised in the light of a causal model. To some extent, Harper argues, historians have not been looking in the right places for the relevant facts. When it is assumed that human conflict in the form of invasions and social strife are the principal causes of the disintegration of the empire, only facts of that kind are considered, and the importance of some of them is exaggerated. But now climate science and the genomic revolution are making us aware that climate change and emerging infectious diseases have been an integral part of the human story all along. The causal narrative of the decline of Roman civilization is beginning to take a different form. The emerging pattern is quite different from what it once was. The desire to grasp the causal structure of the decline of the Roman Empire illustrates the fact that there is a human impulse to perceive structures that are larger than the structure normally depicted in a single proposition. Knowledge of a single proposition gives us a grasp of some part of reality, but knowledge of a string of propositions does not add up to a grasp of a larger part of reality unless each part of reality known in a proposition has a place in a larger nonpropositional structure. The causal structure of historical events is a large structure in the sense I mean. The propositional facts that are the object of knowledge and the nonpropositional causal structure that gives us a different kind of understanding are correctable by each other. That gives us reason to think that understanding and knowledge are connected to the same world.

4.3  Repeating Structures and Analogical Discovery I am proposing that understanding is the grasp of structures of reality. In understanding we are able to see unity in complex phenomena, and that enables us to see some part of the world as a single object. We see a geographical area as a unit because we see a patterned structure in it that we can hold in our minds and possibly remember. We can see the Roman Empire as an object to the extent to which we see in it an evolving structure that eventually disintegrated. The human

86  Knowledge and Understanding impulse to see structure makes us look for structure in events and in sequences of events such as the sequences that constitute a human life or a human society. The impulse to see structure leads to another kind of understanding, one that we get from seeing the same structure repeated in multiple domains. At the beginning of this chapter I mentioned the golden ratio, which appears in many parts of nature as well as in art and architecture. What have we discovered when we see the same mathematical ratio in the growth of leaves and petals, in the Milky Way galaxy, in Leonardo’s Vitruvian man, and in the Fibonacci sequence? When a structure reappears in different parts of nature, that suggests something about the organizational structure of all of nature. Nature has a pattern. I find it fascinating to notice that and to realize that the ability to see the pattern can lead to some of the most impressive intellectual achievements in history. It led the Pythagoreans to believe that the basic structure of the universe is numerical. With that insight they were able to link together mathematics, music, physics, and an ethical system in which natural laws of harmony apply to the human soul. Dmitri Krioukov et al.6 argue that the universe may be growing in the same way as a giant brain, where the electrical firing between brain cells mirrors the shape of expanding galaxies. Physicist Stephon Alexander has argued that repeating features of nature validates a form of argument from analogy that, in my opinion, is much stronger than the standard inductive argument from analogy. If we see part of a structure repeated elsewhere, we have reason to expect the rest of the structure to be there also. This has led to important scientific discoveries. As Alexander points out, Kepler’s ability to connect geometry and musical intervals led him to discover his three laws of planetary motion. Kepler correlated the planets’ placement in the heavens and the speed by which the planets made their orbits with an accurate and measured complete musical scale. By 1605 he had discovered that planets move in an elliptical orbit and that a line joining them to the sun would sweep out equal areas of space in equal periods of time (Kepler’s second law). He calculated the astronomical motion of the heavenly bodies and described them as musical harmonics or note sequences. For each planet the lowest note corresponds to the largest distance from the sun (the lowest orbital velocity), and the highest note corresponds to the shortest distance from the sun (the highest orbital velocity). Each planet creates a harmony as it orbits. So the planet Saturn plays a major third (an interval of 5:4), Jupiter plays a minor third (6:5), and Mars a perfect fifth (3:2).7 So Kepler offered the hypothesis that the planets make music as they orbit.8 This is fascinating in itself, but the point that Alexander stresses is 6 Krioukov et al., “Network Cosmology.” 7 Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: 82. 8 Kepler’s Music of the Spheres can actually be performed in real time, using Kepler’s formulas, but the entire composition would take 264 earth years to perform.

Toward a Theory of Understanding  87 that Kepler was not able to demonstrate his third law and show that his theory applied to all of the planets until fifteen years after he had used the analogy between music and geometry to drive his second law.9 His understanding of the connection between musical harmonies and the geometry of planetary motion led him to his astronomical discoveries. Alexander argues that the key to innovation in theoretical physics today is the same kind of analogical reasoning used by Kepler.10 He says that through his understanding of jazz he was able to quickly intuit string theory, and he proposes that the universe is composed of vibrating strings. Alexander’s works on the connection between the smallest and largest entities in the universe applies the physics of superstrings to address long-​standing questions in cosmology. In 2001, he co-​invented the model of inflation based on higher dimensional hypersurfaces in string theory called D-​Branes. His fascination with the analogy between music and physics has led him to propose that the universe is one big vibrating string rhythmically moving from big bang to big crunch and back again.11 I am not in a position to have an opinion on whether the universe is vibrating strings on the largest scale as well as the smallest, but I think that the kind of analogical reasoning described and used by Alexander in his field of string cosmology is an illustration of the importance of a kind of understanding that applies the grasp of structure in one domain to a completely different domain. It works if the universe is unified in such a way that results in repetitiveness in structure. If it is not an accident that the orbits of the planets correspond to pleasing musical intervals, then it is not an accident that when Kepler discovered that Mars “plays” a musical fifth in its orbit, the orbits of the other planets would have orbits corresponding to other harmonious intervals. Since Kepler understood musical intervals and recognized that one part of the planetary system had the structure with which he was familiar in music, he was able to predict the same musical structure in other parts of the planetary system in advance of the measurements that confirmed it. This is a form of argument by analogy that is much stronger than the familiar form of analogy in which similarities are used as a basis to infer some further similarity that has yet to be observed. More specifically, the logical form of argument by analogy is typically said to be as follows: “Two otherwise unrelated objects, A and B, share properties P1, P2, P3, etc. Object A also has property Q. Therefore, B probably has property Q.” It has frequently and understandably been pointed out that such an argument is weak. In the kind of analogy I have

9 Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: 81.

10 Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: 2.

11 Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: 209.

88  Knowledge and Understanding described, however, the analogy is not based on a series of shared but possibly unrelated properties, but on similarity of perceived structure. If speed is related to musical pitch in one planet, it is reasonable to expect the same relationship in other planetary bodies, not because it is reasonable to expect them to share one more property if they are known to share several properties, but because the repetition of structure upon which the analogy is based has already been perceived. In education we train students to be critical reasoners. That typically means training them not to make mistakes in inferences, raising critical questions about their own and other people’s claims, and knowing how to identify and to evaluate evidence for a belief. None of this encourages understanding. Can we train students to grasp structure? How can we help them to see the same structure in more than one domain, such as the domains of music and geometry and cosmology? It is unlikely that we can do that in a single course, but it is helpful for everyone to have practice in seeing nonpropositional structures and reflecting on them. Some courses teach the grasp of musical structure; others illuminate structure in fiction or film. The social and natural sciences frequently make use of graphs and charts, the interpretation of which can be fostered with practice. Historical writings help readers notice complex causal networks such as those proposed to explain the decline of the Roman Empire that I discussed previously. Grasping structure is an important human ability, and the ability to grasp the same structure in widely differing domains is an important kind of creativity that can generate advances in knowledge by analogical reasoning, as Kepler did in the field of cosmology. This ability cannot be exercised except by individuals who are knowledgeable in more than one field, and so this is a reason to educate students in many fields at the same time even if they ultimately focus on a single field of study or domain of human practice. Why is it that the same structures repeat in many areas of nature? An obvious answer is that all of nature is unified. We know that the desire to grasp that unity drives people like Stephon Alexander in his work on string cosmology. It also seems likely that all of reality, both physical and nonphysical, is unified in some way. The grand metaphysical systems of the past attempted to explain that unity, but there have been few such systems since the nineteenth century. Still, the human desire to grasp the totality of reality is a deep part of our nature. One of the mysteries of the world is how it is that beings with intellects like ours can grasp large portions of reality and almost everyone thinks it is possible to grasp the whole of it. An ancient view going back at least to the Pythagoreans and expressed in many of the world’s religions holds that the human mind or soul can reach union with reality as a whole. According to Aquinas, that is because “intellectual natures have a closer relationship to a whole than do other natures; indeed, each intellectual substance is, in a way, all things. For it may comprehend the entirety of being

Toward a Theory of Understanding  89 through its intellect.”12 What might be more surprising is that some of the most skeptical philosophers believe the same thing. This is what Bertrand Russell says at the end of The Problems of Philosophy: “Philosophy is to be studied . . . above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.”13 Understanding is essential to satisfy our cognitive desires because it is a way of grasping reality without dividing it into propositional bits. I have proposed that even the propositional bits give us a form of understanding because reality has propositional structure as well as structures of other kinds. But the atomistic approach to knowledge hides some of the powers of the human mind that are most important. The impulse to grasp larger and larger wholes pushes us inevitably to the desire for comprehensive understanding of the totality of what exists. The idea that the human mind is capable of grasping all of reality is the greatest idea our species has ever had.

References Alexander, Stephon. The Jazz of Physics. New York: Basic Books, 2016. Aquinas, St. Thomas. Summa Contra Gentiles. Translated by Vernon Bourke. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1956. Elgin, Catherine Z. Considered Judgment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. Harper, Kyle. The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. Krioukov, Dmitri, Maksim Kitsak, Robert S. Sinkovits, David Rideout, David Meyer, and Marián Boguñá. “Network Cosmology.” Scientific Reports, November 2012. Russell, Bertrand. The Problems of Philosophy [1912]. New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1968. Zagzebski, Linda. Exemplarist Moral Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.



12 Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, 195, III, ­chapter 112. 13 Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, p. 161.

PART II

INT E L L E C T UA L  V I RT U E

5

Intellectual Virtues* Admirable Traits of Character

5.1  Admirable Human Traits Human beings are admired for many different qualities. Often we do not clearly grasp the nature of a quality we admire, but we recognize it when we see it expressed in a particularly vivid way in a person who is an exemplar of the quality. When we admire something (or someone) and continue to admire it on reflection, we say it is admirable—​deserving of admiration. Of course, we can be mistaken in what we call admirable. We can admire someone who is not admirable or fail to admire someone who is admirable. Nonetheless, our identification of admirable qualities is based on our experience of admiration when it survives reflection on the object of admiration. What we call “virtues” are the qualities we admire on reflection. Discussions of virtue develop out of a long history of the use of the word “virtue.” The word carries with it assumptions about what the virtues are and how they are organized. I believe, however, that we are more certain of the identities of highly admirable persons than we are of any account of what a virtue is and the way virtues ought to be classified. For that reason, I think that a good place to begin an investigation of intellectual virtue is to think of the wide range of persons we admire. We can then use reflective admiration as a way to generate a classification of virtues, and to identify the components of a virtue.1 Suppose we each made a list of persons we admire. My list would include Jean Vanier, founder of the L’Arche communities where people live with the mentally disabled and give them a loving home-​life; and the Trappist monks of Tibhurine, who refused to abandon their ministry in war-​torn Algeria, and were subsequently kidnaped and murdered by rebels.2 It would include St. Catherine of Siena, a mystic and central figure in the political affairs of fourteenth-​century Europe, who was not afraid to stand up to more than one pope, and managed to * The chapter is reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. 1 My position is that reflective admiration ought to include reflection on the emotional reactions of persons we trust, as well as continuing reflection on the admired person as new evidence arises. See Zagzebski, Epistemic Authority, ­chapter 4. 2 See Kiser, The Monks of Tibhurine, and Xavier Beauvois’s film, Of Gods and Men, 2010.

Epistemic Values. Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197529171.001.0001.

94  Intellectual Virtue convince Pope Gregory XI to return to Rome from Avignon. It would include Holocaust rescuers like Leopold Socha, a Polish sewer inspector and former criminal, who protected Jews hiding in the sewers of Lvov for fourteen months, first for money, then gradually out of compassion and at great personal risk.3 I also admire Arthur Miles, the protagonist of C. P. Snow’s novel, The Search, who is an ambitious scientist doing groundbreaking research in crystallography. At the point of making a major discovery, he finds counterevidence that he is at first tempted to destroy but then accepts it and reports that the hypothesis that would have made him famous is false.4 My list would include Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Leonardo da Vinci, and Marie Curie, and it would include Brian Shaw, said to be the strongest man in the world.5 Finally, it would include many ordinary people such as a woman I know who is impeccably groomed and keeps her home always ready for company, while caring for her husband with Alzheimer’s. The individuals on this list are obviously very different from each other, but I  think they have something in common that elicits my admiration, and I also suspect that the individuals on other people’s lists would have the same common feature. Each admired person has a human power in a high degree of excellence—​intellectual or artistic genius, moral leadership, stalwart courage, compassion, open-​mindedness, and intellectual honesty, the virtues of a host and loving spouse, physical strength. Obviously, some of these qualities are more important than others. Some of them do not have much to do with what makes a person the person that she is, whereas others are much deeper, integrated into the whole of the person’s life, such as helping the “little people” is for Jean Vanier.6 My hypothesis is that the main division among the human excellences I have named is natural versus acquired excellences. Physical strength, musical and artistic talent, and native intelligence are natural gifts. Courage, compassion, hope, intellectual honesty, and hospitality are acquired excellences. I think that we admire these excellences in different ways even when the same person has a mixture of the two kinds. People with natural gifts usually attract our admiration because they have developed their talent through the exercise of acquired traits. Brian Shaw was not born the strongest man in the world. It took a tremendous amount of hard work to achieve that goal. Marie Curie’s indomitable spirit and acquired skills explain her Nobel prizes at least as much as her natural intellectual brilliance. I think, then, that persons with extraordinary natural gifts are

3 See Chiger and Paisner, The Girl in the Green Sweater, Marshall, In the Sewers of Lvov, and Agnieszka Holland’s film, In Darkness, 2011. 4 Discussed by Baehr, The Inquiring Mind: 142. 5 Bilger, “The Strongest Man in the World.” 6 See Vanier, Becoming Human, and Spink, The Miracle, the Message, the Story, for moving accounts of his revolutionary vision of a new kind of community that has already grown to reach every continent of the world.

Intellectual Virtues  95 admirable in one way because of the natural gift, and in another way because the level of excellence they achieve is partly due to acquired traits that they develop through their agency. The admiration we feel for acquired excellences feels different from the admiration we feel for natural excellences. Another way to see the difference between natural and acquired excellences is to compare the emotions we have for natural and acquired defects. If we feel admiration for an acquired excellence like kindness, we feel contempt for an acquired defect like meanness. Meanness is not simply the absence of kindness. It is an acquired trait that is opposed to kindness—​a vice. Likewise, dishonesty is not simply the lack of honesty. It is an acquired trait that arouses our contempt. The same point applies to cowardice, stinginess, and unfairness. In each case we feel an emotion contrary to admiration when we see these traits expressed because they indicate not just the lack of a virtue but the presence of a vice—​an anti-​ virtue. In contrast, I doubt that there is any such thing as an anti-​talent. There is, of course, such a thing as the lack of talent, but normally we do not feel contempt for it. In general, I doubt that we have any emotion at all toward a person who lacks a particular talent, although if someone is extraordinarily lacking in a normal human gift—​is tone deaf, for instance—​we might feel pity, but I think not contempt. In this way, admiration for inborn talent, and admiration for acquired traits have different opposite emotions. This is another indication that there are two kinds of admiration directed at two kinds of excellence. A third important difference between natural and acquired excellences is that we can imitate the latter, but not the former. The two kinds of excellences have a different connection to our motivations. This difference has been confirmed in a series of studies by Jonathan Haidt7 and Sara Algoe.8 Haidt distinguishes between “admiration,” which is what he calls the emotion directed toward natural talents, and what he calls “elevation,” a term he invented for the emotion directed toward acquired virtues. In a series of empirical studies, he has identified differences between the two emotions. The main components of “elevation” are these: a. It is elicited by acts of charity, gratitude, fidelity, generosity, or any other strong display of virtue. b. It leads to distinctive physical feelings, including the feeling of dilation or opening in the chest, combined with the feeling that one has been uplifted or “elevated.” c. It gives rise to a specific motivation or action tendency: emulation, or the desire to perform the same kind of acts oneself.

7 8

Haidt, “Elevation and the Positive Psychology of Morality.” Algoe and Haidt, “Witnessing Excellence in Action.”

96  Intellectual Virtue In my opinion, “admiration” is a perfectly good term for our emotional responses to both natural and acquired excellences. Although I  have emphasized the differences, the similarities are important as well, and I would not go along with Haidt’s suggestion to use two different names for the emotion of admiration. But leaving aside the difference in terminology, Algoe and Haidt’s studies support my contention that we can imitate acquired excellence but not natural excellence. Their studies indicate that both the emotion they call “elevation,” directed at exemplars of moral excellence, and the emotion they call “admiration,” directed at exemplars of natural talents, are uplifting and lead to emulation in some way, but the difference is that admiration for natural talent energizes people to work harder to succeed at their own goals, whereas elevation leads them to emulate the moral goals of the other.9 I take that to mean that the acquired excellences are imitable, whereas the inborn excellences are not, although they are inspiring. I think, then, that Haidt’s research confirms the division I am proposing in the class of human excellences and in our emotional responses to them. Notice next that there are intellectual excellences in both categories. Some intellectual excellences are like natural talents, and some are acquired like moral virtues. Natural intellectual gifts include native intelligence, good memory, and good reasoning ability. Acquired intellectual excellences include intellectual honesty, intellectual fairness, intellectual courage, intellectual generosity, open-​ mindedness, and intellectual carefulness and thoroughness. I propose that we admire intellectual honesty the same way we admire honesty in the practical domain; we admire intellectual courage the same way we admire courage in the practical domain, and so on for the other intellectual virtues that have the same name as moral virtues. I think we also admire open-​mindedness the same way we admire moral virtues. We feel contempt for close-​mindedness, as we feel contempt for intellectual dishonesty and intellectual cowardice. We also feel the urge to emulate the open-​minded and intellectually courageous person the same way we feel the urge to emulate the compassionate, or generous or courageous person. In contrast, we do not feel contempt for a person who has low intelligence or a poor memory or poor eyesight. And the natural intellectual excellences are not imitable for the same reason that other natural talents and physical strength are not imitable. I conclude that the natural intellectual excellences and the acquired intellectual excellences have different relations to admiration and to human motivation. Although it is traditional to classify virtues by the domain in which they are exercised—​moral, intellectual, and physical—​I think it is more useful to classify them by our responses to them. Acquired excellences, whether moral 9 Algoe and Haidt, “Witnessing Excellence in Action:” pp. 123–​24. See esp. table 5 and discussion of study 3.

Intellectual Virtues  97 or intellectual, are admirable in the same way, and they have the same function in the development of human excellence through emulation of persons who are already excellent. If we want to become better at forming and regulating our beliefs, we would do well to focus on the acquired intellectual virtues.

5.2  The Components of Character Traits So far, I have hypothesized that there is more than one kind of admiration, and that admiration for natural talents differs in the way it feels and in its typical behavioral response from admiration for acquired traits. We generally do not call natural talents “virtues,” so not all excellences are virtues. The virtues and vices are acquired traits. Intellectual virtues and vices are acquired intellectual traits. Next, I want to look at how we can use admiration to identify the components of character traits as well as in identifying individual virtues. Admiration is typically precipitated by something easily observable—​usually verbal or bodily behavior. But we think that there is something in the person’s psychology that is expressed in the observed behavior, and it is the internal psychology that is the object of our admiration. In fact, most observed behavior has an internal psychological component, so even the admiration of observed behavior implies that there is something in the psychology of the person that is admired. What we mean by an act is not simply bodily movements but conscious bodily movements. What we mean by an assertion is not just the uttering of words, but the uttering of words that have a certain sense and which the speaker uses to convey information or to express attitudes to other people. There is something we take ourselves to be doing when we speak or act, and when it is intentional, it has other psychological properties. These properties are caused by further psychological features of the person—​perceptions, emotions, the adoption of ends. We admire a person for what she does or says to the extent that the cause of the behavior is in her psychological features rather than in something external to her agency, and our admiration can change when we discover what those psychological features are. The idea that admirable behavior requires certain psychological causes has deep historical roots, both in the East and in the West.10

10 There is evidence from classical Chinese sources for the idea that behavior is not truly admirable unless it arises from deep features of the person’s psychology. Stephen Angle (Sagehood: 53) says that de, translated roughly as “virtue,” refers to a gift from tian (Heaven) in the preclassical era, and then gradually begins to refer to something that a person attains from within; it comes from inner psychological sources. If the behavior is produced by something external or by an ulterior motive, then even if it looks admirable, it is actually common. Only behavior that springs from one’s inner heart counts as de.

98  Intellectual Virtue I have said that we assume that what makes a person admirable is something in her psychology that leads to behavior we admire. That follows from our response to cases in which we find out that an admirable act does not have an internal psychological source but is largely caused by external circumstances. To the extent that we believe or come to find out that the source of an admirable act is something independent of the agency of the person, we admire the person less or not at all. For instance, if we found out that an act of apparent generosity was actually coerced, we would not admire the person who did it. We do not admire something that bypasses a person’s agency the same way we admire her acquired internal features, and that is no doubt the reason we do not admire natural talents the same way we admire acquired traits.11 When something is either a gift of nature or imposed by an external source, we do not admire it in the same way we admire a trait acquired through a person’s agency, and we cannot imitate it. We cannot imitate external circumstances any more than we can imitate natural talents. Imitability is connected with the kind of admiration that underlies the set of character traits I am identifying for this chapter. They all have acquired internal features, particularly motivations that are emotional responses to the agent’s circumstances and that direct the agent to act for certain ends. We can use our responses of admiration or dis-​admiration to make further distinctions in the components of a virtue. We clearly admire certain motives more than others. For instance, our admiration is strongly affected by the discovery of a motive of self-​interest rather than a motive of concern for others. I mentioned that one of the people I admire is Leopold Socha, who rescued Jews from the Nazis and hid them in the sewers of Lvov for fourteen months. Initially he had a financial motive, but when their money ran out and they could no longer pay him, he continued to shelter them and to care for them at great personal risk. I admire him even when his motive was one of self-​interest, but I admire him much more when he was motivated by his love and concern for the welfare of the people he was protecting. I have found that my reaction is almost always shared by people to whom I have told Socha’s story. Next, I propose that we admire a person more when the behavior expresses a psychological disposition that endures over time, and when the disposition is a deep part of her psychology.12 By that, I  mean that she characteristically 11 There are degrees of coercion. I am told that Israeli law requires bystanders to give assistance to persons in obvious distress. I postulate that the coercive force of the law takes away, or at least reduces, admiration for the Good Samaritan, and so it reduces admirability. 12 The idea that a virtue is a disposition that the agent expresses even when tempted to act against it is connected to Aristotle’s distinction between virtue and moral strength. But Aristotle goes farther and says that the virtuous person’s behavior is so entrenched in his character that he does not have to struggle with temptation and finds it pleasant to act virtuously. (See Nicomachean Ethics VII for Aristotle’s discussion of moral strength and weakness, and Nicomachean Ethics II for his view of the process of acquiring virtue culminating in a state in which acting virtuously is pleasant.)

Intellectual Virtues  99 expresses the admirable disposition even when tempted not to do so. I suggest, then, that a deep and enduring psychological disposition is more admirable than one that is not, and for that reason I postulate that a virtue is deep and enduring. The fact that we admire psychological causes of admirable acts that are deep and enduring in these ways is a testable hypothesis.13 So far, we can say that a virtue is a deep and enduring acquired trait that we admire on reflection and which includes a motivational component. In early work, I proposed that each virtue has two major components: a distinctive motivational component, and a success component.14 In my recent work, I propose that both of these components can be subjected to the admiration test.15 Let us consider the motivational component first. There are certain general motives we admire. Some of the most basic and important ones are a concern for the welfare of others and a desire to get the truth and to aid others in getting the truth. Concern for others underlies a variety of other more specific motives, including a desire to give goods to others—​the motive of generosity; a desire to alleviate the suffering of others—​the motive of compassion; and a desire to make others feel liked and appreciated—​the motive of kindness. Concern for the truth underlies a variety of other motives, such as the desire to be open to the views of others even when they conflict with one’s own views—​the motive of open-​mindedness; the desire to be careful, attentive, and thorough in getting evidence, evaluating it, and reaching a conclusion—​motives of intellectual carefulness, attentiveness, and thoroughness. A concern for truth when combined with concern for others leads to desires to aid others in getting the truth—​motives of intellectual generosity and fairness. I think of the motivational component of a virtue as an emotion disposition that leads to either cognitive or overt behavior. The emotion disposition is generally a disposition to govern our emotions in a rational way. That might involve restraining an emotion such as fear, in the virtue of courage; or enhancing an emotion like human sympathy, in the case of compassion. I have argued in another place that intellectual virtues enhance or restrain intellectual self-​trust or trust in others.16 When we train ourselves to be alert to new evidence, to be willing to criticize our own beliefs, and to be sensitive to the arguments of others, we learn to limit self-​trust. We learn to avoid inappropriate forms of self-​ trust such as wishful thinking. There are also virtues that enhance intellectual self-​trust, such as intellectual courage and perseverance. An intellectually firm 13 The Fundamental Attribution Error, which indicates that people tend to attribute a specific instance of behavior to a disposition, might be evidence that we will have trouble telling the difference between a trait that is deep and enduring and one that is not. 14 Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind: 134–​37. 15 Zagzebski, Exemplarist Moral Theory, ­chapter 4. 16 Zagzebski, On Epistemology, ­chapter 4.

100  Intellectual Virtue person has the appropriate degree of assent to her beliefs.17 She is neither stubborn and unyielding and, hence, excessively self-​trusting, nor is she excessively pliable and wishy-​washy and, hence, excessively mistrusting of herself. Virtues that restrain intellectual self-​trust often also enhance trust in others, such as open-​mindedness, intellectual humility, and intellectual tolerance. I think it is important that we would not consider these traits that limit or enhance self-​trust or trust in others as virtues unless people were generally trustworthy in getting the truth. Intellectual attentiveness, carefulness, thoroughness, perseverance, and openness to new evidence would not be virtues unless people were generally epistemically reliable. That is because there is no point in being intellectually attentive, thorough, courageous, persevering, and open to evidence unless we can trust ourselves to be on the right track. The same point applies to intellectual trust in others. Open-​mindedness, intellectual humility, and intellectual tolerance would not be virtues unless basic intellectual trust in others was reliable. The intellectual virtues presuppose that humans by nature are generally reliable. The virtues enhance our natural dispositions when they need to be enhanced and restrain them when they need to be restrained, but it would not be admirable to enhance or restrain natural dispositions unless the dispositions were generally truth conducive. If I am right that we think that intellectual virtues are virtues not only because they are motives to get the truth but because they actually aid us in getting the truth, then there must be a success component in virtue, the second main component of virtue I have identified. There are debates about how strong the success component must be and whether success is a component of every virtue. There is evidence that many people think that a person does not act virtuously unless she is successful in reaching the end of the virtue on a particular occasion. For example, in a study by Pury, Kowalski, and Spearman,18 participants overwhelmingly described an act with a successful outcome when asked to describe a courageous act they did personally, and a study by Pury and Hensel19 replicated these findings in descriptions of courageous acts of other persons. In another study by Pury and Starkey,20 participants rated the degree of courage in a number of scenarios. Successful actions were rated as more courageous than actions that were identical except that they did not have a successful outcome. For instance, if two people rush into a burning building and one succeeds in saving a person’s life whereas the other does not, people rated the first individual as more courageous than the second. I do not believe that the participants were asked whether they 17 See Roberts and Wood, Intellectual Virtues, ­chapter 7, for an interesting discussion of the virtue they call intellectual firmness. 18 Pury, Kowalski, and Spearman, “Distinctions between General and Personal Courage.” 19 Pury and Hensel, “Are Courageous Actions Successful Actions?” 20 Pury and Starkey, “Is Courage an Accolade or a Process?”

Intellectual Virtues  101 admire the successful person more than the unsuccessful one, but it would not be surprising if calling the successful one more courageous also made the successful one more admirable in their eyes. I am not proposing that the agent must be successful on every occasion in which she attempts to reach her virtuous end; my proposal is only that the possession of a virtue requires reliable success in reaching the end of the motivational component of the virtue. So my success condition is weaker than what is assumed by the people participating in the studies I have mentioned. Still, my success component is contentious. It is natural to think that since we do not admire aspects of a person and her behavior that bypass her agency, why should we admire someone more for reliable success in reaching her end when her reliability is partly, perhaps largely, outside her control? In response, I want to point out first that to some extent the success component is not outside her control and is already included in the motivational component. Normally a virtuously motivated agent learns from her failures. If she is properly motivated to help suffering persons and has a reasonable degree of knowledge and understanding of the world, she will find out if her action does not succeed in reaching its end in particular cases, and she will amend her behavior in the future. The same point applies to failures of generosity, temperance, and fairness. But there may still be instances in which the agent is virtuously motivated—​characteristically has the appropriate emotion for the circumstances and aims at the end of that motive, but regularly fails to reach that end through no fault of her own. Is she virtuous? My view is that she is partly virtuous. The full virtue requires regular success. Of course, we would not blame the agent for failure beyond her control, but she fails to have the full virtue, and so she fails to have whatever degree of admirability having a full virtue entails. I think that this is one of the ways in which we can be victims of moral luck. However, even though I am still inclined to think that virtue has a component of reliable success in reaching the end of the virtuous motive, I think this matter could be settled by the test of what we admire on reflection.21 The component of reliable success in virtue means that a person who characteristically feels compassion when confronted with a suffering person but does not reliably act in a way that helps to alleviate the suffering does not have the virtue of compassion, although she is admirable for her motive. A person who

21 The Effective Altruism movement is a social movement that purports to use evidence to determine ways of effectively changing the world for the better. I think that it is obviously better to be effective than ineffective, and I am suggesting that a full virtue requires effectiveness. However, I also think that a virtue requires an admirable motive disposition. I have heard of criticisms of the movement on the grounds of excessive concentration on consequences over internal factors of an agent. I am not in a position to know how to evaluate these criticisms, but I think that it is interesting that the movement exists.

102  Intellectual Virtue is motivated to restrain her desire for pleasure but does not reliably succeed in doing so does not have the virtue of temperance. A person who desires to be open to the views of others but does not do so reliably, perhaps because she often finds people who disagree with her annoying, does not have the virtue of open-​ mindedness. A person who is motivated to be attentive, thorough, and careful in evaluating evidence but often fails to act in a way that is attentive, thorough, and careful lacks the virtues of intellectual attentiveness, thoroughness, and carefulness. As I have mentioned, the motives underlying virtues have immediate ends and more general ends. We aim to alleviate suffering because we care about the welfare of others and suffering diminishes their welfare. We aim to give goods to others for the same reason. Compassion, generosity, and kindness are virtues that are based in a concern for the welfare of others, and each of those virtues requires reliable success in aiding their welfare. Fairness and justice are based in respect for the value of each human being, and those virtues require reliable success in acting in a way that expresses that respect and leads to social conditions that express that respect. The intellectual virtues are based in caring for the value of truth, both for oneself and for others. We think that open-​mindedness, intellectual courage, intellectual attentiveness and carefulness, intellectual honesty, and others are virtues because we think that these traits are dispositions to act in our belief-​formation in a way that makes it likely we will get the truth. At least, we think that we are more likely to get the truth if we have these virtues than if we do not. My position, then, is that open-​mindedness reliably leads to success in reaching the truth, other things equal, through the cognitive behavior motivated by the emotion of openness to the views of others, and similarly for the other intellectual virtues. We admire people who are open-​minded, intellectually careful, thorough, humble, courageous, and fair, and we usually don’t ask if they succeed in getting the truth before admiring them, but we think that the point of having these intellectual virtues is to help us and our community find out the truth. That is why I said earlier that the intellectual virtues presuppose our general trustworthiness for the purpose of getting the truth. The conclusion from this section is that a virtue is an admirable trait, identified through the emotion of reflective admiration. The components of a virtue are identified by comparing our reactions of admiration or dis-​admiration to various features of human behavior. We admire internal motives rather than external causes of behavior. We admire some motives more than others. We admire reliable success in reaching the end of the motive more than failure. The virtues enhance or restrain natural human dispositions that lead us toward goods such as truth and human well-​being. My proposal, then, is that a virtue is a deep and enduring acquired excellence consisting of an admirable motive disposition and reliable success in reaching

Intellectual Virtues  103 the end of the motive because of the behavior to which the motive leads. An intellectual virtue is a deep and enduring acquired intellectual excellence consisting of an admirable intellectual motive disposition and reliable success in reaching the truth because of the behavior to which that motive leads. I have also argued that the virtues are admirable in a different way from natural talents and inborn dispositions. Unlike natural excellences, the virtues can be acquired through imitation. That makes them important for education and self-​improvement. It means we need virtuous exemplars of the intellectual as well as the moral virtues, and empirical research can reveal whether there are connections among the intellectual virtues and between intellectual and moral virtues. Is a person who is morally exemplary in certain ways likely to be intellectually exemplary in other identifiable ways? Is there a connection between the desire to give others the truth and a desire for the well-​being of others? Is there a connection between the motives that underlie such moral virtues as honesty and fairness and the desire to believe the truth? The assumption that moral and intellectual virtues are independent can be tested. I suspect it is false.

5.3  Intellectual Character Traits and Epistemology So far, I have argued that acquired intellectual excellences are importantly similar in their structure to acquired moral excellences and importantly different from natural intellectual excellences. Since the acquired excellences can be cultivated through emulation of people who possess them in a high degree, they are crucial for education. But which kind of intellectual excellence—​natural or acquired—​is more important for epistemology? Natural excellences like being smart and having a good memory and sharp senses clearly contribute to getting knowledge. That is the main reason we consider these qualities excellences. A person with any of these qualities will have more knowledge than one who does not, other things equal. Furthermore, we all trust our senses, our memory, our reasoning ability, and our background knowledge in forming our beliefs, and we have no choice but to do so. We assume that our senses, memory, and reasoning are generally reliable and that our background beliefs are generally true. Self-​trust in this sense is natural and unavoidable.22 But we also know from experience that we are not perfect. We have some false or misleading beliefs, inaccurate perceptions, and mistaken memories, and do not always gather and evaluate evidence in the most intelligent way. We may make fallacious inferences in reasoning, and may let our thinking be directed



22

I discuss the need for epistemic self-​trust in more detail in Epistemic Authority, ­chapter 2.

104  Intellectual Virtue more by what we want to believe than by a desire for the truth. Acquiring the intellectual virtues is our best chance for correcting the mistakes to which we are prone and enhancing our natural desire for truth. If we want to get the truth and to avoid falsehood, our best bet is to acquire intellectual virtue and to avoid intellectual vice. Even if we were not self-​reflective in our desire for truth, we would get many true beliefs anyway, but knowledge is better than true belief because it is the outcome of a conscientiously managed desire to get the truth and to avoid falsehood. This is the reason acquired intellectual excellences are more important for epistemology than natural ones. I have not argued that knowledge on any given occasion requires the possession of intellectual virtue. In Virtues of the Mind, I argued that knowledge is an act of intellectual virtue. By that, I meant an act that is virtuously motivated and succeeds in reaching the truth through the virtuously motivated behavior. But I also said that we can perform acts of virtue without having the deep and enduring trait that we call a virtue.23 A person can perform an act of kindness when she does not have the virtue of kindness. She can perform a just act when she does not have the virtue of justice, and she can perform acts of intellectual carefulness, attentiveness, and open-​mindedness when she does not have those traits. We all get credit for acts of virtue when we do not (yet) have the virtue, and we are admirable for those acts. My position is that knowledge is a state in which we get credit for getting the truth, and we get credit when our belief has arisen from a conscientiously governed desire for truth. Conscientious governance means that the belief must be acquired in a way that is proper for the circumstances. Thankfully, knowledge does not always require intellectual discipline. But to get knowledge, the believer must be as thorough and careful and attentive as is proper for the circumstances. We will be as attentive as we need to be in a situation in which a belief is based on a perception. We will be as thorough as necessary in acquiring relevant evidence and evaluating it with care. We will confirm our memory through another source if there is any doubt about its veracity. When the issue is contentious, we will be open to the views of others who disagree with us and will not be quick to attribute ignorance or intellectual vice to them. We will have the humility to admit we may be wrong and will be ready to change our minds when the weight of our inquiries goes against our beliefs. We will also have the courage to stick with what we know is true even when it goes against the views of the crowd. But the exercise of the intellectual virtues does not require special behavior in every circumstance. Sometimes the virtuous thing to do is what comes easily and naturally. We say the same thing about virtues like kindness and justice. Acting kindly and



23

Zagzebski, “The Admirable Life and the Desirable Life:” 248.

Intellectual Virtues  105 justly in many circumstances is doing what you feel like doing anyway. Similarly, believing virtuously in many circumstances is believing what you are inclined to believe anyway. Believing virtuously is believing conscientiously, but believing conscientiously has a feature that we find in conscientious acting. Our natural dispositions need to be directed by reflection, but reflection tells us that they often can be trusted without any special attention or intervention. Virtuous believing is conscientious believing; knowledge is getting the truth through conscientious believing. Knowledge is a state that is valuable enough to make it the object of sustained investigation by philosophers since at least the time of Plato. Since there are different ways in which something can be valuable, philosophers at different times in history have thought of knowledge in different ways. Is knowledge a gift or an achievement? The naturalistic approach to knowledge treats it as a gift of nature. We can know that the snow is falling, that we had a cup of coffee at the office, that a Facebook friend is celebrating a birthday because our natural faculties are attuned to an environment that gives us readily available knowledge. Some people’s faculties are better than others, and they have knowledge that is difficult to acquire, requiring special skill and training, but what makes a state knowledge does not require the agency of the knower. On this approach, knowledge is good because nature is good. In contrast, I have argued that virtues are traits of character with certain internal features that make them admirable. The virtues improve and correct nature. The intellectual virtues improve and correct the belief-​forming part of our nature. Knowledge is a state in which the agent gets credit for getting the truth because of her motives and the cognitive behavior that results. Knowledge on a particular occasion does not require the possession of an enduring intellectual virtue, but it requires believing in a way that results from the governance of our beliefs motivated by the desire for truth. The motives that lead to virtues also lead to knowledge. That makes knowledge more like an achievement than a natural gift. This approach has the advantage of explaining why knowledge has always been treated as a human good better than mere true belief, and it has the advantage of connecting knowledge with the self-​reflective aspect of believing traditionally associated with justification. If we think of intellectual virtues as acquired character traits, there is another advantage. These virtues include traits we want in members of epistemic communities. Sharing knowledge is an extremely important aspect of any community, and we want people who are intellectually generous, intellectually fair, intellectually tolerant, intellectually honest, and who are careful with the truth in their communications with others. Some epistemic goods are not divisible—​not exhaustively divided among individuals, but are goods that are possessed by the community itself. Epistemic justice and epistemic welfare are closely parallel to justice and welfare in the moral sense, and it is important that epistemologists

106  Intellectual Virtue investigate the social and structural conditions that produce these goods. A vocabulary of virtue with its long history of a connection to values like justice and welfare can help epistemologists investigate the conditions that produce and maintain epistemic communities that are just and thriving. I want to mention one final advantage of thinking of intellectual virtues as character traits similar in structure and in their mode of acquisition to moral virtues. Some virtues are both moral and intellectual. Wisdom is perhaps the most important one because it has a direct connection with knowledge as well as acquired moral traits. The wise person knows the value of things, not only as they appear in particular episodes of life taken independently, but in life as a whole. That makes it unsurprising that Aristotle thought that wisdom (phronesis) is both necessary and sufficient for the possession of the moral virtues, so an intellectual virtue has a preeminent role in the morally virtuous person. Even if we disagree with Aristotle’s strong claim, it is hard to deny that wisdom reveals the artificiality of dividing moral from intellectual virtues. In contrast, I think that it is not artificial to separate virtues from natural abilities and talents. Natural intellectual abilities are importantly different from acquired intellectual virtues. We can call natural belief-​forming abilities virtues if we want, but they are virtues in the same way physical strength and stamina are virtues. The acquired traits are the ones that improve our natural dispositions; they are the qualities that can be taught; they are the qualities that result in epistemic states that are important parts of a good human life.

References Algoe, S. B., and J. Haidt. “Witnessing Excellence in Action:  The ‘Other Praising’ Emotions of Elevation, Gratitude, and Admiration.” Journal of Positive Psychology 4 (2009): 105–​27. Angle, S. C. Sagehood. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, 2nd ed., trans. T. Irwin. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1999. Baehr, J. The Inquiring Mind: Intellectual Virtues and Virtue Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Beauvois, X. Of Gods and Men (film). Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Classics, 2010. Bilger, B. “The Strongest Man in the World.” The New Yorker, July 23, 2012. Chiger, K., and D. Paisner. The Girl in the Green Sweater: A Life in Holocaust’s Shadow. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008. Haidt, J. “Elevation and the Positive Psychology of Morality.” In Flourishing, Positive Psychology and the Life Well-​Lived, edited by C. L.  M. Keyes and J. Haidt: 275–​89. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2003. Holland, A. In Darkness (film). Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Classics, 2011.

Intellectual Virtues  107 Kiser, J. The Monks of Tibhurine: Faith, Love, and Terror in Algeria. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003. Marshall, R. In the Sewers of Lvov. New York: HarperCollins, 1990. Pury, C. L.  S., R. Kowalski, and M. J. Spearman. “Distinctions between General and Personal Courage.” Journal of Positive Psychology 2 (2007): 99–​114. Pury, C. L. S., and A. Hensel. “Are Courageous Actions Successful Actions?” Journal of Positive Psychology 5 (2010): 62–​73. Pury, C. L. S., and C. B. Starkey. “Is Courage an Accolade or a Process? A Fundamental Question for Courage.” In The Psychology of Courage: Modern Research on an Ancient Virtue, edited by S. J. Lopez and C. L. S. Pury, pp. 67–​87. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2010. Roberts, R., and W. J. Wood. Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007. Spink, K. The Miracle, the Message, the Story: Jean Vanier and L’Arche. Mahwah, NJ: Hidden Spring Press, 2006. Vanier, J. Becoming Human. New York: Paulist Press, 1998. Zagzebski, L. Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Zagzebski, L. “The Admirable Life and the Desirable Life.” In Values and Virtues, edited by T. Chappell, pp. 53–​66. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Zagzebski, L. On Epistemology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Press, 2009. Zagzebski, L. Epistemic Authority: A Theory of Trust, Authority, and Autonomy in Belief. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Zagzebski, L. Exemplarist Moral Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

6

Trust* 6.1  Introduction Trust in its practical form is an attitude opposed to suspicion. In its epistemic form it is an attitude opposed to doubt. In either form it is a stance of acceptance of vulnerability. It is natural to be trusting, but the reflective person will want to know whether trust is defensible. If trust is identical with the acceptance of a belief, the reasonableness of trust is just the reasonableness of accepting that belief. If trust includes an affective component, trust is reasonable only if affective states can be reasonable. I will argue that trust is a complex attitude with a component of belief, a component of feeling, and a behavioral component, and these components are present in standard cases of epistemic trust as well as trust in the practical domain. My position is that it is reasonable to have all of the components of basic epistemic self-​trust and trust in others. Epistemic trust has a crucial role in intellectual virtue since many of the intellectual virtues are either enhancements of epistemic trust or constraints on it. If a virtuous person must reliably succeed in reaching the end of the virtue, these traits would not be virtues in a person unless that person is trustworthy, and some virtues require that others are trustworthy as well.

6.2  The Components of Trust Trust is essential to social beings, and it is therefore important for many areas of human life as well as a number of different fields of philosophy. I will start with a schema for trust in its most abstract form. I think of trust as a three-​place relation.1 X trusts Y for purpose Z (or in respect Z). I trust Outlook to send my email message when I click “send.” I do not trust my unreliable rain gauge to accurately register the amount of rain that has fallen. I trust my neighbor not to damage our property while we are away. There are many politicians whom I do not trust to tell the truth when lying would serve their interests. As I think of trust, then, it can be properly directed toward inanimate objects and systems as long as they * The chapter is reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. 1 This view of trust as a three-​place relation appears in Baier, “Trust and Anti-​Trust,” and in Jones, “Trust as an Affective Attitude,” among others.

Epistemic Values. Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197529171.001.0001.

Trust  109 have the potential to harm me, and trust is only appropriate when the potential for harm is something I am aware of and accept. If I am browsing in an antique store and come across an old clock or radio, I might judge that it is unlikely to be reliable, but it would be odd to say I do not trust it to work since it does not have anything to do with me. As long as it remains in the shop, its unreliability does not make me vulnerable. In contrast, my email system, my rain gauge, my neighbors, and politicians can harm me, at least in the weak sense of making it harder for me to reach my ends. I propose that trust combines epistemic, affective, and behavioral components, each of which is a three-​place relation. When X trusts Y for purpose Z, (1) X believes that Y will get Z and that X may be harmed if Y does not do so. (2) X feels trusting toward Y for purpose Z, and (3) X treats Y as if it will get Z. I do not claim that all three components of trust are necessary in every instance, but I think that they are present in standard cases, and for the purposes of this chapter I am only interested in standard cases. Annette Baier defines trust as “acceptance of vulnerability to harm that others could inflict, but which we judge that they will not in fact inflict.”2 A weakness of this definition is that it applies only to trust in persons, although it can be easily amended to include nonpersons. It includes a component of belief, which seems to me to be right, and it includes a component of acceptance of vulnerability, which also seems to me to be right, but I think the affective component of trust goes farther than acceptance of vulnerability. Consider a case in which a person has the appropriate belief and the behavior appropriate for trust, but accepts her vulnerability with fear and trepidation. Suppose Sarah wants to go to a family wedding, but she is phobic about flying. She may believe that the plane will get her safely to her destination and acts as if it will do so, but she might still feel fear, have doubts, face indecision about getting on the plane, and regret her decision as the plane is taking off. All of this is compatible with believing that the plane will get her safely to her destination and acting as if it will. She accepts her vulnerability in the sense that she is willing to take her chances, but it seems to me she does not trust the plane to get her there safely if she is in the grip of fear and doubt. There is a big difference between Sarah and the person happily reading the newspaper in the seat next to her. Trust includes an emotional element, a feeling that I cannot identify any more precisely than simply “the feeling of trust.” In the case I am imagining, Sarah lacks that feeling, and I submit that for that reason she lacks trust. I also think that trust has a behavioral component, although that component might not be independent of the other two. If Sarah wants to take the flight to the



2

Baier, “Trust and Anti-​Trust:” 152.

110  Intellectual Virtue wedding, believes the plane will get her there safely, and feels trusting of it for that purpose, why wouldn’t she get on the plane? Barring special circumstances, failing to behave in a way appropriate to trust indicates that either she does not really have the relevant belief or she lacks the feeling of trust in that respect. If so, the lack of appropriate behavior is evidence, maybe even proof, of the lack of either the epistemic component or the affective component, and the presence of the appropriate behavior does not add an element of trust that is not already entailed by the other two components. So the behavioral component might be redundant. But since we generally associate trust with behaving in a trusting manner, I am including it in my account. Such an inclusion is acceptable insofar as I am not attempting a precise analysis of the state of trust. I have said that trust can be appropriately directed toward nonpersons, and I think it can be appropriately directed toward our epistemic faculties. I assume that the main purpose of our epistemic faculties is to get us the truth.3 If we do not get the truth, we are potentially harmed, and we are aware of that. Trusting our epistemic faculties, then, means that (a) we believe that our faculties will get us to the truth and that we can be harmed if they produce falsehoods, (b) we feel trusting toward our faculties for that purpose, and (c) we treat them as if they will get us to the truth. Trusting our faculties for the purpose of getting the truth does not mean believing that our faculties will succeed every time we use them, of course, but I think it includes believing that they will succeed often enough to make it worth our while to rely upon them and to think that in general we will not be harmed by them. I believe that it is natural to have all three components of trust in our epistemic faculties. We naturally desire truth, and we naturally believe that our faculties can satisfy that desire and rely upon them to do so. I also think that we naturally feel trusting of our faculties, although it is harder to know what we naturally feel. Our awareness of our vulnerability to false beliefs probably grows as we gain experience. Young children may not have all the elements of epistemic self-​trust because they are not aware of their vulnerability if they acquire false beliefs. But the child gradually develops that awareness with experiences of doubting what someone tells her, or doubting a memory, or noticing that she believed something that conflicts with a current observation. Experiences of this kind teach her to reflect, but she begins in a state like self-​trust, minus the awareness of vulnerability. Perhaps we should call the self-​trust of young children proto-​self-​trust.4 3 For those who dislike the term “truth,” the above assertion can be reformulated as the weaker claim that the main purpose of our epistemic faculties is to get us the answers to our questions. 4 Much of this section and section 6.3 are based on Chapter 2 of Zagzebski, Epistemic Authority. In that chapter I claim that there is a natural, prereflective self-​trust. I think now that the trust of young children is missing the aspect of awareness of vulnerability and acceptance of it, so it is not full-​ fledged trust. But as I say above, I continue to think that full-​fledged self-​trust precedes philosophical investigation.

Trust  111 In any case, it seems to me that we develop full epistemic self-​trust long before we have ever heard of philosophical arguments about skepticism. Self-​trust is the starting point of philosophical investigation. The faculties we rely upon in forming beliefs operate on an environment, so trusting our faculties includes trusting that the environment is appropriate to the faculties. It is natural to believe that our faculties are appropriate to the environment; we feel trusting of them in that way, and we treat them as if they are appropriate. Our faculties may operate on the environment directly, or they may operate indirectly through the faculties of others. As a result, the trust we have in our faculties and environment includes trust in the faculties of many other persons.5 Again, awareness of the ways that other persons can harm us epistemically and acceptance of it arises gradually with experience, but trust in others, like trust in the self, is the starting point for philosophical inquiry.

6.3  Reflective Epistemic Self-​Trust I have proposed that epistemic self-​trust and epistemic trust in others precedes philosophical investigation, but it is interesting to look at what happens to epistemic trust under the influence of philosophy. What I will do next is to argue that basic epistemic self-​trust can be shown to be inescapable upon reflection. Furthermore, it is rational if we make three assumptions I accept that (a) rationality is doing a better job of what we do naturally, (b) we do a better job of what we do naturally when we do self-​reflectively what we do naturally, and (c) when we are self-​reflective we attempt to resolve dissonance in the self. In section 6.4, I will argue that given the rationality of epistemic self-​trust, epistemic trust in others is rationally inescapable. The simplest way to see the rational need for epistemic self-​trust is to notice the phenomenon of epistemic circularity, or what Keith Lehrer has called “the loop of reason.”6 A number of philosophers have observed that there is no noncircular way to tell that the natural desire for truth is satisfiable, or as they typically put it, there is no noncircular way to tell that our belief-​forming faculties are reliable as a whole.

5 For the classic expression of this point, see Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense: 196–​97. 6 See Lehrer, Self-​Trust.

112  Intellectual Virtue Richard Foley links the phenomenon of epistemic circularity to the lack of answers to the radical skeptic and the failure of the project of foundationalism.7 We can do everything epistemically that we are supposed to do, including following the evidence scrupulously, but we have no assurances that the results will give us the truth or even make it more probable that we will get the truth. Foley concludes that we need self-​trust in our epistemic faculties taken as a whole, in conjunction with our prereflective opinions. Self-​trust is necessary, and further, he argues, it is rational in that it is a state to which we are led by the process of rational self-​criticism. One is rationally entitled to self-​trust and one is entitled to the degree of confidence one has in one’s opinions and faculties after critical reflection.8 Foley’s thesis that we are entitled to our confidence when it withstands self-​ criticism seems to me to be right. But notice that for Foley, self-​trust is a state to which we must move when we reflect upon the skeptical hypotheses and the failure of responses to them, particularly the failure of foundationalism. While Foley does not say that self-​trust would be unnecessary if there was an adequate answer to the skeptic, his argument explicitly arises out of his view of the skeptical threat. He implies that trust is a state to which we retreat when we do not have adequate justification, or a “guarantee” of the reliability of our faculties and opinions taken as a whole. William Alston offers a more detailed argument for a related conclusion about circularity in his final book, Beyond Justification.9 Alston argues that we cannot justify any belief arising from a basic practice of belief-​formation (e.g., perception, memory, introspection, rational intuition, induction, and others) without justifying the well-​groundedness of the practice, but we cannot do that without using that same practice. For instance, I cannot justify any of my perceptual beliefs without a justification of the reliability of my perceptual faculties, but I cannot justify my belief in the reliability of my perceptual faculties without using perception.10 This is a stronger claim than the one made by Foley. Alston argues that circularity arises in the attempt to establish the reliability of individual basic sources of belief such as perception, memory, and deductive reasoning, whereas Foley claims only that circularity arises in the attempt to establish the reliability of our epistemic faculties and beliefs taken as a whole. I will not take a stand on this issue since it does not affect the points I want to make in

7 Foley, Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others. 8 Foley, Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others: 25 and 47. 9 Alston, Beyond Justification; this modifies an argument in Alston, “Epistemic Circularity.” 10 Alston says that circularity can be avoided by keeping the targets very narrow (e.g., the reliability of perceptual beliefs about pies [Beyond Justification: 205]), but as long as the issue is the reliability of broad sources of belief, the attempt to establish the reliability of beliefs deriving from that source will inevitably take us back to the source from which we started (Beyond Justification: 209–​10).

Trust  113 this chapter. Either way, epistemic circularity is a real phenomenon, and the reflective person must respond to it. A second difference between Alston and Foley is that Alston does not think that the problem of epistemic circularity is necessarily tied to the threat of skepticism. He says that the specter of skepticism is a dramatic way to put the issue, “but it is not necessary for a calm, fully mature consideration of the problem.”11 As Alston sees it, the problem is that the ultimate circularity of the justification of our beliefs prevents us from being “fully reflectively justified” in our beliefs. We need not be especially worried about evil geniuses and brains in vats to notice circularity, and we need not think that the alternative to full reflective justification is skepticism. I think Alston is right about that. The reflective person desires full reflective justification for her beliefs because that is what a self-​reflective person wants. She feels dissonance within her psychic states if she is aware that she does not have it. Her realization that she cannot get full reflective justification need not be driven by fear of skepticism. Alston proposes that our response to epistemic circularity should be this: “Proceed to form beliefs and rely on them (take them to be credible, take them to be at least probably true), using various modes of belief-​formation that we find ourselves in possession of and the reliability of which we find ourselves strongly inclined to trust. All this without already having shown them to be reliable.”12 Alston then says that the better part of wisdom is to get over the desire for the impossible, and full reflective justification is impossible. We need self-​trust, and to try to avoid it is to try to get the impossible. Neither Alston nor Foley says much about the state of self-​trust and what it involves, so I cannot tell whether they think of self-​trust as a belief state or whether they think it includes affective or behavioral components as I  have suggested. But there is at least one respect in which I differ from them. Both of them think of epistemic self-​trust as the outcome of a sophisticated line of argument. According to Alston, we are forced into self-​trust by careful reflection on the human epistemic condition. If we could be fully reflectively justified in our beliefs, presumably we would not need to “take” our faculties to be reliable and our beliefs to be credible. We would not need self-​trust because we would have something in principle better, but impossible to achieve. Similarly, Foley implies that if strong foundationalism had succeeded, or if we had some other adequate answer to skepticism, trust in the self would not be needed. So for both of them trust is a fall-​back position, a state to which we retreat when we cannot get what

11 Alston, Beyond Justification: 216. He says, however, that he will pursue the discussion in the following pages in terms of the “more dramatically attractive” skeptical challenge. His response to epistemic circularity two pages later is therefore framed as a reply to the Pyrrhonian skeptic. 12 Alston, Beyond Justification: 218.

114  Intellectual Virtue we really want—​proof or a strong form of justification—​and for both of them we find we need it after philosophical reflection. It is an end state, not the state from which we start. I differ from them on these points. I have already said that it seems to me that self-​trust precedes philosophical reflection. Before we reflect about the ultimate justification of our beliefs or the skeptical hypotheses, we have trust in ourselves and our environment, including other people, at least to some extent. Foley and Alston think of trust as a fall-​back position because they think of it as something we have when we do not have something else that in principle would be better: proof. My position is that we do not start in a state that is neutral between trust and doubt. We start with trust. Prereflective trust is naive in that it does not include as full an awareness of our epistemic vulnerability as we get from philosophical reflection, but it does not take proof of our lack of proof of the trustworthiness of our faculties to realize our vulnerability as small minds in a big universe, with plenty of experiences of making mistakes in our perceptions, memories, and beliefs. The awareness of epistemic vulnerability and acceptance of it occurs long before we engage in high-​level reflection. The difference is that philosophical reflection shows us that we can never escape epistemic vulnerability. We need either to doubt our beliefs and lose trust in the faculties that produce those beliefs, or else to trust in a fully reflective way. It also seems to me that if, per impossibile, we were able to get noncircular proof of the reliability of our faculties or the truth of our beliefs, we would still need self-​trust and trust in others. Trust, as I see it, does not require the lack of proof. Rather, it is a state that does not depend upon proof. If Jim lacks proof of his wife’s fidelity, he may trust her, but once he gets proof of her fidelity, he does not cease to trust her. His attitude toward her remains the same whether or not he has proof. Perhaps he feels less vulnerable once he gets the proof on some occasion, but the vulnerability never goes away, and trust is still needed. Similarly, even if we got proof that our epistemic faculties are working perfectly on some occasion, we are still vulnerable as long as the match between our faculties and the world can ever change. Is it rational to have self-​trust after philosophical reflection? That depends, of course, on what we mean by rationality, and whether it applies to all three components of trust, including the behavioral and feeling components. As I have said, I think of rationality as doing a better job of what we do naturally in the use of any of our faculties. The moral of the phenomenon of epistemic circularity is that our ultimate tool of rationality is reflection upon our total set of psychic states. There is nothing more we can do than to reflect as carefully as we can in an attempt to make our states properly fit the world. I call the quality of doing that epistemic conscientiousness. Trust is necessary because the conscientious internal use of our faculties is ultimately our only means of telling that those

Trust  115 faculties put us in proper contact with external reality. Our epistemic faculties fit the world when they produce true beliefs. Our emotions fit the world when they are appropriately connected to their objects: we admire the admirable, fear the fearsome, pity the pitiable, etc. Our acts fit the world when we act rightly. As long as emotions can be appropriate or inappropriate, and acts can be right or wrong, I see no reason to exclude our emotion dispositions and overt behavior from the domain of the rational. The conscientious use of our faculties and the conscientious resolution of conflict between them is our ultimate test of whether our faculties are properly in tune with reality. Reflective self-​trust resolves the dissonance we experience when we discover epistemic circularity, and that seems to me to be rational. It is rational to believe that my faculties are trustworthy for the purpose of getting the truth; it is rational to treat my faculties as if they will get me to the truth, and it is rational to feel trusting of them in that respect. Of course, if someone thinks it is not rational to have a belief without noncircular justification, then self-​trust is not rational, but then none of our beliefs is rational. However, I see no reason to think that that is what rationality is. Would it be rational for a person to respond to the problem of epistemic circularity by not trusting her faculties? Since trust has more than one component, there is more than one way she might lack self-​trust. It is hard not to treat our faculties as trustworthy even after grasping circularity, but I know people who claim that they do not believe that their faculties are trustworthy even though they act as if they do. However, it seems to me that to treat something as deserving of trust without believing it is deserving of trust creates dissonance in the self that becomes noticeable once we reflect upon it. When I become aware that I treat myself as epistemically trustworthy, I feel pressure within myself to either believe that I am trustworthy or to stop treating myself as trustworthy. It is possible to accept the dissonance or not to notice it, so I do not insist that it is impossible to live a normal life without believing that our epistemic faculties are trustworthy.13 But the self-​reflective person at some point will become aware of the dissonance if she does not believe her faculties are trustworthy and will then have to decide whether to accept the natural belief that her natural desire for truth is satisfiable or else live with dissonance. The same point applies to the dissonance produced by lacking the feeling component of trust. Someone might judge that her faculties are trustworthy in 13 Alvin Plantinga says proper functioning demands that we trust the reliability of our faculties so as to prevent “cognitive disaster,” and he quotes Hume’s remark that if we find reason to doubt the reliability of our faculties and sink into philosophical melancholy, nature will, fortunately, “cure me of this delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation . . . which obliterates all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends” (Plantinga, “Reply to Beilby’s Cohorts:” 210).

116  Intellectual Virtue getting her to the truth and treat them that way, but she might continue to be plagued by doubts. She might feel this way because she obsesses over the skeptical hypotheses, but the more interesting case is one in which she is a person who just reflects excessively and never feels that the issue is settled even when she judges that it is. Karen Jones gives an amusing example of a woman who believes she has her passport in her purse, in fact knows that it is there, but checks obsessively in the taxi to the airport to make sure that she has it.14 The problem is not that she thinks an evil genius might have stolen it; there is no particular hypothesis that generates her doubts. She simply feels untrusting, even when she not only believes that the passport is in her purse but also believes she has done everything a reasonable person can do to believe truly. It seems to me that a person can obsess over the trustworthiness of her faculties in the same way. Even when she believes they are trustworthy and acts as if they are by living a normal life, she may not feel trusting of them. The feeling of doubt may continue to plague her, and she cannot dispel it because she lacks the feeling aspect of trust. Is she rational? I realize that many people think that rationality is not at issue when we are talking about feelings, but in the broad sense of rationality I am using, she is not rational because of the dissonance between her feelings and her beliefs. She is not doing a better job of what we do naturally. The same point applies to the woman with the flying phobia I mentioned earlier. It is rational to resolve dissonance between components of the self. Doing so is our only way to tell that our faculties are properly connecting us to reality. The woman who never feels trusting of her faculties and the woman with the flying phobia have not done so. Hopefully, in both cases the lack of rationality is short-​lived. But notice that if we agree that these women are not rational, that shows that it is rational to feel trust in those cases. There is, finally, the most radical response to epistemic circularity—​the radical skeptic who, upon reflection, neither believes her faculties are trustworthy, feels trusting of them, nor treats them as trustworthy. Perhaps the ancient Pyrrhonians were like that. Maybe they lacked all of the components of trust I have identified. If there are such people, they would not face dissonance between and among their beliefs, feelings, and behavior. I have my doubts that there are such persons, but let us suppose that there are. Are they rational? The radical skeptic I am imagining does not have the irrationality of dissonance, but she attains that by foregoing much of what we do naturally. I have suggested that rationality is, roughly, doing a better job of what we naturally do. The extreme skeptic I have described is not doing a better job of what we do naturally because she is not doing what we do naturally. However, I am not interested in critiquing skepticism in this



14

Jones, “The Politics of Intellectual Self-​Trust.”

Trust  117 chapter. Epistemic self-​trust is rational in the sense I have described, and it is more rational than alternatives in that it requires making the fewest adjustments in the prereflective self. Self-​reflection is what a self-​conscious being does, and a rational being does it carefully. However, it is possible to go on reflecting forever about whether Y is trustworthy in respect of Z. Trust ends the process of reflection, and it is rational because excessive reflection is not rational. Trust prevents excessive reflection, and in my view, it is an essential component of a rationally self-​reflective  being.

6.4  Epistemic Trust in Others As self-​reflective persons, we reasonably trust the beliefs we form when we are conscientious—​using our faculties in the best way we can to reach their ends. One of the beliefs we will inevitably acquire when we are conscientious is the belief that other normal, mature humans have the same natural desire for truth and the same general powers and capacities that we have. If I have a general trust in my faculties and I accept the principle that I should treat like cases alike, I am rationally committed to having a general trust in the faculties of others to the extent that I have reason to believe they are like me in the relevant respects. Of course, in some cases I may have reason to think that some individual has defective or undeveloped epistemic powers, and if so, my belief in the general trustworthiness of that person would be defeated. In such cases I have good (ultimately circular) reasons to think that I am more generally trustworthy than some other person, but if I am honest, I must admit that those reasons apply to a very limited range of cases. Insofar as I have a general trust in the connection between my natural faculties and desire for truth, on the one hand, and success in reaching truth, on the other, then I should trust the same connection in other persons. When I see no relevant difference between others and myself, then given that I trust myself, I should trust them. My reason for believing that other persons have the same natural faculties that I have is not a priori since I do not know a priori that there are other human beings who belong to the same natural kind as myself and who have the same general sensory faculties, memory, powers of reasoning, and desires. But the principle that I should treat like cases alike is a priori.15 I have said that epistemic trust in myself has three components: (a) I believe my faculties are generally trustworthy for the purpose of getting the truth, and realize that I am vulnerable to falsehoods, 15 Cf. Tyler Burge’s argument in “Content Preservation” that we have a priori entitlement to believe what others tell us.

118  Intellectual Virtue (b) I have a feeling of trust toward my faculties for the end of getting truth, and (c) I treat my faculties as trustworthy in that way. I am arguing now that under the assumption that I see no relevant difference between my general epistemic faculties and those of others, I ought to have the same attitude toward their faculties as I have toward my own. I should believe their faculties are generally trustworthy, feel trusting of their faculties, and treat them as trustworthy. The conscientious use of my faculties not only leads me to have general epistemic self-​trust, but it is also my ultimate means of distinguishing particular occasions when I am trustworthy from those occasions when I am not. When I am epistemically conscientious, I trust myself in particular when I am believing in a conscientious way. But when I am conscientiously reflective and because I am conscientious, I will discover that there are other persons who are as conscientious as I am when I am as conscientious as I can be. If I am consistent, I owe them the same particular trust in their faculties when they are conscientious as I owe myself when I am conscientious. That means that the fact that someone else conscientiously believes p gives me a prima facie reason to believe p. But unless the fact that someone believes p is already a prima facie reason to believe p, there is no reason to think that the fact that a person believes p conscientiously is a reason to believe p. That is because a person would not be trustworthy when she is using her faculties as well as she can unless those faculties were generally trustworthy. Insofar as self-​trust is trust in common human faculties and trust in their connection to a common human environment, trust in myself commits me to trust in others. I want to stress that the argument of this section is not about trust in testimony.16 It is about the reasonable response to conscientiously believing that other persons are relevantly like myself, that they have whatever property I have that I trust in myself, and that the outputs of their faculties are relevantly like the outputs of my faculties. It does not matter whether they tell me anything. I am only talking about how I should think of their faculties and epistemic capacities in comparison to my own. I owe their faculties the same general trust I have in my own faculties, and I owe their conscientiously used faculties the same particular trust I have in my own faculties when I use them conscientiously. Epistemic trust in others is a demand of consistency for those

16 I discuss the relationship between trust in others and reasonable belief on testimony in Epistemic Authority, ­chapter 6.

Trust  119 who respond to the problem of epistemic circularity in the most reasonable way—​by trusting themselves.17

6.5  Trust and the Intellectual Virtues Is epistemic trust a virtue? If a virtue is an acquired trait, prereflective trust is not a virtue; it is part of our natural human equipment. Even reflective trust is natural in the sense that the alternatives to self-​trust or trust in others require us to change something that comes naturally. We would have to give up the natural belief that human faculties can get us truth, or the natural feeling of trust in these faculties, or reliance upon our own faculties and those of others to serve our natural ends. But one function of reflection is to reveal our options to us. When doubt is an option, trust is an option. When suspicion of our faculties is an option, trust in them is an option. After reflection, we do have a measure of control over the option we take, even though nature is on the side of trust, and the degree of trust we have is up to us. In our practical lives we think that a person can be too trusting or too suspicious, and being properly trusting is virtuous. Similarly, if we can be too epistemically trusting or too epistemically suspicious, proper epistemic trust is a virtue. I think that many of the intellectual virtues either restrain or enhance epistemic trust. They prevent trust from becoming either excessive or deficient, and some virtues direct trust in a certain direction. Virtues like open-​mindedness and intellectual humility restrain self-​trust, but they presuppose self-​trust in order to restrain it. Neither trait would be a virtue were it not for the fact that we assume it is reasonable to trust our faculties. However, we think that we need caution to limit our enthusiasm over the self. Humility restrains our level of confidence in the match between our faculties and their objects. Open-​mindedness restrains self-​trust mostly by enhancing trust in others. There is an implicit assumption that our natural tendency is to trust others less than we ought, and ourselves more than we ought. Open-​mindedness requires us to think about a problem or issue from the perspective of other persons, but that would not be virtuous if a basic trust in others were not prima facie justified. That is, we think in advance of the evidence that the perspectives and opinions of others are reasonable and ought to be taken seriously in our reflections. Open-​mindedness is a disposition to be open to the views of others out of a certain belief in their general trustworthiness and feeling of trust in them. If that is right, open-​mindedness

17 An expanded discussion of the way that epistemic self-​trust commits us to trust in others and to a form of common consent arguments appears in Zagzebski, Epistemic Authority, ­chapter 3.

120  Intellectual Virtue is a refinement or enhancement of the attitude of trust in others, as well as a restraint on the attitude of trust in the self. The way I have described intellectual humility and open-​mindedness, they are attitudes that presuppose the attitude of self-​trust or trust in others. But is an attitude sufficient for virtue? Would a virtue that includes trust in others be virtuous if others were not trustworthy? This raises the issue of whether a person must reliably succeed at reaching the end of a virtue in order to be virtuous. If the end of the virtue of intellectual humility is to restrain self-​trust because the self is not as trustworthy as we are naturally inclined to suppose, then intellectual humility is a virtue only if we are not as trustworthy as we are naturally inclined to suppose. But intellectual humility also would not be a virtue unless we are generally trustworthy since it is not a virtue to restrain a natural tendency unless the natural tendency is generally on the right track. Similarly, if reliable success is a component of virtue, then open-​mindedness would not be a virtue unless the open-​ minded person’s belief that other persons are generally trustworthy is true. There would be nothing virtuous about being open to the views of others if others were not generally trustworthy. Some of the intellectual virtues follow immediately from being reflectively self-​trusting. Attentiveness, intellectual carefulness, and intellectual thoroughness are no doubt in this category. There would be no point in being careful, attentive, and thorough in evaluating evidence if it was not reasonable to trust the faculties we are using when being careful and attentive and thorough. But again, if a trait is not a virtue unless it reliably succeeds in reaching its end, these traits would not be virtues unless our faculties are generally trustworthy in this way. There are also virtues that enhance self-​trust, such as intellectual courage, perseverance, and firmness.18 Perseverance is the disposition to persist in a line of inquiry when one reasonably trusts that doing so will pay off with eventual success at reaching one’s intellectual end—​discovery of truth or deeper understanding of truths already believed. Courage adds the feature that some harm to one’s well-​being might ensue, and one must overcome fear or aversion to such harm. I interpret these virtues as not only presupposing self-​trust, but enhancing it when faced with obstacles. It is interesting that if virtue requires reliable success in reaching the end of the virtue, it must be the case that an intellectually courageous person is not only epistemically trustworthy, but that she is capable of recognizing her trustworthiness and justifiably believing that she is trustworthy enough in a particular case to make it worth undergoing sacrifice in the exercise of her epistemic faculties.



18

Robert C. Roberts and Jay Wood discuss the intellectual virtue of firmness in Intellectual Virtues.

Trust  121 I think also that there are intellectual virtues that have as their ends aiding a community in increasing its stock of knowledge or spreading knowledge throughout the community. I have claimed elsewhere that what we as a community know may not be identical with what any one person in the community knows.19 It is because the community is the bearer of knowledge that the bearer of knowledge can remain the same over many centuries, longer than the lifetime of any one person. Participants in the community need certain intellectual virtues to aid the community in getting knowledge, virtues that are not limited to the virtues of an individual in her search for knowledge. For instance, intellectual fairness is hard to explain if the end is knowledge or true belief for oneself. Fairness involves what I owe others insofar as we live in a community. Since there are epistemic communities, there are things we owe each other epistemically that are important features of the community if it functions well. What we believe is not the result of the intellectual inquiry of one person, but of groups of persons acting on behalf of the community. Intellectual fairness is a virtue that aids the intellectual cooperation necessary for community inquiry and community belief-​formation. Fairness is necessary because what we believe is not solely my personal business. Intellectual fairness requires other virtues, such as attention to the views of others. I  think of this trait as going beyond open-​mindedness. The latter is a virtue in aid of my personal epistemic ends, whereas attention to the views of others aids knowledge as a community achievement. The project of getting community knowledge requires much more extensive community participation than the project of getting knowledge for oneself. I believe that much of the edifice of knowledge for both individuals and communities rests on epistemic self-​trust and trust in others. In other work, I have argued that what we call reasons or evidence is derivative from self-​trust, including the trust in others that is a commitment of self-​trust.20 Norms of reasoning are rules that conscientious persons affirm upon reflection. Intellectual virtues are traits that conscientious persons endorse. Here I have argued that many intellectual virtues presuppose epistemic self-​trust or trust in others, and they operate to restrain or enhance epistemic trust in various ways. I have not mentioned virtues that do not presuppose trust. Perhaps intellectual originality or creativity does not. But even those virtues require self-​trust if their exercise leads to a project that lasts for a reasonable amount of time. That is because the creative and original person will not be motivated to exercise her creativity or originality without trust in her own powers. An instantaneous expression of 19 I make this claim in Epistemic Authority, ­chapter 7, where I address the issue of epistemic authority in communities. 20 Zagzebski, Epistemic Authority, ­chapters 2 and 3.

122  Intellectual Virtue creativity does not require self-​trust, but a research program or book project certainly does. Epistemic trust is a fascinating and important human disposition. I have defined it as an attitude—​a combination of belief and feeling, together with the behavior that typically expresses that attitude, although I have said that the behavioral component of trust may not be a distinct feature of it. I have argued that epistemic self-​trust is reasonable because it is natural and is found upon reflection to be inescapable. Trust in others is reasonable because it is a commitment of consistent self-​trust. Most of the traits we call intellectual virtues would not be virtues were it not for the reasonableness of epistemic trust, and many of them are ways of modifying self-​trust or trust in others—​either restraining or expanding it. If a virtue is not simply a dispositional attitude, but requires behavior that reliably leads to a certain end, then the traits we call intellectual virtues not only presuppose epistemic trust, but they also presuppose epistemic trustworthiness. Our epistemic lives rest upon both the attitude of epistemic trust and the trustworthiness of our epistemic faculties.21

References Alston, William P. “Epistemic Circularity.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 47 (1986): 1–​30. Alston, William P. Beyond Justification:  Dimensions of Epistemic Evaluation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. Baier, Annette. “Trust and Anti-​Trust.” In Moral Prejudices:  Essays on Ethics: 95–​129. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Burge, Tyler. “Content Preservation.” Philosophical Review 102, no. 4 (1993): 457–​88. Foley, Richard. Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Jones, Karen. “Trust as an Affective Attitude.” Ethics 107 (1996): 4–​25. Jones, Karen. “The Politics of Intellectual Self-​Trust.” Episteme:  A Journal of Social Epistemology 26, no. 2 (2012): 237–​51. Lehrer, Keith. Self-​Trust: A Study in Reason, Knowledge, and Autonomy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Plantinga, Alvin. “Reply to Beilby’s Cohorts.” In Naturalism Defeated? Essays on Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism, edited by J. K. Beilby Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002: 205–76. Reid, Thomas. An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, ed. D. R. Brookes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997 [1764].

21 Many of the arguments of this chapter appear in a form intended for students in Zagzebski, On Epistemology, ­chapter 4.

Trust  123 Roberts, Robert C., and W. Jay Wood. Intellectual Virtues:  An Essay in Regulative Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Zagzebski, Linda. On Epistemology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/​Cengage, 2009. Zagzebski, Linda. Epistemic Authority:  A Theory of Trust, Authority, and Autonomy in Belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

7

Intellectual Virtue Terms and the Division of Linguistic Labor* The work of Hilary Putnam and Saul Kripke on natural kind terms in the 1970s led to a revolution in semantics. For a long time before that, the dominant theory of meaning maintained that the meaning of a term is a description in the head. What a term refers to is whatever fits that description. Putnam argued in an important paper that meaning cannot be both a description in the head and such that it fixes the reference of a term. Since Putnam continued to accept the connection between meaning (intension) and reference (extension), he concluded that “Meanings ain’t in the head.”1 The key to the new semantics was the idea that many terms refer indexically. The primary focus of the theory was natural kind terms.2 Briefly, water is whatever is the same substance as that, gold is whatever is the same element as that, human is whatever is the same species as that, and so on. A second important feature of the theory was its assertion that it takes observation to find out what makes that substance (element, species) what it is, so empirical observation was woven into the semantics of natural kind terms. A third interesting feature in Putnam’s version was his proposal that natural kind terms function semantically through a network that links users to the extension of the term in a way that privileges certain users. He called this the division of linguistic labor. Speakers do not all have the same function in the linguistic network. Ordinary speakers defer to experts to both identify the objects in the extension and find out what the deep structure of a given kind is. In this way, ordinary speakers are dependent on others in the network for their semantic success. Putnam concluded that what we mean is determined by something outside of us in two ways. First, it is partly determined by the world, because the indexical * The chapter is reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. 1 Putnam said that he thought a meaning was an ordered pair, in which one of the members is the extension of the term and the other a “meaning vector” with a social component in “The Meaning of ‘Meaning,’” Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 7 (1975): 131–​93. In a similar but shorter paper, he says that meanings “ain’t in the head.” “Meaning and Reference,” Journal of Philosophy 70, no. 19, (Nov. 8, 1973): 704. 2 Putnam said in passing that he thought most terms refer indexically, including artifact terms, verbs like “jumps,” and adjectives like “blue.”

Epistemic Values. Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197529171.001.0001.

Intellectual Virtue Terms  125 feature of meaning has the consequence that a difference in extension is sufficient for a difference in what we mean in the use of a term. Second, what we mean is partly determined by a social linguistic network that links us to the extension of the term. A description in the head is not necessary to fix the extension and is far from sufficient. In short, what we mean is not up to us. I have been developing a moral theory I  call exemplarist virtue theory, in which a “good person” functions semantically in the same way natural kind terms function in the theories of Putnam and Kripke. I propose, first, that “good person” refers indexically. A good person is a person like that, where we pick out good persons directly through the experience of reflective admiration. Second, we discover what makes good persons good in a way that is roughly parallel to the way we find out what makes water water and what makes gold gold. We observe them and test what we observe by our responses of admiration or dis-​ admiration. Observation of natural kinds is empirical; observation of admirable persons may include controlled empirical studies, but it more commonly comes in the form of narratives. I think that what we discover when we read or watch narratives of paradigmatically good persons is that we admire certain patterns of emotions, perceptions, ends, and behaviors. We call these virtues. So what “virtue” means is not a description in the head but is what makes persons like that admirable. What makes persons like that admirable is discovered by observation and reflection upon our responses of admiration to what we observe. I conjecture that it will turn out that this approach to virtue excludes natural talents from the category of virtues, but it includes a wide range of traits acquired through human agency, including intellectual virtues. So it excludes natural musical ability, physical strength, good memory, and native intelligence, but it includes open-​mindedness, courage, intellectual courage, perseverance, intellectual perseverance, humility, and intellectual humility. I say this under the hypothesis that we do not admire natural talents in the same way we admire the moral traits, but we admire open-​mindedness, intellectual courage, and intellectual humility in the same way we admire the moral traits. I propose, then, that the most important division in the set of admirable qualities is not the division between moral and intellectual virtues, but the division between acquired traits like the moral and intellectual virtues mentioned above and natural talents that do not involve agency. We discover that by reflecting upon what we admire and how we admire it. This proposal can be empirically tested. If I am wrong about what we reflectively admire, then I am wrong about the set of virtues, but I maintain that a virtue is what we reflectively admire in persons who are picked out directly through the experience of reflective admiration. The third feature of direct reference theory I mentioned is Putnam’s division of linguistic labor. I think that this also is a feature of moral terms, like “good person” and “virtue,” and of terms for particular virtues, like “courage” and

126  Intellectual Virtue “open-​mindedness.” Putnam says that natural kind terms are externalist in two ways, and I think that “good person” and virtue terms are externalist in the same two ways. They are externalist because what “good person” refers to is partly determined by the way the world is—​by the features of good persons awaiting our discovery. It is also externalist because there is a division of moral linguistic labor. We all succeed in referring to good persons, virtue, and particular virtues because we are connected to the extension of these terms through a linguistic network in which different persons have different roles. Externalism in moral semantics therefore leads to externalism in moral philosophy of mind. What we mean by “good person,” “virtue,” “generosity,” “open-​mindedness,” and “fairness” is not up to us. In what follows, I focus on the division of moral linguistic labor and then discuss the way it applies to names of intellectual virtues. I think that this way of looking at the semantics of these terms illuminates the use of virtue theory for the practical purposes of moral education and civic discourse, and it explains some of the particular challenges that arise in the use of the intellectual virtue terms.

7.1  The Division of Linguistic Labor Putnam’s principle of the division of linguistic labor gives certain individuals the role of expert in identifying the objects in the extension of the term. We can identify diamonds and tigers and elm trees as a collective body because some of us can do so, and the rest of us rely upon the experts for success in referring to the objects in the extension. Individual users also have a role to play in using a term correctly, according to Putnam. In order to know what “elm tree” or “diamond” means, it is not enough to speak English and be willing to defer to experts in identifying diamonds and elm trees. There is a linguistic obligation to have a certain minimal competence in the use of a term in order to count as knowing what the term means; and roughly, that means we need to grasp what Putnam calls the “stereotype,” a description that aids the user in connecting to the linguistic network and effectively communicating with others. A stereotype is not a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of a term; the idea is not a return to the descriptive theory of meaning. But Putnam thinks the stereotype is usually roughly correct, even though it is usually vague. So we need to know something about stereotypical tigers in order to count as having acquired the word “tiger,” we need to know something about stereotypical elm trees in order to count as having acquired the world “elm tree,” and so on.3 Interestingly,



3

Putnam, “Meaning of ‘Meaning:’ ” 168.

Intellectual Virtue Terms  127 Putnam conjectures that it is linguistically obligatory to be able to tell tigers from leopards in order to know what “tiger” means, but it is not required that one be able to distinguish elm trees from beech trees in order to know what “elm tree” means.4 As far as I  know, Putnam does not explain why the stereotype of a tiger distinguishes it from a leopard, whereas the stereotype of an elm tree does not distinguish it from a beech tree. My view is that since a linguistic network links individual users with the extension of a term through other speakers, that means that pictures and descriptions produced by other speakers are part of the network. If these pictures and descriptions are common enough, some of them become part of the stereotype that every competent user of the term is expected to grasp. A competent speaker should have seen many pictures of tigers or heard them described. That would explain why ordinary speakers who know what “tiger” means must know that tigers have stripes. If they do not know that, they are not properly connected to the network with respect to that word. But pictures of elm trees do not function the same way as pictures of tigers, at least not in the part of the world I live in. We teach children “a tiger looks like that,” but even those of us who can say “an elm tree looks like that” do not expect others to remember what is distinctive about that species of tree, and the stereotype of an elm tree includes no details about the leaf shape or the appearance of the bark. I could be wrong about that, of course, in which case maybe neither Putnam nor I has properly acquired the use of the word “elm tree.” But even if “elm tree” is more like “tiger” after all, there are still words like “magnesium,” “oryx,” and “dendrobium,” which are such that only a minority of the language users can give any descriptive details about the designated kind or reliably identify its members. I think, then, that Putnam is right that an ordinary speaker can succeed in referring to the members of a kind with only the vaguest idea of what the kind is like, and I think he is also right that a competent speaker must be properly connected to a linguistic network that privileges certain users, but I believe that the privileged users need not be experts in the sense of having a commonly recognized authority, and I will say more about that later. I also think that there is more in the network than speakers who adequately grasp a stereotype and who are causally connected to the objects in the extension of a term through the privileged speakers. Since speakers are aware that they all have the same referential intentions, they are causally connected both to the referent of the term and to each other. The stereotype is a compilation of what many other speakers say 4 Since Putnam says it is preferable to speak of acquiring words rather than knowing what they mean (“Meaning of ‘Meaning:’ ” 167), we can make the same point as follows: it is not necessary to be able to distinguish elm trees from beech trees in order to have acquired the term “elm tree,” but it is necessary to be able to distinguish tigers from leopards in order to have acquired the word “tiger” (169).

128  Intellectual Virtue about the kind, and I have suggested that it can include pictures. The reason a speaker must grasp the stereotype is that the speaker is not properly connected to other speakers without being aware of what is widely said or shown by speakers in the network about the kind in question. When most other speakers have very little to say about the kind, an individual speaker can acquire the word for the kind without knowing much at all about it. In other cases, speakers say quite a lot, and an individual speaker has not properly acquired the word for the kind without knowing what is commonly said. That would explain why individual speakers should be able to distinguish tigers from leopards, but not elm trees from beech trees. The causal connection to other speakers allows an individual user of a term to enhance her grasp of the kind under their influence. If a speaker has only a minimal grasp of the stereotype, but she is properly connected to the linguistic network, she will be willing to adopt the richer descriptions of others in the network, and she will be willing to defer to others who are better than she is at identifying the objects to which the term refers. When appropriate, she will recognize experts who make the final determination of the extension of a term, but for the most part, she will defer to anybody who knows more than she does about the kind in question. (Few speakers are connected to experts directly or pay much attention to experts.) I think there can be practical reasons for stereotypes of different kinds having different levels of precision. Ordinary speakers need to be able to distinguish water from other clear liquids, but they do not need to have the same level of competence in identifying nonpoisonous plant species. So we all need to be able to grasp a stereotype of water that allows us to reliably identify water, to distinguish it from harmful substances, but it does not matter if each of us can reliably identify the different species of orchids and distinguish them one from another. Since there are important practical reasons for every speaker to be able to identify water, the network includes numerous pictures and information about water, which contribute to both a richer stereotype and a better grasp of the stereotype by individual members of the network. Anybody who does not grasp a reasonable part of that information is not properly connected to the network of speakers and does not know what “water” means. The function of experts in the network is to determine what it takes to be “really” water and to make distinctions such as identifying the different isotopes of water, but ordinary speakers cannot simply hand over the job of identifying the water in our ordinary environment to the experts. A term like “tiger” also has a reasonably robust stereotype, but the reason is probably cultural. We enjoy stories and pictures of tigers, even though few of us will ever encounter a tiger outside of a zoo. But if we are properly connected to our linguistic network, we know that tigers are striped.

Intellectual Virtue Terms  129 Putnam says that although the stereotype, typically, is roughly correct, it is not a necessary truth that the stereotype accurately describe the members of the extension of a term. Since the stereotype can change, this must be correct. Putnam thinks that it is part of the stereotype of gold that it is yellow in color (I think he means golden), but if jewelry made of white gold, pink gold, and green gold became more common in the experience of the users in a linguistic community, the stereotype could change without a change in referential intentions and without any change in the meaning of “gold.” It is not a necessary truth that gold is golden, and the stereotype can change because of a cultural accident, without any change in what the experts believe. We also like to think that as the experts find out more about the kinds they investigate and spread their knowledge throughout the community, the stereotype of those kinds becomes more accurate. That assumes, of course, that the experts are good at their job and that communication through the network works well. Individual speakers do a better job of identifying the members of the kind partly because the experts are doing a better job, but it is partly due to the proper function of the network that allows the stereotype to become more accurate. I think that the division of linguistic labor applies to many other terms besides natural kind terms. Artifact terms like “kilim rug,” “mass spectrometer,” and “fuel-​injection system” are all terms whose users refer through other speakers, some of whom are experts, although these terms do not all require the same level of expertise to identify the objects in the extension. For instance, rug buyers can learn what a kilim rug is without extensive training, but even before they acquired that ability, they could refer to kilim rugs for the same reason they could refer to dendrobiums before they took up a career in botany. Other terms refer in such a way that although some persons are experts in them, expertise is not necessary for identifying members of the extension. “Automobile” might be such a term. There are also cases in which the privileged users are not experts in the sense that a scientific expert or an expert in automobile mechanics would be. Some users might be privileged because they were among the early users of a term, but it is a stretch to call them “experts” because they do not have specialized training. This happens a lot with slang terms like “tacky” or “nerd,” which at some point become part of wider usage. So twenty years ago, if you wanted to know whether somebody was a nerd, you would ask a teen. You knew who the privileged users were. My claim, then, is that in each case of a linguistic network, (a) speakers refer to the extension through other speakers; (b) some speakers are recognized as having greater competence than others in the use of the term and have a specialized role in the network; and (c) every speaker is expected to grasp a stereotype, which varies from term to term in its level of richness and precision, and may be contained in stories or pictures as well as in verbal descriptions.

130  Intellectual Virtue

7.2.  The Division of Moral Linguistic Labor I propose that there is a division of linguistic labor for moral terms such as “good person” and terms for individual virtues. We refer to good persons through a network that connects us to admirable persons through other users, some of whom have a privileged function. Each user of the term “good person” needs to be able to grasp the stereotype of a good person. Virtue terms function as descriptors that are part of the stereotype of a good person, and they are important for communication among the members of a community, but they do not provide necessary and sufficient conditions for membership in the kind. An ordinary speaker should be aware that good persons have certain traits like generosity, honesty, and courage, but it is not necessary that she can give an account of these traits or of a virtue in general in order to acquire the use of a virtue term. Virtue terms also refer indexically. They are the traits we admire in persons like that. The stereotype of a virtue term is not just a set of adjectives; it is also likely to be expressed in narratives and pictures of virtuous actions. These stories and pictures serve a linguistic function in connecting the users of moral terms to a causal network linking them to the extension of the term. The stereotype associated with a virtue term or the term “good person” includes narratives about the virtues, so the stereotype is fairly robust—​more like “water” than “cadmium.” No one has properly acquired the use of a virtue term or the term “good person” without the ability to refer to descriptions and narratives. The function of narratives in the stereotype means that an ordinary user of the term “good person” needs to be able to identify some good persons in order to count as having acquired the term “good person,” but there is no linguistic expectation that a member of the network can recognize all good persons. In contrast, I believe that there is a social obligation to know the members of the extension of the deontic terms “wrong act” and “duty,” and the linguistic community is much more demanding of competent users of these terms than of the virtue terms. A speaker who fails to recognize many wrong acts is deemed linguistically incompetent in the use of the word “wrong” and may be called a sociopath. “Wrong” and “duty” connect individuals to act categories that are learned in a variety of ways. Stories can be useful in giving the extension of “wrong,” but wrong acts can usually be adequately identified in a list of prohibitions. In contrast, a story is more useful in explaining what loyalty and disloyalty are. If so, the virtue terms are part of a different type of linguistic network than the deontic terms. In this chapter, I am focusing on the virtue terms, not the deontic terms. The function of privileged users in the division of linguistic labor is different for moral terms than for scientific terms. We expect ordinary users of “diamond” or “gold” to be able to describe a stereotypical diamond or piece of gold and perhaps pick out some examples, but we defer to the experts to tell us what is really

Intellectual Virtue Terms  131 gold or a diamond, and the experts are even more important for kinds that we do not regularly encounter in ordinary life, like cadmium or oryxes. In contrast, most of us probably think we are pretty good at identifying exemplars, probably as good as we are at identifying water, but as is the case with water, it would be a serious mistake to think that our community is irrelevant to our ability to identify exemplars and to teach us the stereotype of a good person. The extension of “good person” is not determined privately or determined by democratic vote. Some members of the social linguistic network are linguistically privileged. I mentioned above that for some terms, like “automobile,” there are specialized functions in the network that do not involve special privilege in identifying the members of the extension. An auto mechanic, for example, has a special role in explaining the proper functioning of an automobile, but almost anybody can identify an automobile. I think we see a variety of special roles in the network for virtue terms. There are psychologists who have the role of finding out how widespread the extension of a virtue term is, how changeable the extension is (e.g., whether virtuous persons tend to remain virtuous), and whether there are any connections between the extension of one virtue term and another. I surmise that philosophers also have a specialized function that includes making the functioning of the network clearer and pointing out inconsistencies in the stereotype, in addition to contributing their powers of abstract reasoning about virtue to the community. The people who deserve to be linguistically privileged are the persons who are good at distinguishing true exemplars from the counterfeits and at spotting counterfeit virtues. Unfortunately, the people who have great influence in determining both the stereotype and the extension of moral terms often have that influence because of their political power or media presence rather than because of their wisdom. Miranda Fricker has made an important contribution to social epistemology in her work on ways in which the use of language can be unjust. Her general point can be extended to a problem in the division of moral linguistic labor.5 There are people who have a great deal of influence over the stereotype of a good person and the individual virtues, and their judgments affect the use of terms by the people in their community. If the opinion-​makers do not have good judgment, the result can be confusion about the meaning of these terms. Imagine what it would be like to live in a community in which the “experts” at identifying certain natural kinds start to misidentify the members of the kind, then put out an inaccurate stereotype to the public. Assume that the experts and ordinary users have the right semantic intentions but they start to lose their causal connection to the extension of the term. The result would be semantic 5 Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice:  Power and the Ethics of Knowing (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2009).

132  Intellectual Virtue confusion. I think that this has happened in the use of moral terms when the opinion-​makers have misidentified the persons, traits, or acts to which we refer in our moral vocabulary, thereby leading those they influence to misidentify the members of the extension of these terms, and thereby further leading to a change in the stereotype that is less accurate than it was previously. I am not sure what is included in the current stereotype of a good person in the United States, but it seems to me that it includes more elements of bravado, incivility, and lack of self-​ control than in the past, and it lacks elements of intellectual humility and open-​ mindedness. If so, it seems to me that the stereotype has become less accurate. A virtue term can fall out of use when people no longer admire a person who fits the stereotype, and that is more likely to happen when the stereotype changes. I think this happened with the word “chastity.” In Christian moral theology, chastity is the virtue that governs sexual desire and behavior. In that sense, it is a virtue everyone needs. But many people identify chastity with sexual abstinence. Obviously, people are not going to think of sexual abstinence as a generally admirable virtue, and if the stereotype of chastity is a person who does not engage in sexual acts, it is no wonder the word has gone out of common usage. There is another reason a virtue term can go out of use. When Simon Blackburn writes that he has no use for the word “chastity,” it appears that it is not because he is using a new stereotype of a chaste person, but because he does not admire the chaste person as described in the original stereotype.6 That suggests something very interesting about virtue and vice terms. Even when there is no change in the descriptive part of a stereotype, if the emotional reaction to that stereotype changes, the word no longer has any meaning. Admiration for virtue and contempt for vice is imbedded in the referential intentions of words for virtues and vices. Members of a linguistic network understand that. If a member of the network does not admire people described in the stereotype of a virtue term, that person will cease using the term, except perhaps in an ironic way. If most members of the network cease to admire people who fit the stereotype, the word goes out of use. I think that loss of words for many of the virtues like gratitude and civility is partly driven by a theoretical stance that these traits are not admirable, but the decline of usage can also be partly driven by general inattentiveness that makes the stereotype thinner and vaguer than it was before.7 Eventually, people become

6 Blackburn focuses on vice terms rather than on “chastity” in Simon Blackburn, Lust: The Seven Deadly Sins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). See also the exchange between Allan Gibbard and Simon Blackburn, “Morality and Thick Concepts,” Aristotelian Society Supp. Vol. 66, no. 1 (July 1992): 267–​99, on the example of “lewd” in their discussion of whether there are thick concepts. 7 However, there is currently a large project, “Expanding the Science and Practice of Gratitude,” at the University of California, Berkeley, with funding from the John Templeton Foundation.

Intellectual Virtue Terms  133 unable to grasp the stereotype at all, and this can lead to a situation in which there is no longer any stereotype to grasp. That can happen even when the majority of people in a community would, upon reflection, judge that a trait like gratitude or civility, as formerly described, are good traits. And once the word disappears, it is very difficult to make a conscious improvement in the behavior the word describes without reintroducing the word. Sometimes we cannot improve the stereotype of a good person without adding a word to our vocabulary that did not previously exist. As Miranda Fricker points out, there are wrong acts that are not noticed until someone invents a word for it—​e.g., “sexual harassment.” Sexual harassment was virtually invisible when there was no word for it in the common vocabulary, and the stereotype of a good person did not include anything that expressed the full range of the value of respect for women. The stereotype changed for the better when words like “sexist” and “sexual harassment” became commonplace, and it is very difficult to see how that change could have happened without the change in vocabulary. Words are not added to the common vocabulary until they become used by people with the greatest linguistic influence. If I  am right that moral critique sometimes requires critique of a linguistic network, that would include critique of the claims of people who are most influential in the network. Fortunately, we are in a better position to critique opinion-​makers than we are scientific experts, as long as we become reflective about our emotions of admiration and its opposite, contempt. It can be hard for a nonexpert to know if someone is a climate expert or an expert economist, but we have ways to identify those whose moral judgment is most trustworthy. We can do that through reflection on our moral emotions, particularly the emotion of admiration. These emotions can be used to critique moral discourse. When we do so, we may need to invent a new term like “sexual harassment” or reintroduce an old one like “civility.” We can also change a stereotype for the better without changing a word. For instance, we may want to eliminate the inclusion of vengeance in the stereotype of justice without eliminating the words “justice” or “vengeance.”8 These changes can be effected by extended reflection on what we admire as a community. A moral linguistic network can therefore change by internal critique, not just by the accident of political power and cultural influence. Another way in which a linguistic community can change is by expanding under the influence of an encounter with other moral linguistic communities. A linguistic community expands as the causal connections between communities expand. To see the simplest case, let us go back to natural kinds and consider 8 My student, Seth Robertson, has a very interesting unpublished paper on exemplars and admirable vengeance, suggesting that we may rightly admire vengeful persons under certain conditions. If so, it may be premature to propose eliminating vengeance from the stereotype of a just person.

134  Intellectual Virtue two independent communities that both have words for the same kind. Call it K1. We can imagine that we know the words are inter-​translatable because the extensions of the terms coincide and the stereotypes are similar. Each community has its own linguistic network and its own experts. But suppose that community A is more scientifically advanced than community B, and community B realizes that. Community B might then come to acknowledge the experts in community A as their own experts. In order to do that, they would need to recognize that the experts in community A have the same intentions as the experts in community B: to find out the deep structure of K1 and to distinguish K1 from distinct kinds. But even if they are unwilling to go that far, they might still acknowledge that the experts of community A are more expert than the ordinary speakers of community B.  In either case, linguistic community B expands, at least with respect to one word. In the case of moral communities, we get blended linguistic communities when one community’s stories and literature about exemplars become available to another. Westerners who read the Analects are automatically causally connected to the Chinese readers (and writers) of the Analects. Obviously, the connection is weak, but it exists. The same thing happens when Western readers read Viking tales or the Bhagavad Gita, and it is bound to happen if they spend any amount of time in a foreign country. The changes can be profound when especially admirable and influential persons change something in the stereotype they use for “good person” or a virtue term. The acceptance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is an especially vivid example of the expansion of a moral linguistic community, especially when we look at the signatories that did not already have a word for “rights” in their linguistic community. One possibility is that they added a word translated “rights” to their vocabulary, in which case their linguistic community expanded to include the linguistic community of people using the term “rights.”9 It is more likely that they signed the document not because they were willing to add a term to their vocabulary, but because they decided that what the drafters of the declaration meant by “rights” was close enough to terms already in use in their vocabulary that they could accept the declaration. But even in that case, it seems to me that the act of signing the declaration put them into a causal network with the drafters of the declaration and its other signatories, thereby expanding the linguistic community they were a part of and inevitably changing their use of moral terms.

9 For a fascinating story about the writing and adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the pivotal role of Eleanor Roosevelt, see Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001).

Intellectual Virtue Terms  135 I think that the expansion of causal linguistic networks is not only the best way to alter the usage of moral terms; it is also the best way to get moral agreement. In fact, I think that such expansion is a necessary condition for agreement. There are examples of that in contemporary cross-cultural moral discourse. I have been told that one translation of “sexual harassment” in Arabic (‫)اﻟﺘﺤﺮش اﻟﺠﻨﺴﻲ‬ would probably be unintelligible to most Arabic-​speaking people, other than intellectuals familiar with contemporary Western thinking.10 This is a case in which Arabic speakers who are knowledgeable about Western views of sexual respect have a weaker connection with ordinary Arabic speakers in some part of their vocabulary than they have with most speakers of European languages. The Arabic speakers who have adopted terms for Western values are connected to a different linguistic network than ordinary speakers of Arabic. If that is right, it is hopeless to change the views of ordinary Arabic speakers about sexual harassment without a network of Arabic speakers t hat closely connects ordinary speakers with those who speak Arabic but who also use words for sexual harassment.11 I think this shows the importance of dialogue among morally admired people in different communities. That kind of dialogue is an important impetus for linguistic expansion, because people have effects on each other, and that, in turn, has an effect on their respective linguistic networks. This makes it all the more important that we solve the problem that admirable people are often not the most influential. I think that when the wisest people are sidelined in public discussion and nonadmirable people take center stage, it is difficult for us to even formulate the thought that certain good things are good and certain bad things are bad.

7.3  Intellectual Virtue Terms I have said that I believe intellectual virtue terms operate the same way as moral virtue terms. Roughly, I  think that any kind of virtue is a trait we admire in people like that, where “that” refers directly to those individuals we admire as people. We identify what we admire in them by observing them and testing our reactions. I hypothesized that we do not admire natural talents the same way we admire acquired traits that engage a person’s agency, and that the latter group

10 This is the view of my friend, Norman Stillman, a specialist in Arab-​Jewish encounters in Arab lands. 11 Stillman says that he often tells students that when reading some social or political thinker whose Arabic is hard to understand, they should try to go back to the European writer and language that that person must have been reading. In North Africa, most feminists and social scientists write in French, not Arabic, for that reason. There are many ideas that they cannot adequately express in Arabic.

136  Intellectual Virtue includes intellectual virtues such as open-​mindedness, intellectual courage, intellectual perseverance, intellectual generosity, and intellectual humility, as well as the standard moral virtues. These are the traits that are central in civic life. I want to conclude by applying the points I have made about the division of moral linguistic labor to terms for intellectual virtues. Like moral virtue terms and the term “good person,” I propose that intellectual virtue terms refer indexically, and not through a description. Open-​mindedness is one of the features we admire in admirable people like that. It is that disposition of motivation and behavior. There is a shared set of referential intentions in the use of intellectual virtue terms that connects users of those terms to the extension of the term through a linguistic network. When we investigate the intellectual behaviors we admire in narratives or personal experience, we can identify the deeper admirable features of the people we admire for their intellectual behavior. Cognitive psychologists and philosophers have a role to play in the network for these tasks. What the specific psychological features of an intellectual virtue consist in—​emotion dispositions, behavioral dispositions, etc.—​is a matter for investigation, both through the kind of moral psychology done by philosophers and the kind of controlled psychological studies conducted by psychologists and neuroscientists. Competent users of intellectual virtue terms must grasp the stereotype of the intellectual virtue in order to be competent users of the term. The stereotype can be expressed in narratives, and it includes descriptions, but these descriptions are not necessary and sufficient conditions for the accurate application of an intellectual virtue term. Stereotypes differ from one another in their levels of richness and precision, and it seems to me that the stereotype associated with most intellectual virtue terms is vague. Intellectual virtue terms that have the same names as moral virtues—​such as intellectual courage, intellectual humility, intellectual honesty, and intellectual generosity—​probably borrow most of their stereotype from the stereotype of the parallel moral virtue, with the proviso that it is in the domain of intellectual inquiry or belief. But I believe that the lack of narratives about intellectual virtues in common discourse is a problem.12 Think of how difficult it would be to understand courage without stories of courageous heroes. The lack of stories about intellectually courageous people puts us in that situation with respect to the virtue of intellectual courage. The same point applies to other intellectual virtue stereotypes. They are deprived of the vividness and motivational power they would have if they were directly linked with well-​told stories. 12 See Jason Baehr, The Inquiring Mind:  On Intellectual Virtues and Virtue Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011): 142, which mentions C.P. Snow’s novel The Search as an example of intellectual virtue, but that is an exception.

Intellectual Virtue Terms  137 I proposed earlier that a virtue term can go out of use either because people change their attitude of admiration toward the stereotype or because the stereotype itself gets distorted and no longer expresses something that the community finds admirable. I said that I think both of these situations happened with the word “chastity.” I  suspect that these two processes are connected because the fading of a term from common usage hastens the distortion of the stereotype. That is happening with the stereotype associated with the term “virtue.” As “virtue” has faded from use, the stereotype has altered. In my experience, people associate “virtue” with religious and political conservatism. If they do not admire the values of religious and political conservatives, they lack the admiration for what is expressed in the stereotype of virtue, and since admiration is an intrinsic component of virtue, the word “virtue” quickly disappears. The suspicion of the idea of truth was a social force that undermined intellectual virtue terminology for decades, and it no doubt contributed to the distortion of the stereotype of intellectual virtue. I think, however, that the almost complete lack of well-​known narratives depicting intellectual virtues is an even greater problem. Civic discourse requires participants not only to possess intellectual virtues but also, importantly, to understand what the intellectual virtues are—​not by having the ability to give an account of an intellectual virtue but by associating intellectual virtue terms with people they admire in a certain way. They need to grasp a stereotype of an intellectual virtue and admire people who fit the stereotype. But to do that, they need access to exemplars of the intellectual virtues. Unfortunately, we live in a society in which people in the public eye get away with close-​mindedness, intellectual stubbornness, intellectual sloth, intellectual cowardice, and a general disvaluing of truth. There is little connection between what they say and what they believe, or between what they believe and what they should believe. Although many people detect something wrong, most lack the vocabulary to express it, and if I am right, they have trouble even forming the thought that the intellectual virtues are worthy of their admiration and the intellectual vices deserving of scorn. That is precluded by the lack of a common word with a commonly grasped stereotype, and a network that links the users to people exhibiting the virtue or vice. But the indexicality of virtue and vice terms is good news because it gives us the opportunity to invent words: “X is stuff like that.” In a sense, Harry Frankfurt did that with his best-​selling little book On Bullshit, but, of course, “bullshit” was a word that already had a meaning. Still, the popularity of the book made the stereotype of a person who is careless about the truth clearer and more widely grasped, and that was an important contribution to the linguistic network. I mentioned the merging or expanding of linguistic networks in the use of moral terms, which I believe happened with the adoption of the Universal

138  Intellectual Virtue Declaration of Human Rights, and I think that the same points apply to the domain of intellectual virtue. Human rights documents typically recognize the right to the free expression of opinion, but we need words for the right to be told what the informant conscientiously believes to be the truth. We need words that express the idea of intellectual or epistemic abuse, and we need words for the social commitment to contributing to the intellectual well-​being of the community, which underlies most of the intellectual virtues. The greater the awareness of the social effects of intellectual vice and virtue, the more likely it will be that we get attention from influential participants in our linguistic network about these vices and virtues. I also said that I think that participation in a common moral linguistic network is a necessary condition for getting moral agreement. The same condition applies to getting agreement about the ethics of belief and testimony. Fortunately, if I am right about the semantics of direct reference as applied to virtue terms, we would not have to have a common concept associated with these terms for us to be linked to the same network. So the good news is that it is not necessary that the work of philosophers on intellectual virtues permeates the network sufficiently to affect the stereotype of an intellectually virtuous person. It is enough to have common words, with some images and stories that ordinary people associate with these words. But the bad news is that we have not even done a very good job of creating stereotypes of intellectual virtues through stories and examples. I believe that civic discourse will be impoverished until we do so.

References Baehr, Jason. 2011. The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtues and Virtue Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Blackburn, Simon. 2004. Lust: The Seven Deadly Sins. New York: Oxford University Press. Fricker, Miranda. 2009. Epistemic Injustice:  Power and the Ethics of Knowing. New York: Oxford University Press. Gibbard, Allan and Blackburn, Simon. 1992. “Morality and Thick Concepts.” Aristotelian Society Supp. 66 (1) (July): 267–​299. Glendon, Mary Ann. 2001. A World Made New:  Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal           Declaration of Human Rights. New York: Random House. Putnam, Hilary. 1973. “Meaning and Reference.” Journal of Philosophy 70 (19) (Nov. 8): 699–​711. _​_​_​_​_​. 1975. “The Meaning of ‘Meaning.’” Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 7: 131–​193. Robertson, Seth. “Revenge, Forgiveness, and Exemplarist Moral Theory,” unpublished. Snow, Charles. 2008. The Search. Cornwall: House of Stratus.

PART III

E PIST E MIC  VA LU E

8

From Reliabilism to Virtue Epistemology* 8.1  The Value Problem One of the problems with reliabilism is that it does not explain what makes the good of knowledge greater than the good of true belief. Previously I gave this objection to process reliabilism,1 but the objection can be expanded to apply to a series of successors to process reliabilism, and it raises deep questions about the way we value knowledge over mere true belief. A reliable process is good only because of the good of the product of the process. A reliable espresso maker is good because espresso is good. A reliable water-​ dripping faucet is not good because dripping water is not good. Reliability per se has no value or disvalue. Its value or disvalue derives solely from the value or disvalue of that which it reliably produces. So the value of the product of a process is transferred to the process that produces it. But the value of the process is not transferred back again to the product. A reliable expresso maker is good because espresso is good, but the espresso made now is no better because it was produced by a reliable espresso machine. The water dripping now is no better because it was produced by a reliably dripping faucet; and neither is it any worse. Similarly, a reliable truth-​producing process is good because truth is good. But if I acquire a true belief from such a process, that does not make my belief better than it would be otherwise. Of course, since the process is good, I am better off for having it, and I may even be better off for using it now, but that does not add status to any given true belief of mine that it produces. So if Adam has a reliable memory and acquires a true belief about the past as a result of using his reliable memory, his belief is no more valuable epistemically than the belief of Eve, who has an equally reliable memory and who acquires the same true belief about the past, but acquires it by a nonreliable process. Eve may be no worse off than Adam, but the important point is that Adam is no better off than Eve. This objection is the analogue of one sometimes given to rule utilitarianism. If we assume that maximizing utility is good, rules generalizing from behavior that reliably leads to maximizing utility are also good; but there is no additional good in the fact that a particular act follows such a rule. If a * The chapter is reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. 1 Linda Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind:  An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996): 301–​2. Epistemic Values. Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197529171.001.0001.

142  Epistemic Value particular act maximizes utility, its value is not increased by the fact that it is a member of a class of acts most of which maximize utility. And if an act does not maximize utility, it does not get value from the fact that it is a member of such a class. One moral to draw from this is that value can be transferred in one direction only, not back and forth. The value of the product is transferred to the value of a process reliably producing that product, but the product in any given case does not get an extra boost of value from the value of the process. So the value of true belief is transferred to the value of a reliable truth-​ producing process, but a particular true belief does not get any extra value from being the product of such a process. Hence process reliabilism cannot explain what gives knowledge greater value than true belief. I will call this the value problem. Evidentialism does not have the value problem. Basing belief on evidence is good not only because doing so reliably leads to the truth but because there is something epistemically good about seeing the connection between the evidence and the truth. So when a person bases a true belief on the evidence, it is good that she has the truth; it is good that she has evidence; it is an additional good that her true belief is based upon the evidence. The fact that she bases her belief on the evidence is good, not because doing so leads to the truth in general, nor only because it has led to the truth on this occasion, but because on this occasion she has seen the connection between the evidence and the true proposition she believes and has thereby acquired a level of epistemic status she would not have had otherwise. We recognize this when we say that there is something epistemically valuable about even a false belief properly based on evidence. In contrast, it is problematic to say that there is anything epistemically valuable about a false belief produced by a reliable process. Would we say that the bad-​tasting espresso produced by a reliable espresso maker is any better than bad-​tasting espresso produced by an unreliable espresso maker? We do not, nor should we, say that the false belief produced by a reliable truth-​ producing process is any better than the false belief produced by an unreliable belief process. If a reliable process does not give value to a false belief, neither does it add value to a true belief. Whatever one thinks of evidentialism, then, it cannot be faulted for not identifying a distinct epistemic good in addition to getting the truth. Its problem, in fact, is just the opposite: the two goods it identifies seem to be too far apart. Evidentialism attempts to capture two sources of epistemic good in one concept of justifiedness—​truth-​conduciveness and rationality. What makes this problematic is that there is no prima facie reason to expect any connection between the two. Perhaps it is obvious that it is rational to base beliefs on evidence, but if that is what it is to be rational, why think that that has anything to do with getting

From Reliabilism to Virtue Epistemology  143 the truth? Elsewhere I have called this the alignment problem.2 I will not go into the alignment problem here, however, since in this chapter I am primarily interested in a different class of theories. I assume that reliabilists are right that the value of knowledge in addition to true belief has something to do with truth-​ conduciveness. But I have argued that it cannot be truth-​conduciveness alone. The reliabilist intuition that there ought to be a connection between the rationality (justifiability, warrant) of a belief and its truth is an advantage of the theory. Evidentialism cannot explain the connection; reliabilism builds the connection into its definition of knowledge. Process reliabilism founders on the value problem. An improvement is, or may be, faculty reliabilism of the sort endorsed by Ernest Sosa. It is possible that the product of a reliable faculty is epistemically enhanced in virtue of being such a product, but that is unclear because the concept of a faculty is vague. If there is a faculty of weighing evidence and forming beliefs based on the evidence, then, given the remarks I have just made about evidentialism, their epistemic value is more than the value of the truth they produce. But, then, they do not get their value solely from their reliability. On the other hand, if a faculty is a psychological mechanism like memory, it does not enhance the believer’s epistemic status unless the faculty consists in more than a reliable process. If a faculty is nothing more than a reliable process for generating true beliefs, it does not give extra value to its product any more than the espresso machine does. So faculty reliabilism is subject to the same objection I have given to process reliabilism unless there is something more in the faculty than an organ/​process for producing beliefs. And that something more must have value that is transferred to its product. The problem for either kind of reliabilism, then, is that whatever makes the product of a reliable faculty good cannot be reliability, but something else. It is reasonable to think that that something else underlies and explains the reliability of the faculty or process. So even though reliabilists are probably right that there is a close connection between reliably formed true beliefs and knowledge, the source of the value of knowledge is something deeper than reliability. Alvin Plantinga’s proper function theory is an attempt to identify something valuable that is deeper than reliability and that explains it. Typically, a reliable faculty is reliable because it is functioning the way it was designed. So Plantinga has proposed that knowledge is true warranted belief where, roughly, a warranted belief is one that is produced by properly functioning faculties in an appropriate environment according to a design plan aimed at truth.3 This theory 2 This problem has been called the ratification problem by Susan Haack in Evidence and Inquiry (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), passim. I have called it the alignment problem in “Phronesis and Christian Belief,” in The Rationality of Religious Belief, ed. Godehard Bruntrup (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000). 3 Alvin Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

144  Epistemic Value has the disadvantage of adding the vagueness of the concepts of proper function and design to the vagueness of the concept of a faculty, but it includes the insight that reliability per se does not epistemically enhance either a particular belief or a believer for having that belief. A properly functioning faculty is reliable, but its reliability is grounded in what Plantinga proposes makes it really valuable—​the fact that it is functioning properly. And it is true, perhaps analytically true, that proper functioning is a good thing, unlike reliability, which, I have argued, is not good in itself. Of course, a reliable espresso machine is almost always a properly functioning one, and a reliably dripping faucet is almost always a malfunctioning one, and one might even say that in the case of espresso machines and water faucets, their function is nothing but reliably producing certain products—​and not certain other products. But the sense of good in which proper function is good is not the one we want in a component of knowledge. A properly functioning faculty, like a reliable faculty, gets its value from what it does or produces when it is functioning properly. A properly functioning cancer cell is not good even though it is functioning properly for a cancer cell. It may be a good cancer cell, but it is not good. Properly functioning nerve gas is not good even though it is functioning as nerve gas is supposed to function. Cancer cells and nerve gas are not good; in fact, proper functioning makes them even worse. At this point another element of Plantinga’s theory becomes crucial. What gives properly functioning faculties additional value in Plantinga’s theory is that they are the product of intelligent design that has a certain aim. On this position, a properly functioning espresso machine is good, not only because espresso is good, but because it has fulfilled the purpose of its designer. Perhaps this gives it value in addition to the value of its product. So if my espresso machine is functioning properly it is a good machine because it is doing what it is designed to do. It is not good simply because espresso is good. A malfunctioning faucet is bad because it is not doing what it is designed to do, and its badness is not merely derivative from the badness of dripping water; or so it can be argued. But is the value of the espresso produced by a machine functioning as it was designed any better than it would be if it were produced by a reliable but undesigned machine, much less an unreliable and undesigned machine? I do not see that it is. Consider three objects used as screwdrivers: one, a properly functioning screwdriver that does a good job of screwing in a screw; the second, a dime, which is not designed to be a screwdriver but does a perfectly good job of screwing in a screw; the third, an unreliable and malfunctioning screwdriver with a loose handle that nonetheless, on this occasion, screws in the screw perfectly well.4 If the unreliable and improperly functioning screwdriver drives the



4

I thank Frank McGuinness for suggesting this analogy to me.

From Reliabilism to Virtue Epistemology  145 screw in straight, the result is just as good as it would be if it were driven in by either the dime or the properly functioning screwdriver. And the screw driven in by the former is just as good as the one driven in by the latter. That is, there would be no reason in any of the three cases to remove the screw and redo the process. If the result is just as good, it makes no difference whether the process was one that usually gets good results, nor does it matter whether the process was one designed to be used in that way. The fact that things and processes operate as designed may be a good thing, but it is a good extrinsic to the product. The product itself is neither better nor worse because it is the work of design. The conclusion is that neither reliability nor proper function identifies what is epistemically valuable in knowledge in addition to truth, but reliability is a sign of something deeper that is valuable. Plantinga’s theory of functioning as designed is an attempt to identify what that is. He thinks that what makes the believer reliable is what is really valuable. And given the objection I have just made to Plantinga, we may add that what proper functioning consists in is what is really valuable. And that has to be something intrinsic to the believer or the belief, not something extrinsic. Design is extrinsic.

8.2.  Which Theories Have the Value Problem? If neither reliability nor proper function is sufficient to explain what makes an instance of knowledge better than true belief, why have so many philosophers thought otherwise? The answer, I  think, is that they have misunderstood the moral of Gettier problems. It is often said that the key problem in Gettier cases is that they are instances in which a person’s belief is justified (or warranted) and true, but she gets to the truth accidentally. There is only an accidental connection between her state of justifiedness/​warrant and her reaching the truth. For this reason it has often been proposed that knowledge ought to be defined as nonaccidentally true belief. Since a belief that is the product of either a reliable process, a reliable faculty, or proper function according to a design plan aimed at truth gets to the truth nonaccidentally, it may be tempting to think that that is good enough both to avoid Gettier problems and to be an instance of knowledge. I believe it does not succeed in either aim. Elsewhere I have argued that reliabilism and proper functionalism cannot escape Gettier problems,5 but my point here is that neither theory has identified the ingredient in knowledge that 5 The first place in which I  gave this argument is “The Inescapability of Gettier Problems,” Philosophical Quarterly 44, no. 174 (January 1994): 65–​73. A revised version of this chapter appears in Virtues of the Mind, Part III, section 3. A more recent form of the argument appears in “What Is Knowledge?” in the Blackwell Guide to Epistemology, edited by Ernest Sosa and John Greco (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).

146  Epistemic Value explains what makes it more valuable than true belief. Non-​accidentality is not valuable enough to give us the value we think knowledge has. Gettier cases are in a genre of counterexamples that illustrate what is wrong with a definition by taking extreme cases. In these cases the truth is reached accidentally, and that is sufficient to preclude their being instances of knowledge. But it is a mistake to conclude from that that anything short of accidentality is good enough. Of course a belief must be nonaccidentally true in order to be an instance of knowledge, but that is only the weakest thing we can say about it. Accidentality is epistemically bad, but it does not follow that nonaccidentality in any degree or form is epistemically good. The hard part is to identify a good-​making property of a belief or a believer that accounts for the extra value of knowledge in addition to true belief and that also is immune to Gettier problems. Susan Haack has suggested that an obvious way to modify reliabilism is to substitute reference to processes (or faculties) that we believe to be reliable for those that are reliable.6 Presumably, Plantinga’s theory could be modified in the parallel fashion. What would make a belief warranted would be that we believe it is the outcome of properly functioning faculties according to a design plan aimed at truth. I think this suggestion is moving in the right direction, but reliabilists and proper functionalists are right to reject it. What a person stupidly, irrationally, or even just mistakenly believes about what reliably leads to truth or functions as part of a design plan is not sufficient to give a true belief the extra value we are looking for. If reliability has anything to do with knowledge at all, it is not simply in virtue of the fact that the believer believes it obtains. Perhaps we should say that the believer must be aware of her reliability. But, of course, such awareness also can be irrational or based on a mistake, and that also would make it disvaluable. Perhaps, then, we should say that the believer must be justifiably aware of her own reliability. But that is nonexplanatory since the issue we are discussing here is the value problem, and one way of putting the issue is to determine what justifiability consists in. It is interesting, though, that reflection on the value problem in reliabilism tends to lead us back to one of the most important features of evidentialism—​that what is good about knowledge has something to do with meritorious features of the agent’s subjective perspective. John Greco has moved in this direction in the most recent form of reliabilism—​ agent reliabilism. According to Greco, an agent’s true belief p has the value that converts true belief into knowledge just in case his believing p results from stable and reliable dispositions that make up his cognitive character.7 Greco intends 6 Haack, Evidence and Inquiry, ­chapter 7. 7 “Agent Reliabilism,” Philosophical Perspectives 13, 273–​296 (1999). Greco uses the term “agent reliabilism” for a larger class of theories than his own, including Sosa’s, Plantinga’s, and my early theory, but as I will argue, his own version comes closer to solving the value problem than faculty reliabilism or proper functionalism.

From Reliabilism to Virtue Epistemology  147 this definition to entail the satisfaction of conditions of subjective epistemic justification. A knower’s reliability must be grounded in the cognitive dispositions she manifests when thinking in a way motivated by the attempt to get truth. Can agent reliabilism avoid the value problem? As with faculty reliabilism, the answer depends upon the kind of dispositions that make up an agent’s cognitive character and why they are reliable. If the value of a cognitive character is no more than the value of its reliability, then the espresso maker analogy can be used against this form of reliabilism as well as the others. Intuitively, character is the sort of thing that is valuable apart from reliability. In particular, the motive for truth is valuable not only because it reliably leads to truth but also because a person with such a motive has a praiseworthy cognitive character. If so, the additional value of knowledge comes from properties of a person’s motives or character; reliability per se is not the source of the value. If this is what Greco intends, I would think the theory would be more appropriately named something like “character reliabilism” rather than “agent reliabilism.” But if the theory places the value that converts true belief into knowledge on the reliability of the agent’s cognitive dispositions rather than on the value of character, the theory falls prey to the argument of this chapter. So far I have argued that knowledge is more valuable than true belief and its value must accrue to the believer for having the belief. A belief produced by reliable or properly functioning processes or faculties or dispositions does not have that extra value unless the reliability and proper function rest on something else that is a valuable epistemic property of the believer. Evidentialism does not have the problem of identifying an extra source of value, and this suggests that evidentialists may be right that the extra source of value is something praiseworthy about the believer’s subjective perspective. The evolution of reliabilism from process reliabilism to faculty reliabilism to agent reliabilism leads in the same direction. Greco discusses cognitive dispositions that arise out of the motive for truth and he intends his form of reliabilism to entail subjective justification. I have not denied that when an agent knows she or the process she uses is reliable and properly functioning. But what makes knowledge valuable is what grounds or explains the reliability and proper functioning of the process and/​or agent. The move from processes to faculties to dispositions in reliabilism can be plausibly construed as an attempt to move toward deeper features of the agent’s character that underlie and explain her reliability. So the moral we have drawn from the fact that reliabilism and proper functionalism have the value problem is that when I know p, there is something valuable about my belief p or the way it was acquired that explains why it was formed by a reliable and/​or properly functioning process/​faculty/​disposition, and the moral we have drawn from the

148  Epistemic Value fact that evidentialism does not have the value problem is that it is somehow grounded in praiseworthy features of the subjective perspective of the believer.

8.3  The Motive for Truth and the Value of Knowledge What makes conscious beings act reliably? Of course, they may do so accidentally, but we have already seen that accidentality does not add value. Or they may do so because that is their nature, a nature of which they may not even be aware. But in that case they do not differ from the espresso maker already discussed. Or they may act reliably because that is what they are motivated to do. Elsewhere I have proposed a definition of knowledge in which its primary constituent is the motive for truth and the motive to act in ways that derive from the truth-​ motive (e.g., being open-​minded, intellectually fair, thorough, careful). Basing knowledge on the motive for truth combines the advantages of reliabilism and evidentialism. Like evidentialism and unlike reliabilism it does not have the value problem because it identifies a good that knowledge has in addition to the good of true belief. Like reliabilism and unlike evidentialism it does not have the alignment problem because it explains the connection between truth and rationality/​justifiability. Let us look more closely at how the motive for truth can serve these purposes in defining knowledge. A motive to get to the truth and to act in ways found to be reliable ways of getting there is a good thing for the same reason a motive to promote human well-​being and to act in ways found to be reliable ways of promoting human well-​ being is a good thing. We think of promoting well-​being as a good thing even if it is done unconsciously. Similarly, we think of getting the truth as a good thing even if it is done unconsciously. That is why it is good to have a true belief no matter how it is acquired. But we think that some ways of promoting human well-​being are not as good as others. Most obviously, promoting well-​being by accident is not as good as doing so intentionally, and this difference in value is not just one of degree but of kind. Similarly, getting the truth by accident is not as good as doing so intentionally, and again, the difference is not just one of degree, but of kind. Notice that I have contrasted getting the truth accidentally with getting the truth intentionally. But accident and intentional action are two ends of a spectrum of conscious control. There is a wide area in between, and we have already seen that while the moral of Gettier cases and cases of guessing is that accidental success in getting the truth is ruled out of the realm of knowledge, it does not follow that any nonaccidental success is good enough for knowledge. Similarly, promoting human well-​being by accident is ruled out of the realm of moral praiseworthiness, but it does not follow that any nonaccidental promotion of well-​being is

From Reliabilism to Virtue Epistemology  149 good enough to deserve moral praise. The intentional promotion of good usually merits the highest praise, but doing good with something less than full conscious intention may be good enough even though doing good by anything more than accident is not always enough. The concept of motive is useful in this context because motives are connected to the successful attainment of their ends in much more than an accidental way even though they are not always intentional or fully conscious. A person may be motivated to bring about the well-​being of others even when she does not consciously think of that as her end on each occasion in which the motive is operative. Similarly, a person may be motivated to get the truth and avoid falsehood even when he does not consciously think of that as his end on each occasion in which that motive is operative. We are conscious of our motives only part of the time, whether in our epistemic or our overt behavior, but our praiseworthiness and blameworthiness for those motives are not limited to those occasions in which we are conscious of them. Rarely do we consciously and deliberatively think that we are motivated to acquire truth when we form beliefs even though it is often the case that the best explanation of our behavior is that that is our motive. Similarly, it is rare that we consciously and deliberatively think that we are motivated to promote human well-​being even when the best explanation of our behavior is that that is our motive. I assume that the motive to get the truth is a good motive in our belief-​forming activity and that the motive to promote human well-​being is a good motive in our overt acts. What makes these motives good is an important question, one that I  address elsewhere.8 My point here is only that these motives are good, and that their goodness is such that it transfers to the goodness of that which it motivates an agent to do. Epistemic behavior motivated by the motive for truth has value in addition to the value of the truth that is thereby attained. Overt behavior motivated by the motive to promote human well-​being has value in addition to the value of the well-​being that is thereby attained. Success in reaching truth or well-​being is not guaranteed in either case, of course, but I assume that when it is attained, the behavior that is successful in attaining it gains value that it would not otherwise have. Therefore, behavior that is both motivated to attain some good and is successful in doing so is more valuable than either behavior that is well motivated but unsuccessful in its end or behavior that reaches the end but does not arise out of a motive to reach it. Finally, behavior that is both motivated to reach a good end and is successful in doing so is more valuable if its success in reaching its end is due to the good motive. 8 Virtues of the Mind. I present a more detailed defense of the primacy of the value of good motives in Divine Motivation Theory, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

150  Epistemic Value An agent who is motivated to promote human well-​being and who does so because of some other mechanism than the causal influence of his motivation on his act and the effects of his act is not deserving of the same kind of moral praise as an agent who is similarly motivated and who is successful in promoting human well-​being because of the way that motive brings about his act and the way that act brings about human well-​being. Similarly, an agent who is motivated to get the truth but who gets the truth on some occasion because of some other mechanism than the way that motive brings about his cognitive acts and their consequences is not deserving of the same kind of epistemic praise as an agent who is similarly motivated and who gets the truth on some occasion because of the motive and the cognitive behavior to which it leads. If a particular piece of behavior is the cause of a good end on some occasion, this usually implies that behavior of that kind reliably or characteristically leads to an end of that kind. A reliable connection between behavior of a certain kind and a consequence of a certain kind is not all that there is to the relation holding between that behavior and the state of affairs it causes, but it is probably the most common and salient feature of the Because relation. For this reason, reliabilists are right to focus on reliability as a critical feature of the relation between believers and truth, but they are wrong if they think it is constitutive of that relation. In short, my suggestion is this: If a cognitive agent is motivated to get to the truth and acts in ways that are reliable because of that motive, and is successful in reaching the truth because of the motive and the reliable processes to which the motive gave rise, that is a cognitive agent who has reached an epistemic state worth having—​not just truth, but knowledge. This theory is a form of virtue theory because it identifies the value in knowledge in addition to true belief as based on the agent’s motive, a primary constituent of a virtue. It therefore avoids the value problem. The theory also avoids the alignment problem because there is a natural connection between the two values identified in the account of knowledge: the motive for truth and getting the truth. In fact, if I am right that the value of knowledge in addition to truth is that the truth is reached because of the motive for truth and reliable cognitive behavior, then there is a definitional connection between the two values as well. In contrast, the evidentialist must explain why there should be a connection between truth and basing beliefs on evidence. It will no doubt turn out, of course, that one of the ways found to be reliable ways of getting to the truth is to base beliefs on evidence, but basing beliefs on evidence gets its value from the fact that that is what truth-​motivated persons do. Reliabilism and proper functionalism made an important turn in epistemology by shifting the focus of epistemic evaluation from evidential relations among propositions to persons and their properties. But both reliability and proper functioning are derivative values. The value of reliability derives from the

From Reliabilism to Virtue Epistemology  151 value of that to which it is reliably connected. The value of proper functioning derives from the value of that which functions properly. The value of functioning as designed is also derivative since it is only as good as the design itself. None of these theories can explain the value that knowledge has in addition to true belief. Ever since Plato, knowledge has been considered a lofty state, one that merits praise for its possessor. Persons are not praised in that way merely for getting the truth. Having reliable faculties/​dispositions and using reliable processes may be good indications that the epistemic agent deserves praise, but they are not the properties for which the agent is praised. Those properties, I have proposed, are motives to behave in ways that derive from the motive for truth and that lead to behavior reliably connected with gaining truth.

9

The Search for the Source of Epistemic Good* Philosophers have traditionally regarded knowledge as a highly valuable epistemic state, perhaps even one of the great goods of life. At a minimum, it is thought to be more valuable than true belief. Contemporary proposals on the nature of knowledge, however, make it difficult to understand why knowledge is good enough to have received so much attention in the history of philosophy. Some of the most common theories cannot even explain why knowledge is better than true belief. I propose that the search for the source of epistemic value reveals some constraints on the way knowledge can be defined. I believe it will also show that the common view that epistemic good is independent of moral good is largely an illusion.

9.1  What Makes Knowledge Better Than True Belief? It is almost always taken for granted that knowledge is good, better than true belief simpliciter, but it is remarkably difficult to explain what it is about knowledge that makes it better. I call this “the value problem.”1 I have previously argued that most forms of reliabilism have a particularly hard time handling the value problem.2 According to standard reliabilist models, knowledge is true belief that is the output of reliable belief-​forming processes or faculties. But the reliability of the source of a belief cannot explain the difference in value between knowledge and true belief. One reason it cannot do so is that reliability per se has no value or disvalue. A reliable espresso maker is good because espresso is good. A reliable water-​dripping faucet is not good because dripping water is not good. The good of the product makes the reliability of the source that produces it good, but the reliability of the source does not then give the product an additional boost * The chapter is reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. 1 For an exception to the almost universal view that knowledge is a better state than true belief, see Sartwell, “Knowledge Is Merely True Belief.” This move displaces the problem to that of identifying the value of true belief, which will be addressed in the second section. 2 I mention the value problem briefly in Virtues of the Mind and discuss it in some detail in “From Reliabilism to Virtue Epistemology.” Another version of the value problem is proposed in DePaul, Balance and Refinement.

Epistemic Values. Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197529171.001.0001.

Search for the Source  153 of value. The liquid in this cup is not improved by the fact that it comes from a reliable espresso maker. If the espresso tastes good, it makes no difference if it comes from an unreliable machine. If the flower garden is beautiful, it makes no difference if it was planted by an unreliable gardener. If the book is fascinating, it makes no difference if it was written by an unreliable author. If the belief is true, it makes no difference if it comes from an unreliable belief-​producing source. This point applies to any source of a belief, whether it be a process, faculty, virtue, skill—​any cause of belief whose value is thought to confer value on the true belief that is its product, and which is thought to confer value because of its reliability. If knowledge is true belief arising out of the exercise of good traits and skills, it cannot be the reliability of the agent’s traits and skills that adds the value. Those traits or skills must be good for some reason that does not wholly derive from the good of the product they produce:  true belief. As reliabilism has matured, the location of reliability has shifted from processes to faculties to agents.3 There are advantages in this progression, but if the good-​making feature of a belief-​forming process or faculty or agent is only its reliability, then these versions of reliabilism all share the same problem; being the product of a reliable faculty or agent does not add value to the product.4 Hence, if knowledge arises from something like intellectual virtue or intellectually virtuous acts, what makes an intellectual trait good, and hence a virtue, cannot be simply that it reliably leads to true belief. This, then, is the first moral of the value problem: Truth plus a reliable source of truth cannot explain the value of knowledge. It follows that there must be a value in the cause of a true belief that is independent of reliability or truth conduciveness, whether we call it virtue or something else. Suppose we succeed in identifying such a value. Is that sufficient to solve the value problem? Unfortunately, it is not, so long as we think of knowledge as the external product of a good cause. A cup of espresso is not made better by the fact that the machine that produces it is valuable, even when that value is independent of the value of good-​tasting espresso. What the espresso analogy shows is not only that a reliable cause does not confer value on its effect but also that there is a general problem in attributing value to an effect because of its causes, even if the value of the cause is independent of the value of the effect. I am not suggesting that a cause can never confer value on its effect. Sometimes cause and effect have an internal connection, such as that between motive and 3 Sosa’s earlier theory is what I call faculty reliabilism. Greco has a theory he calls agent reliabilism. In “Agent Reliabilism,” he uses the term agent reliabilism for a class of theories beyond his own, including Sosa’s, Plantinga’s, and my early theory. 4 On the other hand, reliabilists usually have particular faculties and properties of agents in mind, properties they call virtues, e.g., a good memory, keen eyesight, and well-​developed powers of reasoning. The goodness of these virtues is not limited to their reliability, and so long as that is recognized, the theory has a way out of the value problem. But for the same reason, it is misleading to call these theories forms of reliabilism.

154  Epistemic Value act, which I shall discuss in a moment. My point is just that the value of a cause does not transfer to its effect automatically, and certainly not on the model of an effect as the output of the cause. So even if the cause of true belief has an independent value, that still does not tell us what makes knowledge better than true belief if knowledge is true belief that is good in some way other than its truth. The second moral of the value problem, then, is this: Truth plus an independently valuable source cannot explain the value of knowledge. It follows from the second moral that to solve the value problem it is not enough to find another value in the course of analyzing knowledge; one needs to find another value in the right place. Consider Alvin Plantinga’s theory of warrant as proper function. A properly functioning machine does not confer value on its product any more than a reliable one does. The problem is not that proper function is not a good thing but that it is not a value in the knowing state itself. The first two morals of the value problem, then, reveal a deeper problem. We cannot explain what makes knowledge more valuable than true belief if we persist in using the machine-​product model of belief that is so common in epistemological discourse.5 Knowledge cannot be identified with the state of true belief that is the output of a valuable cause, whether or not the cause has a value independent of the value of true belief.6 In other work I have proposed that in a state of knowledge the agent gets to the truth because of the virtuous features of her belief-​forming activity.7 Wayne Riggs and John Greco’s response to the value problem is that the extra value of knowing in addition to true belief is the state of affairs of the epistemic agent’s getting credit for the truth that is acquired.8 Ernest Sosa’s response to the value problem is similar. He says that in a state of knowing, the truth is attributable to the agent as his or her own doing.9 These approaches clearly are similar, but they solve the value problem only if we reject the machine-​product model of knowledge.10 For the same reason that the espresso in a cup is not made better by the fact that it is produced by a reliable espresso maker or a properly functioning espresso maker, it does not get any better if the machine gets credit for producing the espresso. That is to say, the coffee in the cup does not taste any better. 5 The machine-​product model has been used by Alston, Plantinga, Sosa, Goldman, and others. The word output is frequently used, and some of them illustrate their discussion with analogies of machines and their products. 6 My colleague Wayne Riggs has thought of the location issue as a way out of the value problem. See Riggs, “Reliability and the Value of Knowledge.” 7 Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind, part 3. 8 See Riggs, “What Are the ‘Chances’ of Being Justified?” and Greco, “Knowledge as Credit for True Belief.” 9 See Sosa, “The Place of Truth in Epistemology.” 10 So far as I can tell, Greco and Riggs reject the machine-​product model, but Sosa uses it repeatedly, including in “The Place of Truth in Epistemology,” in which he proposes his way out of the value problem.

Search for the Source  155 The conclusion is that true belief arising from cognitive activity cannot be like espresso coming out of an espresso maker. Not only is the reliability of the machine insufficient to make the coffee in the cup any better; nothing about the machine makes the product any better. So if knowledge is true belief that is made better by something, knowledge cannot be the external product of the believer in the way the cup of espresso is the external product of the machine. Let us look at the idea that knowing has something to do with the agent getting credit for the truth, that she gets to the truth because of something about her as a knowing agent—​her virtues or virtuous acts. There are theoretical motives for this idea that have nothing to do with the value problem, such as the proposal that it avoids Gettier problems,11 so it is supported by other constraints on the account of knowledge. But my concern in this chapter is the way this move can solve the value problem. If I am right that knowing is not an output of the agent, it must be a state of the agent. I am not suggesting that this is the only alternative to the machine-​product model,12 but if we think of a belief as part of the agent, the belief can get evaluative properties from features of the agent in the same way that acts get evaluative properties from the agent. In fact, the idea that in a state of knowing the agent gets credit for getting the truth suggests that her epistemic state is attached to her in the same way her acts are attached to her. An act is not a product of an agent but is a part of the agent, and the agent gets credit or discredit for an act because of features of the agent. In particular, an agent gets credit for certain good features of an act, for example, its good consequences or the fact that it follows a moral principle—​because of features of the act that derive directly from the agent—​for example, its intention or its motive. If believing is like acting, we have a model for the way the agent can get credit for the truth of a belief because of features of the belief that derive from the agent. I propose, then, that this is the third moral of the value problem: Knowing is related to the knower not as product to machine but as act to agent.13 The value problem arises for a group of theories wider than those that are reliabilist or even externalist. Internalists generally do not think of a true belief as the product of what justifies it, and so they accept the first part of the third moral. 11 I argued this in Virtues of the Mind. See also Riggs, “What Are the ‘Chances’ of Being Justified?” and Greco, “Knowledge as Credit for True Belief.” DePaul, Balance and Refinement, note 7, argues that Gettier cases produce another form of the value problem, because we think that the value of the agent’s epistemic state in Gettier cases is not as valuable as the state of knowledge. 12 Another alternative is that knowledge is identified with the entire process culminating in the belief, and it gets value from the value in the process as well as the truth of the end product of the process. I have proposed that it would serve the purposes of Sosa’s account of epistemic value to think of knowledge as an organic unity in the sense used by Franz Brentano and G. E. Moore. That would permit the value of the whole to exceed the value of the sum of the parts. See Zagzebski, “Epistemic Value Monism.” DePaul, “Value Monism in Epistemology,” section 6, also discusses the possibility that knowledge is an organic unity. 13 I explore the requirement of agency in knowledge in “Must Knowers Be Agents?”

156  Epistemic Value Nonetheless, some of them are vulnerable to the first moral of the value problem because they analyze justification in such a way that its value is explained by its truth conduciveness. Laurence BonJour does this explicitly in the following passage: The basic role of justification is that of a means to truth, a more directly attainable mediating link between our subjective starting point and our objective goal. . . . If epistemic justification were not conducive to truth in this way, if finding epistemically justified beliefs did not substantially increase the likelihood of finding true ones, then epistemic justification would be irrelevant to our main cognitive goal and of dubious worth. It is only if we have some reason for thinking that epistemic justification constitutes a path to truth that we as cognitive beings have any motive for preferring epistemically justified beliefs to epistemically unjustified ones. Epistemic justification is therefore in the final analysis only an instrumental value, not an intrinsic one.14

Notice that in this passage BonJour understands the value of justification the same way the reliabilist does, as something that is good because it is truth conducive. The internality of justification has nothing to do with its value on BonJour’s account. But as we have seen, if the feature that converts true belief into knowledge is good just because of its conduciveness to truth, we are left without an explanation of why knowing p is better than merely truly believing p. And this is the case whether or not that feature is accessible to the consciousness of the believer. BonJour does not appeal to the machine-​product model, and so the problem in his case is more subtle than it is for the reliabilist. Nonetheless, the problem is there, because a true belief does not gain any additional good property from justification. In contrast, the traditional account of knowledge as justified true belief does not have the value problem, because the justifying beliefs do not or do not simply produce the belief that is a candidate for knowledge. Instead, they give it a property, justifiedness. They make it justified. The conclusion is that if knowing p is better than truly believing p, there must be something other than the truth of p that makes believing p better. My proposal is that if believing is like acting, it can be made better by certain properties of the agent. Consider a few of the ways an act acquires properties because of features of the agent. The class of acts subject to moral evaluation has traditionally been called the voluntary. A voluntary act is an act for which the agent gets credit or blame. The voluntary includes some acts that are intentional and some that are 14 BonJour, The Structure of Empirical Knowledge, 7–​8. Michael DePaul, Balance and Refinement, ­chapter 2, insightfully discusses the problem of BonJour and others in explaining the value of knowledge. I thank DePaul for bringing this passage from Bonjour to my attention.

Search for the Source  157 nonintentional. Acts that are voluntary but nonintentional can be motivated, and perhaps always are. My position is that acts of believing are generally in the category of acts that are voluntary but nonintentional, although for the purposes of this chapter it is not necessary that this position be accepted. What is important is just the idea that beliefs can be and perhaps typically are motivated, and that the motive can affect the evaluation of the belief in a way that is analogous to the way the motive can affect the evaluation of an overt act. What I mean by a motive is an affective state that initiates and directs action. In my theory of emotion, a motive is an emotion that is operating to produce action. The appreciation for a value is an emotion that can initiate and direct action. When it does, it is a motive in the sense I mean. Acts motivated by appreciation of a value may not be intentional even when they are voluntary. My thesis is that, other things being equal, acts motivated by love of some value are highly valuable.15 As I analyze virtue, a motive disposition is a component of a virtue. A virtuous act is an act motivated by the motive of some virtue V and is characteristic of acts motivated by V in the circumstances in question.16 An act can be compassionate, courageous, or generous, or unfair, cruel, and so on. The name of the virtue or vice out of which an act is done is typically given by the name of the motive out of which it is done, and the motive is a feature of the agent who performs the act. If believing is like acting, it can be virtuous or vicious. The properties of true believing that make it better than mere true believing are properties that it obtains from the agent in the same way good acts obtain evaluative properties from the agent. In particular, a belief can acquire value from its motive, in addition to the value it may have in being true. The idea that to know is to act is not very common these days, although it has a lot of precedent in philosophical history.17 Sometimes the word judge is used to distinguish that which can be converted into knowledge from belief, which is commonly understood as a disposition or a passive state rather than as an act. I shall continue to use the word believe to refer to an act since I think it is an 15 I also think that acts motivated by love of some value are more valuable than those that aim at the same value but without the motive of love or appreciation for the value. So some nonintentional acts have moral value because they arise from a good motive. In contrast, some intentional acts may aim at a good end but have less value because they do not arise from a good motive. I discuss this in more detail in “Intellectual Motivation and the Good of Truth.” 16 In Virtues of the Mind I distinguish a virtuous act from an act of virtue. Unlike the latter, a virtuous act need not be successful in its aim. I use act of virtue as a term of art to identify an act good in every respect. It is an act that arises out of a virtuous motive, is an act a virtuous person would characteristically do in the circumstances, is successful in reaching the aim of the virtuous motive, and does so because of the other virtuous features of the act. 17 Aquinas and other medieval philosophers seem to have thought of knowing as involving an act of intellect. There may be passages in Plato that suggest this also. See Benson, Socratic Wisdom, ­chapter 9.

158  Epistemic Value acceptable use of the term, but some readers might find the substitution of the word judge in what follows clearer. What motives of the agent could make believing better? I  have previously argued that it is motives that are forms of the basic motive of love of truth.18 The motivational components of the individual intellectual virtues such as open-​ mindedness or intellectual fairness or intellectual thoroughness or caution differ, but they are all based on a general love or valuing of truth or a disvaluing of falsehood.19 The motivational components of the intellectual virtues are probably more complex than this since, for example, intellectual fairness may consist in part in respect for others as well as in respect or love of truth.20 But love of truth is plausibly the primary motive underlying a wide range of intellectual virtues.21 If love of truth is a good motive, it would add value to the intellectual acts it motivates. What sort of value does love of truth have? Assuming that if something is valuable, to appreciate or love it is also valuable, then love of true belief has value because true belief has value. But the motive of love of truth also derives value from distinctively moral motives. That is because moral permissibility, praise, and blame rest on epistemic permissibility, praise, and blame.22 Let me propose a condition for impermissibility. When something of moral importance is at stake when someone performs an act S, then if S is a case of acting on a belief B, it is morally important that B be true. It is, therefore, impermissible for the agent to believe in a way that fails to respect the importance of the truth of B. That implies that the agent must believe out of certain motives. In particular, I suggest that the agent’s motives must be such that they include a valuing of truth or, at a minimum, that they do not involve a disvaluing or neglect of truth.23 18 I argue this in Virtues of the Mind, part 2, and in more detail in “Intellectual Motivation and the Good of Truth.” 19 I have argued in “Intellectual Motivation and the Good of Truth” that loving truth is not the same as hating falsehood, but I do not think the difference makes a difference to the point of this chapter. 20 Respect, love, and appreciation in most contexts are quite different, but I  do not think the differences make much of a difference in the context of an emotional attitude toward truth. Since most epistemologists do not think any emotional attitude toward truth makes any difference to epistemic status, it is quite enough to try to show that one of these attitudes makes a difference. 21 Some intellectual virtues may aim at understanding rather than truth. I argue in “Recovering Understanding” that epistemologists have generally neglected the value of understanding. See also Riggs, “Understanding Virtue and the Virtue of Understanding.” 22 The locus classicus for discussion of the connection between the moral permissibility of acts and the permissibility of beliefs is Clifford’s article, “The Ethics of Belief.” W. K. Clifford concludes that an unjustified belief is morally impermissible. See also Montmarquet, Epistemic Virtue and Doxastic Responsibility, for a good discussion of the relation between the permissibility of acts and beliefs. 23 The issue of what is involved in epistemic permissibility is a difficult one, because of the “ought implies can” rule. But unless we are willing to say that no belief is impermissible, there must be some things we ought and ought not to believe, so the “ought implies can” rule does not prohibit us from speaking of epistemic permissibility. I am not going to discuss the extent to which we can control

Search for the Source  159 If moral blameworthiness rests on epistemic blameworthiness, then the same reasoning leads to the conclusion that moral praiseworthiness or credit rests on epistemic praiseworthiness or credit.24 Suppose now that an act S is a case of acting on a belief B and that act S is an instance of an act type that is morally praiseworthy in the right conditions. I propose that act S is credited to the agent only if the truth of belief B is credited to the agent. So if knowing B is something like truly believing when the truth of B is credited to the agent, it follows that the agent gets moral credit for an act S based on belief B only if S knows B.25 Suppose also that I  am right that there is a motivational requirement for getting credit for the truth that involves love of truth. It follows that the motive of love of truth is a requirement for love of moral goods, or at least is a requirement for love of those moral goods for which one gets praise or blame in one’s acts. The praiseworthiness of love of truth is a condition for moral praiseworthiness. There is, therefore, a moral motive to have knowledge. The value that converts true believing into knowing is a condition for the moral value of acts that depend upon the belief. In spite of the moral importance of having true beliefs, we usually think that true belief is good in itself. The value of true belief is a distinctively epistemic value that allegedly permits epistemologists to treat the domain of belief and knowledge as something independent of acts subject to moral evaluation. This brings us to the deeper value problem of knowledge: In what sense, if any, is true belief good? If true believing is not good, we have a much more serious problem than that of finding the value that makes knowing better than true believing.

9.2  The Value of True Belief I have been treating knowledge as something the knower earns. It is a state in which the prize of truth is credited to her; perhaps she is even deserving of praise for it. But why should we think that? I have already mentioned that this idea was each of our beliefs. My point is just that so long as we do think there are acts of belief that are impermissible, it follows that either we have whatever power over believing is intended in the “ought implies can” rule or else the “ought implies can” rule does not apply to these beliefs. In other words, I think the intuition that impermissibility applies in the realm of belief is stronger than the “ought implies can” rule. 24 Praiseworthiness differs somewhat from credit in most people’s vocabulary, in that deserving praise is a stronger commendation than deserving credit. I think the difference is only one of degree and do not believe that much hangs on the difference. 25 There is no doubt a variety of qualifications to be made here. For example, the agent generally gets credit of some kind for S even when B is false so long as her intellectual motive sufficiently respects the importance of the truth of B, she does what intellectually virtuous persons characteristically do in her circumstances, and her belief is only false because of her bad luck.

160  Epistemic Value developed because it avoids Gettier problems, but that objective is surely only a small part of the task of defining knowledge. Knowledge is worth discussing because it is worth having. But the fact that knowledge is valuable does not force us to think of it as something we earn or get credit for or are responsible for or praised for, although that way of looking at it follows from the sports analogies used in discussions of the value problem by Sosa, Greco, and Riggs, and from the analogy of winning a battle used by Michael DePaul.26 They all treat knowledge as an achievement or points earned in a game rather than the blessings of good fortune. I think they are right about that, but it is worth mentioning that the fact that knowing is a valuable state does not force us to think of it in that way. Some goods are just as good if we do not have to work for them—​for example, good health and a safe environment—​and some may even be better if we do not have to work for them—​for example, love and friendship. Good health, safety, love, and friendship are all good in the sense of the desirable. The sense of good that we earn or get credit for is the sense of good as the admirable. I have argued that if we think of knowing as being like acting, it is the sort of thing that can be virtuous or vicious, which is to say, admirable or reprehensible. Knowledge is admirable. But surely knowledge is also desirable because its primary component, true belief, is thought to be desirable. That is to say, we think that true belief is good for us. True belief may be desirable, but it is certainly not admirable. It is not something for which we get credit or praise. That is, true belief by itself does not carry credit with it, although I have said that in cases of knowing we get credit for the truth because of other features of the belief. The kind of value that makes knowing better than true believing is the admirable, whereas the kind of value true believing has is the desirable. But now we encounter a problem, because surely not all true beliefs are desirable. For one thing, many people have pointed out that some truths are trivial. This is a problem for the value of knowledge, because even if knowing a trivial truth is better than merely truly believing it, how much better can it be? There is only so much good that knowing a trivial truth can have. If it is fundamentally valueless to have a true belief about the number of times the word the is used in a McDonald’s commercial, it is also valueless to know it. So even if trivial truths are believed in the most highly virtuous, skillful, rational, or justified way, the triviality of the truth makes the knowing of such truths trivial as well. The unavoidable conclusion is that some knowledge is not good for us. Some might even be bad for us. It can be bad for the agent and it 26 DePaul, “Value Monism in Epistemology:” 179. DePaul also uses the example of a commercial for a financial institution in which a pompous gentleman announces, “We make money the old-​ fashioned way: we earn it.” The implication is that it is better to get money by working for it rather than by luck or inheritance. As DePaul points out, that implies that there is something valuable in addition to the money itself.

Search for the Source  161 can be bad for others—​for example, knowing exactly what the surgeon is doing to my leg when he is removing a skin cancer; knowing the neighbor’s private life. It follows that either not all knowledge is desirable or some true beliefs cannot be converted into knowledge. A common response to this problem is to say that truth is conditionally valuable. It is not true belief per se that is valuable but having the answer to our questions. Our interests determine the difference between valuable true beliefs and nonvaluable or disvaluable ones. Sosa gives the example of counting grains of sand on the beach. He says that we do not think that believing the outcome of such a count has value because it does not serve any of our interests.27 But, of course, somebody might be interested in the number of grains of sand on the beach, yet it seems to me that knowing the count does not get any better if he is. If a truth is trivial, believing it is not improved by the fact that the epistemic agent has peculiar or perverse interests. In fact, the interests may even make it worse, because we add the perversity of the interests to the triviality of the truth.28 Perhaps we can appeal to the idea of importance to save the intuition that our interests and goals have something to do with the truths that are valuable to us, by making the value more significant.29 Maybe some things are just important simpliciter, where that means there are truths whose importance is not reducible to what is important to so-​and-​so. Perhaps there are degrees of distance from the individual in the concept of importance, where some things are important to people in a certain role or in a certain society, and some are important to everybody. But I don’t think this move will help us. There are no important “truths” if a truth is a true proposition, since propositions are not important in themselves, and if truth is a property of propositions, truth is not what is important. Instead, it is the state of truly believing the proposition that is important. So when we say that some truths are important and others are not, what we really mean is that some true beliefs are important and others are not. And then to say this means no more than that the value of true beliefs varies. But we already knew that. What we want to know is what makes them vary. The idea of important true beliefs is just another way of posing the problem. It is not a solution to the problem. Another form of conditional value is instrumental value. It has been argued that satisfaction of our desires or reaching our goals is what reason aims at. True belief is surely a means to reaching our ends, most of which are nonepistemic. A good example of this position is that of Richard Foley, who argues that the epistemic goal of truth is instrumentally valuable as a means to other goals, 27 See Sosa, “For the Love of Truth?” 28 In addition to Sosa, Christopher Stephens uses our interests as a way to resolve the problem of the two values—​getting truth and avoiding falsehood. Goldman, “The Unity of the Epistemic Virtues,” identifies interest as a value that unifies the epistemic virtues. 29 This idea is briefly discussed by Riggs, “Understanding Virtue and the Virtue of Understanding.”

162  Epistemic Value whose value is left undetermined.30 Clearly, many true beliefs have instrumental value, but instrumental value is a form of conditional value, since the condition for the value of the means is the value of the end. If the end is disvaluable, so is the means.31 Conditional value is like a suspected terrorist: someone who is a suspected terrorist may not be a terrorist, and a belief that has conditional value may not have value. No form of conditional value possessed by true belief has the consequence that all true beliefs are valuable. There is still the possibility that true belief has intrinsic value. Perhaps every true belief has some intrinsic value simply in virtue of being true, whether or not it is good for us. That may well be the case, but I do not see that it will have the consequence that every true belief is valuable on balance, because intrinsicality is unrelated to degree. Intrinsicality pertains to the source of a belief, not to its amount. So even if every true belief has some intrinsic value, it is unlikely that the intrinsic value of every true belief is great enough to outweigh the undesirability or other negative value some true beliefs have from other sources. The inescapable conclusion is that not every true belief is good, all things considered. Whether we are considering admirability or desirability, or an intrinsic or extrinsic source of value, on balance it is likely that there are some true beliefs that have no value and probably some that have negative value. Now consider what follows for the value of knowing. In the first section I concluded that knowing is better than true believing only if it is true believing in which the agent gets credit for getting the truth. But if a given true belief is not valuable, how can the agent get credit for it if the truth in that case is not such that it is something someone should be given credit for? So long as some true beliefs are disvaluable, it makes just as much sense to say she is blamed for the truth as that she is praised for it. Assuming that every true belief is intrinsically good, it is good that the agent gets credited with the truth because of what is admirable about the agent’s epistemic behavior—​her intellectually virtuous motives and acts. But the truth credited to her may not be much of a prize. Consider also what happens to my proposal that knowledge is better than true belief because it is a case in which the truth is reached by intellectually virtuous motives and acts, the value of which can be traced back to the value of the motive of valuing truth. But if the truth in some cases is not valuable on balance, why should we be motivated to value it? Of course, we are assuming that true belief has some intrinsic value, and we can also assume that true belief is usually good for us, in which case it is reasonable to think that it is good to value it as 30 See Foley, “The Foundational Role of Epistemology in a General Theory of Rationality.” Foley seems to be content with allowing the value of the goal to be set by the agent. 31 A given means could serve more than one end. I would think that the value of a means in a particular case is determined by its end in that case. This is compatible with a means of that type having value when it serves some other end that is good.

Search for the Source  163 something with some intrinsic value, however slight, as well as something that is usually good for us. But if we are looking for a value that has the potential to be a significant good, we still have not found it. What is more, so long as some true beliefs are not desirable, the agent’s getting the truth can be credited to her even though the agent’s getting a desirable truth is not credited to her. And even when the truth is desirable, it may be a matter of luck that she got a desirable truth rather than an undesirable one. I think this leads us into a problem parallel to the Gettier problem. Gettier cases arise when there is an accidental connection between the admirability of a belief and its truth. Similarly, it is possible that there is an accidental connection between the admirability of a belief and its desirability. I think it is too strong to deny such cases the label of knowledge; nonetheless, they are not as good as they can be. They are not the best instances of knowledge, not the ones that are great goods. The solution to Gettier cases is to close the gap between the admirability of a belief and its truth. The solution to the new value problem is to close the gap between the admirability of a true belief and its desirability. To get a truly interesting value in knowledge, therefore, it should turn out that in some cases of knowing, not only is the truth of the belief credited to the agent but the desirability of the true belief is also credited to the agent. This is a general formula that can be filled out in different ways, just as the formula for the definition of knowledge can be filled out in different ways, depending upon the theorist’s conception of credit, and that in turn depends upon a general theory of agent evaluation. In section 9.3 I outline the contours of a virtue-​theoretic account of knowledge that satisfies the constraints identified in the first two sections of the chapter.

9.3  Knowledge, Motives, and Eudaimonia I have claimed that good motives add value to the acts they motivate, and this includes epistemic acts. Motives are complex, and I have not investigated them very far in this chapter, but a feature of motives that is relevant to our present concern is that they themselves are often motivated by higher-​order motives. Higher-​order motives are important because they keep our motivational structure compact and aid us in making first-​order motives consistent. If good motives can confer value on the acts they motivate, it follows that higher-​order motives can confer value on the lower-​order motives they motivate the agent to acquire. As we are looking for an additional source of value in some cases of knowledge, it is reasonable to look at the source of the value of the motive of true believing in the particular cases of knowing that are more valuable than ordinary knowing. We have already seen at least two ways in which the valuing of truth in particular cases is required by other things we value. That is, we have a motive to have

164  Epistemic Value the motive for truth because of other good motives. First, if something of moral importance is at stake when we perform an act and that act depends upon the truth of a certain belief, then it is morally important that the belief be true. The motive for true belief in such cases is motivated by the higher-​order motive to be moral or to live a good life. Second, since true belief is a means to most practical ends, the motive to value truth in some domain is motivated by the motive of valuing those ends, which is in turn motivated by the desire to have a good life. I propose that the higher-​order motive to have a good life includes the motive to have certain other motives, including the motive to value truth in certain domains. The higher-​order motive motivates the agent to have the motives that are constituents of the moral and intellectual virtues, and in this way it connects the moral and intellectual virtues together. If knowledge is true belief credited to the agent because of its place in her motivational structure, it gets value not only from the truth motive but also from the higher-​order motive that motivates the agent to value truth in some domain or on some occasion. And that motive has nothing to do with epistemic value in particular; it is a component of the motive to live a good life. My proposal, then, is this. An epistemic agent gets credit for getting a true belief when she arrives at a true belief because of her virtuous intellectual acts motivated by a love of truth. She gets credit for getting a desirable true belief when she arrives at a desirable true belief because of acts motivated by love of true beliefs that are components of a good life. The motive for desirable true beliefs is not the full explanation for the agent’s getting credit for acquiring a desirable true belief, for the same reason that the motive for true belief is not the full explanation for the agent’s getting credit for acquiring a true belief, but my position is that motives are primary causes of the other valuable features of cognitive activity. When the agent succeeds in getting a desirable true belief because of her admirable intellectual motives, there is a nonaccidental connection between the admirability of a belief and its desirability. That connection avoids the parallel to Gettier problems that I mentioned above, and it results in some instances of knowledge being a great good. Let me review the various ways a belief can be good. (1) All true beliefs probably have some intrinsic value simply in virtue of being true whether or not they are good for us. When the truth is credited to the agent, the belief is also admirable. That is knowledge. (2) Some true beliefs are good for us; they are desirable. They can be desirable whether or not they are admirable. But some true beliefs are undesirable. It is also possible that some false beliefs are desirable, but I have not discussed those cases in this chapter.

Search for the Source  165 (3) Admirable beliefs are those that are virtuous. Admirable beliefs can be false. (4) Some true beliefs are both desirable and admirable. The most interesting cases are those in which there is a connection between their admirability and their desirability. A  belief is admirable, and given its admirability, there is no accident that the agent has a desirable true belief. These are the most highly valuable instances of knowledge. The problems we have encountered with the value of true belief indicate, I think, that the standard approach to identifying the value of knowledge is the wrong way round. The issue should be not what is added to true belief to make it valuable enough to be knowledge but what is added to virtuous believing to make it knowledge. And, of course, the answer to that question is obvious: It must be true. When we approach the value problem in this way, the harder question is answered first and the easier one second. That is not the usual order, but I think it is the right one. If we begin in the usual way, by starting with true belief, we are starting with something that may have no value of any kind, neither admirability nor desirability. Furthermore, by starting with the value of virtuous believing we can explain why even false virtuously motivated belief is admirable. Let me conclude by briefly considering what makes virtue in general a good thing. Suppose that Aristotle is right in thinking of virtuous acts as components of eudaimonia, a life of flourishing. If I am also right that believing is a form of acting, it follows that virtuous believings are components of eudaimonia. Eudaimonia is a challenging concept to elucidate for many reasons, but one aspect that contemporary commentators find particularly troublesome is Aristotle’s apparent idea that eudaimonia fuses the admirable with the desirable. Nobody disputes the conception of eudaimonia as a desirable life; in fact, eudaimonia is generally defined as a desirable life. It then has to be argued that virtuous—​that is, admirable—​activity is a component of the desirable life. And that, of course, is hotly disputed. The same problem arises over the value of knowing. Nobody is likely to dispute the claim that some true beliefs are desirable. What can be disputed is whether beliefs that are intellectually virtuous, either in the way I have described or in some other, are also components of a desirable life. The question Why should we want to have admirable beliefs? is really no different from the question Why should we want to do admirable acts? If virtuous acts are desirable, it is because it is more desirable to act in an admirable way. Similarly, if knowing a proposition is more desirable than truly believing it, the reason is because it is more desirable to believe in an admirable way. But I can see no way to defend that without a general account of eudaimonia, or a good life. That means that the debates currently going on in virtue ethics on the relation between virtuous

166  Epistemic Value activity and the good life are relevant to an understanding of an intellectually good life as well as to an understanding of a life that is good simpliciter.

9.4  Conclusion The question What is knowledge? is not independent of the question Why do we value knowledge? For those who consider the former question prior, compare the pair of questions What is knowledge? and Can we get it? It is common for anti-​skeptic naturalistic epistemologists to say that whatever knowledge is, it has to be defined as something we have. We are not interested in a nonexistent phenomenon. I say that knowledge has to be defined as something we value. We are not interested in a phenomenon with little or no value. It is possible that no phenomenon roughly coinciding with what has traditionally been called knowledge has the value I have been looking for in this chapter. If so, we would have to move to an Error theory like that of J. L. Mackie in ethics. But I do not yet see that this will be necessary, since it is possible to give an account of knowledge that both satisfies the usual contemporary constraints and identifies a phenomenon with interesting value. I also think we should conclude that if knowledge is a state worthy of the sustained attention it has received throughout the history of philosophy, it is because its value goes well beyond the epistemic value of truth and what conduces to true belief. Knowledge is important because it is intimately connected to moral value and the wider values of a good life. It is very unlikely that epistemic value in any interesting sense is autonomous.

References Benson, Hugh. Socratic Wisdom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. BonJour, Laurence. The Structure of Empirical Knowledge. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1985. Clifford, W.K. “The Ethics of Belief,” Contemporary Review, 1877; reprinted in William K.  Clifford, Lectures and Essays, ed. Leslie Stephen and Frederick Pollock (London: Macmillan and Co., 1886). DePaul, Michael. Balance and Refinement. New York: Routledge, 1993. DePaul, Michael. “Value Monism in Epistemology.” In Knowledge, Truth, and Duty, edited by Matthias Steup. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Foley, Richard. “The Foundational Role of Epistemology in a General Theory of Rationality.” In Virtue Epistemology: Essays on Epistemic Virtue and Responsibility, edited by Abrol Fairweather and Linda Zagzebski. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Goldman, Alvin. “The Unity of the Epistemic Virtues.” In Virtue Epistemology: Essays on Epistemic Virtue and Responsibility, edited by Abrol Fairweather and Linda Zagzebski. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Search for the Source  167 Greco, John. “Agent Reliabilism.” Philosophical Perspectives 13 (1999): 273–​96. Greco, John. “Knowledge as Credit for True Belief.” In Intellectual Virtue:  Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology, edited by Michael DePaul and Linda Zagzebski. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Montmarquet, James. Epistemic Virtue and Doxastic Responsibility. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1993. Riggs, Wayne. “What Are the ‘Chances’ of Being Justified?” Monist 81 (1998): 452–​72. Riggs, Wayne. “Reliability and the Value of Knowledge.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64, no. 1 (January 2002): 79–​96. Riggs, Wayne. Understanding Virtue and the Virtue of Understanding.” In Intellectual Virtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology, edited by Michael DePaul and Linda Zagzebski. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Sartwell, Crispin. “Knowledge Is Merely True Belief.” American Philosophical Quarterly 28 (1992): 157–​65. Sosa, Ernest. “For the Love of Truth?” In Virtue Epistemology: Essays on Epistemic Virtue and Responsibility, edited by Abrol Fairweather and Linda Zagzebski. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Sosa, Ernest. “The Place of Truth in Epistemology.” In Intellectual Virtue:  Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology, edited by Michael DePaul and Linda Zagzebski. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Zagzebski, Linda. Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Zagzebski, Linda. “From Reliabilism to Virtue Epistemology.” In Knowledge, Belief, and Character, edited by Guy Axtell. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. Zagzebski, Linda. “Must Knowers Be Agents?” In Virtue Epistemology:  Essays on Epistemic Virtue and Responsibility, edited by Abrol Fairweather and Linda Zagzebski. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001a. Zagzebski, Linda. “Recovering Understanding.” In Knowledge, Truth, and Obligation, edited by Matthias Steup. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001b. Zagzebski, Linda.“Intellectual Motivation and the Good of Truth.” In Intellectual Virtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology, edited by Michael DePaul and Linda Zagzebski. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Zagzebski, Linda. “Epistemic Value Monism.” In Ernest Sosa And His Critics, edited by John Greco. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2004: 190–​198.

10

Intellectual Motivation and the Good of Truth* 10.1  Introduction According to the medieval doctrine of the Transcendentals there is a fundamental unity between the good and the true. We still think of truth as good, but we use the concept of truth differently than our predecessors did. To us, truth is not a property of a belief. At best, it is a property of the object of belief—​a proposition. In a deflationary theory, truth does not even get the status of a property at all. Either way, truth is not a form of good. A true proposition is not like a good person or a good state of affairs. It is not even like a good thief since a true proposition is not better as a proposition than a false one. So when we speak of the good of true belief, we do not mean that truth is a good property for something to have. What we mean is that the relation that obtains between the believer and the proposition believed in a case of true belief is a good one. We can put the point another way without mentioning truth at all: roughly, what is good about a true belief is that the mind fits reality. Slightly less roughly, the agent’s propositional representation of reality is accurate. Not all mental representations are propositional in form and not all representations aim to be accurate. Believing aims at accurately representing some part of reality propositionally.1 When a belief is true it is accurate.2 To the medieval philosophers truth was identified as the property a judgment has when it is accurate; it is not a property of a proposition. So if accuracy in one’s intentional aim is a form of good, they were right to speak of truth as a good. We continue to speak of the value of truth because of this history, but even though we are right to think that beliefs are good when they have true objects, the goodness of a true belief is not in the truth. The thing we think is * The chapter is reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. 1 Not every propositional representation is a belief because not every such representation has the aim of representing reality accurately. Wishes, hopes, and fears are in this category. Wishes aim at making reality correspond to the propositional content of the wish. In contrast, beliefs aim at making their propositional content correspond to reality. (If I am right about this, corresponding is not a symmetrical relation. Correspondence has a direction.) This difference in the aim of these intentional states may explain why it is problematic to speak of an accurate wish even when you get what you wish for. 2 Compare David Velleman's claim that a belief is accepting something as true with the aim of getting truth in Velleman, The Possibility of Practical Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

Epistemic Values. Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197529171.001.0001.

Intellectual Motivation  169 good—​the state of belief—​is not true. The thing that is true—​the proposition—​is not good. But as long as we are clear about this distinction, I doubt that there is anything wrong with speaking about the good of truth. We have made another change in traditional terminology that hopefully does not unduly complicate the issue of the value of true belief. Our category of belief is broader than the medieval category of judgment. When we speak of true beliefs we usually include dispositional states as well as judgments, where a judgment is a mental act but a belief may not be. True beliefs include dispositions to have accurate propositional representations, where being accurate is the aim of the representation. A true belief is therefore good because it is successful in its representational aim or is a disposition to be successful. One part of the world we represent is ourselves representing the world. We represent ourselves representing accurately or inaccurately. We are therefore able to ask about the truth of our beliefs at the second-​order level while simultaneously believing them at the first. Beliefs aim at truth just because they are beliefs, but our ability to represent ourselves having false beliefs makes it possible for us to raise the question of whether our beliefs are true and hence good. We would not have an idea of good and bad believing if we did not have the second order capacity to represent ourselves representing and to think that we could do it accurately or inaccurately. Nor would we have the idea of knowledge, which is the form of good believing that has most captivated the imaginations of Western philosophers since Plato. Nor would there be an issue of responsibility for beliefs which, like responsibility for acts, requires the ability to examine our beliefs as objects. To have a belief is to think it is true; otherwise it would not be a belief. But even though we think every one of our beliefs is true, it can still be the case that we should not have thought so and we are quite capable of wondering if we should think so even while thinking so. We wouldn’t be responsible for our beliefs if we couldn’t wonder in this way. The situation is similar but not identical in the evaluation of our acts. Aquinas thought that we always do an act “under the aspect of good.”3 But thinking that our acts are good does not in itself relieve us of responsibility if they are not good. We are responsible for our acts because we can reflect upon them. Similarly, when we have a belief we ipso facto think the belief is true, but it does not follow that we have no responsibility for believing what is true. Even while having a belief and thereby thinking it is true, we can, and sometimes should, ask ourselves whether it is true. Our responsibility for that portion of our cognitive activity that leads to belief arises out of the fact that we have this ability. 3 ST I–​II, q. 19, a. 1. The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Benzinger Brothers, 1947.

170  Epistemic Value Our responsibility for our belief states suggests that there is a parallel between beliefs and acts. The degree to which beliefs are acts is an important issue in the philosophy of the mind and I do not insist that beliefs are literally acts. Nonetheless, I  think it aids our understanding of the evaluative status of beliefs to see them as at least analogous to acts. As I mentioned, we tend to include dispositions in the category of beliefs, in which case beliefs ought to be considered acts and dispositions to perform acts of a cognitive nature. The focus of this chapter is on the evaluation of such acts and the cognitive activity that generates them. In particular, I am interested in the kind of evaluation that can function as useful advice in the way we conduct ourselves cognitively.4 Since cognitive acts of this kind aim at true belief and since true belief is good, the good of true belief is bound to play a significant role in the evaluation of cognitive acts. Similarly, the production of good states of affairs is the aim of much of our overt activity. But since there are many ways in which the good of acts is related to the good of the outcomes of acts, there are also many ways in which the good of acts of belief can be related to the good of true belief. In the next four sections I will discuss four ways in which the value of cognitive acts can be related to the value of true belief. I will raise the issue of knowledge briefly when we get to section 10.6, but it is not the primary focus of this chapter.

10.2 Consequentialist Value One way our cognitive activity could be evaluated is in terms of its consequences. We could take accuracy of propositional representations, or to return to the terminology of truth, true belief to be the basic epistemic good and false belief the basic epistemic bad. We could then say that cognitive activity is good just in case it is successful in its aim of reaching truth and avoiding falsehood. This is parallel to the evaluation of acts in consequentialist moral theories—​in particular, hedonistic utilitarianism. Mill acknowledges that hedonist value is more complex than it appears, however, because pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain are different strategies. Mill does not find this problematic, but concludes that there are two kinds of happy lives:

4 This raises the issue of cognitive control. It might be that we are only responsible for our cognitive activity to the extent to which we can control it. If so, this leads to my requirement that the kind of cognitive evaluation relevant to our responsibility to have true beliefs is something we can use in making ourselves better cognizers. I will leave aside the control issue for this chapter, however, relying on the intuition that if we are responsible for our cognitive conduct, then there must be a kind of evaluation of it that we can use in such conduct. That is the sort of evaluation that interests me in the next four sections of this chapter.

Intellectual Motivation  171 The main constituents of a satisfied life appear to be two, either of which is often found sufficient for the purpose: tranquillity and excitement. With much tranquillity, many find that they can be content with very little pleasure: with much excitement, many can reconcile themselves to a considerable quantity of pain. 5

There is an epistemic parallel to Mill’s tranquil life and exciting life, as William James pointed out.6 A person who successfully avoids false beliefs may be content with few true beliefs, whereas with many true beliefs she may be able to reconcile herself to a number of false ones. Simple reliabilism is epistemic consequentialism. Reliabilists say we want to maximize the ratio of true to false beliefs, but we also want lots of the former. One problem with this approach is that it is not at all obvious how we are to weigh the two values against each other. Is 85 percent accuracy with many beliefs better or worse than 87 percent accuracy with somewhat fewer beliefs? We could, I suppose, say that a preference for safety from falsehood over acquiring truth is just a matter of personal taste and epistemic temperament. Perhaps, like Mill, we could just agree that it doesn’t matter. If Mill is right that there are two kinds of happy lives, perhaps there are two kinds of epistemically happy lives too—​two ways of being epistemically good. Could we get away with the epistemic position parallel to Mill’s—​that quantity and a high accuracy ratio are both ways of being epistemically good, and favoring one over the other is up to the individual? It seems to me that in spite of any virtues that position may have in ethics, its epistemic parallel makes epistemic value too much a matter of personal preference. Any set of beliefs that either includes a lot of true beliefs or has a “high” ratio of true to false beliefs would count as good, and we would be forced to permit an enormous range of variation in recognition of the two values. Epistemologists rarely have been so tolerant. Assuming we are right to find this unacceptable, we need a procedure to adjudicate the two. I will leave that question for others to investigate. In spite of these difficulties, I think it is tendentious to deny that consequentialist value is a value. The real issue is whether it is the most important or the most interesting value and, as in debates over ethical consequentialism, we need to look at cases of epistemic value conflict to test that. I will mention two. First, there is the problem that on the consequentialist/​reliabilist approach no substantive activity is automatically evaluated positively, whether it be weighing evidence, following established logical procedures, or trusting that most 5 John. S. Mill, Utilitarianism. Edited by O. Piest (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957). 6 William James, “The Will to Believe,” in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. Edited by F. Burkhardt, F. Bowers and I. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979): 70–96.

172  Epistemic Value authorities in one’s epistemic community are reliable until proven otherwise. It is an empirical question whether any of these activities leads to truth and away from falsehood or furthers the goals of inquiry. None of these behaviors is epistemically valuable unless it is reliable, and it is valuable only because it is reliable. (Elsewhere I call this the alignment problem.)7 Some utilitarians worry about the parallel problem in ethics and some do not. Is it good to be a kind and generous person? Shouldn’t we know that it is in advance of looking at the evidence for the consequences of such behavior? But a committed utilitarian will be unmoved by this difficulty. One can always remain a consistent utilitarian if one is willing to make some adjustments—​sometimes rather serious—​in prior intuitions about what is good and bad behavior, and it is possible to be a consistent reliabilist in the same way. Some people are willing to let it be an open question whether kind behavior is a good thing. And for the same reason, they can let it be an open question whether it is a good thing to weigh evidence, or be intellectually fair, impartial, thorough, and careful. A related problem is that what happens and what we try to make happen can come apart on the consequentialist approach. A  conscious aim for the good does not necessarily have good consequences; in fact, it has sometimes been suggested that better consequences result from a different aim. As Sidgwick says, “Happiness is likely to be better attained if the extent to which we set ourselves consciously to aim at it be carefully restricted.”8 This is another test of how consequentialist a theorist really is. We can evaluate a person’s intentions either by the value of their consequences, or by the value of the ends at which she aims. Suppose the epistemic position parallel to Sidgwick’s is right—​that we are more likely to get true beliefs if we do not consciously aim at truth. What if aiming at falsehood is more truth‐conducive than aiming at truth? Here is another way in which maintaining consequentialism consistently comes with a price. If we cannot assume in advance a connection between aiming for truth and getting truth, then reliabilism does not give us any epistemic advice, and so reliabilism does not help us with the kind of evaluation pertinent to our responsibility to have true beliefs whether or not it is a good theory of knowledge. As long as it is an open question whether anything in particular is reliable, the advice can’t be the advice to be reliable. It is to do what we independently find out is reliable. So if the reliabilist approach is to be helpful, we need a reason to think there is a connection between reliability and trying to get the truth. Hopefully, there is such a connection, as John Greco has argued, 9 but then the latter is doing the work. This leads us away from consequentialism to another 7 Zagzebski, “Phronesis and Christian Belief,” in The Rationality of Theism. Edited by G. Brüntrup (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998): 177–94 8 Henry Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics (New York: Dover Publishing, 1966): 405. 9 John Greco, “Internalism and Epistemically Responsible Belief,” Synthese, 85 (1990): 245–77.

Intellectual Motivation  173 way in which the value of cognitive activity can be related to true belief: the teleological approach.

10.3  Teleological Value 1: Natural Ends Instead of evaluating our cognitive activity by the extent to which true belief is a consequence, we could evaluate it in terms of whether true belief is its end. True belief can be a teleological value rather than a consequentialist one. That in turn could mean either a natural end or an intentional end—​that is, what we move toward by nature, or what we consciously aim at. An end in either sense and a consequence are not the same thing. Let us start with the first sense of “end”—​a natural end rather than an intentional aim. Could the value of true belief contribute to the value of cognitive activity as the natural end of that activity? Perhaps we can tell an Aristotelian story supporting this approach. (I do not mean a story from Aristotelian epistemology; I mean Aristotelian ethics.) The shortest version of the story would be something like this: having true beliefs is part of one’s natural end, living a life of eudaimonia. Good cognitive activity contributes to the natural end of human life in the same way as good moral activity. Now I have no interest in arguing that this approach won’t work. In fact, I hope it does. In spite of the problems with natural teleology, it is hard to deny the sensibleness of the basic value idea of natural teleology, namely, that some things are good for us, and they’re good for us just because we are the kinds of beings that we are and the world is the way it is. We have already seen that truth is the intentional object of the state of belief and there is a sense in which we call that end good; it is a natural good in that it is the aim of belief. Of course, that is not sufficient to show that true belief is good for us. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to think that true beliefs are (in general) good for us. If so, it seems reasonable to evaluate cognitive activity according to how well it gets us what is good for us: true belief. Such activity would then be good for us in a derivative sense—​like nutritious food and sufficient sleep. But this threatens to collapse into the first position, the consequentialist one. Is the value of cognitive activity anything over and above its tendency to have a good consequence, something that is good for us in a nonderivative sense? Presumably, Aristotle thought that moral and intellectual virtues are constituents of eudaimonia, and since eudaimonia is an active state, it includes components of morally and intellectually virtuous acts. So acts of intellectually virtuous true belief may be components of eudaimonia in roughly the same way that morally virtuous and successful acts are components of eudaimonia. But this raises questions about the need for the success component. Eudaimonia no doubt

174  Epistemic Value includes lots of virtuous acts, both moral and intellectual, but there is no reason to think it is limited to virtuous acts that are successful in their ends—​truth in the case of believing, many other ends in the case of moral acts. Do acts of intellectually virtuous true believing have a special place in a life of eudaimonia? The intellectually virtuous contemplation of truth does seem to be the central part of the good life as Aristotle describes it in Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics, but since the contemporary model of cognitive activity is inquiry rather than contemplation, this approach would probably have to be modified in many ways to fit it comfortably into contemporary discourse. I think, then, that this route has promise, but it is complicated. Let me move on.

10.4  Teleological Value 2: Intentional Ends The second sense in which true belief can be an end of cognitive activity is as an intentional aim. If true belief is good, whether good as a final end or as a means to some other good, cognitive activity might derive value from being intentionally aimed at true belief. This is different from the consequentialist approach for the same reason that evaluating an act according to whether it aims at utility is different from evaluating an act according to whether it leads to utility. It differs from the first teleological approach in that it does not appeal to natural ends or what is good for us. Note that on this approach true belief can either be instrumentally good or good as a final end. There is reason to think that we do evaluate positively acts that intentionally aim at goods, including the good of true belief. We commend people who make others happy, and we also commend people who try to make others happy. We praise even more the people who do both. And we praise the most people who make others happy in part because they try to do so. It is the same with the value of true belief. We commend people who have true beliefs, and we also commend people who try to have true beliefs. We praise even more people who do both, those who both have true beliefs and try to do so. Most of all we praise people who not only have true beliefs and try to do so, but who have true beliefs in part because they try to do so. This is something I’ve argued before.10 Ernest Sosa has recently made some critical comments about aiming for the truth “as such.”11 Aiming for the truth as such is not the same as aiming at the truth for its own sake (as a final end), and I think he is right about that. Sosa explains the distinction as follows. Someone could want the truth as such even though she wants it as a means to some other end. For example, Sosa says he may 10 Zagzebski Virtues of the Mind, p. II, sec. 6. 11 Ernest Sosa, “For the Love of Truth?” in Virtue Epistemology: Essays on Epistemic Virtue and Responsibility. Edited by A. Fairweather and L. Zagzebski (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Intellectual Motivation  175 want to open a door as such even though he wants to open it in order to enter a certain room. To do that he may want a key with a certain shape, but he does not want a key with that shape as such. What he wants as such is to open that door. Similarly, he may want to know the number of the winning lottery ticket as such even though knowing that is not something he wants for its own sake, but rather as a means to the end of winning the big money. Now I find Sosa’s terminology confusing because he takes himself to be objecting to the idea that getting truth should be an epistemic motive, whereas it seems to me that the actual object of his criticism is the view that getting true belief should be an intentional aim. I will therefore take Sosa’s objections to apply to the approach of this section and will address the value of motives in section 10.5. Could cognitive acts get value from aiming at truth as such? One way the aim of truth could govern our belief‐forming activities would be that we resolve to act on a maxim to believe p just in case p is true. But Sosa objects that if we are in a position to apply the maxim, then we already believe p. Such a maxim is useless. We might instead try to adopt a maxim to use practices that are truth‐conducive, but that gets us into a vicious regress because we are led into a hierarchy of practices each of which is adopted because of a prior belief that propositions of sort F are likely to be true. So if it makes sense intentionally to aim at true beliefs in one’s cognitive activity, it cannot be by adopting one of these maxims. I agree with Sosa about that. Nonetheless, as we saw in the first section, our ability to reflect about the truth of our beliefs at the second-​order level makes it possible for us to consider the issue of whether our beliefs are true even while believing them. I suggested that one of the reasons we ought to reflect about our beliefs is that we have responsibility for them and for the cognitive activity that leads to them. There are many kinds of responsibility and they have different functions in our ethical practices, but one of the ways in which responsibility for our beliefs arises is from our responsibility to others to be accurate informants. Given the plausible assumption that human beings are naturally garrulous and that we often reveal our beliefs involuntarily, we cannot be accurate informants unless we have mostly true beliefs. Hence, we have a responsibility to others to have accurate beliefs. Assuming that the kind of evaluation relevant to our responsibility for our beliefs is something we can take as advice, something we can act upon, it follows that there must be something we are able to do consciously, i.e., advice we can follow, to satisfy our responsibility to others to have true beliefs. Clearly, the advice “Have true beliefs” is no advice at all, but the advice “Try to have true beliefs” is something many of us think we can follow and, vague as it is, it captures the essence of our epistemic responsibility to others. But since Sosa is right that we cannot do that by

176  Epistemic Value following the practical syllogisms he describes, we must be able to do it in some other way. 12 Sosa proposes a case that we can use to test the suggestion of this section that cognitive activity gets extra value from having truth as an intentional end. He asks us to consider his belief that his parents cared for him. It is possible that his desire that the belief be true disposes him to discount or ignore evidence that his parents did not care for him. But since there is no such evidence, his nonvirtuous disposition is never engaged. He believes that they cared for him because he has plenty of evidence that they did. Sosa wants to say two things about this case: (1) his belief has epistemic value, even the kind that gives him knowledge (although knowledge is not my topic in this section); (2) he does not believe in a way that aims at truth as such since he might still have believed his statement had it been false. But it seems to me that Sosa’s description of the case is not one in which he does not believe with the aim of getting truth as such; rather, it is a case that shows that aiming to get truth and aiming to avoid falsehood are not the same thing, as James showed us. Let me illustrate with a different example. Here’s what it would be like not to aim at truth as such: suppose I need to buy a new bathroom scale and I announce to my friends that I want to buy a scale that says I have lost 5 pounds. Why do they laugh? Because if we assume that it is reasonable for me to want to lose 5 pounds, then I should want a scale that indicates I have lost the weight because I have lost the weight. But if I simply want a scale that says I have lost 5 pounds, I do not want the truth of the belief as such. I want the pleasure of the belief rather than the truth of the matter, and that is silly. But if the scale indicates I have lost the weight, the belief that I have is probably true, assuming most new scales are reasonably accurate, so I probably wouldn’t be able to get the belief unless it was true. But I do not want the truth as such because I want a true belief only insofar as such a belief is one I enjoy having. I don’t really care about accuracy. What I care about is the enjoyment of having the belief. I want the belief qua enjoyable, not qua true. This is like Sosa’s example of wanting a key with a certain shape as one that opens a certain door. He wants the key qua key that opens that door, not qua key with the shape that it has. He doesn’t really care that the key has that shape, and I don’t really care that my belief is true. But a key with that shape is the one he wants (one that opens the door), and a true belief is the one I want (one I enjoy having). Now let us return to Sosa’s belief that his parents loved him. As he describes the case, it seems to me that he does care if it’s true, and he does aim at having a 12 Notice that if we think of cognitive evaluation as arising primarily from our responsibility to others, that tends to make our responsibility not to have false beliefs stronger than our responsibility to have true beliefs. I would conjecture that this is related to the fact that we have a greater responsibility not to harm others than to do them good. Social responsibility therefore favors a conservative approach. This is probably a mistake, but it is an understandable one.

Intellectual Motivation  177 true belief as such. It’s not that he wants to enjoy having the belief. But he is much more motivated to believe accurately if the belief is true than if it’s false. And the same situation could apply to my believing that I’ve lost 5 pounds. Let’s suppose now that I do want to know if I’ve lost 5 pounds—​that is, if I’ve lost the weight, I want to know it. But maybe I do not want to know if I have not lost weight, and I especially do not want to know if I have gained 5 pounds instead. But that does not mean that if I want to know the truth when I’ve lost 5 pounds I am not motivated by the aim of getting that true belief as such. After all, I do not want to miss the fact that I’ve lost 5 pounds if I have, and I want that as such. It is like wanting there to be a God, and wanting not to miss finding out if there is one, but being much less motivated to find out if there isn’t one. So it seems to me that Sosa and I are aiming to get at the truth as such in these cases, even though we’re much less motivated to get at the truth as such if the negations of our beliefs are true instead. Now we may be epistemically criticizable, of course, but I don’t see that either of us can be criticized on the grounds that we are not aiming at truth as such. 13 The moral is that valuing truly believing some proposition p as such is compatible with not putting equal value on truly believing not p should not p be true instead. And it is compatible with not putting equal disvalue on falsely believing p. So I may not disvalue falsehood to the same extent that I value truth about some proposition, but James already alerted us to that possibility. It is rather common to value believing truths about matters of concern to us more than believing their negations should the negations be true, but that does not mean that we do not aim at the truth as such. It just means that we do not value the truth as such and disvalue falsehood as such across the board. Very little of what we value is across the board anyway. So I can aim for truth as such in my belief formation, although Sosa is right that we cannot form our beliefs as the result of a practical syllogism the major premise of which is either “Believe what is true” or “Adopt belief‐forming practices that are truth‐conducive.” It is highly doubtful that I follow any such syllogism, even implicitly, but this should not be too surprising when we consider that many things at which we aim do not typically appear as a major premise in a practical syllogism, for example, our own happiness. Like true belief, happiness is an aim we have for ourselves. But for the most part, I doubt that we follow a practical syllogism: (1) Be happy. (2) X leads to happiness. (3) Do X. I seriously doubt that we use any such syllogism for most of what we do, even implicitly. But that does not 13 Sosa's footnote on this starts out right and then goes into an example that does not apply to our case here. He construes the desire that if p, I believe p as the desire that it not be the case that p and I don't believe p. His example is one where that is satisfied because I don't want p to be true. But the bathroom scale case is not like that. I want p to be true and I want to make sure that if it is, I take notice.

178  Epistemic Value mean that we do not have the intentional end of being happy. More important, valuing happiness and truth typically operate in our psychology not as ends in any sense, but as motives. Let us turn, then, to the fourth way in which the value of true belief can contribute to the value of cognitive activity—​as a motive.

10.5  The Value of Motives Motives and ends are not the same thing. A motive is not the same thing as the intention to bring about a certain end. More than one motive can have the same end and the same motive can aim at different ends. For example, the end of giving someone a gift could be variously motivated by love, pity, or gratitude. And a motive such as love can cause an agent to aim at different ends, even at the same time. I take a motive to be a certain kind of psychic state in the agent that causes her to act and which can explain or make intelligible the acts it motivates. An end, in the sense discussed in section 10.4, is a state of affairs the agent tries to bring about through her act. A desire or intention to bring about an end is a psychic state, and these states are commonly associated with particular motives, but neither one is identical with a motive; a motive is not even the same kind of state as either a desire or an intention to bring about a certain end. Nonetheless, knowing that an agent aims at a certain end is often sufficient to identify her motive. So when we say that an agent’s motive for her searching behavior is to find her keys, we understand the typical motivational state associated with the end of finding one’s keys, even though there is more in the motive than a state directed toward that end. In my view motives are emotional states that move us because they are ways of representing the world affectively. However, my position on the nature of emotion and the way it motivates us is not important for my points in this chapter. I want to focus on the way motives can add to the value of the acts they motivate. The motives I will use for illustration are noncontroversial examples of motives. These are the emotions of compassion and love. Neither is a determinate emotion, but they have many forms arising from the nature of their intentional objects. The love of true belief differs significantly from other forms of love and it is no part of my project to distinguish love of truth from, say, appreciation of truth. My point in this section depends only on the position that love of true belief is a psychic state that includes the valuing of true belief, and that it can motivate cognitive activity. For comparison I will discuss compassion, which is a disvaluing of the suffering of another person, and which also can motivate action. For brevity I will sometimes speak of the love of truth, but given my remarks at the beginning of this chapter, I will take that to mean love of true belief since truth itself is not a good.

Intellectual Motivation  179 What kind of value does the love of true belief have? Presumably it at least has extrinsic value derived from the value of true belief. This might be due to a general principle that love of something valuable is itself valuable. Love of truth might also be good for us. Robert Adams has recently argued that what is good for a person is a life characterized by enjoyment of the excellent.14 Presumably, he also thinks it is good for us to act in ways motivated by enjoyment of the excellent. If we applied Adams’s approach to cognitive activity we could say something like this: (1) True belief is an excellence. (2) It is good for us to appreciate true belief. (3) Cognitive activity motivated by such an appreciation is good for us. My own preference is for a nonteleological approach, but I do not deny that it is good for us to be motivated by love of truth, nor do I deny that love of truth gets some of its value from the value of true belief. I also think love of truth has intrinsic value, by which I mean value that is not derived from the value of anything else. But what I am particularly interested in here is whether the love of truth has a kind of value that is capable of conferring additional value on the acts it motivates, and I want to argue that it does. Whether it can do that without being intrinsically valuable is an issue in the metaphysics of value that I will discuss only briefly in this chapter. One way to defend the position that love of truth can confer value on the acts it motivates without going very far into the metaphysics of value is by example. Let me use an analogy between the value of cognitive acts motivated by love of truth and the value of overt acts motivated by compassion. Apart from what compassion motivates a person to do and the ends it aims to accomplish, and apart from the consequences of acting on it, compassion is a good state because it is an accurate emotional fit with its intentional object, a suffering person. It is a disvaluing or aversion to the suffering of others. Acts motivated by compassion are better than acts arising from just any reliable process or faculty for relieving suffering. For example, suppose suffering persons were helped just by being around other people and hearing them talk, that the sound of the human voice eased their pain. And suppose also that people were not aware of that connection. Talking when around a suffering person would have consequential value, but we would not evaluate it the same way we would evaluate an act with the same consequence that is motivated by compassion. An act motivated by compassion is better than an act that merely has the consequence that the suffering of another is relieved. An act motivated by compassion is also better than an act that aims at alleviating suffering but without the motive of compassion. Suppose I am the sort of person who gets nauseated at the sight of a person suffering, so I aim to eliminate

14 Robert Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999): 93. Adams's view on excellence seems to blur the distinction between intrinsic goods and final goods. He says an excellence is a non‐ instrumental good, good as an end, but he also says an excellence is a type of intrinsic good: 14.

180  Epistemic Value their suffering. I do not really disvalue their suffering as such; I just don’t like to be nauseated. I would think that an act with such a motive is not as laudable as an act motivated by compassion. The conclusion is that, other things being equal, an act motivated by compassion is more valuable than an act that has the aim of compassion but without the motive, and is more valuable than an act that has the consequence at which compassion aims but without either the motive or the aim. Compassion is a disvaluing or aversion to the suffering of others. The most straightforward epistemic parallel is an aversion to false beliefs. I maintain that such an aversion is a good thing quite apart from the fact that it motivates a person to act cognitively in ways that lead away from false beliefs. It is better for the same reason that compassion is better than the propensity to do something that happens to relieve suffering. This makes cognitive acts motivated by an aversion to falsehood better than those that arise from processes that lead away from falsehood but without such a motive. Furthermore, cognitive acts motivated by an aversion to falsehood are better than those acts that aim to avoid falsehood, not because the agent actually disvalues false beliefs as such, but for some other reason. Maybe, as in the compassion case, I get nauseated every time I have a false belief and, realizing the connection, I aim to shun false beliefs. More realistically, I might aim to avoid false beliefs because false beliefs give me a bad reputation. In these cases I would not be motivated by an aversion to false belief as such. I suggest that acts motivated by an aversion to a bad reputation are not as good as acts motivated by an aversion to falsehood as such. It follows that acts motivated by compassion or the aversion to false belief confer value on the acts they motivate in addition to any other value the acts have because of their ends or consequences. The aversion to falsehood and the aversion to human suffering are negative motives, but positive motives can also confer value on the acts they motivate, in particular love. I propose that love of truth is a motive that confers value on acts of belief in addition to any other value such acts might have. Here we might pause for a moment to take a closer look at the motives of love of truth and aversion to falsehood because I have sometimes heard it said that the motive for truth is so natural and automatic that it is trivially satisfied. We have already seen one reason why that cannot be the case—​the aim to get truth and the aim to avoid falsehood are two different aims, and it is unlikely that they arise from the same motive. A love of truth is not the same as a dislike of falsehood any more than a love of comfort is the same as a dislike of discomfort. We will return to the problem of a potential clash of epistemic motives. But first I want to say that neither one of these motives is trivially satisfied. To think so does not do justice to the commonality of wishful thinking. There is a sense in which everyone wants to believe the truth, but there is a difference between someone who wants to believe p if p is true, and someone who wants p to be true and wants to believe it.

Intellectual Motivation  181 When we indulge in wishful thinking, we believe p because we want p to be true, and we want p to be true because we want to believe it. The love of truth as such does not operate as a motive for the belief. The typical motive in wishful thinking is closer to love of the possible state of affairs of a certain proposition’s being true. One difficulty mentioned in section 10.2 on consequentialist value is that getting truth and avoiding falsehood are not only distinct values, but they are sometimes in tension. Unless we are willing to settle for a very high degree of personal preference in weighing the two, we need a way to adjudicate between them. This problem arises in all four of the approaches we have considered, including the motivational approach I am supporting. An appreciation for true belief can be at odds with an aversion to false belief. The parallel phenomenon is well known in ethics. The value of autonomy can be at odds with the value of trust in others, and there is similar tension between the values of perseverance and flexibility, open‐mindedness and steadfastness, honesty and kindness, and many others. In other work I have suggested that one of the functions of the Aristotelian virtue of phronesis, or practical wisdom, is to adjudicate among the competing demands of different virtues and the different values relevant to a given situation. I propose that the phronimos not only has good judgment about the extent to which in a given situation autonomy should be balanced against trust in others, or perseverance against flexibility, or honesty against kindness, but he is also the standard of good judgment about the extent to which it is worth risking falsehood in order to get a true belief concerning some proposition.15 It is very doubtful that there is any rule or decision procedure that captures such good judgment. What ultimately counts as good motives, whether cognitive or moral, are the motives of a practically wise person. The motivational approach I endorse can therefore avoid the need for a third value by adopting this virtue‐ ethical approach to resolving moral quandaries. A quandary requires practically wise judgment.

10.6  The Value of Knowledge In the last section we looked at the way the value of a motive can add value to the act it motivates. Given two acts, both of which are successful in their ends, the acts can differ in value because of a difference in their motive. In this section I want to address briefly the question of whether the value of the motive can explain the value that knowledge has in addition to the truth of the belief.



15

See Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind, p. II, sec. 5.2.

182  Epistemic Value Before proceeding, let me say that I have become increasingly skeptical that the question of what constitutes knowledge can be resolved since the concept of knowledge has been made to serve so many different philosophical purposes. Sometimes knowledge is thought to be no more than the minimum state we expect out of a reasonable person with respect to a given proposition, but sometimes it represents the pinnacle of our cognitive aspirations. The value I am talking about in this chapter is unlikely to be the pinnacle, but it is probably more than the minimum we can get away with. I don’t know how it could be demonstrated that the value of a cognitive state is of the right sort to convert true belief into knowledge, but for the purposes of this chapter I want to argue only that if we think of knowledge in the way I will describe, we can explain why knowledge is more valuable than true belief. Many times I have claimed that moral discourse can aid us in understanding the evaluative aspects of our cognitive behavior, but I  used to think that this strategy does not help in the analysis of knowledge since, as far as I could tell, knowledge has no ethical analogue. There are parallels between moral motives and cognitive motives, moral acts and cognitive acts, and morally good outcomes analogous to true beliefs, but how can moral outcomes be converted into something more valuable in the way true belief can be converted into knowledge? My position now is that I was thinking of knowledge on the wrong analogy. It is true that a good outcome such as relief of suffering cannot be made better by the act that produced it, much less by the motive of the act that produced it, but that’s because the outcome is a state of affairs separate from the act. In the case of acts of belief, the intended outcome is a property of the act itself. The closest moral analogy would be an act that aims at having a certain property, a property that is determined by something outside the agent. I do not know if there are acts like that, but I suggest that if there are, they are the closest analogues to the state of knowing. They are good when they are successful in achieving the intended property, but they are even better when they arise from the right motive. Let us return to the bathroom scale cases to test whether acts of true belief motivated by love for truth have the value that makes knowledge better than mere true belief. Recall that in the first bathroom scale case I believe what the scale says and since the scale is accurate, I am unlikely to have the belief unless it is true, but I don’t care whether it is true or not. What I want is to enjoy believing that I have lost 5 pounds. Let us suppose the belief is true, that I have lost 5 pounds. Do I know that I have? The scale is reliable and its reading is good evidence, but I care neither about the reliability of the scale nor its evidential support of my belief. Still, I am not so irrational that I can believe what I want at will, and so there is some connection between the fact that there is good evidence for the belief and my belief. After all, I cannot believe a proposition unless I think it is true, and I cannot think it is true if there is no indication of its truth. But I do

Intellectual Motivation  183 not care about the indicators of the truth as such. I care only about having whatever it takes to enjoy believing that I’ve lost weight. I doubt that very many of us are able to manufacture a belief out of thin air; we cannot form a belief without indicators of its truth. But I doubt that that means we are incapable of wishful thinking. In the first scenario I believe I have lost weight because I want to. The evidence for the truth of my belief plays no role except to make it psychologically possible for me to form the belief at all. It thus shields me from the most extreme form of irrationality, but it hardly makes me grasp the truth in a good way. My getting the truth is a matter of luck in a certain sense of luck. In a way, it is not an accident that I got the truth since it is not accidental that I believe what the scale says and it is not accidental that the scale is accurate. Still, from a certain point of view it is an accident that I got the truth.16 I don’t get credit for getting the truth. I suspect that that is sufficient to deprive me of knowing, but I don’t know to what extent we can really expect to settle the matter. My point is just that my act of true belief arising in this way is not as good as an act of true belief arising out of the right motive. In the second bathroom scale case I do value the truth as such with respect to believing that I’ve lost 5 pound, but I do not equally value the truth as such with respect to believing that I have not lost weight. And I might not disvalue believing that I’ve lost weight falsely as much as I value believing that I’ve lost weight truly. This means that I do not impartially value truth and disvalue falsehood about the matter of my weight. Nonetheless, I do value believing that I’ve lost weight truly. In fact, I value it highly. My cognitive activity in this case therefore has the following virtues: I value believing that I’ve lost weight if it’s true that I have, I use a reliable process and good evidence in forming the belief because of my valuing the truth in this case, and I get to the truth in part because of my motive and the processes to which it gives rise. From my point of view, the accuracy of the scale is not accidental, as it is in the first case. Granted, I do not get as much credit as I would if I valued truth more impartially and consistently, but it does seem to me that I get credit for believing the truth, and that is probably sufficient to attribute knowledge to me. Sosa’s case of believing that his parents cared for him is similar. In both cases we care about the truth of a particular proposition, we care about the evidence as evidence, and our believing seems to be knowing, although not unqualifiedly. Again, I’m not sure whether we can settle the matter, but my primary point is that my belief state in the second bathroom scale case is better than in the first. In Virtues of the Mind I defined a category of act I called “an act of virtue.” An act of virtue V is an act motivated by a V‐motive, is an act a person with virtue



16

Wayne Riggs, “What are the “Chances” of Being Justified?” The Monist, 81 (1998): 452–72.

184  Epistemic Value V would characteristically do in the circumstances, and is successful in reaching the end of virtue V because of these other good‐making features of the act. When this schema is applied to intellectual virtue, we can say that an act of intellectual virtue is an act motivated by the motivational component of intellectual virtue, is an act an intellectually virtuous person would characteristically do in these epistemic circumstances, and is successful in reaching the truth because of these other features of the act. I then argued that knowledge can be defined as true belief arising out of acts of intellectual virtue, and showed how this definition avoids Gettier problems. 17 Now I think that this definition can also solve the value problem, but to do so the schema of acts (p. 153) and outcomes needs to be modified. True belief is not an end state analogous to relief of suffering that is the product of intellectual acts. True believing is an intellectual act, or at least, it is strongly analogous to an act. Of course, it is an act that is in part generated by a series of previous acts. Nonetheless, it is enough like an act to make a comparison with overt acts illuminating. I propose, then, to modify my definition of knowledge as follows: knowledge is an act of intellectual virtue.

10.7  Conclusion Ever since the ancient Greeks, Western thinkers have admired those who are relentless in the pursuit of truth. Such people are thought to be noble, certainly beyond the ordinary. I suspect that the source of this idea also comes from the Greeks—​the pervasive suspicion that much of what we take to be true isn’t really true. When left to our own devices and the conventions of our various cultures, we do not do a very good job of getting at the truth.18 We are unreliable, both individually and collectively. Of course, we are much more reliable about some things than others. That is why there has been so much emphasis in modern epistemology on clear perception of medium‐sized objects. But the wide disagreements in practical, moral, religious, and philosophical beliefs, as well as many categories of scientific beliefs, is evidence that reliability about many important matters is not widely distributed among the general human population. This makes the desire for truth a desire to rise above the common lot. Traditionally, that desire led to a search for one or two inspired people who have the truth and can become one’s mentors. Nowadays we are less likely to think that such a search will be successful, and so we rely upon ourselves. And that

17 Zagzebski Virtues of the Mind: 248 and 270–​71. 18 Not only philosophers have this suspicion. It is standard among educators to say that they aim to train the young to learn how to learn, implying, of course, that the young won't do it right if they are not trained.

Intellectual Motivation  185 often means flouting convention. In any case, it takes special effort. John Dewey is probably right that human beings are naturally credulous, which means that all too often learning the truth involves unlearning a falsehood. And that is what is noble about the desire for truth: we often have to give something up. If I’m right about this, the difficulty in getting at truth means that the right way to behave cognitively requires the motives needed when there are internal or external obstacles to overcome, the motives constitutive of autonomy, courage, perseverance, humility, fairness, open‐mindedness, and other intellectual virtues. In this chapter I have concentrated only on the motive of valuing truth, which is probably primary, but I suspect that for many categories of truth we are not going to get truth at all unless we have the motives that are constituents of these other virtues. Within some domains the situation is not just that some people get the truth through virtuous activity and others by non-​virtuous but reliable processes and we credit the former more than the latter. Rather, it’s that the latter don’t exist at all. Reliability in getting many of the most valuable truths requires dispositions to have virtuous motives. If so, the criteria given by reliabilism coincide with virtue criteria in these domains. I have argued that virtuous motives give the beliefs they produce a value that mere reliability cannot. What makes the thinking agent reliable is what is really valuable. It is also what makes the resulting belief truly her own.

11

Epistemic Value and the Primacy of What We Care About* 11.1  Epistemic Demands and the Logic of Caring Let me begin with what we care about. By that I mean what is important to us to some degree. I am not assuming that we all care about the same things, but I will argue that if we care about anything, we must care about epistemic goods, and thus there are epistemic demands we cannot escape. I will also argue that epistemic value is always derivative from what we care about, and one of the most important things we care about is morality. There is no independent domain of epistemic value. Moral norms and epistemic norms apply to beliefs for the same reason: they are the demands of what we care about. It follows from the logic of caring that if we care about anything, we must care about truth-​-​true beliefs about that which we care about. If I care about my children’s lives and I am minimally rational, I must care about having true beliefs about my children’s lives. If I care about the history of medieval science, I must care about having true beliefs about medieval science. It is misleading to stop there, however, because an important reason we care about truth is that it is an aspect of something else that we care about even more than truth, namely, knowledge. I do not deny that it is possible to care about truth for its own sake, but it distorts our psychology to ignore the connection between true belief and knowledge. Compare the psychology of caring about one’s plants. Because I care about my plants, I care that they have unblemished leaves of the right color for the species, but I  care about that because what I  really care about is healthy, thriving plants, and having bright, unblemished leaves is an aspect of good health in plants. I may also value bright, unblemished leaves for their own sake, but it would be misleading in any discussion of caring about the color of leaves to ignore the connection between unblemished leaves and healthy plants. Similarly, even though it is possible to value truth for its own sake, it is misleading in any discussion of caring about truth to ignore the connection between truth and knowledge. True belief may be just as useful as knowledge on some occasions (e.g., believing there is danger nearby), and having plants with bright, unblemished leaves may be just as useful as healthy plants on some occasion (e.g., I am * The chapter is reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. Epistemic Values. Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197529171.001.0001.

Epistemic Value  187 having a party and want the garden to look nice temporarily), but true belief would not get so much attention were it not for the fact that it is an aspect of knowledge, a greater good than truth. The logic of caring requires something stronger than true belief for a variety of reasons. For one thing, we are often agents in the domain of what we care about. We want beliefs that can serve as the ground of action, and that requires not only true beliefs, but confidence that the particular beliefs we are acting upon are true. The degree of confidence needed varies with the context. Acting involves time, usually effort, and sometimes risk or sacrifice, and it is not rational to engage in action1 without a degree of confidence in the truth of the beliefs upon which we act that is high enough to make the time, effort, and risk involved in acting worthwhile. We also know that we have false beliefs, if for no other reason than that we sometimes have beliefs that conflict, and since we do not want false beliefs in the domains of what we care about, we want mechanisms to sort out the false beliefs from the true ones. In addition, we know much of what we know in the domains of what we care about from other people, and we want to be in a position to tell who is a trustworthy informant and which of two different informants in our community has the truth when they disagree. In addition, we often care that others care about what we care about, which means that we care about their having true beliefs about what we care about, and we also care, at least to some extent, about what they care about. So we care about being good informants to others, which requires that we have the qualities that make us trustworthy and credible. All of these epistemic goods are things we care about in addition to true belief. Some of them may appear in an account of knowledge, but it is not necessary to give an account of knowledge to observe that whatever knowledge is, it is desirable in the domains of things we care about. Finally, we want understanding, arguably a state we care about even more than knowledge in the domains of what we care about. In short, every epistemic state that is thought desirable—​true belief, ability to distinguish true from false belief, confidence in our beliefs, credibility, ability to identify the trustworthy, knowledge, understanding—​is desirable within a domain of what we care about because we care about that domain. Some epistemologists take the position that the primary and perhaps only epistemic value is the maximization of the balance of truth over falsehood in our beliefs.2 I think this view is false, but this chapter can be suitably altered for those who think it is true. The range of the arguments that follow would need to be narrowed in fairly obvious ways, but the structure of the arguments does not 1 For a similar point see Hilary Kornblith, “Epistemic Normativity,” Synthese 94 (1993): 357–​76. 2 See William Alston, “Concepts of Epistemic Justification,” in Alston, Epistemic Justification:  Essays in the Theory of Knowledge (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989): 83. See also Alvin Goldman, “The Unity of Epistemic Virtues,” in Virtue Epistemology, ed. Abrol Fairweather and Linda Zagzebski (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 200l): 30–48.

188  Epistemic Value depend upon my claim that if we care about anything, we must care about knowledge and other epistemic goods in addition to truth in the domains of what we care about. For simplicity I will focus on the relationship between caring about something and caring about knowledge in that domain, but what I will argue can be easily amended to the more modest claim that if we care about anything, we must care about true belief in the domain of what we care about. And it can be easily extended to the more ambitious claim that if we care about anything, we must care about understanding and a variety of other epistemic goods in the domain of what we care about. Caring about knowledge in domain D puts a demand on me to behave in a way that a conscientious seeker of knowledge in domain D would behave. The overworked word “justification” is sometimes used to refer to the property a belief has when it is the result of conscientious knowledge-​seeking behavior. In my vocabulary, a justified belief is an epistemically permissible belief; it does not violate any epistemic obligations.3 So to say that we have an epistemic obligation to have a justified belief is to make the vacuous claim that we have an epistemic obligation to have a belief that violates no epistemic obligations. But it is not vacuous to say there is a nonepistemic obligation to be epistemically justified, and I will argue in this chapter that we have such obligations. These are the obligations of what we care about. What we care about gives us obligations to be epistemically justified, that is, to engage in conscientious belief-​forming behavior. I assume that conscientiousness is something that comes in degrees, but what I mean by being more or less conscientious is not limited to having more or less evidence. To be conscientious is to try to be intellectually virtuous—​careful, thorough, open-​minded, fair-​minded, and so on for the other intellectual virtues. Some of the intellectual virtues do not aim at getting truth and avoiding falsehood, but aim instead at the other things we care about mentioned above—​confidence in our beliefs, trustworthiness and the ability to identify the trustworthy, credibility, understanding, and so on. Again, the relevant virtues can be expanded or contracted for readers who have broader or narrow positions on the range of epistemic value. Since my position is that virtue has a success component, trying is not sufficient for acting virtuously, although some virtues are mostly trying (e.g., epistemic carefulness). There is probably a sense of obligation in which we have an obligation to be successful, and we may even have an obligation to get knowledge, but that is not the sense I will use in this chapter. I am interested in the sense of obligation we are able to act upon, and we cannot act upon the advice to be successful. What we can do is to try; we can be conscientious. To be



3

In this chapter I use the terms “obligation” and “demand” interchangeably.

Epistemic Value  189 conscientious in believing is to try to form beliefs in a virtuous manner. So caring about knowledge in domain D demands that I try to be virtuous in seeking and forming beliefs in domain D. Since caring about knowledge in domain D puts a demand on me to be epistemically conscientious in seeking and forming beliefs in domain D, it follows that if I care about anything at all, there is a demand on me to be epistemically conscientious in the beliefs I have in the domain of what I care about. When I  say there is a demand on me that arises from the logic of caring, I do not mean to imply that the demand is moral. Not all demands are moral demands; not all obligations are moral obligations. The demand to be conscientious in my beliefs in domain D is conditional upon my caring about domain D. But being epistemically conscientious in the domains of what we care about is not optional. It is a demand of our caring. The demand to be epistemically conscientious in my beliefs in the domain of what I care about is not only a demand to be conscientious in whatever beliefs I have; it is also a demand to have beliefs acquired in an epistemically conscientious manner. There is a demand to seek out such beliefs and to maintain them. One reason this is demanded is that my awareness of the limits of a domain I care about are not set in advance of knowledge about the domain. Once I care about something, one of the most important things demanded of me by that caring is to find out the scope of the domain. If I care about my children’s lives, I must conscientiously seek information that tells me what is relevant to my children’s lives; that is, what is in the domain and what is not. No doubt there are degrees to which beliefs are relevant to something I care about, but even knowing that is something my caring demands that I care about. As I acquire an idea of the scope of the domain of what I care about, there is then a conditional demand on me to seek out more conscientiously acquired beliefs in that domain. But this demand must be qualified in various ways. For example, I might care about life on other planets, but given the difficulty in obtaining evidence or acquiring beliefs based on trustworthy authority in that domain, there probably is not a very strong demand on me to conscientiously seek beliefs about life on other planets, even if I care about it very much. There are also domains I care about, but I do not care about having beliefs in those domains since having such beliefs conflicts with something else I care about. For example, I may care deeply about the happiness and fulfillment of my friend’s personal life, but since I also care about her privacy, I  do not care about having beliefs—​at least not many detailed beliefs—​about her personal life. Even if I accidentally acquire such beliefs as the result of overhearing gossip, there is no demand on me to hold them conscientiously. On the contrary, there may be a demand on me to shed the beliefs, if possible. So even though I maintain that the demand to be conscientious is usually not exhausted by merely being conscientious in whatever beliefs I have in that domain, I am not

190  Epistemic Value claiming that caring about some domain always puts a demand on me to seek out conscientiously acquired beliefs in that domain nor is there always a demand on me to be conscientious in whatever beliefs I happen to have in that domain. But even the exceptions arise from something I care about, such as the privacy of my friends. The more I care about something, the greater the demand that I be epistemically conscientious in my beliefs in that domain, and the greater the demand to get and to maintain conscientiously acquired beliefs in that domain. The demand that I be conscientious in my beliefs about my children’s lives is greater than the demand that I be conscientious in my beliefs about my plants. It also follows from the logic of caring that if I do not care about a domain at all, I should not seek beliefs in that domain. I do not think there is a common word to designate the opposite of caring, but whatever that attitude is—​dis-​caring or dis-​valuing—​I can have that attitude about some domains, and that puts a demand on me to not seek out beliefs in that domain. Granted, it is tempting to think that the demand to be conscientious in whatever beliefs we do have is independent of whether we care about the domain of the belief. But I will argue in section 11.3 that it is permissible to have unconscientious beliefs in certain domains. In addition to variability in the degree of the demand that varies with the degree to which I care about a domain, there is variability in the degree of conscientiousness demanded of me that varies with the context. If the difference is unclear, we can think of the degree of the demand as the degree of the importance of doing what the demand requires—​the degree to which violating the demand reflects negatively on me. The degree of conscientiousness demanded is another matter. There can be a weak demand to be very conscientious and there can be a strong demand to be weakly conscientious. The degree of conscientiousness demanded of a particular belief varies with the circumstances. In one form of contextualism, the standards for knowledge change with what is important to either the subject or the attributor. For example, Keith DeRose maintains that whether we are willing to say that someone knows the bank will open on Saturday depends upon how important it is to him or to us that the bank is open. If the agent only needs $10 and can obtain it elsewhere, it takes much less to know the bank is open on Saturday than if he will be shot by the Mafia unless he can get money from the bank that day. 4 In another contextualist example, I know that my children are playing in the backyard in ordinary circumstances if I saw them in the backyard five minutes ago playing a game that could be expected to last some time, but I do not know they are in the backyard once I find out that there is an escaped convict who has been taking hostages somewhere in the 4 Keith DeRose, “Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (1992) 52: 913–​29.

Epistemic Value  191 neighborhood. 5 In the second case new information makes it more important that I am right that they are in the backyard (and can take away my previous knowledge that they are), whereas in the first case the context that makes it important that the bank is open on Saturday is set in advance. But in both cases the contextualist claims that there are more stringent requirements for knowledge when my life is at stake or my children’s lives are at stake than in more ordinary circumstances. I have not yet said anything about requirements for knowledge, but it is surely the case that the degree of conscientiousness required of me in forming my beliefs when I am at risk of being shot by the Mafia or my children are at risk of being taken hostage is much greater than in ordinary situations. An ordinary degree of conscientiousness is sufficient to ground action or omission in the usual, less threatening circumstances, but is insufficient when something I care about very much is at stake. The degree to which I care about my life and my children’s lives may be the same in both contexts, but the degree to which my caring makes it important that a particular belief is true varies with the context. The situation is no different if what I care about is idiosyncratic. Perhaps I am wild about my peonies and I believe they are doing just fine in the backyard since I watered them five minutes ago, but then I hear that a lunatic peony-​hater has been in the neighborhood destroying peonies. Once I hear that, I have the same reason to be more conscientious in believing my peonies are fine as I did when it was my children’s lives that were at stake. If my neighbor and I both looked at our peonies five minutes ago, discussing the fine points of peony culture, it would be odd to say she knows hers are fine and I do not know mine are fine just because I love my peonies more than she loves hers. But it is not strange to say that if it is important to me that my peonies are okay, it is required of me that I am conscientious in believing they are okay, and the degree of the demand to be conscientious depends upon the level of importance the safety of my peonies have to me. Furthermore, the degree of conscientiousness demanded depends upon the context. In contexts in which much is at risk if my belief p is false, given the degree to which I care about something, a high degree of conscientiousness in believing p is demanded of me, the degree of which can easily be greater than that demanded of my neighbor. That follows from the logic of caring about something. I may even care excessively about all sorts of things. It may be irrational, even immoral, to care about some of these things, but it is demanded by the logic of caring that I be conscientious in my beliefs, given that I care. The demand after 5 Bruce Brower, “Epistemological Contextualism,” entry in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1998). The fact that there is a hostage-​taker somewhere in the neighborhood does slightly reduce the probability that my belief that the children are in the backyard is true, but the contextualist maintains that the degree to which I must be conscientious in my belief that they are in the backyard greatly exceeds the degree to which the probability that my belief is true has been reduced.

192  Epistemic Value all is conditional. Caring raises the bar of conscientiousness for me. Whether it also raises the bar of knowledge will be addressed in section 11.4. The logic of caring can also explain why many philosophers are deeply concerned about the skeptical hypotheses. Given that it is very important to us that the world is more or less the way we think it is, it is very important to us that we are not brains in vats, and that puts a high demand on us to be very conscientious in our belief that we are not brains in vats. The degree of the demand to be conscientious depends upon the level at which we care. Again, this follows from the logic of caring, whether or not it has anything to do with knowledge. Philosophers no doubt care more than the average, and that is one of the reasons skepticism is so threatening to philosophers and much less so to other people. It is not the awareness of the possibility of the skeptical scenario itself that is the problem, but caring about the way the world would be if the possibility obtained. The logic of caring also has some interesting implications for religious epistemology. It follows from what I have said that the more important religion is to a person, the stronger the demand to have conscientiously acquired religious beliefs. This position differs from that of most religious epistemologists, including Alvin Plantinga, for whom doing one’s epistemic duty with respect to some belief p and being rational (internally or externally) with respect to p has nothing to do with the importance of the content of the belief p.6 I am suggesting, in contrast, that the degree of conscientiousness demanded varies with the importance of the belief to the person who holds the belief. The more important the domain, the greater the demand that a belief in that domain be conscientious, and the degree of conscientiousness demanded of a particular belief depends upon how important it is to me in that context that the belief is true. But I have also argued that there is a demand to conscientiously acquire beliefs in the domains of what we care about, and this makes agnosticism problematic for those who care about the domain of religion. It would be interesting to investigate further the ways in which the logic of caring applies to religious belief, but I will not do that here.

6 Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2000). I  have argued elsewhere that Plantinga’s conditions for being justified and internally rational are too easy to satisfy; e.g., he argues that voodoo beliefs can easily satisfy them. On the other hand, satisfaction of his conditions for external rationality and warrant are mostly a matter of luck. In the domain of Christian belief there is no connection at all between believing conscientiously and being warranted in a belief. Conscientiousness does practically no work in getting the agent to reach the truth. Almost all the work is done from the outside—​the work of the Holy Spirit. See my “Philosophy of Religion: The Need for Engagement,” in Knowledge and Belief, Proceedings of the 26th International Wittgenstein Symposium, edited by W.  Loffler and P.  Weingartner (Vienna:  Osterreichischer Bundesverlag/​Holder-​Pichler-​Tempsky, 2004): 386–​98.

Epistemic Value  193

11.2  Morality and Epistemic Demands Morality is something most of us care about a lot, and although it may be possible for a given individual not to care about morality, it is something we care about in the collective sense of “we.” In fact, what distinguishes morality from other things we care about is that its application to a given individual does not depend upon the fact that that individual cares about morality. The fact that we care about morality collectively puts demands on each one of us. If morality’s importance to us is unconditional, it follows that knowledge in the domain of morality is unconditionally important also. The importance of knowledge about moral matters puts a demand on each of us to be epistemically justified in those beliefs. There is a moral demand not to violate any epistemic demands. Given that there is an epistemic demand to be epistemically conscientious, there is a moral demand to be epistemically conscientious in my beliefs in the domain of morality. It is morally wrong to be epistemically unconscientious in any of these beliefs. Since these demands follow from the unconditional importance of morality, the demand to be epistemically conscientious in these beliefs and to conscientiously acquire beliefs in this domain is unconditional. It does not follow from the fact that the demand to be epistemically conscientious in domain M is unconditional that the demand is great. Morality is highly important in general, but it is doubtful that every aspect of morality is highly important, and there are no doubt many contexts in which the demand that a particular belief relevant to morality is conscientious is not very great, even though the demand to be conscientious is not conditional upon caring about morality. It also seems to me that morality does not have well demarcated boundaries. For example, one of the things we care about is what others care about, but caring about what others care about is often understood to be a moral virtue. It certainly is a moral virtue in some contexts, whereas in others it is probably a virtue but not a moral virtue, and in still other contexts it is not a virtue at all. It is very doubtful that we can isolate the moral contexts of caring about what others care about. Truthfulness is another quality that is generally understood to be a moral virtue. If that is correct, morality applies directly to the achievement or the effort to achieve the telling of the truth. But we have already seen that the demand to attempt to be truthful arises from other things we care about besides morality, so we know that it is not only a moral demand. But in addition, there are contexts in which truthfulness is not a moral demand, although it may be a demand of something else, for example, friendship. We have no moral obligation to reveal personal information to nosy inquirers, but we no doubt feel that the demands of personal intimacy require more extensive and detailed revelations of truths about ourselves. There are many other ways in which there is no clear distinction between the demands of morality and the demands of other things we care about.

194  Epistemic Value If the demands of morality are unconditional, whereas other things we care about make only conditional demands upon us, there is no clear line between what is unconditionally demanded and what is only conditionally demanded. This is not a problem I find very worrisome, so I will not say more about it. Given that some things are morally more important than others, the degree of the demand to be conscientiousness demanded of me by morality varies, as it does in other cases of what I care about. My children’s lives are more important morally than the safety of my peonies, and the moral demand to be epistemically conscientious in the belief that they are safe is greater. The degree to which I should be conscientious differs with the context since I need to be more conscientious in the hostage situation than in more ordinary situations. Even though the moral importance of my children’s lives is the same in the hostage case and the ordinary case, the degree of conscientiousness morally required of me in the hostage case is greater. As with other domains of what I care about, the logic of the importance of morality requires that I care about identifying the beliefs relevant to the domain. Suppose that I do not care much about global warming, but I do care about morality, and even if I do not care about morality, since morality is important to us, the demands of caring about morality apply to me whether or not I care. One of the things demanded of me by morality is caring about what is a moral matter and what is not. So morality demands that I be epistemically conscientious in seeking beliefs that pertain to morality. If an epistemically conscientious search for such beliefs would lead me to acquire beliefs about global warming, then there is a moral demand on me to acquire epistemically conscientious beliefs about global warming.7 I think, however, that there is room for individual variability in the strength of the moral demand to be epistemically conscientious about beliefs whose moral importance is collective. Global warming may be a moral issue and an important one, but it does not follow that its level of moral importance to typical individuals is very great. It may not even be very important that a particular person’s belief in a certain context is true. So the degree of conscientiousness morality requires of me in having a particular belief about global warming may not be very great. Unlike the case of my children playing in the backyard, global warming is an issue in which everyone has a shared interest. It seems to me that my beliefs about this issue may be conscientious enough to satisfy the demands of morality if I accept what I read or hear from those I trust, whereas the same level of conscientiousness would be insufficient in the hostage case.



7

I thank Ray Elugardo for the example of global warming.

Epistemic Value  195 Our considerations about the demands of what we care about can explain what is right about W. K. Clifford’s famous example of the shipowner who sends his ship full of immigrants to sea, believing without evidence that his ship is seaworthy.8 Clifford is surely right that the shipowner is morally wrong in being epistemically unjustified in this case, but the example is insufficient to support his famous thesis that it is morally wrong to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. Suppose that the shipowner has no intentions of sending the ship to sea, but if he can attest that the ship is seaworthy, he will get a tax deduction. He believes the ship is seaworthy and declares that it is in order to get the deduction, but does not bother to do a careful and expensive inspection of the ship. Or maybe he simply announces to a friend that his ship is seaworthy while the two of them are in a bar, bragging to each other about their respective ships. At worst he has violated a weak moral requirement. In Ian McEwan’s novel, Atonement (New  York:  Random House [Anchor Books], 2003), a bright and imaginative thirteen-​year-​old girl, Briony Tallis, witnesses a flirtatious incident between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the talented son of a servant, who has been awarded a scholarship to Cambridge. When Briony later finds them in an embrace, her sexual innocence combined with her attraction to the melodramatic leads her to interpret the event as an act of aggression against her sister. When a guest is raped later that night in the dark wood near the house, Briony, who had a fleeting glimpse of the assailant, swears that it was Robbie. The innocent Robbie is convicted and sent to prison upon Briony’s evidence, breaking the family apart and ruining the lives of Robbie and Cecilia. In this story, Briony sincerely believes her testimony, but her belief is acquired unconscientiously and is a moral wrong to Robbie and probably to others as well. The adults in the story also form beliefs and act upon the beliefs unconscientiously, and we probably blame them more than Briony herself since the demands of conscientiousness in adults no doubt exceed the demands on children. This story illustrates the moral obligation to care about true belief, but in addition, it shows the moral demand to care about the other epistemic goods mentioned at the beginning of this chapter—​trustworthiness, credibility, knowledge, and understanding—​and it shows the moral importance of such intellectual virtues as carefulness, open-​mindedness, intellectual fairness, and intellectual humility, which go well beyond Clifford’s demand to have sufficient evidence. But it also supports Clifford’s point that the great wrong of believing unconscientiously (or upon insufficient evidence, in Clifford’s view) is that it makes a person credulous. Briony’s personality and the isolated circumstances of her life make her a credulous person. In this case the results are tragic, but 8 W. K. Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief,” in The Ethics of Belief and Other Essays, ed. Timothy J. Madigan (New York: Prometheus Books, 1999): 70–96.).

196  Epistemic Value Clifford is right that intellectual credulity is a moral failing whether or not it has tragic results. The way in which morality dictates and constrains the demand to be epistemically conscientious explains why we think, in general, that moral virtue puts a higher demand on us to be conscientious in any negative belief we have about others than on the corresponding positive beliefs, and again, the degree of conscientiousness required varies with the context. There is no doubt also a moral demand not to seek beliefs in certain areas, such as other people’s personal lives, and it explains why curiosity can be a vice. 9 We are morally required to be epistemically conscientious in a very broad range of beliefs because of the social dimension of belief-​formation. It is not at all obvious whether some belief will be relevant to moral judgment or action by myself or someone else who relies on my testimony, so that gives us a prima facie duty to be conscientious in a vast number of our beliefs. When we add to that the range of things we care about outside of morality, including caring about what others care about, that broadens even further the range of beliefs that we are required to be epistemically justified in holding. Finally, there are epistemic demands of the social roles we perform. A jurist in a litigation case has an obligation to reach a decision conscientiously whether or not she cares about the case and whether or not the case involves something within the domain of morality. (It can easily happen that whether the litigant morally deserves a particular monetary settlement is not at issue.) Here the epistemic demand arises not from what she cares about personally but from the importance of the role itself. So in addition to morality, there may be other things whose importance to us collectively makes epistemic demands on us whether or not we care about them ourselves. These considerations extend the range of beliefs that must be epistemically justified as a demand of something outside of epistemic value itself—​what we care about individually or collectively—​to cover a very wide range of our beliefs. I conclude that the question, “Is there a demand to be seek epistemically conscientious beliefs in this domain and how great a demand is it?,” cannot be answered without a background theory of what we care about. The degree of the demand and the degree of the conscientiousness demanded must be placed in a context of what we care about as well as the situational context of the formation of particular beliefs.

9 See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica II-​II, q. 167 Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province (N.Y: Benziger Bros), 1947, for a discussion of the vice of curiosity.

Epistemic Value  197

11.3  Conflicts among the Things We Care About Caring about knowledge is entailed by the logic of caring about anything, and one of the things some people care about is knowledge for its own sake. It is highly unlikely that anybody cares about every possible item of knowledge for its own sake, but if someone does, there is a conditional demand on her to be conscientious in all of her beliefs and to conscientiously acquire as many beliefs as possible. Alternatively, some of us care about knowledge because we believe that a life of flourishing is a life that includes knowledge, even knowledge about some matters that we do not otherwise care about. It might be a fact about a flourishing life that such a life has much knowledge, and if aiming at a flourishing life is not conditional upon a choice, but is something we aim at by nature, then it is a demand of nature that we care about knowledge. But it is doubtful that every item of knowledge contributes to a flourishing life, so even if there is a demand of nature that we have conscientiously formed beliefs, the demand probably does not extend to every possible belief. 10 But even if it does, it is caring that requires the agent to form beliefs in a conscientious manner. The extent of the demand to be conscientious is the extent of what is demanded by what the agent cares about and what we care about collectively—​morality and social roles. There is no epistemic value that is unhinged from what we care about. It is common for epistemologists to discuss epistemic value without reference to what we care about, but it is hard to see what grounds the values they have in mind. Perhaps this is just an example of the reticence of epistemologists to discuss value theory, but we do need some explanation of what makes epistemic value a value. William Alston defines epistemic value as value “from the epistemic point of view.”11 I find this a misleading way to explain our caring about truth, knowledge, understanding, and the other epistemic values mentioned in this chapter since it encourages the mistake of thinking that epistemic value is a special category of value in competition with, and perhaps incommensurable with, moral and pragmatic value. Suppose I care about my flowers. It would be odd to express that by saying that flowers are valuable from the floral point of view or that I am required to do S from the floral viewpoint. The fact that what I care about is a certain sort of thing x does not make x important from the x viewpoint, nor does it make me required to behave in a certain way from the x viewpoint. So if I care about knowledge, it would be odd to say that that makes knowledge valuable from the epistemic viewpoint and what I am thus demanded

10 I  have explored the connection between the good of knowledge and human flourishing in Linda Zagzebski, “The Search for the Source of Epistemic Good,” Metaphilosophy 34, no. l/​2 (January 2003): 12–​28. 11 Alston, “Concepts of Epistemic Justification:” 3.

198  Epistemic Value to do the thing to do from the epistemic viewpoint. There can be conflicts between the things I care about, but the conflict does not arise from different points of view. False beliefs or unconscientiously acquired beliefs can be beneficial to the agent or conducive to morality, and true beliefs or conscientiously acquired beliefs can be harmful to the agent or detrimental to morality. This is not a conflict between points of view if, as I have argued, epistemic values arise from any point of view—​or rather, since I am skeptical of the “point of view” terminology, they arise from anything I care about. If we say that epistemic value is value from an epistemic point of view, moral value is value from a moral point of view, and so on, that tends to stymie discussion because it appears that we have to deal with conflicting points of view in order to resolve the conflict. My position is that if we understand epistemic value as always entailed by something we care about, the conflict arises between the different things we care about. I am not suggesting that the conflict is always easy to resolve, only that it is an instance of the common and quite nonmysterious phenomenon of caring about things that conflict in particular contingent circumstances. Suppose that an unconscientiously formed belief B in domain X (my health, my appearance) would alleviate distress and give me comfort. If I care about domain X, then with the qualifications noted earlier, I am required to form conscientious beliefs in domain X, which requires me not to believe B. But I also care about comfort and avoiding distress, and belief B would give me comfort. So believing B is required by one of the domains I care about but is forbidden by another. The easiest answer to this dilemma is that I follow the requirement that arises from what I care about the most, but there is a problem if I violate the requirement to believe conscientiously: I am forced to engage in self-​deception. Clearly, no matter which way I go, I am forced to act against something that I care about. The self-​deception arises in forgetting that. If I do not believe B, I will not forget it. On the contrary, I will be continually reminded of it since I will feel discomfort. But if I do believe B, believing B will only work to comfort me if I deceive myself about the epistemic requirements of caring about my comfort. Caring about my comfort entails that I care about having true beliefs about my comfort, so I am required to believe that believing B gives me comfort, something that is not likely to give me comfort. Only by engaging in self-​deception can I get comfort by believing G. I am not concluding that we should never do that since I would not say that self-​deception is always a bad thing. I am merely pointing out the problem. And the problem is exacerbated if I care about not being self-​deceived. An interesting conflict within the things we care about arises with the possession of opinions. I find the ethics of opinion an important but neglected topic in epistemology. “Opinion” probably applies to a number of different cognitive

Epistemic Value  199 states, some of which are weaker than beliefs. But many of them, presumably, are beliefs, and a significant number of those have a property that is problematic: They are unjustified. Furthermore, they are known to be unjustified by the agent who has them. That is why they are called opinions. The fact that we often append the expression of an opinion with the disclaimer, “That’s just my opinion,” suggests that we are alerting others that we do not want to be socially committed to the truth of the belief expressed. Other people ought not to take what we say as information. That gets us off the hook in one sense: We cannot be held responsible for harming others if they believe what we say. But opinions are typically in a domain of something we care about, so it is far from clear that we have acted conscientiously in having the opinion at all. It is common to say that people have a right to their opinions, but that might mean only that they have a political right, a right to noninterference. It does not follow from that that we are doing no wrong in having opinions. The impermissibility of unjustified opinions cannot be established so easily, however. Having opinions can arise from something we care about. When I have asked friends what they think about the problem I am addressing here, sometimes they say that it is fun to have opinions, or that one of the things we care about is having beliefs about certain topics and we care about what others believe apart from the truth of what they believe. It surely must be the case that many people think this way. Why else would the media focus more attention on the fact that people have certain opinions than on assessing the content of the opinions? One indication that we do not usually think of opinions as always wrong is that we say that an opinionated person is one who has too many opinions, implying that there is something like the right number of opinions. We might also think that there is a vice opposed to being opinionated. Consider how we react when we ask students their opinion on a philosophical issue discussed in class. If they have no opinion, we tend to think that that indicates they are not thinking.12 If so, we must think that an active inquirer starts to form opinions early on. Perhaps having an opinion aids rather than inhibits further inquiry. It is doubtful that this is true in all areas of discourse, but it might be true in philosophy and in other domains in which it is extremely difficult to get justified beliefs. In those cases in which having an opinion is a demand of something we care about but the opinion is not conscientiously formed, we have the same problem of conflict between things we care about that arises when an unjustified belief is demanded by caring about my psychological well-​being: I must indulge in self-​ deception. If I am right that caring about knowledge in the domain of what we care about is always demanded by caring about that domain, then if one thing



12

I thank Ray Elugardo for this observation.

200  Epistemic Value I care about demands that I have the opinion and another thing I care about demands that I do not, the only way I can have the opinion is to forget that I care about knowledge and other epistemic goods in that domain. I am inclined to think then, that it is highly problematic to have any unconscientiously formed belief in a domain of what I care about. That makes a very large proportion of our opinions problematic. As I have said, sometimes caring about knowledge and caring about not being self-​deceived can be over-​ridden by other things we care about, but my conjecture is that that does not happen very often among self-​ reflective persons. I have argued that there is no demand to be epistemically conscientious or to get knowledge that is not based on something we care about. If there is such a demand, the argument for it needs to be given. It follows from my position that if a belief does not concern any domain I care about, nor is related to morality or to any role I am performing that is something we care about collectively, then I am violating no obligation if the belief is unjustified, that is, is not formed conscientiously. The range of beliefs that are permissibly unjustified is no doubt very small, but the existence of such beliefs has not been ruled out. For example, suppose I believe that my great-​great-​grandmother was born on a Wednesday, and my reason for thinking so is weak. This might be an example of a belief that has nothing to do with morality or anything I care about or anything that is important for one of my social roles. The imaginative reader will no doubt think of some story in which this belief would be related either to morality or to something I care about, but it does seem possible that no such story is true, and that this is a belief that is outside the range of what I care about or anybody I care about cares about, and which furthermore is outside of anything related to morality or to performing my social roles. It is also possible that having this belief will not make me credulous, the vice abhorred by Clifford. If so, I propose that I have done no wrong in any sense if I have the belief unconscientiously.

11.4  Knowledge and What We Care About Elsewhere I have defined knowledge as an act of intellectual virtue, by which I mean an act of getting to the truth because of one’s virtuous motives and behavior. 13 A variant would be getting to the truth because of one’s conscientious motives and behavior. I have argued in this chapter that given what we care about,

13 In Virtues of the Mind I define knowledge as true belief arising from acts of intellectual virtue. In “The Search for the Source of Epistemic Good” I argue that knowledge is not the result of an act, but is an act, so part of the original definition is redundant. In both definitions having a virtue is not necessary for performing an act of virtue.

Epistemic Value  201 some contexts demand more conscientiousness than others. Does it follow that knowledge requires more conscientiousness in some contexts than in others? Possibly, but I doubt it. It depends upon how we understand the because-​of relation in particular cases. Since I have not given an analysis of that relation and do not know of one that is plausible, there may be room for context variance in my account of knowledge, but much more would need to be done to reveal that variance. Generally contextualists rely on intuitions about examples, so let us return to the cases of the hostage-​taker and the peony-​destroyer. If I believe my children are in the backyard based on seeing them there five minutes ago, then in ordinary circumstances, if the belief is true, we do not hesitate to say that I know my children are in the backyard. Similarly, if I saw my peonies thriving five minutes ago, my belief that they are still fine constitutes knowledge in ordinary circumstances if true. However, given that my children’s safety is very important to me, if I find out there is a lunatic hostage-​taker in the neighborhood, it is more important than usual that my belief that they are in the backyard is true, and the degree of conscientiousness demanded of me in believing they are in the backyard goes up. I am not conscientious enough if I believe my children are okay based on the fact that I saw them five minutes ago. Similarly, if I love my peonies a lot, then if I find out there is a peony-​destroyer in the neighborhood, I am not conscientious enough in believing my peonies are thriving if the belief is based on the fact that I saw them thriving five minutes ago. But this leads to the question, “Conscientious enough for what? For knowledge?” Knowledge is not the only thing we need to be conscientious for. In subject-​based contextualism the question of whether some subject has knowledge depends upon the subject’s context. In attributor-​based contextualism the attribution of knowledge to a subject depends upon the attributor’s context. It seems to me that whether the agent gets to the truth because of her conscientious behavior cannot depend upon how much she cares that her belief is true. The causal relation (or “because” relation) between trying and success is not dependent upon what the agent cares about. Admittedly, the lack of clarity about what it does depend upon leaves my observation here at little more than an intuition, but I imagine that it is a common one. Furthermore, if knowledge did depend upon what the agent cares about, that would have some implausible consequences. It would mean that my neighbor knows her peonies are okay and I do not when we are equally conscientious in our beliefs that our respective peonies are fine and the only difference between us is that I care more about my peonies than she does hers. It would also mean that if someone cares excessively about all sorts of things, that fact is sufficient to take away much of her knowledge about those things, whereas someone else who has

202  Epistemic Value the opposite vice and cares very little about anything thereby has more knowledge than the rest of us. So subject-​based contextualism of the kind discussed here is implausible and is not countenanced by the definition of knowledge I endorse. Attributor-​based contextualism is implausible for the same reason if there is no restriction on who the attributor is. The fact that the attributor’s degree of caring can be idiosyncratic does not affect the issue of whether the agent’s getting the truth is due to her conscientious believing. But suppose the attributor is not idiosyncratic, but is an ideal observer? According to the Ideal Observer theory in meta-​ethics, moral judgments are true just in case they would be affirmed by a being with ideal properties such as omniscience, impartiality, and sympathy with all the relevant agents. If an Ideal Observer theory of meta-​ethics is plausible, I so no reason why it would not also be plausible as applied to nonmoral evaluative judgments, including judgments of epistemic value. The idea would be that S knows p just in case an ideal observer of S would attribute knowledge of p to S. The ideal observer would not simply be a being who applies the criteria for knowledge specified by a given theory, but would have the properties of an ideal being—​perhaps an ideal human, including what such a person cares about. Debate about what the ideal observer cares about is a feature of the meta-​ ethical literature. I suspect that literature would be useful for the development of an Ideal Observer theory of knowledge, which would be an interesting variant of contextualism. Definitions of knowledge similar to my own and which I have endorsed elsewhere have been given by John Greco, Wayne Riggs, and with slightly different wording by Ernest Sosa. Greco and Riggs define knowledge as true belief in which the agent gets credit for reaching the truth.14 Sosa proposes that knowledge is true belief in which reaching the truth is attributed to the agent as her or her own doing.15 The idea here is that when the agent knows, she deserves credit, or in Sosa’s account, she deserves to be attributed with the achievement of truth. But that leaves undetermined whether getting credit or being attributed with achieving truth is a state that is bestowed on the agent or whether it is independent of an imaginary attributor. Who or what determines whether the agent deserves credit for getting the truth? What the imaginary attributor cares about might affect the attribution of credit, so there is room for attributor-​based contextualism in these accounts, and Greco16 endorses a form of contextualism. 14 See Wayne Riggs, “Reliability and the Value of Knowledge,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64, no. l (January 2002): 79–​96, and “The Real Value of Knowing that P,” Philosophical Studies 107 (2002): 87–​108; John Greco, “Knowledge as Credit for True Belief,” Intellectual Virtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology, ed. Michael DePaul and Linda Zagzebski (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 2003): 111–134. 15 Ernest Sosa, “The Place of Truth in Epistemology,” in Intellectual Virtue. 16 John Greco, “Knowledge as Credit for True Belief:” 111–134.

Epistemic Value  203 If the standards for knowledge depend upon what the agent or attributor cares about, that has the ironic consequence that the more the agent or attributor cares, the more conscientious the agent is required to be, and the less likely it is that she will know. If knowledge is credit for true belief, the result is paradoxical, for it means that the more I or my attributor cares, the less likely it is that I will be credited with successfully reaching truth. But the more conscientious I am in getting to the truth, the more credit I deserve. So caring and conscientiousness pull in opposite directions. The former makes it harder to deserve credit; the latter makes it easier. Caring makes it harder to get knowledge; conscientiousness should make it easier. Those who combine the view that knowledge is credit for true belief with contextualism need a way to avoid this paradox.

11.5  Conclusion What unifies the various demands to be epistemically conscientious is what we care about. This explains why we think that persons with epistemically unjustified beliefs are irrational. They are irrational because they have beliefs that oppose demands of what they care about. I have argued that epistemic values always arise from something we care about, and I have argued that epistemic values arise only from something we care about. It is caring that gives rise to the demand to be epistemically conscientious. That means that there may be a (small) class of beliefs which it is not wrong to hold unconscientiously. I have also argued that epistemic values enjoy a privileged place in the panorama of what we care about because they are entailed by anything we care about. That means that when there is a conflict between caring about knowledge or true belief and caring about something else, that conflict cannot be resolved simply by following the one we care about the most because caring about knowledge in any domain is entailed by caring about that domain. The only way we can choose against epistemic value in some domain is by engaging in self-​deception. Self-​deception may not always be a bad thing, but it should be recognized for what it is. Finally, I have argued that whereas caring demands different degrees of conscientiousness in different contexts, contextualism about knowledge is less plausible, but a form of contextualism modeled on the Ideal Observer theory of meta-​ethics has not been ruled out.17

17 I  thank Wayne Riggs, Steve Ellis, and Ward Jones for comments and discussions about this chapter.

PART IV

V IRT U E IN R E LIG IOU S E PIST E MOLO G Y

12

Religious Knowledge and the Virtues of the Mind* 12.1  Some Features of Reformed Epistemology Since the publication of Faith and Rationality a lot of attention has been focused on the claims of Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and George Mavrodes that religious belief can be rational or justified without evidence and without foundations in other justified beliefs.1 This position has important negative implications for epistemic theory, in particular, the consequence that certain forms of evidentialism and classical foundationalism are false. More recently, Plantinga has proposed a set of positive criteria for epistemic justification and knowledge and has argued that his proposal is preferable to those of other contemporary epistemologists such as Roderick Chisholm, Alvin Goldman, Robert Nozick, Frederick Dretske. Plantinga uses the terms “positive epistemic status” and, more recently, “warrant” to refer to that normative quality that a true belief must have enough of to be a case of knowledge.2 He prefers either term to “justified” since he says the concept of justification is a deontological one, implying the fulfillment of duty, whereas it ought to be an open question whether or not the quality that converts true belief into knowledge is deontological. In this chapter I shall argue that the quality that converts true belief into knowledge is not a property of the belief at all, but a property of the believer, so neither “justification” nor “warrant” is an appropriate term for this property. I will, however, speak derivatively of beliefs being “justified” or “warranted” and will use the terms interchangeably, although I agree with Plantinga that such a property involves more than fulfilling a duty.3

* The chapter is reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. 1 Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God, ed. Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (University of Notre Dame Press, 1983). 2 Alvin Plantinga, “The Prospects for Natural Theology,” in Philosophical Perspectives 5: Philosophy of Religion, ed. James Tomberlin (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Press, 1991). 3 Unlike Plantinga. I believe that knowledge involves at least the fulfillment of epistemic duty to the extent that epistemic duty applies. Plantinga now claims that justification is neither necessary nor sufficient for warrant in “Justification in the 20th Century,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 50, supplement (Fall 1990); and in Warrant and Proper Function (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1992).

Epistemic Values. Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197529171.001.0001.

208  Virtue in Religious Epistemology Plantinga’s proposed criterion for warrant is as follows: A belief B has warrant for S if and only if that belief is produced in S by his epistemic faculties working properly (in an appropriate environment); and (in those circumstances) B has more warrant than B* for S if and only if B has warrant for S and either B* does not or else S is more strongly inclined to believe B than B*.4

Plantinga has argued that on the above criterion, theistic belief has warrant for many people and, in fact, has a fairly high degree of such status. Wolterstorff speaks approvingly of Plantinga’s criterion,5 and Mavrodes has used an approach similar to Plantinga’s in defending the justification of religious belief based on revelation.6 So in these and other recent works by Reformed Epistemologists, a positive theory of knowledge and justification has begun to take shape. The theory has a number of interesting aspects, but I would like to call attention to three of its features that I think are important if we want to compare it to other current epistemic theories, on the one hand, and to traditional Catholic theology, on the other. First, like almost all contemporary American epistemology, Reformed Epistemology focuses on individual beliefs—​where by a “belief ” is meant a particular state of believing, not the proposition believed—​and it searches for the properties of a belief that convert it into knowledge. We already saw this feature explicitly in Plantinga’s criterion for epistemic warrant. So just as most contemporary moral theory is act-​based, most contemporary epistemology is belief-​based, and Reformed Epistemology is no exception. The property of being justified or warranted or having positive epistemic status is a property of a belief, just as being right is a property of an act, and as long as a belief has the right properties, it is a case of knowledge. Of course, it may be recognized that certain properties of the believer are relevant to the status of the belief, just as it is often recognized that certain properties of the agent may be relevant to the rightness of an act; nonetheless, the analysis focuses on the individual belief and 4 Plantinga, “Prospects for Natural Theology.” An almost identical definition appears in Alvin Plantinga, “Positive Epistemic Status and Proper Function,” in Philosophical Perspectives 2: Epistemology, ed. James Tomberlin (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Press, 1988): 34, although the definiendum of that definition is “positive epistemic status” instead of “warrant,” and the parenthetical condition about the appropriate environment is taken from the preceding page. In Plantinga’s book, Warrant and Proper Function, the definition is amended further. There he says that B has warrant for S if and only if B is produced in S by S’s epistemic faculties working properly in an appropriate environment according to a design plan successfully aimed at truth. The amendment does not affect what follows in this chapter. 5 Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Once Again, Evidentialism—​This Time Social,” Philosophical Topics 16, no. 2 (Fall 1988): 54–​55. 6 George Mavrodes, Revelation in Religious Belief (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), and several papers.

Religious Knowledge  209 the most important epistemic concepts are analyzed in terms of properties of an individual belief. Second, Reformed Epistemology is largely externalist. The distinction between internalism and externalism has become important in recent epistemology and the distinction is not precise. The basic idea is that a theory is internalist as long as the criteria for justification or warrant are accessible to the consciousness of the believer. Since there are stronger and weaker forms of accessibility, there are stronger and weaker forms of internalism. Internalism has dominated modern epistemology until recently, its primary contemporary exponent being Roderick Chisholm. Externalist theories, such as the reliabilism of Alvin Goldman, Robert Nozick, and Fred Dretske, define justification in terms of the relation between a belief and features of the world that typically are not accessible to consciousness, such as the causal process generating the belief. There are also theories that combine internal and external features in the criteria for justification, such as Alston’s “internalist externalism.”7 On internalist theories, if a belief is justified, the believer is in a position to be aware of its justifying feature and, on most internalist theories, is in a position to be aware of the justifying feature as justifying. It cannot happen that two believers are with respect to a certain belief in exactly the same mental state as far as they can tell, and yet one is justified and the other not. On externalist theories the believer will often have no awareness of those properties of the belief that make it justified and consequently will not be in a position to know or justifiably believe that it is justified. Two believers could be relative to a certain belief in exactly the same mental state as far as they can tell, and yet one would be justified in the belief and the other not. Generally, internalist theories hold that whether a belief has justification or warrant is within the control of the believer. This, of course, does not automatically follow from the claim that the conditions for justification are accessible to consciousness, but in the most historically important versions of internalism, including Chisholm’s, the motivation to make justification something within our voluntary control is so strong it could plausibly be maintained that the internalism follows from the position that we control justification and warrant rather than the reverse. Externalist theories, in contrast, present criteria for justification that we do not control, and again, although no necessary connection exists between externality and lack of control, the belief in lack of control tends to be associated with 7 William Alston’s view is largely nonvoluntarist, yet it contains what he calls “an internalist constraint.” This theory has been called “internalist externalism.” Lately, however, Alston has suggested that the disputes about the nature of justification indicate that there is no unique concept of justification about which the various accounts are differing but that the concept of justification cannot be abandoned. See William Alston, “Epistemic Desiderata,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (1993), pp. 527–551.

210  Virtue in Religious Epistemology the belief in externalism. Because of the sense in which those features of us and our beliefs that we do not control are a matter of luck, we can say that the more externalist a theory is, the more room is made for epistemic luck. An important motivation driving externalist theories is the desire to avoid skepticism; in fact, this is one of its most attractive features. As long as nature has ensured that we respond to stimuli from the external world in a way that reliably leads to truth, our beliefs are warranted, and if they are true, as they often are, we have knowledge. Indeed, Plantinga began to develop his epistemic theory as a response to religious skepticism. His work demonstrates that the generous optimism about knowledge that we find in this school of epistemology can be rather easily extended to religious knowledge. Now in what way is Reformed Epistemology externalist and nonvoluntarist? The heart of Plantinga’s criterion for warrant is that a believer’s cognitive faculties are working properly in the appropriate environment. But this operation is not typically accessible to her consciousness, at least not directly or immediately so, and sometimes it may not be even indirectly accessible. The second component of the criterion—​the fact that she feels more inclined to believe B than B*—​is accessible yet is not within her control, according to Plantinga. So neither component of Plantinga’s criterion for warrant is within the control of the believer. Theistic believers whose faculties are working properly are heavily blessed with good luck. Nontheistic believers whose nonbelief is due to the fact that their faculties are not working properly are cursed with epistemic bad luck. The fact that the presence or absence of warrant is very heavily, if not totally, a matter of luck does not, however, alter the fact that warrant is intended on this theory to be a normative concept.8 Plantinga’s rejection of cognitive voluntarism is both central to his positive theory and is offered as one of his chief grounds for rejecting Chisholmian internalism. Plantinga stresses that we do not decide what to believe.9 Typically, he says, I simply find myself with the appropriate belief. Mavrodes also routinely uses the expression “I find myself believing p.” This way of expressing the matter suggests that not only do we not voluntarily control the process of coming to believe a proposition p, but also we are typically not even aware of the process, only of the outcome. Plantinga thinks the nonvoluntary character of belief formation in typical cases is an important asymmetry with typical cases of actions, many of which are voluntary. This asymmetry makes impossible Plantinga’s taking very 8 Note that this is not necessarily paradoxical if one accepts the concept of moral luck, made popular by Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel. Williams’s article, “Moral Luck,” originally appeared in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary volume 50 (1976): 115–​35, and is reprinted in his collection, Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Nagel’s paper, “Moral Luck,” appears in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 9 Plantinga, “Positive Epistemic Status:” 37.

Religious Knowledge  211 seriously the structural similarity between good believing and good acting that I want to defend. Nicholas Wolterstorff ’s early view of justification does not seem to be externalist and nonvoluntarist.10 In recent papers, however, there are indications that he is sympathetic with an externalist and nonvoluntarist view. He says, for example, that “fundamentally, it is not our volitional but our dispositional nature which accounts for our beliefs.”11 In the case of religious belief, he explicitly accepts the Calvinist explanation that God has implanted in human beings a natural disposition to believe in God, a disposition that can be, and has been, thwarted by sin of all kinds. The dispositional process leading to belief is largely outside both the control and the consciousness of the believer. In addition, Wolterstorff at least hints that he might go further and accept the justifiability of beliefs that are implanted by God in a more direct way than by disposition: “Is not God’s power and freedom such that he might well reveal something to some person without providing good evidence for his having done so? Might he not simply effect in the person the firm conviction that he has said such-​and-​ such? . . . Why would God speak to us if he did not want us to believe that he was speaking to us? And if he wants us to believe, are we not at least permitted to believe?”12 The implication here is that a person would be justified in believing in such a case, at least in the weak sense that he is violating no epistemic duty. As far as I know, George Mavrodes does not explicitly endorse Plantinga’s criterion for warranted belief, nor does Mavrodes propose a criterion of his own, but his analysis of religious revelation is clearly externalist and nonvoluntarist. He argues in “Enthusiasm”13 that there is no way to tell from the inside the difference between the genuine revelations to Abraham, Moses, St. Paul, the prophets, and mystics, on the one hand, and the ravings of “enthusiasts,” on the other hand. Mavrodes is clearly willing to say that the prophets, saints, and mystics have knowledge and consequently that their beliefs have justification or warrant. The enthusiasts, however, seem not to have justification even though the recipients of the alleged communications themselves cannot tell the difference. Whether 10 Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Can Belief in God Be Rational If It Has No Foundations?” in Faith and Rationality, ed. Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (Notre Dame, IN:  University of Notre Dame Press, 1983): 135–​86. This chapter is devoted to a discussion of justification in the sense of what a person is rationally permitted to believe, rather than on what it takes for a true belief to be a case of knowledge. Wolterstorff maintains that we have at least indirect control over many of our beliefs, and the account of justification he offers is not externalist. 11 Wolterstorff, “Once Again, Evidentialism:” 55. 12 Nicholas Wolterstorff, “The Migration of Theistic Arguments:  From Natural Theology to Evidentialist Apologetics,” in Rationality, Religious Beliefs, and Moral Commitment: New Essays in the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Robert Audi and William J. Wainwright (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986): 42. 13 George Mavrodes, “Enthusiasm,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 25 (1989): 171–​86.

212  Virtue in Religious Epistemology a belief has justification or not, then, is not accessible to the consciousness of the believer. Another example that shows the extent of Mavrodes’s externalism comes from his book, Revelation in Religious Belief. Suppose that we think of God as being powerful, perhaps even omnipotent. And suppose that we think of God as being the creator of the world. It would seem plausible to suppose that an agent of that sort would probably be able to produce psychological effects in human beings. In fact, it might well seem plausible to think that God could produce some such effects directly. Suppose, for example, that someone who has had no discernible theistic belief throughout his life goes to bed one night, and he wakes up in the morning with the firm conviction that there is a God who is the creator of the world. Could it be the case that God has caused him to have this belief, inserting it, we might say, into his mind overnight? It looks like the answer to that question should be “yes.” At least, if we think only of the divine power, it seems as though an effect of this sort ought to fall within the scope of that power. This would be one example of what I am calling the causation model of revelation.14

A third example from Mavrodes appears in a reply to a paper by Stephen Wykstra: Suppose, as may easily happen on my own campus, that a student hears in a single day a vigorous proponent of atheism in a classroom and a Christian evangelist outside on the central “diag.” And suppose too that it is the Gospel which attracts the student and to which he commits himself that day. Suppose finally, that it is in fact the secret and inward testimony of the Spirit of God confirming the words of the evangelist which draws the student in that direction. . . . If it really is God who draws the student to believe the Gospel, and if God . . . is not lying to him, then in what way is the student’s hookup with reality defective? What better agent of such a hookup with reality could there be, a better connection with reality than God himself? Why should we not suppose that the student I describe, though he is not a sensible evidentialist in Wykstra’s sense, is nevertheless in full possession of epistemic adequacy?15

Now clearly, if the student was moved in his heart by the workings of the devil or the weakness of his own nature to go the other way and to accept the atheist’s argument, there would be no discernible difference from his point of view. So either Mavrodes must conclude that the former belief has justification or what 14 Mavrodes, Revelation in Religious Belief: 37–​38. 15 George Mavrodes, response to Stephen Wykstra’s “Until Calvin and Evidentialism Embrace:” 6–​7 (unpublished).

Religious Knowledge  213 he calls “epistemic adequacy” and the latter belief does not, in which case the criterion for having justification is clearly externalist, or, he must say both beliefs have justification, in which case the concept of justification becomes empty since the student has fulfilled no epistemic duties whatever. He has merely followed his inclination. Either way, all the work of giving him justification is outside his control; in fact, outside his consciousness. A third feature of Reformed Epistemology is its individualism. Justification or warrant is person-​relative. Warrant is a property a belief has for an individual believer, not a community. Notice first the way Plantinga sets up the criterion for warrant: “A belief B has warrant for S if and only if . . . .” In the ensuing discussion, Plantinga focuses on the structure of an individual person’s beliefs. The relevant hookups are between each belief, the person’s faculties, and the world outside—​ things causing the belief—​but there is no significant sense in which there is a community doxastic structure. Furthermore, there is no interesting sense in which the warrant of an individual’s belief depends on the warrant that belief has for other persons in the community. True, on the Plantinga criterion, an investigation of the proper functioning of faculties may happen to unearth certain social conditions for such functioning. For example, in Plantinga’s discussion of testimony he mentions that his belief can fail to have warrant because someone else lies to him.16 Even so, no social conditions of which we must be conscious have any impact on our beliefs’ having warrant. In fact, some recent suggestions on social conditions for justification or defeaters of justification have been explicitly rejected by the Reformers. For example, Wolterstorff is suspicious of any view, such as Gary Gutting’s, that links the justifiability of a person’s religious beliefs to those of his “epistemic peers.”17 In addition, Plantinga and Mavrodes have both rejected Stephen Wykstra’s support of “sensible [social] evidentialism.”18 The individualistic character of justification is very clear in the work of Mavrodes, who analyzes revelation as either a communication from God, a manifestation of God, or a way in which God causes a belief in a particular individual; and as far as I know, all his discussions of justified beliefs are relativized to the individual person. The recipient of divine revelation is not the community or the church; rather, the recipient is an individual, and the justifiability of the beliefs of other individuals based on such revelation is derivative from the justifiability of the revealed beliefs of the original recipient. Never suggested is that perhaps religious beliefs are held by a community and that the conditions for justification or warrant are conditions that the community must satisfy.

16

See Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function, ­chapter 4. Wolterstorff, “Once Again, Evidentialism.” 18 Wykstra, “Until Calvin and Evidentialism Embrace.” 17

214  Virtue in Religious Epistemology Reformed Epistemology has the first feature I have identified because it is a contemporary American epistemic theory, not because it is Reformed. I assume that this theory focuses on individual beliefs rather than on qualities of the believer because that is current practice, not because of any religious constraints. The second and third features of the theory, however, clearly relate to its Calvinist origins. Calvin’s view on theistic belief is that it is a natural disposition implanted in us by God but corrupted by sin. A person whose faculties are working the way they were designed would believe in God automatically, the way we believe in an external world, other minds, and the past. Such a person’s theistic belief would not be the result of a conscious process, much less would belief be the result of using the higher cognitive faculties. It is not surprising, then, that Reformed Epistemology is more at home with externalist theories. The nonvoluntarist aspect of the theory is connected with the Calvinist view on the Fall. According to Calvin, original sin has had a corrupting effect both on human cognitive faculties and on the human will, as well as on the natural, nonvoluntary human disposition to theistic belief. Left to our own devices, we have very little control over our belief-​forming mechanisms, especially as they relate to the formation of religious beliefs. Reformed Epistemology, then, is uncomfortable with cognitive voluntarism. In contrast, traditional Catholic theology has had a more moderate view of the effects of original sin on our cognitive faculties and consequently is more inclined to see such conscious processes as potent instruments in the justification of religious belief. The traditional Catholic respect for natural theology, then, makes Catholic theories more inclined to see internalist features of our epistemic states as desirable, though whether they are necessary is another matter. More important, even though the Catholic tradition would agree with Calvin that belief in God is natural but corrupted, its naturalness is closer to the naturalness of moral behavior than to the naturalness of the belief in other minds. The will has been more damaged by the Fall than the cognitive faculties, and grace is needed both for good moral behavior and for faith in God, but the consequences of the Fall do not eliminate the voluntary aspect of both morals and faith. Since on the Catholic view religious faith includes religious belief, we can see that Catholic epistemology is more at home with some form of cognitive voluntarism. I have noted a contrast between Calvinist epistemology, which is basically externalist and nonvoluntarist, and Catholic epistemology, which tends to be internalist and voluntarist. This contrast is only rough, of course. There are other considerations in the choice between internalism and externalism than the religious aspects I have mentioned. Nonetheless, I believe that part of the motivation behind the choice of either externalism or internalism is theological and that differences between Catholics and Calvinists affect this choice.

Religious Knowledge  215 The individualism of Reformed Epistemology is also connected with its Calvinist origins. The epistemology of Plantinga, Wolterstorff, and Mavrodes stresses personal religious experiences as the ground for religious faith and consequently de-​emphasizes social relationships as the basis for the evaluation of religious beliefs. Catholic philosophy, on the other hand, is more inclined to focus on the social aspects of human activity, including beliefs, in evaluating them. This difference is particularly marked in the evaluation of beliefs based on revelation. Catholics are much more inclined to evaluate these beliefs communally rather than individually since the primary recipient of revelation in the Catholic tradition is the Church, and the validity of revelation does not depend on the validity of any particular case of personal revelation or religious experience. The possessor of warrant is fundamentally the church, not the individual, so the conditions for justification of a belief are conditions that the church must satisfy, not Francis or Jane or Edward. The criteria for justification of key religious beliefs and the conditions for knowledge in these cases are not primarily a matter of an individual believer satisfying certain criteria independently of the church. Catholic philosophy casts a wider social net than does Calvinist philosophy. Apart from revelation, Catholic philosophy tends to think of the criteria for both epistemic and moral evaluation as accessible to nonbelievers. So in moral theory the Catholic tradition has stressed natural law, while in epistemic theory the Catholic view might be considered the cognitive equivalent of natural law. Calvinists, on the other hand, stress that the effects of the Fall make the judgment of other persons untrustworthy, and so we have good reason not to regard nonbelievers as either our epistemic or our moral peers. The basic evaluative principles are not necessarily accessible to everyone. These differences in approach within the Christian tradition have interesting consequences for epistemic theory as well as for moral theory.

12.2  The Concept of Epistemic Virtue 12.2.1 Epistemological Methodology Traditional Catholic moral philosophy has had a high regard for virtue theories. Since believing is, if not quite a form of acting, at least strongly analogous to it, I propose to use a virtue theory of morality to identify the normative aspect of knowledge. I suggest that if we think of the normative component of knowledge as a virtue and take seriously what we know about virtue from moral theory, we can learn a lot about the conditions for good cognitive activity. Although the theory I will outline in this section is inspired by some of the features of

216  Virtue in Religious Epistemology traditional Catholic philosophy, the theory is my own; I do not claim any authority for it from Catholic theology. It is my position that knowledge is true belief grounded in epistemic virtue. In this section I want to outline an argument that epistemic virtue is the normative component of knowledge and that epistemic virtue cannot be understood apart from the believer’s relationship to a social community. Then I argue that the normative element in knowledge is not adequately captured by the current versions of Reformed Epistemology that are too externalist, insufficiently voluntarist, and insufficiently social. Before making my proposal on the normative component of knowledge, I wish to make some comments on epistemological method. It seems to me that in formulating a theory of human knowledge we ought to take certain things about human nature for granted, just as we should do in moral theory. An attempt to discuss the conditions under which a human being has knowledge is an attempt to understand something about the mental states of human persons. We should expect the norms of rationality and justifiability to be what they are because humans have human nature. If there had been no humans, but another species of earthly knowers instead, the norms might very well have been different, as they no doubt are different for angels or any extraterrestrial knowers there may be. There are, of course, different philosophies of human nature and we have seen some differences in the understanding of human capacities even within the Christian tradition. Still, these differences are not serious enough to preclude our taking certain things about human beings for granted in the present inquiry: I will assume that human beings are knowing creatures, that we are generally rational in the formation and maintenance of our beliefs, and that the world cooperates with our cognitive faculties much of the time. What I take for granted means that we can trust our reason, our senses, our memory, and, at least to some extent, our common sense. Our nature itself determines that we receive knowledge in these ways. A being with different cognitive faculties would not be human. Of course, this is not to say that these faculties are infallible, only that they are generally reliable or, at least, not radically defective. They lead to the formation of true beliefs often enough to make the pursuit of knowledge a realistic goal. I will also assume that humans are social by nature, and that this means the process of acquiring knowledge depends on complex interactions with other people—​in learning the language, in learning the rules of reasoning, in keeping knowledge in the collective memory, and in interpreting and explaining human experience. The epistemic norms that apply to human persons, then, are not what they would be if we lived in isolation from others of our kind. There is plenty of evidence for this assumption about our social nature, but I will not argue for it

Religious Knowledge  217 here. Furthermore, this assumption is perfectly compatible with Calvinist theology, in spite of the Calvinist tendency toward cognitive individualism. Finally, I will assume that human beings are self-​reflective creatures and that self-​ reflectiveness extends to an awareness of our own nature. Here I understand self-​ reflectiveness as both a descriptive and an evaluative property. It is a property that is vital to human nature but also admits of degree and is a property that we usually associate with maturity. No doubt the property is one we ought to have to a fairly high degree if we are to be evaluated positively. So I conclude that the evaluation of our beliefs rests both on the fact that we have a nature of a certain kind and on the fact that we ought to know that it is of that kind. I have described, of course, a very thin view of human nature, but as obvious as it may be, it is remarkably easy to ignore. Virtue theorists claim that it is a mistake to begin an investigation in moral philosophy with the question of when an act is right or wrong. I accept this position and think that for the same reason it is a mistake to begin an investigation in epistemology with the question of when a belief is justified or unjustified. To be justified is a way of being right. “Justified” applies to individual instances of belief, just as “right” applies to individual acts. Justified beliefs are like right acts. Epistemic virtue, on the other hand, is a quality of persons, and I believe it cannot be reduced to a disposition to have justified beliefs any more than moral virtue can be reduced to a disposition to perform right acts. The concept of justification is derivative from the concept of epistemic virtue; I believe it is important that the concepts not be conflated.

12.2.2  The Components of Knowledge Belief. Belief is a much easier state to acquire than knowledge. It happens easily, sometimes automatically, and an investigation of knowledge almost always begins with an investigation of belief. Some philosophers have denied that belief is a component of knowledge, but even they would agree that knowing involves thinking with assent. As long as believing just is thinking with assent, as Augustine says,19 knowing has believing as a component. In the history of philosophy the extent to which our believing processes are subject to voluntary control has been a matter of considerable disagreement. That is because beliefs are typically the outcome of processes that are either instinctive mechanisms or so habitual that they are part of our intellectual character. We have seen that the Reformers have made a point of calling attention

19 Augustine, Predestination of the Saints, Chapter 5, Edited by Philip Schaff et al, CreateSpace Indepedent Publishing Platform, 2015.

218  Virtue in Religious Epistemology to the questionable voluntariness of our beliefs. If beliefs really are involuntary, that would make them inappropriate subjects of evaluation in anything like the moral sense. To respond to this point, I think it is important that we do not think that the only element of the voluntary is a distinct act of choice occurring immediately before an act. True, we rarely if ever choose to believe something, but then, the roles of deliberation and choice in human action are often exaggerated anyway. Acts that follow a process of deliberation and choice are in a very select category, and if morality and the realm of the voluntary applied only to that class of acts, morality and the voluntary would not apply to very much. Furthermore, even acts resulting from deliberation and choice are based on prior nondeliberative processes of belief, attitude, and value acquisition. So the element of the voluntary cannot be limited to the element of choice that some acts exhibit. Aristotle himself did not limit the voluntary to the chosen, and although his account of the voluntary is notoriously difficult, I think we might find something in his discussion that is useful to the question of the voluntariness of beliefs. It seems to me that believing is in general at least as voluntary as acts done out of passion or while drunk for which Aristotle rightly says we are responsible. Consider also such acts (or omissions) as not noticing someone else’s distress, taking out one’s anger on an innocent bystander, laughing at someone’s misfortune, impulsively making an envious remark. Each act or pattern of acts exhibits faults—​insensitivity, meanness, envy—​which are all moral faults, yet such acts and omissions are no more voluntary than typical cases of believing. I maintain, then, that even though there is rarely if ever an act of choice immediately preceding the formation of a belief, beliefs are nonetheless in the realm of the voluntary. Truth and the  motive to  attain truth.  A noncontroversial component of knowledge is truth. Truth is an external component as long as we think that the world must be a certain way for a belief to be true and that the truth of a belief is not necessarily guaranteed by the phenomenological qualities of the mental state of believing itself. It is possible for two people (or the same person on two different occasions) to be in mental states of assenting to a proposition that are qualitatively identical from the inside, and yet the proposition assented to by the one is true and the one assented to by the other is false. This means that the phenomenological quality of a mental state alone is not sufficient to determine that a particular state is one of knowing rather than of mere believing. It follows that there is some degree of independence between the external and the internal components of knowledge. So far we can see that knowledge includes true belief, or true thinking with assent. I wish to discuss, however, another internal component of knowledge in somewhat more detail, and that is the motive for truth.

Religious Knowledge  219 Aristotle begins the Metaphysics with the pronouncement, “All men by nature desire to know.” If this is more an expression of ingenuous hope than a statement of plain fact, it is true enough to describe a good many of our fellow human beings. If we are going to evaluate our success in attaining knowledge, asking why we want it seems reasonable. An obvious answer is that we want to possess the truth, and knowledge is partly the possession of truth. The desire for truth is so deeply built into our nature that no attempt to thwart that desire, or even to weaken it, has lasted for long. And we desire truth not merely for its instrumental value. We cannot, of course, deny that true belief aids in the attainment of other goals. In fact, we cannot attain much of anything we want without a healthy proportion of true beliefs to help us out. Nonetheless, I doubt that instrumentality of truth is the most basic reason we want to possess it. Truth is valued as an end in itself, and our nature determines that we value it in that way. So the motive for truth is important in knowledge and in evaluating us epistemically, just as the motive for good is important in moral evaluation. The motive for truth involves both the desire to obtain truth and the desire to avoid falsehood, and this can be roughly expressed as the desire to balance obtaining as much truth as we can get with as little risk of falsehood as we can manage. This motive leads us to guide our epistemic processes in certain ways. For example, we do not think of the lucky guess as a case of knowledge, for one reason that guessing is something we should not do if we want truth. I should not form a belief by guessing partly because guessing permits too great a risk of falsehood, which is incompatible with the motive for truth. Further, my belief comes from an unsound intellectual procedure, unsound because guessing is not a reliable procedure for obtaining truth; in fact, a guess could be considered the lack of a procedure. But I ought to use a good procedure, and, what is more, I ought to know that. If there is any doubt about this, consider the fact that a guesser will almost always agree, upon reflection, that he should not have guessed. We have used here one of the constraints I claimed we should put on any acceptable theory of knowledge. Our nature determines both that we ought to use reliable procedures for forming true beliefs and also that we are responsible for being aware that our nature is of that kind. So believing by guessing is defective both because guessing is an unreliable procedure for getting the truth and because I should have known that guessing is unreliable. Furthermore, if I do not use a good procedure in one instance, I shall more easily not use a good procedure in others; I may eventually acquire a very unreliable intellectual habit that I should have known better than to let myself acquire. Beliefs are produced by processes, but there are probably only a limited number of such processes and I tend to use the same ones over and over again. So these processes soon become habits. In guessing, then, a third reason we think of the

220  Virtue in Religious Epistemology belief as defective is that guessing in one instance can lead to guessing in other instances and may lead me to form a bad epistemic habit—​an epistemic vice. The epistemic deficiency of guessing is primarily a deficiency in the motive of the guesser. Motive is an important component in the evaluation of what we do in aretaic theories. Aristotle argued that a virtuous person both has a clear view of the end of human life and acts from the motive of reaching that end. If this is right it seems reasonable that an epistemically virtuous person has a clear view of truth as the ultimate end of belief, values truth as such, and forms and maintains her beliefs from the motive of reaching that end. The guesser fails in her motive because guessing is not something a person who values the truth and wants to obtain truth and avoid falsehood would do. It follows that reliabilist theories are inadequate because the relation between cognitive processes and reliability in such theories is merely a means–​end relation. Just as moral virtues are not valuable only because they reliably lead to producing good, epistemic virtues are not valuable only because they reliably lead to true beliefs. Just as a person who fulfills the goal of the moral life not only produces good consequences but also does so through a motivational structure directed towards good, a person who fulfills the goal of the cognitive life not only obtains many true beliefs and few false ones but also does so through a motivational structure directed towards truth. The social component of knowledge. There is another way in which believing is like acting: much of it is cooperative. The fact that we are suspicious of the person who uses incorrect methods of acquiring beliefs such as guessing is connected with the cooperative character of our beliefs. We do not just feel sorry for such a person, we do something similar to blaming him; and I think one reason for this is that so often our own beliefs depend upon those of others. The justifiability of my beliefs often depends on the procedures other people use, so someone else’s using bad procedures can affect the justifiability of my own beliefs. And even if I am careful not to hook up my beliefs to his in a way that would affect the justification of my own beliefs, I cannot count on him in my epistemic pursuits. But I should be able to count on him, and so I can blame him. Social relations have important implications for good believing in another way, too. If I  am right that epistemic virtue is structurally very similar to moral virtue, and if virtues ought to be understood in roughly Aristotle’s way, then Aristotle’s concept of phronesis, or practical wisdom, would be as important for epistemologists to analyze as for moral philosophers. Aristotle says that we acquire virtue by modeling ourselves on persons with phronesis and we learn what to do in specific circumstances by imitating their behavior. Phronesis involves not only good judgment but also the feelings and

Religious Knowledge  221 motives that support good judgment, and, if I am right, such good judgment applies not only to what to do but also to what to believe. Identifying clear instances of phronesis is not difficult, but it no doubt cannot be defined with any precision. An aspect of phronesis that makes it particularly difficult to analyze is that it is not strictly rule governed. The person with phronesis uses no one identifiable decision-​ procedure in all circumstances, nor can a moral theorist describe the behavior of a person with phronesis by appealing to a set of rules or principles that invariably fits his behavior. This means, of course, that if good believing, like good acting, is determined by the behavior of a person with phronesis, there will be a degree of built-​in vagueness in the criteria for justification and warrant. I suggest that this lack of precision in epistemology is something we should accept. Notice that as just described, phronesis is a concept which makes no sense apart from social relations. It is acquired by a process of imitating those who have it, and a person can follow no set of rules or principles as a substitute for acquiring phronesis. So our epistemic virtuousness is dependent on other people—​the people who raise us and teach us. If phronesis is lacking in a community, it is unlikely that anybody in that community will be praiseworthy in either beliefs or actions. Epistemic virtue, like moral virtue, is less a matter of the health of individual faculties than of the health of the community. Both the social character of knowledge and the connection of knowledge with habits shows that beliefs cannot be evaluated singly. As long as a component of knowledge is an intellectual habit, such a habit will result in my believing many propositions, and the evaluation of my success or failure in attaining knowledge in all the cases resulting from that habit are interdependent. Further, the social character of belief formation shows that knowledge rarely depends on facts about myself alone. The fact that I succeed at attaining knowledge depends on facts about other people, including the epistemic virtues and vices they possess and the knowledge they have attained. From what has been said so far, I conclude that knowledge is not only the possession of true beliefs but also the possession of them in an admirable way that comes from either an instinct or an intellectual habit worthy of our aspiration. Such a habit is in part a process that reliably leads to the truth. This process must also be generated by a certain motive—​briefly, a passion for truth. We have seen that knowledge comes partly from my side, in that I supply the virtue. But it comes partly from the outside, in that the world supplies the truth. What I supply cannot be isolated to any particular belief since I supply my intellectual character. Knowledge, then, depends partly on who has the belief, and it depends on who that person knows, who taught her, and whose work she reads

222  Virtue in Religious Epistemology or hears about.20 Knowledge requires a delicate balance of effort, skill, and luck. I supply the effort and skill; the world supplies the luck. Summary.  I have argued that believing is like acting because it is the outcome of habitual processes, many of which may not be under my immediate control but are part of my character and for which I can be held responsible. This suggests that intellectual virtue is a component of knowledge, and that such virtue is related to beliefs as moral virtue is related to acts. Since believing is an activity that can be done either properly or improperly, it is reasonable to think that believing has a proper virtue. What we have said so far suggests that we may think of epistemic virtue, like moral virtue, as a habit, enough within our voluntary control to be subject to praise and blame, and which is admirable. As a rough approximation, we might say that whereas moral virtues are habitual processes that reliably lead to the good and that are consciously motivated by a love of the good, epistemic virtues are habitual processes that reliably lead to the formation of true beliefs and that are consciously motivated by a love of the truth.

12.3  Objections to Reformed Epistemology If epistemic virtue is roughly as I have described it in section 12.2, and if it is an element of knowledge, as I believe it is, then there are problems with all of the features of Reformed Epistemology that I identified earlier, in section 12.1. I have argued that the quality that a person must have in addition to true belief in order to have knowledge has an internalist and voluntarist aspect, although the Reformed theories are externalist and nonvoluntarist. Let us begin with one of the most extreme examples of this in Mavrodes’s work on revelation. Consider again the case mentioned by Mavrodes as an example of the causal model of revelation. In that example God inserts the belief that there is a God into the mind of the believer while he sleeps. Such a believer has no idea where the belief comes from; in fact, he is not aware of any process of coming to believe at all. He simply wakes up with the firm conviction that there is a God. Mavrodes clearly thinks there is nothing epistemically wrong with such a person if he maintains his conviction, and one could argue that the example passes Plantinga’s criterion for warrant. After all, there is really nothing wrong with the believer’s faculties per se, although credulity is undoubtedly a defect. The Plantinga criterion, then, may be vague enough that it could be interpreted either way. Also, we have seen in a remark by Wolterstorff that he might accept the belief produced in this scenario as justified as well. As an aside, the belief no doubt passes the test of the reliabilist since God’s direct production of a belief is reliable if anything is. 20 This may be another way in which justifiability is like morality. What makes an action good may be a matter, not only of what a person does, but also of who does it.

Religious Knowledge  223 But surely the man described by Mavrodes is not justified in the belief that there is a God. He is not justified because he has contributed nothing to the process generating the belief. No habits or processes within him, much less any such habits within his control, direct or indirect, have had anything to do with his acquiring the belief. It is impossible to ascribe to him anything like an intellectual or epistemic virtue in this case. His getting the truth is pure luck from the epistemic point of view, and though, as we have said, an element of luck no doubt attends epistemic virtue just as it does moral virtue, pure luck is not enough for justification or warrant. The same point applies to the other case described by Mavrodes in his answer to Wykstra. The Mavrodes case violates one of the strictures on epistemological methodology mentioned at the beginning of section 12.2 by not giving sufficient weight to the self-​reflectiveness of human nature. A self-​reflective person ought to worry if he wakes up with a firm belief of some sort with no memory of how he got the belief or how it might be justified. If he continues to believe, he is suffering from a deficiency of motive. He is lacking in the desire for truth that ought to motivate our cognitive activities insofar as this is within our power. Even if he cannot help believing at that moment, he ought to rethink the matter later and worry about it. The problem with motive is related to another feature of Reformed Epistemology identified in section 12.1: the fact that this theory evaluates beliefs singly. To see more clearly what is wrong with such a case, consider how we would respond if the Mavrodes belief were combined in a certain way with other beliefs. Suppose that God causes me to have many true beliefs by inserting them into my head overnight on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, but the devil also causes me to have many false beliefs by inserting them into my head overnight on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Let us suppose that phenomenologically the cases are identical, so that I cannot tell the difference from the inside. Am I justified in believing the ones produced by God? Even if half of the beliefs I wake up with are true, it seems to me that I am not justified in believing any of them any more than I am justified in believing half of the beliefs I acquire by flipping coins. What is wrong with the Mavrodes view is that it comes dangerously close to reducing knowledge to true belief. Beliefs put into the head by God are epistemically on a par with guesses that are always true. The believer has not done anything to contribute to the truth of his belief. He has used no procedure to obtain true beliefs. God has done all the work in the Mavrodes case, just as the world has done all the work in the guessing case. So there is nothing admirable about the Mavrodes believer and we would not want to be such a person. We might, of course, envy him the way we might envy the lucky guesser. Someone might even envy him exactly for the reason that he would not have to do any cognitive work. But that is like saying it would be nice if good always came of our acts, no matter

224  Virtue in Religious Epistemology what we choose to do. Our responsibility would be taken away, and that can at times sound appealing. But given that our nature is human and not some other nature, given that we have certain capacities, and given that those capacities have norms for their proper use, epistemic virtue will be a state to which we contribute through our own efforts, both in the particular case and in the formation of the habits that make up our intellectual character. And if so, the person described by Mavrodes lacks epistemic virtue and his belief is not justified. If epistemic virtue is a condition for knowledge, as I have claimed, he will also lack knowledge. In section 12.1, I showed how Reformed Epistemology focuses on individual beliefs and identifies justification and warrant with a property of a particular belief of a particular person. We have just seen one of the peculiar consequences of doing so. Even apart from the externalism of Mavrodes’s example of the believer waking up with a conviction that there is a God, it will not be a convincing case of revelation in the presence of a phenomenologically identical mechanism for producing false beliefs. So this belief cannot be evaluated without examining other belief mechanisms of the believer. There are other problems with evaluating beliefs singly and looking for justification in a property of the belief-​producing mechanism of a single belief. Since a belief is acquired in a social context, it cannot be evaluated separately from the beliefs of others in the community who may, or may not, have phronesis. This is a serious problem for beliefs based on visions or voices, explicitly addressed by Mavrodes.21 Mavrodes admits that on his view the difference between beliefs arising from genuine religious experience and those arising from possibly dangerous delusion cannot be reliably distinguished either by the person herself or by others. Since he analyzes revelation as based on personal religious experiences, Christians are not in a position to tell the difference between revelation and putative revelation. Mavrodes is apparently willing to live with this result. But suppose, as Catholics have traditionally believed, that the primary recipient of revelation is the Church rather than, say, Abraham or Moses or Paul. If so, it would be a mistake to look for warrant as a property of a belief of a particular person. This approach not only avoids the problems of distinguishing revelation from “enthusiasm” but also recognizes the high degree of cognitive interdependency among human beings. Such cognitive interdependency no doubt reaches across religious and confessional lines and may indicate that to the extent it does so, criteria for rationality and good believing must be both accessible and applicable to nonbelievers. This shows an important function of natural theology, I think, but that is a topic for another paper.



21

Mavrodes, “Enthusiasm.”

Religious Knowledge  225 The individualism of Reformed Epistemology may distort the conditions for knowledge in yet another way. In section 12.2, I stressed the importance of phronesis for good believing as well as for good acting. We act well when we act in a way that imitates a person with phronesis, and we believe well when we believe in a way that imitates a person with phronesis. If this is right, we cannot be too sanguine about either our cognitive well-​being or our moral well-​being if our social environment is unhealthy. The presence of persons with phronesis in the community is vital to doing well, and this suggests that there are rather extensive social conditions for knowledge. I am unlikely to have knowledge about anything other than those states of affairs very close to me, nor will I learn the right way to form beliefs, if I do not from an early age have close and rather frequent exposure to people who already know how to do these things well. The conditions for knowledge partly depend on criteria other people in my community must satisfy. Finally, let us look again at the criterion for warrant proposed by Plantinga. In what way does Plantinga’s idea of proper functioning differ from my idea of epistemic virtue? After all, in classical Greek philosophy, virtue is actually defined in terms of the function of beings of a kind. If so, Plantinga’s theory may not be very far removed from mine. In fact, he does mention as examples of the lack of proper functioning the formation of beliefs in a way caused by such moral vices as pride, jealousy, lust, contrariness, desire for fame, wishful thinking, and self-​ aggrandizement.22 Clearly, Plantinga thinks that in each case the beliefs’ lack of warrant is due to the fact that the believer’s mechanism for generating beliefs is not functioning properly. One might conclude from this that Plantinga thinks of a vice as a type of improper functioning of human faculties, in which case our theories would be very similar. Although I hope that this is the case, it seems to me that Plantinga’s idea of the properly functioning cognizer is quite different from my idea of the epistemically virtuous cognizer. In Plantinga’s discussions the primary image that comes to mind is the well-​oiled machine—​a machine whose functioning is not primarily accessible to its consciousness at all, much less to self-​reflective control, and where the functioning of such a machine is unaffected by the functioning of the machines around it. I suggest that this does not allow adequate room for the responsibility we have for our epistemic virtues; nor does it allow adequate room for the social conditions for good believing, particularly the place of phronesis in our epistemic evaluation. Just as it would be odd to speak of a morally good person as a person whose faculties are properly functioning with little or no conscious awareness or control, it seems to me equally odd to speak of an epidemically good person in that way. Of course, we have seen that Plantinga denies



22

Alvin Plantinga, “Justification and Theism,” Faith and Philosophy 4, no. 4 (October 1987): 408.

226  Virtue in Religious Epistemology the symmetry between the processes leading to acts and the processes leading to beliefs upon which my theory of epistemic virtue rests. He stolidly maintains that we have voluntary control over the former but not the latter, so we are more like machines in our cognitional processes but conscious and free agents in our actions. But if my argument in section 12.2 is correct, we are no more machinelike in our cognitional processes than in our actions. Both the processes leading to the formation of beliefs and the processes leading to action are governed by habits that come under the category of the voluntary. I have suggested that we ought to be guided in our cognitional activity by the motive for truth, just as we ought to be guided in action by the motive for good. If so, the normative element in knowledge will include this motive.

12.4  Conclusion In this chapter I  have called attention to three features of Reformed Epistemology that I find problematic. The first is not specific to the Reformers but is common to almost all American epistemic theories: the fact that these theories are what I call belief-​based rather than person-​or virtue-​based. This feature has no relation to religion or doctrine, as far as I can tell. On the other hand, the second and third features are connected with aspects of Calvinist Christianity that are usually not associated with Catholic Christianity. These are the externalism–​nonvoluntarism and the individualism of these theories. In both cases, however, the doctrinal constraints the Reformers must respect seem to me to be only weakly associated with their epistemic theories. So even though the religious background of these philosophers makes it very understandable that they would be predisposed to the type of theory they advocate, I do not see that they are actually prevented by Calvinist doctrine from modifying their views in the directions I have defended. The final choice of theory will no doubt be much more influenced by philosophical considerations than by religious ones. In spite of the objections I have given to Reformed Epistemology, it is nonetheless clear that the work of Calvinist philosophers has opened up promising strands of philosophical inquiry. I wish to mention just one of these. Until recently, philosophers have tended to be obsessed with argument as the model of rationality. Plantinga and others have called attention to the fact that rationality in belief is not always the result of argument. This point is important and I have no quarrel with it. I have suggested that rationality is a form of virtue, and that the test for rational belief, as for moral behavior, is the phronesis test. But persons with phronesis do not act by following a specifiable procedure, and

Religious Knowledge  227 I suggest that typically they do not form beliefs by following a specifiable argument. Plantinga is right that rational belief is a matter of behaving in accordance with our nature. My suggestion is that an account of that nature will show that our cognitive behavior is much more like our moral behavior than is recognized by the Reformers.

13

Phronesis and Religious Belief* 13.1  Introduction Hilary Putnam has argued that reason is both immanent and transcendent. It is immanent in that it is not to be found outside human language games, cultures, and institutions, but it is also a regulative idea that we use to criticize the conduct of all activities and institutions. We always speak the language of a particular time and place, and we think as members of a culture that exists only at a time and place, but the rightness and wrongness of what we say is not just for a time and a place.1 I think that Putnam’s position is profoundly right. Unfortunately, it is much easier to state it than to form a coherent conception of reason that combines immanence and transcendence. In fact, the difficulty in doing so is demonstrated by the fact that some of the deepest and longest-​lasting philosophical disputes are forms of the rift between what we might call immanentism and transcendentalism, as the upheaval in philosophy since the Enlightenment demonstrates. Even harder is to put the two aspects of reason together in a way that permits us to settle cases in which the rationality of a particular belief is in dispute. My purpose in this chapter is to begin exploring the question of what reason would have to be like in order to be both immanent and transcendent, and the implications of that feature for the evaluation of beliefs. I will then propose a method to apply it to culture-​specific beliefs, in particular, to religious beliefs. Putnam makes it clear that he does not think it is just reason that has the feature of being both immanent and transcendent. The grounds for making that claim about reason apply equally to what we call the rational or the reasonable. Putnam is willing to say that these properties also are both immanent and transcendent in the sense he means. And there is a hidden implication of this position that Putnam does not mention. Rationality is a property that is not obviously limited to cognitive activity. In fact, I maintain, along with many others, that it cannot be, that rationality applies to our affective and motivational states and states in which the cognitive and the affective cannot be pulled apart—​that is what I think an emotion is. But I am not going to argue for that today: I only

*

1

The chapter is reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. H. Putnam, “Why Reason Can’t Be Naturalized,” Synthese 52 (1982): 3–​23.

Epistemic Values. Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197529171.001.0001.

Phronesis and Religious Belief  229 want to point out that if we are going to make a fair attempt to figure out what rationality would have to be like in order to be both immanent and transcendent, we may not presume that only cognitive states are the issue. That can too easily beg the question. An important implication of the fact that rationality is both immanent and transcendent is that neither a purely formal nor a purely substantive account of rationality will do. The more substantive an account is, the more it includes particular facts about the rational beings under discussion—​almost always human beings since those are the only rational beings we are acquainted with, and these facts may vary cross-​culturally. So substantive accounts can be expected to lack transcendence. For the sake of transcendence we may go the purely formal route, the route of explicating the concept of reason or rationality by defining it in terms of other concepts. So, for example, given that the history of the idea of rationality is closely connected with the history of the idea of truth, it is possible to define rationality solely in terms of its relation to truth. Rationality can be designated as whatever property or activity we have or do that leads us to the truth. This approach makes it an open question whether rational persons do anything in particular—​for example, that they pay attention to the evidence, that they are open-​minded when their colleagues (or their enemies) offer views that they don’t like—​whether they are even motivated by concern for the truth at all. It even leaves open the question of whether Aristotle was right that rationality is something intrinsic to human nature and distinguishes us from other animals. It also has the unfortunate consequence that the relation between rationality and truth becomes trivial—​a matter to which I will return. Instead of taking the formal approach, we can go to the other extreme. Rationality can be defined purely substantively as behavior of a certain description, such as the behavior I have just mentioned (weighing evidence, fairly evaluating the contrary views of others, and so on), without any implication of its formal relations to truth. But by leaving open the relation between rationality and truth, this route leaves it undetermined whether rationality has the theoretical interest most of us have always thought it had. After all, who cares whether we weigh evidence or not unless we think it gets us somewhere? And that somewhere is the truth. To maintain the theoretical interest in rationality, there ought to be a presumption of a connection between rationality and truth; it is precisely because we expect the connection that we care so much about rationality. But the interest is lost if we gain the connection by definition. Similarly, while it is unwise to insist that very much substantive behavior is rational by definition, the concept demands that there be a presumption that certain behaviors are rational and others irrational. We assume it is irrational to believe whatever pops into your head, for example, or to engage in wishful thinking, or to take for granted that you and you alone are the final authority

230  Virtue in Religious Epistemology on the truth. That is implied by the history of the use of the idea of rationality. I think, then, that both the purely formal and the purely substantive approaches fail to respect either the immanence or the transcendence of rationality and are not consistent with the way the concept has been used in its history. Of course, there is nothing wrong with modifying a concept from its ordinary usage, even to do so radically, but when that happens we must recognize that the question we are addressing may not be the same one that others are interested in. I hope that the question I am addressing here is one that others are interested in. So, in my discussion today I will try to respect as much as possible both the formal properties commonly attributed to rationality and the most important substantive claims made about it in the history of discussion of what is and is not rational. I will propose three corollaries of the immanence and transcendence of reason and three constraints that I think we should respect in formulating definitions of rational belief. I will suggest a method for filling out the concept of rationality that respects both its immanence and its transcendence, and is sensitive to the constraints I will identify. It also gives us a method to settle questions about the rationality and epistemic praiseworthiness of culture-​specific beliefs, including beliefs distinctive of particular religions.

13.2  The Transcendence and Immanence of the Rational and Three Corollaries Putnam argues for the cultural transcendence of reason on the well-​known grounds that denying it is inconsistent, but he puts a novel spin on that argument by claiming that cultural relativism is self-​refuting for the same reason that methodological solipsism is self-​refuting. Methodological solipsism is the view that all of our talk is about our own experiences and this applies to everyone, so while the methodological solipsist treats her own talk solipsistically, she grants that others do the same. The problem, of course, is that she cannot maintain this consistently. If all of her words are used solipsistically she cannot say that others do the same thing. To avoid inconsistency, Putnam says, the methodological solipsist must be a real solipsist. She must deny that there is any you other than what she constructs out of her own experiences. Real solipsism is not self-​refuting, Putnam says, but it is nonetheless irrational. For the same reason, he argues, cultural relativism, the analogue of methodological solipsism, is self-​refuting, but cultural imperialism, the analogue of real solipsism, may not be. However, Putnam adds, it is self-​refuting in our culture since we treat norms of rationality in a way that is inconsistent with the view that rationality is whatever is accepted by our culture. An epistemically imperialist culture that did have such a view

Phronesis and Religious Belief  231 could avoid inconsistency, but it would still be irrational for the same reason real solipsism is irrational. Such a culture would lose the ability to critique itself.2 My argument for the transcendence of rationality is simpler than Putnam’s. I do not attempt to identify a formal problem with immanentism, but to call attention to the fact that it is incompatible with a major substantive position on the nature of rationality in the history of the use of the concept, namely, that whatever rationality is, it is something all humans share. I have already said that I take this to be one of the substantive constraints on the concept of rationality. Aristotle also thought that rationality sets us apart from other animals. That may or may not be the case, but I think it is indisputable that rationality is something that humans have qua human. So while I do not insist that no nonhuman animals are rational, I do insist that all normal humans are rational. And this is not just an empirical claim because it is not purely contingent; I think it is part of what we mean by rationality that it is connected with our humanity.3 What is rational is in principle recognizably rational by all rational beings, which means all humans, even those outside one’s cultural community. To be rational is to be able to talk to other persons and to make oneself understood, no matter who those persons are. This is the sense in which rationality is transcendent. It is what permits us to communicate with one another and to form a human community that transcends the individual communities we inhabit.4 Because we are rational we must face the limits of self-​trust. For the same reason, it is because we are rational that we must face the limits of trust in our culture, our social group, our religious community. I am not denying that self-​trust in some degree and in some sense is rational, in fact, rationally required. And similarly, trust in our culture or religious community is rational and required for the same reason. But we know that individuals can go astray and be irrational in belief or action, and so can cultures. We must all answer to the court of the best human judgment, not just the judgment of our like-​minded peers. So rationality is transcendent, but it is also immanent. The ideally rational person is not a person who believes only what someone outside of any culture would believe. And while this point may be obvious, it has taken some hundreds of years for its moral to sink into the discourse of English-​speaking philosophers. Rationality is something we all share as humans, but even though there is no particular culture that all humans have, it is nonetheless true that all humans 2 Putnam, “Why Reason Can’t Be Naturalized,” and Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 3 I think that irrationality is connected with our humanity also. Irrationality is not simply the lack of something else that is intrinsic to our nature. It is a positive trait, although, of course, not evaluatively positive. I have explored this topic in “Hot and Cold Irrationality,” unpublished. 4 Cf. Putnam’s Principle of Communication in “God and the Philosophers,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 21 (Philosophy of Religion), ed. Peter French, Theodore Edward Uehling, and Howard Wettstein (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997): 183.

232  Virtue in Religious Epistemology have culture. No human thinks in a way that is not embedded in a culture. So the idea that a belief is rational only if it passes norms of reason that are independent of all culture misunderstands the sense in which rationality derives from what humans are like qua human. In fact, it is to attempt to make the ideally rational human a nonhuman. The problem, then, is to understand the rationality of beliefs that are distinctive of individual cultures without ignoring either the transcendence or the immanence of reason. I suggest we aim to understand normative judgments, whether about the normativity of acts or the normativity of beliefs, in a way that avoids the twin problems of solipsism, and the illusion of detached, disembodied, disencultured reason. Let me now turn to three corollaries of the transcendence and immanence of reason. In discussing transcendence I mentioned a principle that I will call the Rational Recognition principle (RR): RR If a belief is rational, its rationality is recognizable (in principle) by rational persons in other cultures.

Given the Aristotelian assumption that rationality is part of human nature, this principle has the consequence that if a belief is rational, its rationality is in principle recognizable by all other normal humans. I believe this principle is true, but it is unhelpful in its present form since too much needs to be packed into the qualification “in principle.” For the vast majority of the beliefs of everybody, no matter how impeccably rational the belief is, there is undoubtedly somebody somewhere who is incapable of recognizing its rationality even though that somebody is human and more or less normal. We will therefore need to modify the principle once we have settled on the other criteria we want in an account of rationality. The immanence of rationality suggests the Culture Sensitivity principle (CS): CS The beliefs of one culture are prima facie as justified as the beliefs of any other culture.

This principle wisely reminds us to avoid epistemic imperialism. Given that rationality is connected with what makes us distinctively human, and given that culture is distinctively human, it follows that culture is not in conflict with rationality. Culture is not an aberration of nature; it is a good thing. And if it is really a good thing, it must be a good thing even when it results in conflicting beliefs in different cultures. That is hard to accept, and not only for alethic realists like myself. It is hard to accept because when persons in culture A assert p and persons in culture B assert not p, the members of both cultures experience that as a conflict, and they experience conflict as far from a good thing. Rationality moves us

Phronesis and Religious Belief  233 to attempt to resolve conflict whenever possible. Cultural relativism is one way of attempting to resolve the conflict by interpreting the claims of cultures A and B in such a way that the conflict disappears. It is important to see that relativism would not exist if there were not a perceived conflict to be resolved, and the relativist, like every rational person, tries to resolve it. My point here is not about the content of the relativist’s claim but about the place at which it appears in the human predicament. The relativist’s way is subsequent to the perception of conflict in belief; it is not given prior to the experience of perceived conflict and the recognition of its undesirability. Of course, the relativist’s way out is in conflict with the way of others such as those who claim that the conflict must be resolved by arguing it out—​and that conflict also must be resolved. The deeper fact about rationality that this reveals is that it is a dictum of rationality to attempt to resolve conflict between rational persons. This leads to the third corollary, the Need to Resolve Conflict principle (NRC): NRC It is rational to attempt to resolve putative conflicts of beliefs between cultures.

The Need to Resolve Conflict principle is required because the Culture Sensitivity principle and the Rational Recognition principle do not explain why members of cultures A and B experience tension when culture A accepts p and culture B accepts not p, and why this tension is an expression of their rationality. The Culture Sensitivity principle tells us that when A says p and B says not p, the members of A and B are prima facie equally rational in their beliefs, and the Rational Recognition principle has the consequence that the members of A and B are capable of recognizing that fact. But rational persons in A and B do not let it rest, at least not when p is something one or both cultures care about (and the caring itself can be rational). They want to resolve the conflict between them, whether it is by the relativist route, or the absolutist route, or some other. I think, then, that the Need to Resolve Conflict principle is one of the deepest principles of rationality.

13.3 Three Constraints So far I  have argued that Putnam is right that rationality is both culture-​ immanent and culture-​transcendent, and I have proposed three corollaries of these two features. Next I want to propose three constraints on any acceptable account of rationality, each of which involves the formal properties of rationality. The first is demanded by the enormous theoretical interest in connecting rationality with truth; the second and third are internal constraints, relating the formal

234  Virtue in Religious Epistemology and substantive features of rationality. There are no doubt other constraints that come from the substantive properties of rationality. For that I would take very seriously work by those people engaged in the empirical study of human behavior, including cross-​cultural comparative studies. So I am by no means suggesting that the constraints I am proposing are exhaustive. Let us first look at what I  call the alignment problem:5 How is rationality connected with truth? This problem arises out of the formal interest I have already mentioned in connecting rationality with truth. The problem is, we think rationality should be closely connected with truth, but we also think we are cheating if it is gained too cheaply. Rationality cannot be connected with truth trivially, by definition. This leads to the first constraint: Rationality should put us in the best position to get truth, but it should not come too easily. I have already mentioned one way in which the alignment problem is solved too easily, and that is when rationality is defined as whatever leads to truth. There are versions of the popular theory of reliabilism about rationality or justification that have this defect. Putnam himself makes the alignment problem too easy, but he does so by making the definition go the other way. He defines truth in terms of rational acceptability rather than rationality in terms of truth.6 In contrast, evidentialists (here I’m thinking of Locke, W. K. Clifford, and a number of mainstream American epistemologists) make the alignment problem too hard because they identify two distinct epistemic goods that are included in rationality—​believing on evidence and believing in a way that is truth-​ conducive—​but there is no prima facie reason to think that they are connected. We cannot be sure, then, that when they talk about rationality, they are talking about a real phenomenon at all. Another way of making it too hard is to give a relativist account of rationality and a realist account of truth. This is an extremely common view in American intellectual culture, and it is tempting. I am tempted by it myself. To see why it is so tempting and also what the problem is, let us take an example. Suppose we are considering nine cultures with conflicting beliefs on the origin of the world. If all nine are established, respected views with a long history, an elaborate literature, and many adherents, how can we deny that all nine are rational? But if their beliefs are mutually conflicting, at most one succeeds at getting the truth. This is a very common move, but it breaks the desired connection between rationality and truth. That is because on this approach, the likelihood that our culture-​specific beliefs are rational is very high (in fact, nine in nine), whereas the likelihood that they are true is very low (less than one in nine). I find this an undesirable consequence in spite of the fact that this move has obvious attractions. (Let me say that it is also, in my opinion,

5

Bill Alston suggested this term to me.

6 Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History.

Phronesis and Religious Belief  235 the most serious objection to the realist conception of truth, and it is one that I’ve never seen addressed, but I’m going to leave that aside.) By making truth culture-​transcendent and rationality culture-​immanent, this approach tries to have it both ways. The attraction is understandable, but unfortunately it does not work as long as there are numerous incompatible beliefs from culture to culture about the same thing. It is just too easy for them all to be rational and too hard for any of them to be true. The problem is avoided if it turns out there really are not very many differences among cultures after all, and some observers have, of course, claimed just that (e.g., John Hick). Notice that this position, like the others we have considered, arises from a more basic recognition of conflict and a rational desire to resolve it. This supports my earlier claim that the Need to Resolve Conflict principle is one of the most basic principles of rationality. The second constraint is that it is not the content that makes a belief rational or irrational. I am not denying that the content of some beliefs might be such that no person could arrive at them rationally, but I am proposing that even in those cases, it is not the content per se that makes the belief irrational, but the way in which the belief is formed or maintained. For example, suppose that I believe that the satellite dish on my neighbor’s roof is really a UFO. That belief is very likely irrational, but I am claiming that it is not irrational simply because it is the belief that UFOs have landed on my neighbor’s roof. It is irrational because I did something I shouldn’t have done in arriving at that belief, or else I didn’t do something I should have done in arriving at that belief. The fact that it is not the content per se that determines rationality is suggested by the fact that we think that rational persons continue to have rational beliefs when their beliefs change. This leads to our second constraint on an account of rationality: Rationality is not determined by the content of a belief. This constraint does not mean that certain beliefs cannot be privileged. There is nothing wrong with saying that whatever rationality is, it is not compatible with the rationality of the belief that denying the antecedent is valid. But there are two important points here. One is that there are serious limits to the beliefs in this category. The privileged beliefs may not call into question the normativity of rationality itself, nor the facts about rationality that we started with, for example, that normal humans are rational, that they are capable of recognizing the rationality of others, that the beliefs of other cultures are prima facie rational. So the privileged beliefs may not be ones that support cultural imperialism or solipsism. The second important point about the privileging of beliefs is that any such beliefs have a feature that prevents circularity: we may not use the theory to defend their rationality. This gives us the third constraint: Any beliefs taken to be benchmarks of a theory of rationality cannot be defended by the theory itself. Let me take an example from ethics to make the point. Suppose we agree that no acceptable ethical theory may have the consequence that it is morally right to

236  Virtue in Religious Epistemology torture people for fun. We then formulate our theory, and, as planned, it has the consequence that it is seriously wrong to torture people for fun. But what we may not do, if asked why such torture is wrong, is to say that it is ruled out by the theory. The price we pay for making certain moral principles or beliefs benchmarks of any acceptable theory is that we may not justify the beliefs on the basis of the theory. That, of course, is usually an acceptable price since nobody is likely to question these beliefs if they are properly chosen; that is, indeed, one of the reasons we chose them. Similarly, we may decide that no acceptable theory of rationality may have the consequence that it is rational to believe that my mind is the only one in existence, or that I am the only rational being in existence, or that my culture is the only rational one in existence, but then we may not use the theory to justify the judgment that these beliefs are not rational. Consequently, we must choose them carefully.

13.4  Phronesis I am now going to propose a way of defining rationality that we can use to determine the rationality of culture-​specific beliefs. I have suggested principles and constraints with which any acceptable account of rationality should comply, but they do not give us a determinate direction in which to proceed. And, as I have said, those scholars working on empirical studies of the way humans form and maintain beliefs may have other constraints to add. But I think we have enough to make a start. There are not many ways to go about defining something when you don’t pretend to know what it really is. But there is one way that was used both by Aristotle and, in a completely different context, by some contemporary philosophers of language. In the seventies Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam proposed a way of defining natural kind terms that became known as the theory of Direct Reference. According to this theory, a natural kind such as water or gold or human should be defined as whatever is the same kind of thing or stuff as some indexically identified paradigm instance. For example, they proposed that gold is, roughly, whatever is the same element as that, water is whatever has the same chemical structure as that, a human is whatever is a member of the same species as that, and so on. In each case the demonstrative term “that” refers to an entity to which the person doing the defining refers directly, usually by pointing. Obviously, these definitions require an experiential basis, in fact, a shared experiential basis. One of the main reasons for proposing definitions like this was that Kripke and Putnam believed that often we do not know the nature of the thing we are defining, and yet we know how to construct a definition that links up with the nature that it has. We may not know the nature of gold, and for millennia nobody

Phronesis and Religious Belief  237 knew its nature, but that did not prevent people from defining “gold” in a way that fixed the reference of the term and continued to do so after its nature was discovered. I am not proposing that rationality is a natural kind, but it is interesting to see that the same indexical procedure was used by Aristotle in defining phronesis, or practical wisdom. Aristotle has quite a bit to say about what the virtue of phronesis consists in, but he clearly is not confident that he can give a full account of it. And what is more important for my purposes here, he thinks that fundamentally, that doesn’t matter because we can pick out persons who are phronetic in advance of investigating the nature of phronesis. The phronimos can be defined, roughly, as a person like that, where we make a demonstrative reference to a paradigmatically good person. So Aristotle assumes that we can pick out paradigmatic instances of good persons in advance of our theorizing. I propose that we use the same procedure in defining rationality. There is an important metatheoretical consideration that supports this move. A theory of rationality, like an ethical theory, is a theory about an existing human practice or set of practices. We call something rational or irrational as part of our practices of evaluation of beliefs, acts, and persons. Theory must connect to the practice; otherwise, it is not a theory of the practice at all. Ethicists do this all the time in justifying ethical theories. Certain particular judgments of value or moral correctness that come directly out of the practice are accepted pretheoretically and become gauges of the validity of any theory. I have already mentioned one example, that it is wrong to torture people for fun. Other such judgments might be that Jesus Christ was a good person, that the judicial punishment of the innocent is bad, that so and so was a courageous person, and so on. Any ethical theory that is incompatible with these judgments not only fails to be a correct theory; it fails in a more radical way. It fails to be a theory of ethical practices at all. In other words, if it is not wrong to intentionally torture another for fun, we don’t know what “wrong” means, and we are not talking about ethics. The rational and irrational, like the right and wrong, are imbedded in practices of evaluation from which particular judgments arise. We recognize rational persons the same way we recognize good persons, and what we say about rationality when we decide to theorize must be compatible with our judgments about who those people are. My proposal, then, is that rationality should be defined in relation to its paradigm instances in the same way that Aristotle defined “phronesis” and Kripke defined “water.” A rational person is, roughly, a person like that—​and we point to a paradigmatically rational person. Notice that this model can be interpreted in a way that is as pluralistic or as monistic as you like provided that it is not so monistic that there are no paradigms of rationality in all cultures, and it is not so pluralistic that they are not recognizable outside their own culture. Either

238  Virtue in Religious Epistemology extreme would be incompatible with one of the principles of rationality we started with. It is also likely that some of our paradigms will not remain fixed. We may need to use a process of reflective equilibrium between our judgments of rational behavior and our judgments identifying the paradigms. So initially a person may appear to be paradigmatically rational, and we form judgments about how to behave rationally by observing that person, but over time, as we compare that person with other paradigmatically rational persons, we may revise our judgment. This procedure also permits us to avoid a move that I earlier said puts us in danger of begging the question, namely, assuming that rational behavior is limited to cognitive behavior, or that it puts primacy on the cognitive. It also leaves open the question of whether rational behavior is a matter of following universal principles, or for that matter, principles of any kind. It leaves open the possibility that rationality may sometimes be governed by what John Henry Newman calls the illative sense or some other sense yet unidentified. To determine the answer to any of these questions, I suggest we look at what rational persons do. Now I would like to connect my suggestion here with previous work. I have argued at some length (in Virtues of the Mind) that the intellectually virtuous person is the paradigm in relation to which a host of concepts of epistemic evaluation can be defined. My motives in that work were different from the ones I have here since one of my primary concerns there was to show that there are no significant differences between the normativity of cognitive activity and belief-​ formation, on the one hand, and the normativity of conduct, on the other. Both are moral, both involve the emotions, and both have the same grounding in virtue. Ultimately, I argued, it is the behavior of persons with phronesis, or practical wisdom, that determines both right acting and justified believing, as well as one’s moral and intellectual duty and the other evaluative properties of acts and beliefs. Phronesis has the same relation to justified beliefs as it has to right acts in a pure virtue theory, and it has the same relation to epistemically praiseworthy beliefs as it has to morally praiseworthy acts. Phronesis is necessary because the virtues are many, but the self is one. It is, among other things, the virtue that permits a person to mediate between and among the considerations arising from all the virtues in any given situation, and to act in a way that gives each its proper weight. Phronesis determines what it is right or justified or praiseworthy to do or to believe, all things considered. Here I want to propose two principles that identify the paradigmatically rational person with the phronimos and which use the behavior of such a person as a way of determining the rationality or epistemic praiseworthiness of culture-​ specific beliefs. Even though culture-​specific beliefs are not transcendent in their content, they may be transcendent in the qualities of mind out of which they arise. Intellectual virtues are qualities that are culture-​transcendent, or, at least,

Phronesis and Religious Belief  239 they are as close as we are going to get to transcendent qualities in the normative realm. So even though I am not suggesting that all cultures place equal value on open-​mindedness, intellectual fairness, thoroughness, and attentiveness, or intellectual courage and autonomy, these traits are the ones that make cross-​ cultural dialogue possible. Putnam himself hints at something like this in his discussion of the way reason transcends culture in its regulative use. He mentions “a just, attentive, balanced intellect,” and he goes on to emphasize the importance of discussion and communication, criticism and impartiality, all of which are intellectual virtues, although he does not give them that name.7 I propose that what is rational is what would or might be believed by a person of a certain sort in the circumstances in question. The sort of person is trans-​ cultural since there are phronimoi in all cultures, but the circumstances may be such that they only arise in a single culture. Let me suggest, then, two principles of rational belief—​a weaker principle of rational permissibility, and a stronger principle of rational praiseworthiness: Principles of Rational Belief (PRB) PRB1  S’s belief p in culture C is rational just in case a person with phronesis outside culture C might believe p if she were in S’s circumstances in culture C. To say that the phronimos​might believe p is just to say that it is not the case that she would not believe p. Of course, this principle applies to phronimoi within S’s culture as well as to those without. PRB2  S’s belief p in culture C is epistemically praiseworthy just in case S’s belief p is virtuously motivated, and a person with phronesis outside culture C would characteristically believe p if she were in S’s circumstances in culture C.

These principles of rational belief permit us to give the needed modification of the Rational Recognition principle, as promised. It is not useful to make the standard of rational recognition all rational humans if rationality is used in the generic sense in which all humans are rational. The problem is not that such a principle is false; it is just that it has to be qualified too much to be useful. Instead, the standard of recognition should be persons who are exemplars of ideal rationality, and I have suggested that that is persons with phronesis. So if a belief is rational, its rationality must be recognizable by persons with phronesis outside the cultural community of the believer. This means that the phronimos outside the community should see that he or she might have the same belief if he or she were a member of that community.8 That is, for any belief p, and person S, 7 Putnam, “Reason and History,” in Reason, Truth, and History: 163. 8 What a phronimos might believe in some circumstances that obtain only in another culture can differ from what he might have believed in those circumstances. If he had been born in another

240  Virtue in Religious Epistemology if S is rational in believing p, then a phronimos outside of S’s cultural community might believe p if she were in S’s community and circumstances, and the Rational Recognition principle says that the phronimos​herself is capable of judging that to be the case. S’s belief p is rational in the stronger sense only if a phronim​outside of S’s cultural community would characteristically believe p if she were phronimos in S’s community and circumstances. PRB respects the Rational Recognition principle (RR). The Rational Recognition principle is useful to persons who wish to test the rationality of their own culture-​specific beliefs provided that they are able to recognize phronimoi outside their own culture. It is quite likely that they can do this in many cases since the qualities that make a person a phronimos are qualities that make him stand out. To be a phronimos is, in part, to be recognized as a person of good judgment. The phronimos is a person who is imitated and his judgment consulted. Such qualities are probably among the easiest for persons on the outside to recognize. PRB respects the Culture Sensitivity principle (CS) since it presupposes that there are phronimoi in all cultures. This principle makes two forms of cultural imperialism prima facie unjustified. One is the view discussed by Putnam that rationality is defined by what my culture believes. The second is the more common view that my own culture is prima facie more rational than all others even though the rationality of others is not ruled out by definition. PRB respects the principle that rationality gives rise to a Need to Resolve Conflict (NRC), since the phronimoi are the persons in whom we entrust leadership in conflict resolution (leaving aside the enormous political obstacles that may need to be overcome). They are more careful than most of us to determine through intercultural dialogue that putatively conflicting beliefs really are conflicting before taking steps to resolve the conflict, and they do not necessarily aim to reach consensus since they also know when the differences are too great to make consensus realistic. But their ability to look at their own culture with some detachment makes them fair arbiters of disagreement. If any two persons in any two cultures can reach agreement, it is the phronimoi in both. The constraint that rationality is not defined by content is respected by PRB since the phronimos is not identified by any particular beliefs, but by qualities of mind and character. This constraint does not prevent us from dictating that nobody counts as a phronimos who has certain crazy beliefs, but if we do so, the

culture and had grown up there, he might have believed some proposition p, even though it is not the case that he might believe it if he were suddenly transported there today. Since it is the possession of phronesis itself and not the personal identity of the phronimos that does the work of the phronesis test, it is more likely that the might have criterion is preferable. However, this needs to be investigated much more thoroughly.

Phronesis and Religious Belief  241 noncircularity constraint indicates that we cannot justify our judgment about those beliefs on the grounds that the phronimos does not believe them. The constraint that the alignment problem must be neither too easy nor too hard is the most difficult one with which to comply. The problem is not that PRB makes it too easy to connect rationality and truth, but that it seems to make it too hard. As I have said, this is a problem faced by metaphysical realism in general. It is common to think that the alignment problem can be solved if the judgments of rational persons converge. If a range of independent investigators converge on a determinate set of beliefs, that assures the objectivity of those beliefs. So it is common to think that agreement among rational persons is aligned with truth, and it is usually added that it is hopeless to expect that this will ever happen.9 That may be true, but I propose that we have more reason to hope that the judgments of phronimoi will converge than that the judgments of all rational persons will converge. Still, we have no guarantee that it will happen. I think, then, that even though the phronesis theory is an improvement, the alignment problem still exists.

13.5 Religious Belief My suggestion so far has been predominantly a formal one:  (1) Rationality should be defined indexically by essential reference to paradigm instances. (2) What counts as a rational belief is what such persons would or might believe in the circumstances in question. (3) The person with phronesis is the best candidate I know of to serve the role I have identified. (4) The immanence and transcendence of rationality and the three constraints I have discussed are particularly important in the context of a discussion of culture-​specific beliefs. Religious communities are cultures in the sense I  mean in this chapter. Christianity constitutes at least one culture, probably more, and so I propose that distinctively Christian beliefs be evaluated for their rationality and epistemic praiseworthiness by the principles I have given. And, of course, the same goes for other religions. But PRB is only an outline of a procedure. A number of questions need to be answered and details filled in before the principles can have any real practical value. The concept of phronesis is a rich one with a long history, and in part I am relying upon that history in order to supply the necessary detail, but that rich history also means that there is more than one way of explaining what the phronimos is. I do not think that is necessarily a problem as long as whatever account we give of phronesis respects the principles I’ve mentioned. So the 9 Bernard Williams has taken this position in a number of places. See Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), ­chapter 8.

242  Virtue in Religious Epistemology immanence of rationality permits individual cultures to give their own accounts of what the phronimos is like, but the transcendence of rationality requires that there must be phronimoi in all cultures and that they must be recognizable both inside and outside their culture. I also think that these are the people to whom we turn to resolve conflict. It seems likely that when PRB1 and PRB2 are filled out to be sufficiently useful and are applied to Christian beliefs, it will turn out that most of these beliefs are rational for most Christians and fewer of them, but still many of them, are epistemically praiseworthy. I think it will also turn out that the same principles have the consequence that many beliefs of the other major religions are also rational and epistemically praiseworthy. But as mild as these principles are, they are enough to rule out at least one belief that is common among many Christians, and I’ll get to that soon. But first, let me turn to the application of the three principles of rationality to religious beliefs. The Rational Recognition principle implies that we are capable of studying other religions not simply out of curiosity, but because we think we may have something to learn from them and they from us. We depend upon each other’s rationality and our ability to recognize when the other is and is not being rational in the process of promoting mutual understanding and increasing religious knowledge on both sides. Cross-​cultural experience and study in comparative religion both support and are supported by the Culture Sensitivity principle. This rules out exclusivism about the rationality of religious beliefs. The Need to Resolve Conflict principle suggests that we must be willing to change when we engage in cross-​cultural dialogue. This process also highlights the differences between different kinds of epistemic evaluation. Not everyone agrees on the relative importance of having epistemically praiseworthy beliefs versus having true beliefs. If many persons have epistemically praiseworthy but false religious beliefs, how should others react? How should we react to ourselves when we see that we are perceived by others as having false beliefs? How should we react when we see that we are perceived as having beliefs that lack epistemic praiseworthiness, even if they are not perceived as lacking rationality? Inter-​cultural and inter-​religious dialogue is an important part of communication of us all as members of the human race. But I think it is important that when we engage in it, we show to others that we respect the three principles I have discussed, in particular, that we show them that we take their beliefs to be prima facie as rational as ours, and that we believe that our rationality and theirs is mutually recognizable. Let me now turn to the three constraints. The alignment problem is the hardest, whether it applies to Christian beliefs, other religious beliefs, culture-​ specific beliefs, or even to beliefs that are not culture-​specific. It is therefore a problem for religious belief, but it is not a special problem for religious belief. It is a serious philosophical problem, not a distinctively religious one. I said that

Phronesis and Religious Belief  243 I do not claim that my position solves the problem, although I think the phronesis proposal makes some headway. That is because there is a greater chance of convergence of belief among persons with practical wisdom than among the whole community of human persons. But I also mentioned that it would probably turn out that many beliefs of many different religions pass the tests of PRB1 and PRB2. If so, the phronesis proposal still permits a wider gap between rationality and truth than is desirable. Adding further principles of rationality may help us solve the problem, but I think there really is a tension within the concept of rationality between the different roles it plays in our thinking. We think rationality is our best shot at getting the truth, but we also think that members of other cultures are as well placed as we are at getting the truth. This exposes a deeper problem in the connection between the theory of rationality and the theory of truth. The second constraint is that reasonableness cannot be determined by content. I have said that we may privilege certain beliefs as constraints on any acceptable account of rationality, but we may not privilege beliefs that call the principles of rationality into question, and the third constraint requires that any beliefs that are privileged cannot be defended by appealing to the account we then use. So there is nothing irrational in Christians taking certain specifically Christian beliefs to be privileged, but if we do so, we may not then defend the rationality of these beliefs by a theory of rationality generated in part to be compatible with their rationality. Nor may we privilege beliefs that deny the fundamental principles of rationality. So, for example, I might believe a story which, if true, would explain why I alone in the universe am rational and others are not. Similarly, a cultural imperialist might tell a story that explains why, from the point of view of their own culture, imperialism is not irrational. But solipsism and cultural imperialism are irrational even when they are justified on the basis of a story standardly believed by the members of their culture. A form of this problem can arise for those Christians who believe an interpretation of the doctrine of Original Sin according to which human rational faculties have been so severely damaged by the Fall that the common dictates of these faculties cannot be trusted; and in addition, personal sin leads individuals to self-​deception on such a grand scale that most persons cannot trust their own sense of what is rational and what is not. Such a view shares the problems of solipsism and cultural imperialism: it comes dangerously close to denying that rationality exists at all and it makes true intercultural dialogue impossible. The principles I have proposed rule out not just specific doctrines but also certain approaches to the rationality of religious belief. Among philosophers of religion, Alvin Plantinga has produced a body of work that is very influential. In his book, Warrant and Christian Belief, Plantinga proposes a model according to which the Holy Spirit directly causes the Christian to believe the Christian doctrines in the model in the basic way, and uses a process of which the

244  Virtue in Religious Epistemology believer is unaware. Such beliefs are based on nothing—​not evidence, not testimony, not even experience. Plantinga argues that belief in the model is rational if it is true, and he admits that it is not rational if false. He also admits that his position has the consequence that its rationality is not recognizable from the outside. This approach is incompatible with some of the deep features of rationality that I have tried to identify in this chapter.

13.6  Conclusion Rationality is not a suspect notion even though it has sometimes been used for suspect purposes. In fact, I think Aristotle was right that it is partly constitutive of being human. The idea of rationality is more interesting if it retains both the formal connection with truth and the substantive content with which it has been most frequently associated. I have proposed the mildest account of rationality that I think is consistent with these features, but as modest as it is, it does rule out both some particular beliefs and some rather common approaches to the rationality of religious belief.

14

Religious Trust, Anti-​Trust, and Reasons for Religious Belief* 14.1  Introduction What I mean by an epistemic reason to believe p is something on the basis of which a reasonable person can settle for herself whether p. An epistemic reason need not be sufficient to settle the question whether p, but it is the sort of thing that can do so, normally in conjunction with other epistemic reasons. I will argue first that there are two kinds of epistemic reasons—​one irreducibly first personal, the other third personal. Epistemic self-​trust is an irreducibly first personal epistemic reason, and it is the most basic epistemic reason we have. Attacks on religious belief are sometimes attacks on third person reasons, but they are sometimes attacks on epistemic self-​trust or trust in religious communities. Attacks on self-​trust need to be handled in a different way than attacks on third person reasons for belief.

14.2  The Distinction between First Person and Third Person Reasons I call the kinds of reasons that are irreducibly first personal “deliberative reasons,” and the kinds of reasons that are third personal “theoretical reasons.” My use of the terms “deliberative” and “theoretical” is not essential to the distinction I am making, but these terms draw attention to the different functions of the two kinds of reasons in our psychology. By theoretical reasons for believing p I mean facts that are logically or probabilistically connected to the truth of p. They are facts (true propositions) about states of the world that, taken together, give a case for the fact that p.1 Reasonable persons care about getting the truth, and so they care about getting indicators that what they believe (or a candidate for their belief) is true. Theoretical reasons are not intrinsically connected to believing, but they are reasons because a * The chapter is reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. 1 In this chapter I do not distinguish facts from true propositions. If there is a difference, the argument of this chapter can be easily amended. Epistemic Values. Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197529171.001.0001.

246  Virtue in Religious Epistemology reasonable person who comes to believe them and grasps their logical and probabilistic relations to p will see them as indicating the truth of p. Theoretical reasons can be shared with others—​laid out on the table, so they are third personal. They are relevant from anyone’s point of view. In fact, they do not require a point of view to be reasons. The connections between theoretical reasons and what they are reasons for are among the facts of the universe. What we call evidence is most naturally put in this category of reasons, although the notion of evidence is used in many different senses, and I do not insist that what we mean by “evidence” is limited to theoretical reasons. In contrast, what I  mean by deliberative reasons has an essential connection to me and only to me in my deliberations about whether it is the case that p. Deliberative reasons connect me to getting the truth of p, whereas theoretical reasons connect facts about the world with the truth of p. Like theoretical reasons, deliberative reasons are reasons because a reasonable person—​a person who cares about the truth, takes them to be indicators of truth. Deliberative reasons provide me reasons for p that are not simply weightier than the reasons they provide others. They are not reasons at all for other persons. They are irreducibly first personal. To see the distinction I  have in mind, consider experience as a reason for belief. If I have an experience, the fact that I have it is a theoretical reason that supports a variety of propositions. I can tell you about my experience, and if you believe what I tell you, you can then refer to the fact that I had the experience as a reason to believe whatever it supports. So suppose I have the experience of seeming to see a scissor-​tailed flycatcher near my home. You and I can both refer to the fact that I had that experience as a reason to believe that the flycatchers have not yet migrated, and so can anybody else who is aware of the fact that I had the experience. The fact that the experience occurred is therefore a theoretical reason. It is on the table for anyone to consider, and anyone can consider its logical and probabilistic connections to other facts about the world. However, I am in a different position with respect to my experience than you are because I not only grasp the fact that I had the experience, but in addition, I and I alone had the experience. I am the one who saw the flycatcher with its long split tail. That visual experience can affect my reasoning processes, emotional responses, and the way I come to have or give up certain beliefs directly, and that is perfectly normal for human beings. In contrast, the fact that I had the experience is something you and I and any number of other persons can come to believe. So my experience of seeing the scissor-​tailed flycatcher gives me a reason to believe that the birds have not yet gone south. You cannot have my experience, but you can believe that I had the experience. When you do so, you are not accessing my experience: you are accessing the fact that the experience occurred. Of course, I can access the same fact, but my having a reason to believe

Religious Trust  247 that scissor-​tailed flycatchers have not yet migrated does not depend upon my accessing the fact that I had the experience of seeing one. The seeing itself gives me a reason to believe they are in the neighborhood. Perhaps the visual experience is a stronger reason than the fact that the experience occurred, but I think that is a misleading way to put it. The experience is not the same kind of thing as the fact that the experience occurred. Both provide reasons for belief, but they are reasons of a different kind. Another type of deliberative reason is what are often called intuitions in one of its senses. What I mean by an intuition is, roughly, something internal to the mind that responds with an answer to a question, often about a concrete case. For example, I have the intuition that it is not morally permissible to directly kill an innocent person to save five others, but someone else might have a different intuition. Most philosophers have the intuition that a Gettier case is not an instance of knowledge, but we probably have encountered students who do not have that intuition. I have no position on the strength of an intuition as a reason to believe what the intuition supports. Maybe it is strong, maybe it is not. But insofar as it is a reason at all, it is a deliberative reason. My intuitions are mine alone, and they give me but not you a particular kind of reason for certain beliefs. But again, the fact that I have an intuition can be put out on the table. I can tell you that my intuition is such and such. When I do so, I give you a theoretical reason supporting some position. The fact that many people have the same intuition can also be used to support a position. So the fact that a large majority of those persons who have carefully thought about the nature of knowledge have the intuition that a Gettier case is not an instance of knowledge supports the position that a Gettier case is not an instance of knowledge. Intuitions, then, are like experiences. An intuition and an experience provide the agent with first person reasons to believe something, but the fact that the experience occurred or that the intuition is what it is can be treated as evidence, as a theoretical reason for the truth of some proposition. Experience and intuition reveal an important feature of deliberative epistemic reasons: They are psychic states of a person that seem to her to indicate the truth of some proposition p. Human beings are constituted in such a way that certain states are like that. We would expect, then, that other psychic states can have the same function, for instance, memories and certain emotions. My favorite example of an emotion that can be a reason for a belief is admiration. My admiration for an epistemic exemplar can be a reason to believe what the exemplar believes in the domain of her exemplarity. That is a deliberative reason, not a theoretical one. Of course, it is not a good reason unless my admiration for the epistemic admirability of the exemplar satisfies certain conditions, including my reflection on the responses of other persons. But when it is a reason, it is a reason only for me, not others. I think also that a belief state can be a deliberative reason.

248  Virtue in Religious Epistemology I have argued elsewhere that a state of believing p can be a deliberative reason to continue to believe p.2 But it is not necessary for present purposes to defend that claim or to give an exhaustive list of deliberative reasons. My general claim is that reasonable persons take certain of their conscious states to be indicators of the truth of some proposition. I propose that these states include experiences, memories, intuitions, some emotions, and epistemic states. What makes these states reasons is that a reasonable person takes them to be truth-​indicators. What makes these reasons deliberative is that they are reasons only for their possessors. Theoretical and deliberative reasons have features that make it important to distinguish them. For one thing, theoretical and deliberative reasons do not aggregate. As far as I know, no one has yet figured out how to reduce the first person perspective to the third person perspective or vice versa, nor has anyone identified a perspective that is common to both perspectives. What is a reason from the first person perspective is not a reason from the third person perspective because conscious states are not facts. Likewise, a reason from the third person perspective is not a reason from the first person perspective. The fact that p is not at all the same thing as my conscious states. Earlier I compared a visual experience of seeing a certain species of bird with its third person counterpart—​the fact that the experience occurred—​and I said that they function differently as reasons to believe the birds have not yet gone south. I said it is misleading to say that the experience is a stronger reason than its third person counterpart because they differ in kind. This is not to deny that frequently conscientious persons treat their experience as a stronger reason, but I deny that there are rules that determine that whenever someone has an experience of a certain kind, it has a certain weight in comparison with its third person counterpart—​for example, it is x percent stronger. For the same reason, there are no rules that determine the way any conscientious person ought to weigh the support for p given by her experience against third person reasons she can access for or against p. When I say that theoretical and deliberative reasons for p do not aggregate, I am not denying that they can both raise my confidence in the truth of p. If I have theoretical reasons for p and then get a deliberative reason for p, that often (although not always) increases my confidence that p. Similarly, getting theoretical reasons when I already have deliberative reasons can increase my confidence. But there is no formula that determines whether a given combination of 2 In Zagzebski, Epistemic Authority, c­ hapter 10, I argue that the popular problem of reasonable disagreement is easier to resolve if we use the distinction between theoretical and deliberative reasons. If we focus only on theoretical reasons, my beliefs are no different than anyone else’s. That explains the temptation to say that the reasonable response to peer disagreement is skepticism. However, I argue that my belief state gives me a deliberative reason to continue to have the belief, a reason that nobody else has. Trust in my previous states of self gives me a deliberative reason to continue those same states of self. Of course, this reason can be lost as states of the self change with new experiences and further reflection.

Religious Trust  249 theoretical and deliberative reasons gives a conscientious person confidence, or how much confidence he receives. The second important difference between theoretical and deliberative reasons is that I relate to my deliberative reasons as an agent, but my agency is independent of theoretical reasons. I am passive with regard to the facts. My only job when I reflect about the facts is to figure out what they are and what they support. In contrast, my conscious states are parts of myself and, because I am self-​reflective, I can manage those states. Self-​reflection is the process by which the self guides itself. One goal of self-​reflection is to get the truth. A reasonable person reflects upon her memories, intuitions, emotions, and beliefs because she thinks that reflection makes it more likely that she will get true beliefs and avoid false ones. Sometimes reflection can make the state itself change—​for example, reflection on someone I admire and the responses of others to that person can change my emotion of admiration. More commonly, reflection upon a set of my beliefs, emotions, memories, etc. can change what I take to be the relations of support between some of my conscious states and certain beliefs. Deliberative reasons, then, respond to self-​management. I call them “deliberative” because they respond to deliberation.

14.3  The Primacy of Self-​Trust Suppose I am considering the reasonableness of believing some proposition p. Perhaps I already believe p, but reflection leads me to look for reasons for p. As I have said, a reasonable person wants reasons for her beliefs. Or perhaps I am not sure whether p, so I want reasons in order to determine whether p. I know I  might get deliberative reasons, but deliberative reasons are often the sorts of things I cannot simply look for. Theoretical reasons are facts, and I can always look for facts. So if I want reasons for p, I will typically look for theoretical reasons for p. But since a theoretical reason is a fact independent of me, it does not operate as a reason for me to believe anything until I take it on board. I must be aware of the facts that bear on whether p if those facts are reasons for me to believe p. However, my taking a certain set of theoretical reasons for p as reasons for me to believe p is not sufficient to make it likely that p is true. That is because my taking something to be a set of theoretical reasons for p is irrelevant to the actual connection between those reasons and p unless I am taking them properly—​have accurately identified the appropriate facts, have figured out the correct logical and probabilistic relations between those facts and p, have appreciated the significance of individual facts, and have not left anything out. Hopefully all of that is a fact about me. But that fact depends upon the more basic fact that my epistemic

250  Virtue in Religious Epistemology powers are conducive to getting me the truth—​the fact that I have the kind of powers that enable me to find out facts about the world. But now the question arises: How can I access that fact? It has been pointed out by many others—​for example, Richard Foley3 and William Alston4—​that any reasons I have to believe that my powers connect me to the truth are circular. I cannot tell that my powers get me to the truth without using those powers. In fact, I cannot tell in a noncircular way that my epistemic powers ever get me to the truth, much less that they get me to the truth reliably. It would take a perspective outside of my mind to identify the quality of the relationship between my mind and a world outside of it, but I am a being who can never ascend to a perspective outside of my own mind, save in imagination. Notice that I face the same problem for deliberative reasons as for theoretical reasons. Just as I have no way of telling in a noncircular way that my attempt to access the theoretical facts gets me to the truth, I also have no way of telling that my sense experience, memory, or intuition get me to the truth without using some of my own powers. However, there is a difference between the problem as it arises for my deliberative reasons and the problem for my theoretical reasons. For theoretical reasons, I have two problems: (a) accurately identifying the theoretical reasons, and (b)  accurately identifying a relationship between those reasons and some proposition p such that that relationship makes it likely that p is true. I cannot do either (a) or (b) unless my powers are truth-​conducive. When, upon reflection, I ask myself whether I have reason to believe that I can do (a) and (b), I realize that I cannot do either one unless my powers are conducive to getting me the truth. But I do not have reason to think that my powers are conducive to getting me the truth without assuming (a) and (b). My situation with respect to my deliberative reasons is somewhat different. Since my deliberative reasons are conscious states, their existence is often (although not always) self-​evident. So for at least some deliberative reasons, I do not have a problem parallel to (a). Nonetheless, I have problem (b) for deliberative reasons as well as for theoretical reasons. I cannot tell that my deliberative reasons connect me to the truth without using powers the truth-​conduciveness of which I must assume, but I cannot tell that the powers that give me deliberative reasons are generally truth-​conducive without appealing to particular outputs of those powers. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that various forms of this problem have dominated epistemology since Descartes. Not all reasonable persons notice the problem, but I think it is significant that those who do notice it rarely respond

3 Foley, Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others. 4

Alston, “Epistemic Circularity” and Beyond Justification.

Religious Trust  251 with a degree of doubt that prevents them from having beliefs. Reasonable persons have beliefs even if and when they realize that they have no guarantee that their total set of theoretical reasons for p and the deliberative reasons of the sort we have discussed so far are sufficient to indicate the truth of p for a reasonable person. What is the reasonable response to this problem about reasons? Both Foley and Alston maintain that it is self-​trust, but neither of them tells us what self-​ trust consists in. I agree that reasonable persons trust their faculties both before and after they notice the problem of the circularity of reasons. But I think that if self-​trust serves the function of being a response to our epistemic predicament, rather than just a statement of it, self-​trust must have certain features. First, self-​trust must be more than the belief that my epistemic powers are generally conducive to getting me the truth. That belief precedes the awareness of epistemic circularity and is not sufficient as a response to it. What is important about the awareness of circularity is that it raises the issue of doubt, and once that issue is raised, I must either succumb to doubt or dispel it. I have already said that reasonable persons rarely succumb to generalized doubt. But doubt is not a belief. In particular, it is not the belief, “My beliefs might be mostly false.” A crucial feature of doubt is its affective element. Doubt is in part a feeling that leads one to weaken or give up the beliefs that are the object of doubt. Since doubt is partly an affective state, it takes an affective state to dispel it. I think, then, that trust is the response of reasonable persons to doubt only if it has an affective component that dispels doubt. I propose, then, that epistemic self-​trust includes at least two components: (a) believing or taking for granted that my epistemic powers are suited to getting me the truth, that they are trustworthy, and (b) having a feeling that dispels doubts about their trustworthiness, or holds doubt at bay. I take it, then, that self-​trust has an affective element as well as an epistemic element.5 Notice next that if, as I proposed at the beginning of this chapter, a reason for p is something on the basis of which a reasonable person settles for herself whether p, then self-​trust is a reason, but it is a deliberative reason, a reason in the same category as experiences, emotions, and intuitions as a ground for belief. Furthermore, it follows from what I have said that epistemic self-​trust is more basic as a reason to believe any proposition p than any other reason I can have, whether theoretical or deliberative.6 It is in virtue of a state that is partly affective that I take it that what I identify as reasons for some proposition p point to

5 I discuss the reasonableness of epistemic self-​trust and its components in Epistemic Authority, ­chapter 2. I argue there that trust in standard cases includes a behavioral component as well as an epistemic component and an affective component. 6 Of course, self-​trust is not more basic than theoretical reasons, which are facts of the universe. But it is more basic than my use of theoretical reasons in my attempt to figure out what the truth is.

252  Virtue in Religious Epistemology the truth of p without succumbing to doubt. Self-​trust is a reason for me and me alone. It is the most basic reason I can have, and it is partly affective.7 I have mentioned a number of deliberative reasons for belief: experience, intuition, memory, admiration, epistemic self-​trust. I have argued elsewhere that epistemic trust in others is a commitment of self-​trust. Insofar as I see no relevant difference between myself and others, I am committed to trusting them in the same way I trust myself. Consistency leads me to trust others when I trust myself because trust in myself for the goal of getting truth includes trust in certain powers of myself, powers shared by others.8 Epistemic trust in others is also a deliberative reason for belief. It is a state directed toward the epistemic powers of others that is partly epistemic and partly affective. My trust in others is a state only I can have. It can function as a reason for my beliefs in the same way my self-​ trust and admiration and intuition function as reasons. I trust myself in particular when I  am being epistemically conscientious—​ using my powers as carefully as I can to get the truth. I trust others in particular when the conscientious exercise of my powers reveals that they are conscientious. My acceptance of epistemic norms of all kinds derives from trust in myself and others. It is because of trust in self and others that I trust the rules of reasoning that have been devised by persons I trust. The intellectual virtues are the qualities of conscientiously reflective persons who attempt to get truth (or some other epistemic good such as understanding). It is reasonable for me to attempt to acquire the intellectual virtues only because it is reasonable to have a more basic trust in the epistemic powers of cognitive agents. There would be no point in rules for the conscientious exercise of powers that are devised by the conscientious exercise of those same powers unless we reasonably trusted the powers. Similarly, there would be no point in advocating open-​mindedness, intellectual carefulness, courage, etc., each of which is a trait that we identify as desirable for epistemically conscientious agents by the conscientious exercise of the powers of conscientious agents, unless it was reasonable to trust those powers.9 It is reasonable to trust the powers of conscientious epistemic agents and the norms and virtues that conscientious agents endorse because reasonable persons do so. The trust that undergirds epistemic norms and the identification of the intellectual virtues is first personal. There is therefore a deliberative epistemic reason that is not only more basic than theoretical reasons and other deliberative reasons, but it is more basic than the norms of belief-​formation. Ultimately, to be reasonable is to do what conscientious persons—​persons I conscientiously trust—​do.

7 I argue in “Powers and Reasons,” that powers are more basic than reasons. 8 I develop this argument in Epistemic Authority, ­chapter 3. 9 I argue in “Trust” that most of the intellectual virtues either restrain or enhance epistemic self-​ trust or trust in others, and they all presuppose trustworthiness.

Religious Trust  253 Trust in others leads to trust in communities, some of which consist of living persons (e.g., members of one’s academic profession), and some of which extend far into the past. Religious communities are almost always in the latter category. There are deliberative reasons for the beliefs of a community as well as theoretical reasons, and the way the community identifies theoretical evidence often depends upon trust in the community’s ability to get the truth, just as it does for individuals. Of course, members of a community believe many things that do not arise out of the community per se, but communities often function like a self: They have norms of belief formation and shared background beliefs that derive from trust in the community that operates the way self-​trust operates for an individual. I have said that epistemic self-​trust is reasonable because reasonable persons have it. Reasonable persons also have basic trust in others. It might appear that I am suggesting that reasonable persons trust out of blind hope, which reasonable persons themselves ought to take to be unreasonable. But that is not correct. It is not blind hope to manage the self as all reasonable persons do. The self manages itself by reflecting upon its conscious states. That is what a self does in a world that is much larger than the self and which includes many other selves. Perhaps we wish that that were not the case. We might prefer to be able to go outside our self in order to determine what states of the self ought to survive and which ought to be given up. But we know that is impossible. A self just is a being that can only manage itself from the inside. I think this tells us something about the object of self-​trust. To trust the self is to trust the self ’s ability to manage itself by exercising its power to conscientiously reflect upon states of the self. Some of these states have aims, such as truth, in the case of beliefs. So to trust myself epistemically is to trust my ability to manage my beliefs for the goal of truth by conscientious reflection on my total set of psychic states. Since trust has an affective as well as an epistemic component, this means that I take for granted that I am likely to get the truth when I conscientiously reflect on myself in this way, and I have a feeling that dispels doubt about my ability to reach the truth in this way. The ultimate test that I have reached the truth in any given case is survival of conscientious reflection. We reflect upon all our conscious states, evaluate them according to norms that we have adopted as the result of previous reflections, and adjust our beliefs in an attempt to make those states survive future conscientious self-​reflection, given that we expect there will be changes to the self with new experience, new memories, changes in what we feel and what we trust, and changes in other beliefs. That is all a reasonable person can do.

254  Virtue in Religious Epistemology

14.4  Theoretical Attacks on Religion Reasonable persons want reasons for their beliefs, and attacks on their reasons are indirectly attacks on their beliefs. They may, of course, have more than one set of reasons for a given belief, and they may have more than one kind of reason. So an attack on one set of reasons is not necessarily sufficient to rationally undermine their belief. But given what I have argued in section14.3, there is a difference between an attack on one’s theoretical reasons and an attack on one’s deliberative reasons. There have been historically important attacks on religious belief in both categories. An attack on one’s self-​trust or trust in others is an especially virulent form of attack because it undermines a vast portion of one’s epistemic structure. I will discuss attacks on self-​trust in section 14.5. In this section I will discuss attacks on religious belief that proceed either by attacking one’s theoretical reasons for a religious belief R, or by offering theoretical reasons to believe  not-​R. Many, but not all, religious believers have theoretical reasons for their beliefs. Those who do are usually people who are used to discussion and debate with others. Given certain conditions, they will think it important that a religious belief can be supported by reasons that they can put out on the table for all to consider. If their own reasons for belief are primarily deliberative—​personal religious experience, trust in their religious community, admiration for the Gospel message, etc.—​and if their acquaintances are people who have similar deliberative reasons, it might not occur to them that theoretical reasons are important or worth the effort to discover and examine. And they might be right about that. But sometimes their own reflections will lead them to notice incongruities in their beliefs, and that can be a motive to look for evidence—​for ­theoretical reasons. The traditional arguments for theism provide theoretical reasons for theism, whereas the traditional problem of evil provides theoretical reasons for the denial of theism. So a reasonable person looking for theoretical reasons regarding theism will usually find both theoretical reasons for theism and theoretical reasons against it. Her job with respect to these reasons is to attempt to identify them accurately and to accurately identify their logical or probabilistic connection to the thesis of theism. Since theoretical reasons are facts, they are accessible in principle to anybody, but theoretical reasons are not necessarily facts that many people believe, nor need they even be facts of which many people are aware. So the following could be among a person’s theoretical reasons for believing in God or believing some particular religious proposition: (1) The authors of the Bible were reliably reporting the experiences of Abraham and the prophets.

Religious Trust  255 (2) Most of the people in human history have believed in God. (3) The worldview of the Christian religion is more coherent as a view of the world taken as a whole, including human consciousness, moral reality, aesthetic features, etc., than a naturalistic worldview. (4) My neighbor J had a mystical experience after which he changed his life and became the kind of person I admire. Of course, since theoretical reasons are just facts, there are uncountably many other facts that have logical or probabilistic relations to the thesis that God exists. But the theoretical reasons any one person can access are limited, and they differ from person to person. Many people do not believe (1), (2), or (3), and we can easily imagine that almost nobody believes (4) because very few people in the world have even heard of neighbor J. But these people have access to other facts about the world that support theism or support atheism. How does a reasonable person handle her theoretical reasons for and against theism or other religious beliefs? As I have argued, theoretical reasons are derivative from basic self-​trust in our faculties, and the force of these reasons for or against a given proposition for any given person is no stronger than that person’s trust in the faculties she uses in coming to accept the premises and the rules of logical or probabilistic inference used in the argument. But of course she may have that trust. If so, she may be able to weigh the probability that theism is true, given all the theoretical facts of which she is aware. I would not suggest it is easy to do this, but perhaps it is possible in principle. It is important to notice, however, that a person’s total epistemic situation with respect to belief in God may include much more than her theoretical reasons because she may have deliberative reasons to believe there is a God. In this category would be included such things as her personal religious experiences, her admiration for the Gospel message, a moral intuition that supreme goodness is possible, or her trust in her religious community. In section 4.3 I argued that theoretical and deliberative reasons do not aggregate. When a person considers only her theoretical reasons for or against the existence of God, she can weigh the evidence that there is a God, given the facts as she sees them. What she cannot do is to add her deliberative reasons to her theoretical reasons to get a total case for or against the existence of God since her first person reasons do not aggregate with reasons from a third person perspective. What does a reasonable person do when she has both theoretical reasons and deliberative reasons for and against the same proposition? As I said in section 4.3, there is only one thing she can do, and that is to reflect as conscientiously as she can on her total set of beliefs, emotions, and memories of past experiences, as well as anything else in her psyche that responds to reflection. Typically, a reasonable person’s confidence in the truth of one of her beliefs decreases once she

256  Virtue in Religious Epistemology becomes convinced of a theoretical reason against it of which she was previously unaware. Likewise, her confidence increases when she becomes aware of a new theoretical reason for the belief. But there is no formula that dictates how a reasonable person manages her psychology. In fact, it follows from what I have said that it is impossible that there is such a thing, given that all our norms of reasoning and belief-​formation are derived from our basic ability to manage our psychic economy. What we do when we reflect conscientiously dictates the rules, not vice versa. Reasonable persons do not all respond the same way to theoretical reasons even when they are in possession of all the same theoretical facts, including facts about the experiences, memories, emotions, and degrees of trust each person has. The reason for differences in response is differences in their first person reasons. An experience gives me a different kind of reason to believe something than awareness of the fact that the experience occurred. Since deliberative and theoretical reasons do not operate the same way in our psychic economy, there is no reason to expect that the level of support given by an experience is the same as the level of support given by awareness of the fact that the experience occurred. To generalize this point, a being with no inner life—​no experiences or personal memories, no emotions, no feelings of trust, no intuitions, but who is aware of all the facts about the inner life of some other being, would not possess the same epistemic reasons as that other being. Our deliberative reasons are ours alone, and although awareness of the fact that those reasons exist is also an epistemic reason, it is not a reason of the same kind, and it is not capable of conferring the same level of support as deliberative reasons. This is not to say that deliberative reasons are always stronger. No doubt they are not. But they are the kind of reason that is capable of being so. There will always be differences between reasonable persons in the way they handle theoretical reasons for and against religious belief because there will always be differences in their deliberative reasons bearing on the same beliefs.

14.5  Debunking Self-​Trust Beliefs are not always attacked via attacks on theoretical reasons for the belief, or by giving theoretical reasons for the denial of the belief. There are also attacks on one’s deliberative reasons. The most extreme attack of this kind is an attack on epistemic self-​trust. Given that self-​trust is a more basic reason than any other, a general attack on self-​trust is an attack on my norms of reasoning, the intellectual virtues I endorse, and my higher-​order belief that most of the beliefs I have already acquired are true. A successful attack on self-​trust undermines my entire epistemic structure. Most attacks on self-​trust, however, are not designed to be

Religious Trust  257 so radical. They are intended to be surgical strikes against a particular epistemic community, or a specific subset of the belief-​forming faculties of individuals. There are historically important attacks on religious belief in this category. Freud’s attack on religion is a classic example. If religious belief would satisfy our need for safety and the exorcism of our fears, it is claimed that the belief is not caused by faculties aimed at truth, and so we cannot trust the connection between the dispositions in us that produce the beliefs and the truth. Another well-​ known example is the claim that evolutionary theory reveals that our beliefs arise from mechanisms that were selected for survival, not correspondence to reality. Attacks of this kind aim at destroying self-​trust, and sometimes they succeed.10 It is important to see that these attacks offer theoretical reasons aimed at undermining self-​trust. So, for example, the Freudian hypothesis offers evidence that the causes of religious belief include wishful thinking and other motives that are not reliably truth-​related.11 Similarly, evolutionary attacks on religious belief offer the evidence of evolutionary theory with natural selection as an explanation of the origin of human epistemic faculties. If the hypothesis is true, it would have the consequence that the cause of beliefs produced by these faculties is independent of truth. Such a consequence undermines self-​trust in the general reliability of epistemic faculties. Notice that these are attacks on aspects of the self used in self-​reflection. As I have argued, ultimately our only way to tell that any belief is true is that it survives conscientious self-​reflection, but self-​reflection requires a substantial amount of trust in oneself. Evidence we trust that indicates that conscientious reflection is not apt to produce true belief in broad areas of belief formation undermines trust in the reflective capacities needed for believing anything, including the hypotheses generating the problem. Even if the attack is directed at only one category of belief—​for example, moral, political, religious, or philosophical beliefs—​loss of trust in the faculties and dispositions that lead to beliefs in that category can easily lead to a loss of trust in the faculties that lead to beliefs in many other categories because they are usually the same faculties. We do not, after all, have very many belief-​forming faculties, and if we have reason to think these faculties are untrustworthy in their deliverances in one area, there is reason to suspect their deliverances in general. At the worst, the evidence casts doubt on the trustworthiness of the norm of conscientious self-​reflection—​on the connection between following the norm and getting the truth. But we cannot act rationally if we doubt the connection between conscientious self-​reflection and success

10 See, for example, the focus on religious beliefs in Pinker, How the Mind Works, Barrett, “Exploring the Natural Foundations of Religion,” and Boyer, “Religious Thought and Behaviour as By-​Products of Brain Function.” 11 Freud, The Future of an Illusion.

258  Virtue in Religious Epistemology at getting the truth. This should lead us to be skeptical that a surgical attack on the faculties that lead to religious beliefs can succeed. An attack on the powers that produce religious beliefs undermines more than religious beliefs. I do not deny the possibility that there are mystics who have distinctive religious powers, but by far the greatest proportion of religious beliefs, even among mystics, arise from epistemic powers that they use in other domains. It is doubtful, then, that this approach can undermine religious belief without thereby undermining a vast area of beliefs in other categories, including beliefs in the Freudian hypothesis or the evolutionary hypothesis. Let us assume, however, that a reasonable person reflecting upon the Freudian hypothesis is not led to give up trust in the faculties that produced belief in the Freudian hypothesis. As I have already argued, what she must do, and the only thing she can do, is to conscientiously reflect upon her total set of beliefs and other psychic states. In doing so she can tell whether her religious beliefs are harmonious with her deliberative reasons and theoretical evidence, including, we’ll assume, the Freudian hypothesis, or whether instead there is dissonance between her total reasons and her religious beliefs. Her religious beliefs may or may not survive conscientious self-​reflection. If they do, it does not matter whether they were originally acquired through desire, instinct, testimony, personal experience, deduction from some other belief, or by some other mechanism. Survival of conscientious self-​reflection is the ultimate test of truth. The same point applies to belief in the Freudian hypothesis itself. That also will not be adopted by the conscientiously reflective person unless the hypothesis survives conscientious reflection. It might or it might not. If it does survive, it should not reduce trust in those religious beliefs that also survive conscientious reflection. That would be a case in which the conscientious person judges that her religious beliefs are true even though she judges that the Freudian hypothesis is also true. The evolutionary hypothesis about religious beliefs is in the same situation. In each case we reflect in more than one way. We reflect upon theoretical and deliberative reasons for and against the hypothesis, and we reflect upon the conjunction of the hypothesis with our total set of beliefs, emotions, memories, and other psychic states. Conscientious reflection on a hypothesis includes reflection on higher-​order beliefs about the hypothesis, such as reflection about the way persons we trust when conscientious respond to the hypothesis. If such persons either reject the evolutionary hypothesis about the origin of religious beliefs, or accept it but do not respond by mistrusting religious beliefs, that gives us a deliberative reason to think that such a hypothesis does not undermine trust in religion for the conscientious person. But I will not prejudge how this will be handled within the psyche of an individual person. We also cannot say how much credence any individual person can put in the theoretical reasons that

Religious Trust  259 undermine self-​trust without the reasons becoming self-​defeating. But I think we can say with confidence that there is a limit to the credence any conscientious person can have in a belief that undermines self-​trust in a vast network of her beliefs. There is a more direct attack on epistemic self-​trust than the Freudian hypothesis and evolutionary theory. Many people who live for a time in another country, or study the wisdom literature of another culture in depth, find that their trust in their own beliefs is undermined. It is common to think, “I would have had different beliefs if I had grown up in a different place, and it is an accident of history that I have the beliefs I have. I could have been Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Christian, atheist, or many other things.” The same line of thought applies to philosophical positions and attitudes about political arrangements. I am a believer in libertarian free will but I could have been a determinist. I am a believer in Western democracy, but I could have believed in Islamic theocracy. This is more serious than the debunking arguments we have already considered because it is not just reason to believe that people in general form beliefs in certain ways. It is an argument that I could have developed a very different self than the one I have, one in which a different set of beliefs and perhaps values would direct my life. Furthermore, if this line of thought arises from my trust in other people whom I believe to be similar to me, it gives me a deliberative reason to weaken my self-​trust. It is not simply a theoretical reason like Freudian psychology or evolutionary biology. The attack directly affects people’s conscientious reflection upon their own beliefs, and unlike the hypotheses discussed above, conscientious persons do respond to this line of thought by feeling a loss of trust in their beliefs, although I cannot say how many people actually give up beliefs because of these experiences. I think this problem reveals a deep dilemma about the nature of the self. On the one hand, I realize that persons whom I trust because of their similarity to me have very different beliefs and values, and that creates a problem for me within the things I trust. But on the other hand, I realize that I am not a different person. When I look back at my life and the way my self has developed through a long sequence of experiences, emotions, and the acquisition of beliefs, some of which change over time, I realize that I could have gone off on a different track at various points. But I am not what I could have been; I am what I am. I must admit that I have the ability to change, and it is possible to radically change my beliefs. Conversion can be the conscientious thing to do for some people, but only when there is something they do trust (not might have trusted), that they trust more than all the beliefs they must give up. But we always change because of something in the self, not because of something that might have been in the self. The awareness that conscientious persons can radically differ from me and from each other in their beliefs is humbling because it shows that a multitude

260  Virtue in Religious Epistemology of selves with the same natural faculties and the same ends, and with the same conscientious use of those faculties, end up with different results. That can easily lessen my confidence in my self in particular, even though I will continue to have confidence in human selves in general. Humility is fundamentally the realization of what a self is. We all engage in the task of creating a harmonious self, and we want it to be in contact with reality. Herein lies a puzzle for the self: We think there is something wrong about a clash of beliefs, emotions, or values with those of others, and yet we are also sure there is something right about it too. If I am right that each of us has deliberative reasons for beliefs that differ from those of any other person, in fact, necessarily differ from those of any other person, then it should not be too surprising that reasonable persons have different beliefs. But this realization does not dissolve the dilemma as long as we also think that there are facts about the universe, facts that are not relative to the selves attempting to discover them. As long as both first person and third person perspectives exist, and as long as both perspectives put rational demands on us, this problem of the self will not be resolved. Religious beliefs are not unique in this respect, but they force us to confront the difference between first person and third person reasons for belief in a way that cannot be ignored, and they reveal how much we do not know about the nature of the self and what it means to trust it.

References Alston, William. “Epistemic Circularity.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 47 (1986): 1–​30. Alston, William. Beyond Justification:  Dimensions of Epistemic Evaluation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. Barrett, Justin. “Exploring the Natural Foundations of Religion.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4, no. 1 (2000): 29–​34. Boyer, Pascal. “Religious Thought and Behaviour as By-​Products of Brain Function.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7, no. 3 (2003): 119–​24. Foley, Richard. Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Freud, Sigmund. The Future of an Illusion. Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books [1928], 2011. Pinker, Steven. How the Mind Works. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Zagzebski, Linda. Epistemic Authority:  A Theory of Trust, Authority, and Autonomy in Belief. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Zagzebski, Linda. “Powers and Reasons.” In Powers and Capacities in Philosophy, edited by Ruth Groff and John Greco, 270–​82. New York: Routledge, 2013. Zagzebski, Linda. “Trust.” In Virtues and Their Vices, edited by Kevin Timpe and Craig Boyd. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014: 269–284.

PART V

IN T E L L E C T UA L AU TONOM Y A N D AU T HOR I T Y

15

Ethical and Epistemic Egoism and the Ideal of Autonomy* 15.1  Epistemic Egoism and Epistemic Autonomy In this chapter I argue that the ideal of epistemic autonomy is incoherent. I’ll begin with an exploration of three forms of epistemic egoism, each of which has an ethical analogue, and will argue that each form of epistemic egoism is inconsistent. Given that epistemic autonomy is often described in a way that makes it indistinguishable from epistemic egoism, it follows that epistemic autonomy as widely understood is incoherent. I will end by raising some questions about the coherence of autonomy in the moral sense. Let us begin with the strongest form of epistemic egoism, the position I will call extreme epistemic egoism.1 The extreme epistemic egoist maintains that the fact that someone else has a belief is never a reason for her to believe it, not even when conjoined with evidence that the other person is reliable. If she finds out that someone else believes p, she will demand proof of p that she can determine by the use of her own faculties, given her own previous beliefs, but she will never believe anything on testimony. Similarly, the extreme ethical egoist maintains that the fact that someone else has an interest is never a reason for her to take it into account when she acts. She will act for the sake of the interests of others only if it can be demonstrated to her that doing so serves her own interests.2 So the extreme epistemic egoist puts no epistemic value on the beliefs of others. The fact that another person has a belief does not count in her considerations about what to believe. Similarly, the extreme ethical egoist puts no practical or moral value on the interests of others. The fact that another person has an interest does not count in her own desires or practical considerations.

* The chapter is reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. 1 This is the position Richard Foley in Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others calls “epistemic egotism,” but he drops the term in “Universal Intellectual Trust.” The term “egotism” is probably not apt because “egotism” as it is used in ethics has more to do with the way a person assesses her own importance than with the way she treats her interests relative to the interests of others. 2 By “interests” I mean to include desires, aims, values, and things we care about. I do not mean to limit interests to what is good for one. Epistemic Values. Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197529171.001.0001.

264  Intellectual Autonomy and Authority Extreme ethical egoism is very implausible and it is hard to find a philosopher who endorses it, but many philosophers have endorsed extreme epistemic egoism, although of course, it would not be usual to call it by that name. Elizabeth Fricker describes epistemic autonomy as follows: “This ideal type relies on no one else for any of her knowledge. Thus she takes no one else’s word for anything, but accepts only what she has found out for herself, relying only on her own cognitive faculties and investigative and inferential powers.”3 Notice that what Fricker calls “epistemic autonomy” is the same as what I am calling “extreme epistemic egoism.” Fricker finds the idea that one should trust one’s own epistemic faculties and beliefs but not those of another laudatory and cites Descartes, Locke, and others as supporting it.4 Her objection is that it is impractical; we would have very little knowledge if we could not rely upon testimony. A superior being could do so, however, and such a being would be superior for being able to do so. Fricker says: A superior being, with all the epistemic powers to find out everything she wanted to know for herself, could live up to this idea of complete epistemic autonomy without thereby circumscribing the extent of her knowledge. Given the risks involved in epistemic dependence on others . . . this superior being is, I suppose, epistemically better placed than humans are. That is, if she knew at first hand just as much as I myself know in large part through trust in others’ testimony, she would be epistemically more secure, hence both practically more independent, and—​in some abstract sense—​more autonomous than I am. In the same way that I might regret that I cannot fly, or live to be 300 years old, I might regret that I am not such a being.5

Fricker’s suggestion here seems to be that extreme epistemic egoism would be an ideal if we could live up to it, but it is undesirable because of our limitations. The need for epistemic trust is thus due to our inferiority. An extreme epistemic egoist with superior epistemic powers would not need epistemic trust in others, and she would be epistemically superior to us. Why does extreme epistemic egoism seem like an ideal under the name “epistemic autonomy,” whereas extreme ethical egoism is quite the opposite? Fricker’s remarks above suggest a partial answer. Ethical and epistemic egoism differ in their relations to trust. One does not need to trust another person in order to take into account her desires, interests, and aims, whereas it is necessary to trust 3 Fricker, “Testimony and Epistemic Autonomy:” 225. 4 Fricker could have found much earlier support in Plato’s Theaetetus 201B/​C where Socrates claims that the jury members in a court case do not know what the eyewitness knows because the jury believes only by “hearsay” (ex akoes). 5 Fricker, “Testimony and Epistemic Autonomy:” 243.

Ethical and Epistemic Egoism  265 the epistemic faculties and belief-​forming history of others in order to take their beliefs into account in forming one’s own beliefs. So suspicion of the trustworthiness of others is a consideration in favor of extreme epistemic egoism, whereas it has no relation at all to the acceptance or rejection of extreme ethical egoism. But even if worries about trust make extreme epistemic egoism more acceptable than extreme ethical egoism, that does not explain why many philosophers treat extreme epistemic egoism as an ideal. If the problem with trust is that it leaves us epistemically insecure, given that many people are untrustworthy, why should I be any more secure if I rely upon myself? I do not have evidence that I am more trustworthy than all other people. For one thing, it is impossible for me to obtain evidence of my trustworthiness as a whole since I have to use my faculties and previous beliefs in order to gather and evaluate the evidence, so it is in principle impossible for me to have evidence that as a whole I am more trustworthy than all other people. By relying upon my powers, I do have evidence that many other people are untrustworthy, but why should that lead me to fall back on my own powers? Using those same powers, I also have evidence that I am sometimes untrustworthy, and I have evidence that in some domains some other people are more trustworthy than I am. As far as I can see, fear of untrustworthiness can make us epistemically insecure, but it does not support extreme epistemic egoism. Furthermore, if the untrustworthiness of others is the ground of the ideal of autonomy/​extreme egoism, that does not explain why the ideal is not one in which persons are epistemically dependent upon perfectly trustworthy other persons. Suppose we compare an imaginary community of epistemically trustworthy persons who collectively acquire the same range of knowledge as Fricker’s imaginary superior individual. Would the epistemically autonomous individual still be superior to a member of the superior trustworthy community? If epistemic autonomy is really an ideal, the answer would have to be yes, but I do not know what the support for that would be. A second form of epistemic egoism is the position we can call strong epistemic egoism. The strong epistemic egoist maintains that she has no obligation to count what another person believes as relevant to her own beliefs, but she may do so if she sees that given what she believes about them, they are likely to serve her desire for the truth, that is, she sees that they are reliable. Similarly, according to the strong ethical egoist, she has no obligation to count the interests of another as relevant to her practical considerations. She might count their interests as relevant if she sees that there is a reliable connection between serving their interests and serving her own interests, but she acknowledges no obligation to do that. So the strong ethical egoist maintains that she has no unchosen obligation to desire what another person desires because he desires it, and the strong epistemic egoist maintains that she has no unchosen obligation to believe what another

266  Intellectual Autonomy and Authority person believes because he believes it. The strong epistemic egoist will believe on testimony only when she believes the testifier is reliable based on the use of her own faculties and reference to her own previous beliefs, but she acknowledges no obligation to do so. In the same way, the strong ethical egoist will desire what someone else desires only when she sees that doing so is instrumentally connected to satisfying her own desires, but she acknowledges no obligation to do so. There is a third form of epistemic egoism that I find interesting. What I call the weak epistemic egoist is someone who maintains that when and only when one has evidence that someone else’s beliefs reliably serve one’s desire for the truth in some domain, one is not only rationally permitted, one is rationally required to take their beliefs into account in forming one’s own beliefs.6 Likewise, the weak ethical egoist is a person who maintains that one is rationally required to take into account the interests of others only in those cases in which she has evidence that serving their interests serves her own interests. Otherwise, she has no obligation to care about anyone else’s interests. Although strong and weak ethical egoism are not as implausible as extreme ethical egoism, I assume that both are implausible, and I do not think there are many philosophers who have defended either one. In contrast, strong or weak epistemic egoism appeals to those who uphold the ideal of epistemic autonomy because it preserves fundamental dependence upon oneself while conceding the fact that we must rely upon the testimony of others for much of what we believe and know. I interpret Elizabeth Fricker as defending a version of weak epistemic egoism. Fricker argues for a principle of testimony according to which one properly accepts a proposition on the basis of testimony only if one correctly recognizes that the testifier is epistemically better placed than oneself with respect to the proposition in question. That makes her position a version of epistemic egoism. Fricker goes on to argue that in such cases it is not merely rationally permissible, but it is in fact rationally mandatory to defer to the other person. That makes her a weak epistemic egoist.7 One reason to accept epistemic egoism, then, is the desire to retain autonomy as far as possible while having a healthy amount of knowledge, but it is hard to see why we should accept epistemic egoism as an ideal. We have already seen that egoism cannot be defended on the grounds that I am more trustworthy than 6 Foley in Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others discusses epistemic egoism and its ethical parallel, but does not mention what I call weak egoism. 7 Fricker, in “Testimony and Epistemic Autonomy:” 232, defends a Testimony Deferential Principle paraphrased as follows: A hearer, H, properly accepts that P on the basis of trust in a speaker S’s testimony that P, if and only if S speaks sincerely, and S is epistemically well enough placed with respect to P to be in a position to know that P, and S is better epistemically placed with respect to P than H, and there is no equally well-​qualified contrary testimony regarding P, and H recognizes all these things to be so.

Ethical and Epistemic Egoism  267 others since I have no reason to believe that. Perhaps the reason is that I must rely on my own powers, but I have a choice about whether to rely on the powers of others. It is true that reliance upon my own faculties and previous beliefs is inescapable, whereas reliance upon others can be escaped if one is willing to give up many beliefs. But that does not support the position that it is better for me to rely upon my own powers above those of others. If some form of epistemic egoism is an ideal, that cannot be defended on the grounds that it is good for me to do only what I must do in any case. That would be very implausible. The result is that both strong and weak epistemic egoism are just as puzzling as extreme epistemic egoism. All three forms of egoism propose an ideal of epistemic autonomy that needs defense, and all three forms have problematic ethical analogues.

15.2  The Incoherence of Epistemic Egoism So far we have not seen a reason to accept epistemic autonomy as an ideal if it is identified with one of the three forms of epistemic egoism, but we do not yet have a reason to reject epistemic autonomy/​egoism either. Perhaps there is some other reason to treat epistemic egoism as an ideal that I have not mentioned, or perhaps epistemic egoism is a plausible position, even if not an ideal. But I want now to argue that the demands of consistency push the epistemic egoist into weaker and weaker forms of egoism, forcing her eventually to reject egoism. None of the three forms of epistemic egoism can be coherently maintained. The extreme epistemic egoist trusts only her own powers and previous beliefs as a means to getting further true beliefs and knowledge. But if she lives in a universe similar to our own, the use of her own powers will show her that there are other people who are trustworthy means for giving her the truth. She finds out that other people are reliable in the same way she finds out that the grass will grow—​by perception and induction. It takes a further use of her powers to infer that a particular belief of a particular other person is probably true, but there is no difference in principle between that inference and many other inferences she makes routinely and routinely trusts as an extreme egoist. So by using her own powers she sees that she is permitted to trust the powers and beliefs of many other people, and she begins to accept some beliefs on testimony. Trust in her own powers requires her to weaken her extreme egoism and to become a strong epistemic egoist. However, if she were only permitted and not required to trust these people, she would have to have a reason not to trust them based on her own powers and beliefs. That might happen in some cases. Perhaps the beliefs of trustworthy others conflict with each other or with her own beliefs, or maybe the exercise of her faculties gives her conflicting verdicts on the trustworthiness of another.

268  Intellectual Autonomy and Authority But again, if she is living in a universe anything like our own, there will be many cases in which there is no such conflict. By using her own powers and relying on her own previous beliefs, she will see that certain other people are trustworthy sources of truth on some occasion, and there is no reason not to trust them. The use of her own faculties leads her to see that trusting them is mandatory, not optional. She is then required by a consistent trust in her own faculties to become a weak epistemic egoist. Let us now look at the reasonableness of weak epistemic egoism. What distinguishes egoism in general from its rejection is that all else being equal, the egoist puts greater trust in her own faculties than in the faculties of others. As we have already seen, the egoist does not have evidence that she is a more trustworthy epistemic agent than many others in relevantly similar situations. She has evidence that she is more trustworthy than some others in some domains and less trustworthy than some others in some domains, but she does not have evidence that she is more trustworthy on the whole than all other people; nobody has such evidence. She therefore lacks evidence for her egoism. But the lack of evidence for egoism is not sufficient to show that egoism is unreasonable. After all, I lack evidence that my faculties as a whole are trustworthy, but I assume that it is reasonable to have basic trust in my faculties as a whole. Why couldn’t egoism be reasonable in the same way basic self-​trust is reasonable? I want now to argue that epistemic egoism is inconsistent with the egoist’s own standards. I am interpreting the epistemic egoist as someone who cares about the truth. She trusts only her own faculties and the faculties of others whose reliability she has discovered through the use of her own faculties because she believes that that is the best way to get the truth. Since she cares about truth, she commits herself to being a conscientious believer, one whose epistemic behavior is governed by caring for the truth, and it is rational for her to trust herself when she is conscientious. She also has evidence that she gets the truth when she is conscientious, but like everybody else, she must trust herself in advance of the evidence since she must trust herself in order to collect and evaluate the evidence. So the rational epistemic egoist trusts herself when she is conscientious in attempting to get the truth, and this trust is not based on evidence of her trustworthiness. Now if the epistemic egoist is rational, she is committed to trusting others when they are conscientious, when they have the qualities she trusts in herself. Trusting herself commits her to trusting others when they are in the same position she is in; that is, when they are in similar circumstances, have apparently similar powers and abilities, and act as conscientiously as she acts when she trusts herself. If she is consistent, she must trust them as much as herself, other things being equal, since she has no basis upon which to trust herself more than those she perceives to be epistemically equally well placed. Let me stress

Ethical and Epistemic Egoism  269 that she is not committed to trusting them because she has evidence that they are trustworthy. She is committed to trusting them because there is no relevant difference between her grounds for trusting herself and her grounds for trusting them. Assuming it is reasonable to trust herself, it is reasonable to trust others. If she insists upon trusting herself—​her faculties, beliefs, and emotions—​more than others, she must be trusting her faculties, beliefs, and emotions just because they are her own and not someone else’s. She cannot consistently do that if she thinks there is any reason to trust herself. Any reason she can point to is a reason that applies to many others. There is the possibility that she trusts herself and distrusts others without any reason other than the fact that her own powers and beliefs are hers and the powers and beliefs of others are not hers. But if that is what she is doing, she is valuing her own powers more than the truth. When she has to choose between relying upon her own powers and beliefs without trusting others, and relying upon others when she finds by the use of her own powers that relying upon them is the way to truth, she will choose the former. Such a person is not an epistemic egoist. Rather, she is an extreme ethical egoist in the realm of the intellect. I have not given any arguments against ethical egoism in this chapter, but I doubt that many philosophers would want to accept epistemic egoism at the cost of commitment to extreme ethical egoism of this sort. Assuming that the latter position is unacceptable, all three forms of epistemic egoism should be rejected. Richard Foley offers a different argument that epistemic egoism is incoherent. Foley begins with an observation we have already discussed: A normal, non-​ skeptical life requires a significant degree of self-​trust since there are no noncircular tests of the reliability of our faculties and opinions as a whole.8 Foley then argues that if I have self-​trust, I must trust those from whom I acquired my beliefs. That is because I would not be reliable unless they are. In fact, I am not only committed to trusting my precursors, I am committed to trusting my contemporaries since they acquired their beliefs from roughly the same sources from which I acquired mine.9 That is enough to make the three forms of epistemic egoism incompatible with self-​trust, and since self-​trust is a rational requirement, the rejection of epistemic egoism is a rational requirement. We therefore have a prima facie reason to believe whatever these other people believe in advance of evidence for their reliability. We should trust them for roughly the same reason we trust ourselves. Foley goes on to argue that self-​trust commits us to widening the scope of epistemic trust even farther. Since people all over the world at all times are more similar than dissimilar in their faculties and environment, the fact that some

8 Foley, Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others: 99.

9 Foley, Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others: 102.

270  Intellectual Autonomy and Authority person somewhere at some time has a certain belief gives me a prima facie reason to believe it myself. This is the position Foley calls epistemic universalism.10 According to the epistemic universalist, the fact that another person has a belief is a mark in favor of its credibility, no matter who the person is. The epistemic universalist always treats the fact that another person has a belief as a reason to believe it herself, but that reason can be defeated by evidence of the person’s unreliability or by evidence against the proposition believed. So whereas the extreme epistemic egoist says we should never put epistemic trust in others, and the strong and weak epistemic egoists say we should trust them only if we have evidence of their trustworthiness, the epistemic universalist says we should trust them unless we have evidence of their untrustworthiness. My argument against epistemic egoism is that the exercise of my own powers, powers that I trust, commits me to trusting others. The epistemic egoist trusts her own powers, and the exercise of those powers in a world like our own commits her to trusting others, which is to say, she is committed to giving up epistemic egoism. Foley’s argument is different. He argues that the fact that I trust myself commits me to trusting others. Since self-​trust is reasonable because it is inescapable, prima facie trust in others is reasonable because a condition for my own trustworthiness is the trustworthiness of others. Foley then uses a thesis of broad intellectual egalitarianism to extend his argument to an argument for epistemic universalism. My argument does not extend as far as an argument for epistemic universalism.11 Like the forms of epistemic egoism, epistemic universalism has an ethical analogue. According to the ethical universalist, the fact that someone else has a certain interest or desire gives me some reason to take that interest or desire into account in my deliberations. I always have a reason to make someone else’s interests my interests simply because their interests are their interests. Again, that reason can be defeated or overridden, but the ethical universalist maintains that I have a prima facie reason to take an interest in the interests of everybody else, just as I have a prima facie reason to believe what anybody else believes according to the epistemic universalist. Notice that there is no argument for the incoherence of ethical egoism that parallels either Foley’s or my argument for the incoherence of epistemic egoism. My argument against epistemic egoism starts from the assumption that all sides have a common desire for truth, and the dispute between the epistemic egoist and the nonegoist is about trust in the attempt to get truth. But there is no common 10 Foley, Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others: 103–​5. 11 I find it very hard to know whether epistemic universalism should be accepted because there are no pure test cases in which all I know in favor of p is that some person of whom I know nothing believes p. Finding out that somebody believes p invariably brings with it other information, either about the source of the belief or its content.

Ethical and Epistemic Egoism  271 assumption of the desire for some good the means to which is the basis for the dispute between the ethical egoist and the nonegoist. I do not see that the exercise of my taking an interest in whatever I am interested in commits me under pain of inconsistency to take an interest in the interests of others. Similarly, there is no ethical parallel to Foley’s argument because even though the fact that I trust my own faculties and previous beliefs commits me to trusting the faculties and beliefs of others since my trustworthiness depends upon theirs, caring about my own interests does not commit me to caring about the interests of others since what I care about does not depend upon what other people care about, and my interests do not depend upon other people’s interests. Of course, many philosophers have argued that it is irrational to care about my own interests and not those of others, but it is not inconsistent, or at least, if there is an inconsistency, it is not as straightforward as it is in the case of epistemic egoism. I suspect that the widespread rejection of ethical egoism is primarily due to the fact that many of us find it morally repellent and we trust the emotion of moral repulsion. Arguments that ethical egoism is irrational are used to bolster a preexistent rejection of the position. In contrast, as we have seen, epistemic egoism is not repellent, and, in fact, philosophers often find it appealing. A person who personally disvalues the interests of others upsets us. A person who personally disvalues the beliefs of others does not. It is interesting to consider why that might be the case. My conjecture is that we do not get upset about people with differing strategies to a shared end (the truth), but we do get upset about people who do not value our ends and may even thwart them. But that might not be quite right. It seems to me that we do get upset at extreme epistemic egoists who do not take our word for anything, and we often get upset at the epistemic egoist who demands proof of our reliability before believing us, proof that we usually cannot provide. To do so, we would have to know what they already believe and accept as premises of a demonstration, and we would then have to lay out the evidence of our reliability, a procedure that is not only cumbersome and time-​consuming, but is unlikely to do much to foster a relationship with them. In fact, it seems virtually guaranteed to keep a distance between us. That suggests that if there is no difference in the behavior of the epistemic egoist and the non-​egoist, we are not likely to complain about epistemic egoism. In fact, we probably wouldn’t even notice it. It is only when we are not trusted that we take offense. However, I take it that the dispute over epistemic egoism is interesting because there typically is a difference in the behavior of the epistemic egoist and the non-​egoist. Epistemic egoism affects the way epistemic communities function, and it no doubt affects the way other sorts of communities function. Think of the problem of the legendary Cassandra, whose ability to foretell the future was not trusted by the Trojans, with disastrous results when they did not heed her warning that the Trojan horse was a hoax. But even more telling was

272  Intellectual Autonomy and Authority the effect on her. Aeschylus tells us it drove her mad. One of the morals of the story of Cassandra is that we need to be trusted epistemically as well as in other ways. I think, then, that not only is epistemic autonomy a position that cannot be consistently maintained, but I think that the attempt to live by it probably has undesirable consequences for community life. I would like to end this section by noting that the rejection of epistemic autonomy does not commit us to rejecting intellectual autonomy in all forms. I have focused on the issue of autonomy in the adoption of belief or nonbelief about standard objects of belief, which are generally understood as propositions. But the human intellect does much more than form beliefs. An important state of intellect which we value and to which the arguments of this chapter do not apply is understanding. I surmise that whereas other people can give us beliefs, other people cannot give us understanding; at least, we cannot pick up understanding from them in the straightforward way we can pick up their beliefs. Autonomy may be necessary in the quest for understanding, not because there is something allegedly better about the autonomous understander over the nonautonomous understander, but because we can only get understanding on our own. Similar points apply to traits of intellectual character. Nobody else can make me open-​ minded or intellectually cautious or thorough or fair or humble. But that is not because there is an ideal of intellectual autonomy to which I should aspire, but because there are certain things I have to do myself.

15.3  Moral and Epistemic Autonomy It is interesting to consider the connection between epistemic autonomy and moral autonomy. As I interpret the ideal of the morally autonomous agent, she is autonomous in two ways: (1) She figures out the moral law for herself and trusts nobody but herself to figure it out, so she is an extreme epistemic egoist about morality. (2) She is self-​legislating; she obeys a law she gives to herself. The issues raised by moral autonomy are among the deepest and most important of all those examined in ethical theory, but all I will do in this brief concluding section is to mention some ways the arguments of this chapter might apply to moral autonomy. These remarks are intended only as a prelude to future work. Is it coherent to be an extreme epistemic egoist about morality, as the morally autonomous agent is? Such a person would not necessarily be an extreme epistemic egoist about nonmoral matters. She could even be an epistemic universalist about nonmoral matters. So she might think that there is something importantly

Ethical and Epistemic Egoism  273 different about moral beliefs that makes them immune to the argument I gave against epistemic egoism. Perhaps she has the position that the moral beliefs of different persons do not conflict, or she might think that the conflict is not cognitive, or she might think that no two people are ever in the same epistemic situation with respect to moral beliefs. Perhaps there is something more subjective or distinctively personal about moral beliefs that would make it appropriate to rely only upon oneself for such beliefs, on the grounds that no one else can contribute the personal element to her beliefs. That was notably not the thinking of Kant, of course, but it might be the thinking of a contemporary upholder of extreme epistemic egoism about the moral. Suppose instead that I think that I should trust myself in forming my moral beliefs at least in part because I form these beliefs conscientiously; I try to figure out the truth about moral matters. I also notice that there are other people who are just as conscientious as I am in their moral beliefs, and some of their beliefs conflict with mine. I see for myself that some other people do what I do when I am conscientious in figuring out what morality requires and what a morally virtuous person is like. That is, they do what I trust in myself. Furthermore, I may admire them in the way they think about moral matters and I trust my emotion of admiration. If so, I can easily trust some of the moral beliefs of some other people as much as my own and I might trust some of the beliefs of some people more than my own. With these assumptions, I should reject epistemic egoism about morality for the same reason I would be led to reject epistemic egoism about nonmoral beliefs. How would Foley’s argument against epistemic egoism apply to moral beliefs?12 Recall that Foley argues that I would not be trustworthy in my beliefs unless many other people are trustworthy also. That is because he assumes that most of my beliefs were acquired from other people, and I would not be reliable unless they are. But we probably do not take moral beliefs on testimony to the same extent that we take beliefs in many other categories on testimony, at least not after we reach adulthood, so the inconsistency between self-​trust and failure to trust others is not as striking in the moral case as it is with our beliefs in general. Furthermore, the set of moral beliefs is small enough that it does seem possible to live by Fricker’s ideal of extreme epistemic egoism in the moral domain without circumscribing one’s moral knowledge. So I am not sure that Foley’s argument against epistemic egoism should lead us to reject epistemic egoism about the moral.

12 Foley seems to be sympathetic to the view that we should be more reluctant to rely on others for our moral opinions than for other kinds of opinion (Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others: 115), but he supports that contention by expressing sympathy for the view that moral judgments lack truth value, in which case, neither his argument nor my argument against epistemic egoism would apply.

274  Intellectual Autonomy and Authority But Foley also has an argument for epistemic universalism, which would presumably apply to moral beliefs. The epistemic universalist ought to acknowledge a prima facie reason to accept the moral beliefs of any other person. Of course, that reason is often immediately defeated by the conflicting beliefs of other persons, so the argument does not get us very far in determining what to believe, but Foley’s argument does require the rejection of epistemic autonomy in the moral realm. I think, then, that some of the arguments of this chapter should lead us to be skeptical of the first component of moral autonomy, the component of epistemic autonomy about morality. What about the second component of moral autonomy? If I should not value my cognitive powers above those of others just because they are mine, why should I value my will just because it is mine? The problem is especially acute if my will depends upon my intellect in a significant way. If the ideal of epistemic autonomy fails, it may carry with it the failure of the ideal of the autonomy of the will. But it is doubtful that the ideal of the autonomy of the will depends entirely on the ideal of the autonomy of the intellect, and there are some very interesting issues here about the nature of the self and the place of the will (if there is any such thing) at the core of the self. I have focused on the way the ideal of epistemic autonomy tends to undermine itself. I cannot say whether the autonomy of the will undermines itself in the same way. It is curious that we accept the limitations of a material world, but we hate submitting to the will of another, and we hate submitting to the intellect of another. We are right to resist being abused or dominated or controlled, but I have argued that there is nothing wrong with submitting to the intellect of another just because it is the intellect of another and not our own. Submission to a will is a more complicated case because submission implies a will to submit. We can have a will to submit to the intellect of another, and we can have a will to submit to the will of another. I do not see that there is anything inconsistent in refusing to do the latter, but neither do I know of a plausible argument in favor of refusing to submit to the will of another.

References Foley, Richard. Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Foley, Richard. “Universal Intellectual Trust.” Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology 2, no. 1 (2005): 5–​11. Fricker, Elizabeth. “Testimony and Epistemic Autonomy.” In The Epistemology of Testimony, edited by Jennifer Lackey and Ernest Sosa: 225–​ 50. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

16

A Defense of Epistemic Authority* 16.1  Authority in the Realm of Belief Philosophers generally assume that authority applies only to the political domain and do not even mention epistemic authority.1 I suspect that is because authority in general has been in disrepute in the modern era, and it is only because of the fact that political authority is inescapable that philosophers make the attempt to justify it. Theorists recognize the tension between authority and autonomy, but the tradition of modern liberalism maintains that political authority can be derived from the authority of the self over the self. We can have authority without sacrifice of autonomy. In this chapter I will argue that epistemic authority can be justified in the same way. Authority in the epistemic domain is justifiable even if we begin with the natural authority of the self. I will argue that epistemic authority satisfies principles modeled on the general principles of authority proposed by Joseph Raz. My main focus will be on the authority of another person’s beliefs, although I believe that stronger kinds of authority can be defended using the same model, in particular, the authority of testimony and its application to epistemic communities.2 I will approach the issue primarily from the standpoint of the subject, but let me begin with a question from outside the subject’s perspective. Is anyone ever justified in using coercion over the beliefs of others? This is a peculiar question since it is hard to see how it is even possible to successfully coerce someone else’s belief, much less to do so in a justified manner, but it is also hard to get clear on the reason. One answer was given by John Locke: “It is absurd that things should be enjoined by laws which are not in men’s power to perform. And to believe this or that to be true does not depend upon our will”.3 On the next page, however, Locke offers a different and incompatible reason: “Nobody is obliged in that matter to yield obedience unto the admonitions or injunctions of another, further than he himself is persuaded. Every man in that has the supreme and * The chapter is reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. 1 For instance, Christiano’s article “Authority” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy addresses only political authority. 2 I defend the authority of testimony in Epistemic Authority, ­chapter 6, and authority in communities in c­ hapter 7. Most of this article is taken from c­ hapter 5. 3 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (ital), edited by Peter Nidditch (Clarendon edition, 1979): 33.

Epistemic Values. Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197529171.001.0001.

276  Intellectual Autonomy and Authority absolute authority of judging for himself. And the reason is that nobody else is concerned in it, nor can receive any prejudice from his conduct therein”.4  Neither reason stands up to scrutiny. Let us start with the second. Each person has, Locke says, “absolute authority” to judge for himself. Clearly, your beliefs and judgments are within your own private space. No one can do your believing for you; your beliefs would not be yours if you were not the one who forms them. And you are the one who can reflect upon them in a way that may lead to change. But Locke’s claim that your authority over your own beliefs comes from the fact that no one else is concerned in it is surely mistaken. Obviously, other people are affected by your beliefs insofar as they lead to acts and your acts affect them, and even apart from the acts to which beliefs lead, a belief about another person can involve a wrong to that person. I take it that that is the reason for the moral injunction against vicious gossip.5 But we can leave Locke’s second claim aside because his more influential reason for claiming that there is no duty to believe by obedience to authority is that belief does not depend upon the will. This position has received a lot of attention in recent philosophy, and I think it involves some confusion. I assume that we can exercise reflective self-​control over our beliefs. Our beliefs are not like pains or passing thoughts. There are no norms for pains or passing thoughts, but there are norms for beliefs. We teach students those norms and remind ourselves to follow them. If there were no norms, there would there be no point in inquiring about the rational way to respond to the beliefs of others or to evidence contrary to our beliefs. This does not mean, of course, that we are continuously exercising reflective control over our epistemic states. We not only acquire most of our beliefs without reflection, but we often resolve conflict between one belief and another or between a belief and some other part of our psyche unconsciously. Most of the time we do not monitor our beliefs because we have processes that adjust our beliefs with little or no conscious awareness. But on some occasions we do not resolve conflict automatically and have to figure out a way to do it. In other cases it is the process of reflection that generates conflict, and then it has to be resolved. Or maybe there is no conflict, but reflection shows us the reasonableness of adopting or eliminating certain beliefs because of our trust in certain norms. It is uncontroversial that we can exercise control over our beliefs and the processes by which we change our beliefs in these ways and others. Believing p because S told me that p is true and I ought to believe it is no harder in principle 4 Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: 35. 5 The idea that unfounded beliefs about another person can constitute a moral wrong to that person is the point of W. K. Clifford’s example of the island religion (“The Ethics of Belief;” 71–​72). But not everyone agrees that “vicious gossip” is morally wrong. There is evidence that the spread of information about defectors in Prisoner’s Dilemma situations pressures people to cooperate. See Nowak, “Evolution of Indirect Reciprocity,”

A Defense of Epistemic Authority  277 than believing p because p seems to me to be probable on evidence E. In both cases we can do it if we have adopted norms that make it a reasonable thing to do. I have not argued yet that there are such norms, but if there are no norms, that is not because belief is not under the control of the will. But can we believe on command? When we consider that possibility, we tend to imagine an agent of the sovereign proclaiming, “All subjects take heed. From now on all of you must believe the following by order of the King,” followed by the announcement of a list of propositions. Believing in this scenario seems impossible. But the problem with obeying such an order is not that one cannot obey on command, but that one cannot obey a command to believe when one has no reason to think that what is commanded is true. If the authority is political, then clearly there is no reason to think that what is commanded is true, but if the authority is epistemic, and the subject recognizes that what the authority says to believe is likely to be true, it is no harder to believe on command than to believe ordinary testimony. In any case, there is plenty of evidence that people can believe on the authority of an epistemic authority. For instance, the Catholic view of “obedience of the judgment” in assenting to church teachings is not only psychologically possible, but is something actual persons have done for centuries.6 However, my defense of epistemic authority in this chapter does not assume that we can believe on command. Perhaps this seems to undermine my aim since some philosophers maintain that intrinsic to authority is a right on the part of the person in authority to command, and a corresponding duty on the part of the subject to obey.7 But even if no one can legitimately command a belief, it does not follow that there is no epistemic authority. Authority is typically exercised in the practical domain by telling somebody to do something, but the way it is typically exercised is not essential to it. What is essential to authority is that it is a normative power that generates reasons for others to do or to believe something preemptively. The feature of preemption is a distinguishing feature of authority from the subject’s perspective. A preemptive reason is a reason that replaces other reasons the subject has. Believing what another person believes or tells me preemptively is parallel to doing what he tells me to do preemptively. In both cases what the authority does gives me a reason to believe or do something that replaces my other reasons relevant to the belief or act. What is essential to authority is the kind of reason authority gives me. The right to command is not necessary.8 I am 6 See Vatican II, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church: Lumen Gentium, pars. 12, 25, and discussion by Sullivan, Magisterium: Teaching Authority in the Catholic Church: 162–​64. 7 This claim can be found in numerous places, for instance, Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism: 4–​9. 8 If an authority can give me a preemptive reason to believe or do something even though the authority does not have the right to command, that means that the right to command acts involves more than giving the subject a preemptive reason to act in a certain way, but I will not discuss practical authority here.

278  Intellectual Autonomy and Authority not suggesting that taking a reason to be preemptive is sufficient for either acting or believing on authority. If you love someone, you might take the fact that he or she asks you to do something as a preemptive reason to do it, and when you do so you are not treating the beloved as an authority. Similarly, it is possible (although less likely), that you will take the fact that the loved one has a certain belief as a preemptive reason to believe it. If so, believing preemptively is not sufficient for believing on authority. However, we usually do not think that the people we love have a normative power to give us preemptive reasons even if we choose to take their wishes as giving us preemptive reasons. In contrast, authority is such a power.9 Since I will be approaching the issue of authority from the point of view of the subject until the end of the paper, I will assume that authority is a power that the subject can recognize and to which she can rationally respond. It is not necessary for my account that the authority sees herself as an authority for a particular subject; indeed, for the argument I am giving here, it is not necessary that she even be aware of her subject’s existence. The question I want to raise, then, is the following: If I am a conscientiously self-​reflective person, should I ever treat another person as having a kind of normative epistemic power which gives me a reason to take a belief preemptively on the grounds that the other person believes it? I will argue that the answer is yes.

16.2  The Contours of Epistemic Authority: The Principles of Joseph Raz Before the modern era in the Western world, the legitimacy of authority was thought to derive from God, the ultimate authority. Of course, many people accept the same view today and I have no objections to it, nor do I object to positions that base authority on Natural Law and the natural need for human beings to live in societies. Those approaches give us other models for justifying epistemic authority, but they are widely disputed in modern liberal societies, and so they do not serve my purposes in this chapter. What I want to do instead is to look at an influential account of the nature of authority that is consciously proposed within the framework of political liberalism, and which justifies authority from assumptions that any rational person would accept. The account I will use is that of Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom. I have no position on whether

9 It is interesting that in Robert Adams’s version of Divine Command Theory (Finite and Infinite Goods), a human subject’s obligation to do what God commands is connected to the reason a person has to do what a loved one requires. There is a sense, then, in which love does have authority in Adams’s view. See his c­ hapter 10 on obligation and c­ hapter 11 on divine commands.

A Defense of Epistemic Authority  279 Raz’s account is adequate for all the purposes required of political authority. It is Raz’s account of authority as such that I am interested in. I believe he has identified conditions strong enough that a subject who recognizes that the conditions obtain has a preemptive reason to follow the authority. Further, I will argue that all of his theses of authority can be satisfied by authority in the epistemic domain. The first condition of authority is Content-​Independence, a condition Raz10 takes from H. L. A. Hart. An authoritative utterance gives the subject a reason to follow the directive which is such that there is no direct connection between the reason and the action for which it is a reason. The authority might have directed any number of different actions, and if he had directed a different action, the subject would have had a reason to perform that other action instead. So the authority might order citizens to drive on the right side of the road, but if the authority had ordered them to drive on the left, the subjects would have had reason to drive on the left. This feature of Content-​Independence is compatible with the need for reasons to accept the authority as an authority, and I will return to that, but under the assumption that the subject has reason to accept the authority as legitimate, the subject has reason to do what the authority says that is not dependent upon the content of what the authority says.11 There are cases of epistemic authority that satisfy the condition of Content-​ Independence. That is, there are cases in which an authoritative person or community’s belief gives the subject a content-​independent reason for belief. If the epistemic authority had believed a different proposition, the subject would have had reason to believe the other proposition instead. So if I am justified in believing what the climate scientist judges about the emission of greenhouse gases, I would be justified in the same way if the climate scientist had had a different belief about the emissions. Beliefs taken from another person can therefore satisfy the condition of Content-​Independence. The second feature of epistemic authority and the one I have said is its most important feature is the Preemption Thesis. As Raz describes it, the Preemption Thesis states that the fact that an authority requires performance of an action is a reason for its performance that replaces other relevant reasons and is not simply added to them.12 The epistemic analogue of Raz’s Preemption Thesis, formulated in the first person, is as follows:

10 Raz, The Morality of Freedom, p. 5. 11 Raz argues that while Content-​Independence is necessary for authority, it is not sufficient because threats and requests are also content-​independent (The Morality of Freedom, p. 36). I assume that epistemic threats and epistemic requests are unusual and will leave them aside for my purposes here. 12 Raz, The Morality of Freedom: 42, 57–​59.

280  Intellectual Autonomy and Authority Preemption Thesis for Epistemic Authority: The fact that the authority has a belief p is a reason for me to believe p that replaces my other reasons relevant to believing p and is not simply added to them.

This thesis says that in certain cases the authority stands in for me in determining whether p. In these cases I have reasons for thinking that the authority is more trustworthy than myself in some range of beliefs, based on aspects of myself that I trust, but that is compatible with letting the authority’s determination of the truth within that range replace my own determination of the truth within the range. What would justify me in believing what someone else believes in this preemptive way? To begin answering that, let us return to Raz’s proposals. Raz argues that in addition to the Preemption Thesis, authority ought to be understood in terms of two other theses: the Dependency Thesis and the Normal Justification Thesis.13 The first states the general character of the considerations that should guide those who give authoritative directives. The second concerns the type of argument that would justify an attribution of authority. Raz’s Dependency Thesis states that all authoritative directives should be based on reasons that already independently apply to the subjects of the directives and are relevant to their action in the circumstances covered by the directive.14 Raz denies that the directive must correctly reflect the reasons upon which it depends, but it must be intended to reflect those reasons. The Normal Justification Thesis (NJ thesis) states that the normal way to establish that a person has authority over another person is to show that the alleged subject is likely better to comply with reasons that apply to him if he accepts the directives of the alleged authority as authoritatively binding and tries to follow them, rather than by trying to follow the reasons that apply to him directly.15 Although Raz is interested in political authority, the features of authority he identifies in these two theses do not depend upon the fact that the authority at issue is authority over actions, nor do they depend upon the fact that the authority issues directives that are intended to apply to particular subjects. Let us look at the relevance of the Dependency Thesis to the epistemic domain and frame it from the subject’s perspective.16 A reasonably close epistemic analogue 13 Raz, The Morality of Freedom, ­chapter 3. 14 Raz, The Morality of Freedom: 47. 15 Raz, The Morality of Freedom: 53. 16 Raz, in The Morality of Freedom, mentions epistemic authority only briefly, and he does so for an interesting purpose. He says that the Dependency Thesis is more plausible in the epistemic domain than in the domain of political authority, and he uses the plausibility of the former as a reason for accepting the latter. He does not discuss epistemic parallels to the Normal Justification Thesis or to the Preemption Thesis, nor does he discuss the content independence of epistemic authority. However, in Between Authority and Interpretation, pp. 155–​57, he discusses the application of his Normal Justification Thesis to the epistemic domain.

A Defense of Epistemic Authority  281 of that thesis says that an epistemic authority’s belief is authoritative for me only if her reasons for believing what she believes reflect the reasons I would have if I were forming the belief myself. I think that this thesis is on the right track but is probably false. Of course, it is not clear what reasons count as appropriate for me to use, given that my level of understanding and development of intellectual virtues may be inferior to that of the authority. In many situations, I identify an exemplar who does not simply have better access to evidence and a better grasp of it than I have. She may be a person who has more of the qualities I trust in myself insofar as I am epistemically conscientious. She may also have deeper understanding than I, and I trust that. She may have special insights that I trust, and in many cases I would not have those insights if I were forming the belief independently. The general point is that an epistemic authority is someone who does what I would do if I were more conscientious or better than I am at satisfying the aim of getting the truth, and I am aware of that because I am conscientious and I trust what I believe when I am conscientious. But if it is due to self-​trust that I trust the qualities of an exemplar, the ground of my trust in her authority depends on myself, and her authority satisfies a version of the Dependency Thesis. There is more than one epistemic version of Raz’s Dependency Thesis broad enough to include the cases of taking a belief on the authority of an exemplar. I propose the following: Dependency Thesis for the Authority of Another’s Belief: If the belief p of a putative epistemic authority is authoritative for me, it should be formed in a way that I would conscientiously believe is deserving of emulation.

Believing on the evidence is not my only epistemic aim, and it is not even the most important one. The evidence we can identify is derivative from what conscientious persons do in attempting to get the truth. I care about the evidence because I care about the truth. But it is possible to be in a situation in which I conscientiously believe that I am more likely to believe the truth if I believe what a certain other person believes than if I try to figure it out for myself. Such a person’s authority can be justified by another epistemic form of Raz’s NJ thesis: Justification Thesis for the Authority of Belief 2 (JAB 2): The authority of another person’s belief for me is justified by my conscientious judgment that I am more likely to form a true belief and avoid a false belief if I believe what the authority believes than if I try to figure out what to believe myself.

JAB 2 is not sufficient to justify taking a belief on epistemic authority without qualification. For one thing, a small difference between myself and the putative authority is not likely to be sufficient to ground authority. In addition, I might

282  Intellectual Autonomy and Authority judge that even though the putative authority is more likely to get the truth whether p than I, the authority is not very likely to get the truth either, and in many such cases I should forego having a belief whether p. But if the authority is in a better position to get the truth than I, the authority is presumably also in a better position to judge whether she should believe or withhold belief, and I can still conscientiously judge that I should follow the authority in that case. There are also problematic cases of competing authorities, cases in which the authority is more likely to get the truth than I am, but so are several other persons. There is no reason for me to trust this particular authority more than others. A partial response to this situation is the same as to the first. It is likely that an authority would be aware of competing authorities, in which case the authority’s own response to the presence of competitors is relevant to what I should do if I am conscientious. However, I am not going to try to adjudicate these cases here. They are enough to indicate that the epistemic justification thesis will need qualification. But Raz’s Justification Thesis for practical authority needs qualification also. Raz calls his thesis the “Normal” Justification Thesis because it is the normal way to justify authority. He does not argue that the thesis gives necessary and sufficient conditions for the possession of authority, and I am not suggesting that JAB 2 gives such conditions either.

16.3  Preemption and Evidence Let us look now at what it means to take someone else’s belief as a preemptive reason to believe the same thing. It might appear that this requires doing something psychologically impossible: ignoring our own reasons for and against the belief. But letting a reason preempt my other reasons does not require ignoring my other reasons. In fact, it is because I am not ignoring them that I see that the belief of the authority has a certain status vis-​á-​vis my other reasons. If I stop at a red light because that is what the law requires, I let the fact that the law requires it be my reason for stopping. I do not ignore the fact that I would prefer not to stop because I am in a hurry, or that I believe it is generally safer to stop, or that I do not want to take the chance of getting a high-​priced traffic citation. But if I stop because the law says to do so, that reason has the status of being my reason for stopping. It can be the reason even though I am quite capable of reciting many reasons for and against stopping. The Preemption Thesis also does not require that I decide to let one kind of reason preempt my other reasons. I am not committed to the position that I control states of the self by decision or force of will. The degree and scope of our control is not at issue in the Preemption Thesis. The latter is a thesis about what I ought to do, what a rational person would do if conscientious. It is neutral on

A Defense of Epistemic Authority  283 how or even whether I am able to behave rationally. Presumably, I can believe rationally part of the time, and so it is useful to know the conditions under which I believe rationally. But nothing in any of the epistemic authority theses requires a position on my control over my reasons for belief. Still, the Preemption Thesis will be resisted by those who insist that a reasonable agent treats an authority’s belief as evidence of the truth of the belief which ought to be added to her other evidence. Why isn’t it more reasonable to add my other reasons to the balance of reasons, perhaps weighing the authority’s belief more heavily than my other reasons? Isn’t the authority’s belief just one more piece of evidence that I put into the mix of my total evidence? No, I should not, because if I do so, I will worsen my track record in getting the truth. Joseph Raz anticipates this objection for practical authority and gives a response that also applies to epistemic authority. Raz says: Consider the case in a general way. Suppose I can identify a range of cases in which I am wrong more than the putative authority. Suppose I decide because of this to tilt the balance in all those cases in favor of its solution. That is, in every case I will first make up my own mind independently of the “authority’s” verdict, and then, in those cases in which my judgment differs from its, I will add a certain weight to the solution favored by it, on the ground that it, the authority, knows better than I. This procedure will reverse my independent judgment in a certain proportion of the cases. Sometimes even after giving the argument favored by the authority an extra weight it will not win. On other occasions the additional weight will make all the difference. How will I fare under this procedure? If, as we are assuming, there is no other relevant information available, then we can expect that in the cases in which I endorse the authority’s judgment my rate of mistakes declines and equals that of the authority. In the cases in which even now I contradict the authority’s judgment the rate of my mistakes remains unchanged, i.e., greater than that of the authority. This shows that only by allowing the authority’s judgment to preempt mine altogether will I succeed in improving my performance and bringing it to the level of the authority. Of course sometimes I do have additional information showing that the authority is better than me in some areas and not in others. This may be sufficient to show that it lacks authority over me in those other areas. The argument about the preemptiveness of authoritative decrees does not apply to such cases.17



17 Raz, The Morality of Freedom: 68–​60.

284  Intellectual Autonomy and Authority Notice that if this argument is sound, it does not matter whether the authority’s judgment is about what to do or what to believe, and it seems to me that it is sound. There are amusing empirical studies that support the position that pre emption leads to better results and is quickly learned by rats, but humans resist it and are outperformed by some other animals. Animals like rats and pigeons maximize. If the animal discerns that one choice is better the majority of the time, it chooses that option all the time. In contrast, humans attempt to match probabilities. For instance, if humans are trying to predict whether a red rather than a green light will flash, they proportion their choices to match the probability of the mechanism. So if the light has flashed green 75 percent of the time, humans will typically predict green 75 percent of the time, whereas in similar situations, rats will always choose the option that appears 75 percent of the time. The rats are right 75 percent of the time. The humans do worse!18 We are better off preempting, but it is hard for us to accept that. It is especially hard for us to accept that when the authority is human.19 There is another source of resistance to preemption plus content independence. Suppose the authority’s belief is something outrageous. Can’t that count as a defeater of your belief that it is an authority? Yes it can, but that is not a reason to reject preemption. Suppose your physician tells you to take 4,000 pills an hour for the rest of your life.20 I assume that you will judge that your belief that you should not take so many pills is more likely to be true than your judgment that your physician is an authoritative guide to your health. To determine whether the physician is a better guide to your health than you are, you have a right to take into consideration anything that you find trustworthy when you are conscientiously attempting to get the truth. But as long as you conscientiously think 18 See Mlodinow, The Drunkard’s Walk: 5–​6. There are a number of studies that indicate that animals maximize whereas humans attempt to probability match. In a study that pitted Yale undergraduates against rats, the humans and rats had to predict where the food was in a T-​maze. The rats did better (see Gallistel, The Organization of Learning, c­ hapter 11). There is also a study that indicates that preemption is favored by the right side of the brain (see Wolford et al., “The Left Hemisphere’s Role in Hypothesis Formation:” 1–​4). I thank Marian David for pointing me to these studies. 19 It is not hard to find anecdotal evidence that humans dislike preemption. We are very unforgiving of an authority who makes a mistake even if following the authority gives us a significantly better track record. It is possible (at least it used to be possible) that there are financial experts who really are better at investing our money than most of us are. Once we identify such an expert, we should follow that person’s investment advice all of the time, as Raz argues. This does not require us to make the assumption that the expert is perfect. But woe to the financial expert who makes even one mistake! The wrath of his client will be upon him. 20 My example is adapted from an example by Thomas May (“Authority and Obligation:” 145). In May’s scenario the physician tells you to take 46,000 pills an hour for the rest of your life. I am not sure it is even physically possible to follow those directions, and that makes the point unclear. Presumably the case we want is one in which, even if it were possible to do what the physician directs, you should not do so because the directive is absurd, and you trust your judgment of its absurdity.

A Defense of Epistemic Authority  285 the physician is a better guide, you have reason to take the physician’s directive as one that preempts your own decision about what you should do in that domain. And, of course, the same point applies to your belief that you ought to take 4,000 pills an hour. Epistemic authority has the consequence that trust in ourselves in some domain is replaced by trust in the authority, but it remains the case that a general trust in ourselves leads us to trust the authority, and the judgment that someone is an authority can be withdrawn. Adam Elga makes a similar observation about the condition I  have called Content-​Independence: Only in highly idealized circumstances is it reasonable to defer to someone’s opinion absolutely whatever that opinion might be. For example, upon finding out that my forecaster is confident that it will snow tomorrow, I will follow suit. But upon finding out that my forecaster is confident that it will rain eggplants tomorrow, I will not follow suit. I will conclude that my forecaster is crazy. The same goes for the news that I myself will believe that it will rain eggplants tomorrow. In realistic cases, one reasonably discounts opinions that fall outside an appropriate range. In addition, not even a perfect advisor deserves absolute trust, since one should be less than certain of one’s own ability to identify good advisors.21

I think Elga’s point here is well taken. Notice that although it requires a qualification of Content-​Independence, it does not dispute preemption. We resist preemption, but it is the rational outcome of reflection upon my own reasons for belief.

16.4  Epistemic Authority from the Third Person Perspective Joseph Raz’s theses of authority are given in the third person (although many of his examples are given in the first person). But the Normal Justification Thesis says nothing about the subject’s ability to recognize the authority as an authority. It simply states that the normal way to establish that a person has authority over another person is to show that the alleged subject is likely to comply better with reasons that apply to him if he accepts the directives of the alleged authority as authoritatively binding rather than by trying to follow the reasons that apply to him directly. My JAB theses are disanalogous with Raz’s NJ thesis in that I give the conditions of authority in the first person. So, for example, my JAB 2 thesis



21

Elga, “Reflection and Disagreement:” 483.

286  Intellectual Autonomy and Authority says that the authority of another person’s belief for me is justified by my conscientious judgment that I am more likely to form a true belief and avoid a false belief if I believe what the authority believes than if I try to figure out what to believe myself. But what can we say about a closer analogue of Raz’s theses? Can we defend a third person version of the JAB 2 thesis? The third person thesis would be as follows: Third Person JAB 2 Thesis: The authority of a person’s testimony for me is justified by the fact that I am more likely to satisfy my desire to get true beliefs and avoid false beliefs if I believe what the authority tells me than if I try to figure out what to believe myself.

One defense of moving from the first person version of JAB 2 to the stronger third person version is the way we justify ourselves to another person when we take a belief on authority. When challenged, I typically do not point out that taking someone as an authority satisfies JAB 1 or 2 for me. Rather, I give him reasons to think that it is true that taking a belief from the putative authority is more likely to get me to the truth than if I try to figure it out myself. In doing so, I imply that I am using the third person version of the thesis. To make the point rather crudely, nobody cares what my conscientious judgment is. They care what my conscientious judgment should be. That is to say, it is the probable truth of the judgment that is doing the justifying work. For the same reason that I point to the third person thesis to show that I am justified in taking someone to be an authority, someone else can show me that I am justified in taking someone as an authority because he recognizes that the conditions of the third person JAB 2 thesis obtain. If I conscientiously accept what he says, that will lead me to see that the putative authority satisfies the first person JAB 2 for me, but the most natural thing for me to judge in such a case is that the putative authority was already authoritative before I made the judgment. What my interlocutor did for me was to show me something that was true before I recognized it. And, of course, I can discover myself that authority A satisfied the conditions for authority long before I recognized A as an authority. If so, why should my actual judgment matter? I think that it does matter. The considerations above do not show that we should accept the third person epistemic authority theses instead of the first person theses. In the conditions we have imagined, I ought to have done the following: (a) recognized A’s authority, and consequently (b) taken various beliefs on A’s authority. But it does not follow that I ought to have taken various beliefs on A’s authority. It does not follow from the fact that I ought to do X and Y, that I ought to do Y. The fact that I ought to do Y can be conditional upon my doing X. For instance, I am instructed to show the secret letter to a particular person

A Defense of Epistemic Authority  287 and then burn it. So I ought to show him the secret letter and burn it, but it is false that I ought to burn it. The fact that I ought to burn it is conditional upon my first showing it to the right person. Similarly, the fact that I ought to believe what the authority believes may be conditional upon my first recognizing the person as an authority justified by JAB 2. If so, the first person thesis is basic. If this interpretation is right, then even if the third person JAB theses are true, they do not threaten our intellectual autonomy. The autonomous person ought to accept authority when it satisfies the conditions given in one of the third person JAB theses, and when she does so, she ought to accept particular beliefs on the authority’s authority. It is still the case that the ultimate authority is the self even though an autonomous person is always governed by the norm of truth. The autonomous person must submit to the truth, but it does not follow from that that an autonomous person ought to accept certain truths in the absence of accepting certain others. Raz’s theses of authority applied to the political domain are intended to show that political authority is compatible with autonomy, the fundamental authority of the self over the self. If he succeeds, it seems to me that the epistemic analogues of Raz’s theses show that epistemic authority is compatible with intellectual autonomy. My primary aim has been to propose and defend epistemic theses that are the analogues of Raz’s theses: the Content-​Independence Thesis, the Dependency Thesis, the Preemption Thesis, and the first person version of the Justification theses for epistemic authority. Secondarily, I have argued that the stronger third person justification of epistemic authority theses might also be defensible. I have also suggested that even the stronger theses are compatible with intellectual autonomy, provided that they are interpreted in a way that makes the first person theses fundamental.

References Adams, Robert. Finite and Infinite Goods. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Christiano, Tom. “Authority.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2012 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta, 2012. http://​plato.stanford.edu/​archives/​spr2012/​ entries/​authority/​. Clifford, W. K. “The Ethics of Belief.” In The Ethics of Belief and Other Essays. West Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1999. Elga, Adam. 2007. “Reflection and Disagreement.” Nous 41: 478–502. Gallistel, C. R. The Organization of Learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,1990. Locke, John. 2009. A Letter Concerning Toleration: Humbly Submitted. New York: Classic Book America. May, Thomas. “Authority and Obligation.” In Autonomy, Authority, and Moral Responsibility. London: Kluwer Academic, 1998: 125–148.

288  Intellectual Autonomy and Authority Mlodinow, Leonard. The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. New York: Random House, 2008. Nowak, Martin, and Karl Sigmund. “Evolution of Indirect Reciprocity.” Nature 473, no. 27 (2005): 1291–​98. http://​dx.doi.org/​10.1038/​nature04131. Raz, Joseph. The Morality of Freedom. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Raz, Joseph. Between Authority and Interpretation. New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2009. Sullivan, Francis. Magisterium:  Teaching Authority in the Catholic Church. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1983. Vatican II. Dogmatic Constitution on the Church: Lumen Gentium. 1965. Wolff, Robert P. In Defense of Anarchism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Wolford, George, Michael Miller, and Michael Gazzaniga. “The Left Hemisphere’s Role in Hypothesis Formation.” Journal of Neuroscience 20 (RC 64) (2000): 1–​4. Zagzebski, Linda. Epistemic Authority:  A Theory of Trust, Authority, and Autonomy in Belief. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

17

Intellectual Autonomy* 17.1  Introduction According to a standard interpretation of philosophical history, Immanuel Kant revolutionized ethics by making the ultimate moral authority one’s own rational will. I take that to be the heart of the idea of autonomy. In this chapter I will describe a view of the self according to which autonomy properly applies in the intellectual domain on the same grounds as it applies in the practical domain. I will explain why I believe that the power of reflective self-​consciousness is more basic than any epistemic reasons—​anything that indicates to a reasonable person that some proposition is true. The argument is epistemological, not moral. The conclusion is that what we mean by reason in its theoretical sense derives from reflective self-​consciousness. The authority of the self over the self is the natural right of the self to reflect, which is to say, the natural right of the self to be a self. The authority of reason over a person’s belief-​forming activities, like the authority of reason over a person’s practical action, is derivative from the natural authority of the self.

17.2  Autonomy 17.2.1  A Very Short History of Autonomy In contemporary discourse, autonomy can mean a number of different things, but I  assume that the dominant idea is that of rational self-​governance. Autonomy has sometimes been identified with the different notion of independence, especially in political discussions, and that is one of the reasons for the vilification of autonomy by those opposed to the individualism of our times. When autonomy is applied to the epistemic domain, it has sometimes been equated with epistemic self-​reliance, the analogue of political independence. For instance, Elizabeth Fricker describes intellectual autonomy as follows: “This ideal type relies on no one else for any of her knowledge. Thus she takes no one else’s word for anything, but accepts only what she has found out for herself, relying only on her own cognitive faculties and investigative * The chapter is reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

Epistemic Values. Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197529171.001.0001.

290  Intellectual Autonomy and Authority and inferential powers.”1 This ideal raises a number of issues, but I  find it particularly interesting that intellectual autonomy should be identified with epistemic self-​reliance when it is far from obvious that autonomy and self-​ reliance are identified in the practical domain. My purpose in this essay is to present a view of intellectual autonomy as a form of autonomy, not simply self-​reliance by another name. In my opinion, autonomy is most interesting if it is a value that is premoral. What I mean is that the idea of autonomy does not rest upon any moral value, and it might be strong enough to be a constraint on our understanding of what morality is. If I am right about that, that would explain why the idea of autonomy can support the modern shift from viewing morality as obedience to law to understanding morality as self-​governance. Self-​governance was arguably an important value since the ancient Greeks, so that is not what was new in the modern era.2 What Kant gave us was the idea that morality is self-​governance, the rules by which a rational being governs itself. The additional premise is that morality comes in the form of a command; it is the product of a will. So if morality comes in the form of a command, and a person should not submit to any will but her own, it follows that morality is a command I give myself. It gets its authority from myself. The Kantian position on the nature of morality, then, follows from the nature of autonomy as self-​governance combined with the view that morality comes in the form of a command. Why would modern philosophers think, either on moral or premoral grounds, that I should not submit to anything but my own rational will? In the ancient and medieval periods, philosophers recognized two grounds for authority—​one Greek, one Judeo-​Christian, both of which were modified or even rejected in the modern West. The first way to ground authority was in God, who created and governs the universe. The second way to ground authority was in reason. For the Greeks, reason is intrinsically authoritative; the authority of reason is self-​evident. A person is self-​governing in so far as she has a share in the force of reason that governs the universe. But since an individual person’s reason is limited, her authority to govern herself is also limited. In the last several centuries before Kant, I see two shifts in the way philosophers thought of the ground of authority. The first shift was from reason to the will. In the later Middle Ages there was a dispute between those who accepted the

1 Fricker, “Testimony and Epistemic Authority:” p.  225. The identification of intellectual autonomy and epistemic self-​reliance has also been made by some who are opposed to epistemic self-​reliance. For instance, Benjamin McMyler, Testimony, Trust, and Authority, ­chapter 1, says he is opposed to intellectual autonomy, but he makes it clear that that is because he equates it with epistemic self-​reliance. 2 Anthony Flood, “Self-​Governance in Aquinas and Pre-​Modern Moral Philosophy,” argues that there are numerous ancient sources of the idea of self-​governance stretching back to Socrates, and that Aquinas had a robust notion of self-​governance in his moral philosophy.

Intellectual Autonomy  291 ancient view that the source of authority is in the divine reason, and those who claimed that the source of authority is in the divine will rather than the divine reason. Duns Scotus was one of the earliest proponents of the latter view.3 The shift from reason to will as the ground of authority had significant consequences since the relation between the divine and human wills is quite different from the relation between the divine and human reason. Our reason is arguably a share in the divine reason, which is why a measure of self-​governance for the ancients and medievals is compatible with being governed by God. In contrast, our wills obviously do not share in the divine will. A will by its nature is individual. The focus on will cannot help but be a focus on the individual. In the century leading up to Kant, there was a second shift—​from the idea of the natural authority of reason to the idea of the natural authority of the self. Kant brilliantly combined (a) the modern idea of the authority of the self, (b) the ancient idea of the authority of reason, and (c) the later medieval view that authority resides in a will. He argued that to be governed by oneself and to be governed by reason are the same thing because the true self is one’s own rational will. But that does not yet tell us which is more basic. Is the point of the Kantian view of autonomy that I should not submit to anything but my rational will, or is it that I should not submit to anything but my rational will? If it is the former, reason is still the primary authority, and there is no explanation for why it should be my will that governs me rather than any other rational will. If instead, autonomy means that I should not submit to anything but my own rational will, my rationality is not sufficient to explain why other wills do not have authority equal to or greater than mine. Many modern philosophers will say that I do not need a justification for the authority of my own will, but since philosophers before the modern period did not see it that way, we need a defense for the shift from the idea that the authority that needs no justification is reason to the idea that the authority that needs no justification is the authority of the self over itself. Christine Korsgaard offers such a defense. She argues that Kant’s answer to our question is that the self ’s authority over itself does not derive from the authority of a rational will; rather, reason is authoritative because it is the rules that the self must set to govern itself.4 The self just is a being with an executive function. It must take control of itself because of the operation of self-​consciousness. The rules of reason are the rules of a self-​conscious being. Korsgaard interprets the authority of reason as derivative from the authority of the self-​conscious self, the reverse of the traditional view.

3 See Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy, c­ hapter 2, sec. iii, for a historical overview of voluntarism, or the view that moral authority is grounded in a will. For a history of Divine Command theory, see Idziak, Divine Command Morality. 4 Korsgaard, Self-​Constitution, p. xi.

292  Intellectual Autonomy and Authority As I interpret the historical development of the idea of autonomy, then, there was a progression from the ancient idea that authority over me resides in reason, to the idea that authority resides in the rational will, to the idea that authority resides in my rational will. The first two were rooted outside the individual person, generally in the divine reason or will, with human authority based on the human being’s submission to or imitation of the divine ground of authority. The third constituted a radical shift, although Kant did not give up the idea that authority is grounded in universal reason. What was radical was the idea that universal reason is attached to my own will. I surmise that it was that feature that permitted later degeneration into the view that my will, unconstrained by anything, including reason, is the only authority over me.5

17.2.2  Intellectual Autonomy and Heteronomy Let us now begin to look at what all this has to do with autonomy in the intellectual domain. First, I think it is fair to say that even if the ultimate bearer of practical or moral authority is someone’s will, nobody but Hobbes would say that the ultimate bearer of intellectual authority is a will.6 Nevertheless, we would expect there to be a close connection between intellectual autonomy and autonomy of the will, and a corresponding connection between intellectual authority and practical authority. Notice first that autonomy of the will presupposes autonomy of the intellect. It is unlikely that we can autonomously make a choice unless the beliefs upon which the choice is based are autonomous. This point does not depend upon any particular view of autonomy, but only on the assumption that choices depend upon beliefs. If it is good that acts are autonomous, at least some of our beliefs

5 For an interesting discussion of the culmination of the idea of authority in the individual will, see Taylor, “Responsibility for Self:” 288–​94. 6 In Behemoth, Dialogue 1, Hobbes argues that the Sovereign is the intellectual authority in the state, holding authority over the church in its teachings. He argues that the universities need to be disciplined so that they teach what the sovereign wants since the universities are the core of rebellion, as happened in the English civil war. This part of Behemoth includes a long diatribe against the Catholic Church and the Presbyterian Church for their “pretensions” to authority. In contrast to Hobbes, Locke denies that authority over religious belief is possible. He says: “The care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate, because his power consists only in outward force: but true and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God. And such is the nature of the understanding, that it cannot be compelled to the belief of anything by outward force. Confiscation of estate, imprisonment, torments, nothing of that nature can have any such efficacy as to make men change the inward judgment that they have framed of things” (Locke, Behemoth, para 16). Rousseau seems to have an intermediate position. He agrees with Hobbes that the sovereign should fix the articles of faith, but he says it cannot compel a citizen to believe them, although it can banish whoever does not believe them as an anti-​social being (The Social Contract, Book IV, c­ hapter 8). I thank Zev Trachtenberg for conversation on these passages.

Intellectual Autonomy  293 ought to be formed autonomously. The conditions of the mind upon which choice depends must be autonomous. Notice also that the ways in which a will can be heteronomous according to Kant have a parallel in the formation of beliefs. A will is heteronomous in one way when it is controlled by a will outside of it. Similarly, an intellect can be too greatly influenced or even controlled by someone else’s will. It is plausible to say such an intellect is heteronomous. Intellectual coercion is generally thought to be impossible, as Locke observed (see note 6), but commercial and political advertising are common ways of pressuring people to form particular beliefs even though the beliefs are not literally coerced. It is understandable that people sometimes complain that their autonomy is violated, at least to some degree, by the use of such methods of influencing belief. An amusing and more extreme view on coercion over belief is Robert Nozick’s claim that rational persuasion is coercive, and philosophers are guilty of coercing people’s minds. Nozick says: The terminology of philosophical art is coercive: arguments are powerful and best when they are knockdown, arguments force you to a conclusion, if you believe the premises you have to or must believe the conclusion, some arguments do not carry much punch, and so forth. A philosophical argument is an attempt to get someone to believe something, whether he wants to or not. . . . Why are philosophers intent on forcing others to believe things? Is that a nice way to behave toward someone?7

We may not all agree on whether anyone is entitled to influence the beliefs of others by rational argument or any other method, but fortunately, we do not have to settle that issue because the first kind of intellectual heteronomy is relevant either way. Surely another person can unduly influence my beliefs, and that can happen even when the other person is not claiming authority, is not attempting to coerce my belief or to persuade me, and may even be unaware of my existence. Of course, we will want to know what undue influence is, but it is plausible that it exists and that it is problematic for roughly the same reason Kant gives for thinking that the first kind of heteronomy of the will is problematic. If we are not fully rational when our wills are pushed around, then we are not fully rational when our intellects are pushed around, whatever “pushed around” amounts to. At least, there is a prima facie case for the equivalence. A will is heteronomous in the second way, according to Kant, when it is determined by forces within the self other than reason—​by inclination or fancy. An intellect also can be determined by inclination or fancy, or something other than



7 Nozick, Philosophical Explanations: 4–​5.

294  Intellectual Autonomy and Authority reason, and there is a prima facie case for calling such an intellect heteronomous. The value of intellectual autonomy that contrasts with a heteronomous intellect in this sense is not very controversial. Nobody denies that reason is good for the intellect, and that forming beliefs by inclination or fancy is a bad idea. I think that we can expect, then, that if autonomy is valuable, intellectual autonomy is also. Both of the ways in which a will can be heteronomous according to Kant probably apply to the intellect, and both ways are disvaluable. So far we have nothing more than a couple of hints about the nature of intellectual autonomy. In sections 17.3 and 17.4 I will return to the view adopted from Korsgaard that reason derives from self-​consciousness. Rather than to give a Kantian argument for that position, I will give an epistemological argument that epistemic reasons derive from the powers of a self-​reflective being. This will lead to a view of intellectual autonomy that connects it with autonomy in the practical domain.

17.3  The Primacy of Conscientious Self-​Reflection 17.3.1  The Exercise of Self-​Reflection What I mean by a self is the inner world of a person. When a self is conscious, it is aware of the distinction between the subject and object of consciousness, and in self-​consciousness the subject is able to direct consciousness to itself. To be conscious of oneself includes consciousness of a variety of mental states, including beliefs, desires, emotions, sensations, attitudes, judgments, and decisions, as well as imaginary versions of each. Some of these states occur naturally. For instance, I think there is a natural desire for truth and a natural belief that the natural desire for truth can be satisfied, so basic epistemic self-​trust is natural. I think it is natural to have many other beliefs, such as the belief that there are other persons with conscious states similar to mine. Many emotions are no doubt natural as well. But most of our particular beliefs, desires, and emotions are acquired. Our mental states can sometimes conflict with one another. We experience conflict between our mental states as dissonance. It seems to me that the experience of dissonance is basic. It cannot be explained or analyzed in terms of some other experience. I do not mean that conflict is defined by the experience of dissonance since there can be conflict that is unconscious, but we detect conflict through the experience of dissonance. Many times when there is dissonance, the self automatically adjusts by giving up one of the states that conflict. This often happens when there is conflict between a belief and a perception. I believe that I turned off the watering system, but then hear the sprinklers go on. I give up my belief without any attention to

Intellectual Autonomy  295 the conflict. The conflict is short-​lived and psychic harmony is restored effortlessly and without conscious attention. I think that the awareness of dissonance resolved without effort gives us our initial model of what rationality is. I say that because I think that rationality is a property we have when we do what we do naturally, only we do a better job of it. To be rational is to do a better job of what we do anyway—​what our faculties do naturally. Sometimes there is conflict that is not automatically resolved. If we are aware of dissonance, we typically feel a need to resolve it by giving up one of the components of the self that creates the dissonance, and we may not want to do so. Some forms of dissonance do not need to be resolved; we can get along well enough with the dissonance. This often happens with conflicting desires, or with a desire that conflicts with a belief. I believe that I will go on a trip tomorrow, but I do not want to go. I am aware of the dissonance between the belief and the desire, but I do not feel an urgency to give up either the belief or the desire the way I do when I am aware of conflicting beliefs. Nonetheless, it is better if dissonance is resolved. Conflict between desires or between a belief and a desire can also be resolved unconsciously, and the experience of the resulting harmony gives us a model of a kind of rationality that is desirable for the same reason we desire harmony in our beliefs: We naturally desire and attempt to achieve a harmonious self. When we are aware of a conflict within the self, we might find it hard to give up either side to the conflict, but may make the judgment that a certain one ought to be given up. This situation often occurs when a decision conflicts with a set of beliefs. We may judge that we ought to change the decision, but find it difficult. Perhaps we are able to do so after a struggle; we call that continence. Perhaps we are not able to do so and we call that incontinence or akrasia. Akrasia is often called moral weakness, but the weakness need not have anything to do with morality. Indeed, one can be akratic when what one judges one ought to do is opposed to morality.8 A mild form of akrasia exists as long as the conflict exists and we are aware of the dissonance but do not resolve it. A stronger form of akrasia occurs when we resolve the conflict in favor of the wrong side to the conflict—​ what we judge we ought not to do. I have proposed that we begin reflection with a model of what we ought to do to resolve conflict, which is, very roughly, what we would do if we were doing it automatically and without effort. What we do reflectively builds upon a base in what we do prereflectively. Of course, part of the point of reflection is to change some of what we do prereflectively, but reflection operates on processes that



8

Davidson, “How Is Weakness of the Will Possible?”

296  Intellectual Autonomy and Authority already exist in our prereflective state. We judge ourselves reflectively with the prereflective experience of successful resolutions of conflict. My position, then, is that there is a connection between rationality and our reflective judgment of what produces harmony in the self. I have added the idea that there is a connection between rationality and what people do automatically. I think we would have a lot of trouble distinguishing rational from irrational behavior were it not for the experience of making an automatic adjustment when there is dissonance in the states of the self. Of course, I am not suggesting that rationality should be defined by such behavior. But what we do automatically gives us our initial standard of rationality, a standard for what it is to make the adjustment in the self correctly. The criterion works only if there is a close connection between the way the self naturally operates and what the self ought to do. That means that there is a connection between the natural and the normative, in particular, a connection between the self as it naturally operates and the way it should operate. When parts of the self adjust automatically, no executive is needed. The self exercises its executive function when we have to make up our mind. Choice in action involves an executive function, but other changes in the self do also. Sometimes resolution of dissonance within the self requires the exercise of the executive function of the self. It does so when the resolution of dissonance does not occur automatically. The executive self can also be called an agent. The self is an agent in its role of taking charge of itself, correcting itself, and thereby becoming a more harmonious self, and hence, in some deeper way, more of a self. A self-​conscious being has an executive function in virtue of being a self. This is the sense in which the self has natural authority over itself. I have no objections to someone who says that the reflective ability of the self to monitor and change in the way I have described shows the centrality of the will in our psychology, but I find it misleading to use the term “will” for the executive function I have described. I do not maintain that the self-​reflective regulation of the self involves changing states of the self “at will,” and I think that our power to act is not a good model of the reflective powers of the self, which are broader and generally weaker than the power to perform basic acts. My preference, then, is not to say that the ultimate authority over a self is the will. Rather, the natural authority of the self over the self is the power of the executive function of self-​ reflective consciousness.

17.3.2  Beliefs and the Reflective Self Let us look now at a deep kind of dissonance produced by reflection upon our beliefs as a whole. Many philosophers who have rigorously reflected upon their

Intellectual Autonomy  297 beliefs notice the phenomenon of epistemic circularity, or what Keith Lehrer (1997) has called “the loop of reason.” The problem is that there is no noncircular way to determine that the natural desire for truth is satisfiable, or to put the claim in the preferred idiom, there is no noncircular way to tell that our belief-​forming faculties are reliable as a whole. In Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others, Richard Foley links the phenomenon of epistemic circularity with the lack of answers to the radical skeptic and the failure of the project of strong foundationalism. We can do everything epistemically that we are supposed to do, including following the evidence scrupulously, but we have no assurances that the results will give us the truth or even make it more probable that we will get the truth. Foley concludes that we need self-​trust in our epistemic faculties taken as a whole, together with our prereflective opinions. Self-​trust is necessary, and further, he argues that it is rational in that it is a state to which we are led by the process of rational self-​ criticism. One is rationally entitled to self-​trust, and therefore one is rationally entitled to the degree of confidence one has in one’s opinions and faculties when one has trust in the self since it is critical reflection that leads to self-​trust.9 Foley’s model is one in which it is rational to do what self-​reflective beings do. That seems to me to be right. William Alston offers a more detailed argument for a related conclusion about circularity in his final book, Beyond Justification, which modifies an argument in Alston, “Epistemic Circularity.” Alston argues that we cannot justify any belief arising from a basic practice of belief-​formation (perception, memory, introspection, rational intuition, induction, and others) without justifying the well-​groundedness of the practice, but we cannot do that without using that same practice. For instance, I cannot justify my belief that a dive-​bombing hawk just swooped by my window without a justification of the reliability of my perceptual faculties, but I cannot justify my belief in the reliability of my perceptual faculties without using perception. This is a stronger claim than the one made by Foley. Alston argues that circularity arises in the attempt to establish the reliability of individual basic sources of belief such as perception, memory, and deductive reasoning, whereas Foley claims only that circularity arises in the attempt to establish the reliability of our epistemic faculties and beliefs taken as a whole.10 9 Foley, Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others: 25, 47. 10 Alston’s position on the circularity of justifying basic sources of belief has an interesting twist. He argues that circularity does not prevent us from using an inductive argument to establish the conclusion that a doxastic practice such as sense perception is adequately grounded (“Epistemic Circularity;” 202–​3). An inductive argument of this sort is not logically circular, given that the conclusion does not appear in the premises, but it is epistemically circular in that one’s confidence in each premise depends in practice upon the assumption of the reliability of sense perception (SR). Nonetheless, epistemic circularity does not prevent us from being justified in believing each of the premises in the argument, nor does it prevent us from being justified in believing that SR follows

298  Intellectual Autonomy and Authority It does not matter for my argument whether Alston’s stronger view on the extent of circularity is correct. Either way, circularity is a problem that reflective beings notice. But there is an interesting difference between Alston and Foley that I think is important. Alston does not think that the problem of epistemic circularity is necessarily tied to the threat of skepticism. He says that the specter of skepticism is a dramatic way to put the issue, “but it is not necessary for a calm, fully mature consideration of the problem.”11 The problem as Alston sees it is the fact that the justification of our beliefs is ultimately circular prevents us from being “fully reflectively justified” in our beliefs. We need not be especially worried about evil geniuses and brains in vats to notice circularity, and we need not think that the alternative to full reflective justification is skepticism. I think Alston is right about that. A problem arises as soon as a person reflects upon her desire for truth and carries reflection upon that desire as far as she can. She is doing what every self-​reflective being does, only more thoroughly and scrupulously. She feels dissonance when she lacks full reflective justification for her beliefs, and that is a problem even if she does not fear skepticism or even pays any attention to skepticism. Alston and Foley think of self-​trust as the rational outcome of a sophisticated line of argument. It is an end state, not the state from which we start. I differ from them on this point since I have suggested that there is prereflective self-​trust. Before we reflect upon the justification of our beliefs or the reliability of our faculties, we already trust ourselves and our environment, including other people. The difference is that awareness of epistemic circularity forces us to confront the prereflective trust we have in ourselves at the reflective level. Is it rational to have self-​trust after reflection? That depends upon whether reflection creates dissonance between our natural prereflective trust and beliefs that result from reflection on our total set of beliefs, including the belief that full reflective justification is impossible. Foley and Alston say that self-​trust is the rational result of reflection upon beliefs. But even if someone is not convinced by their arguments, surely the rational result of self-​reflection is not to give up prereflective trust. There is no dissonance between self-​trust and our total set of beliefs, including the belief that full reflective justification is impossible. On the contrary, there is less dissonance between self-​trust and our total set of beliefs than there is between the belief that full reflective justification is impossible and the rest of our beliefs. from the premises. And so epistemic circularity does not prevent us from being justified in believing the conclusion, SR. 11 Alston, Beyond Justification: 216. He says, however, that he will pursue the discussion in the following pages in terms of the “more dramatically attractive” skeptical challenge. His response to epistemic circularity two pages later is therefore framed as a reply to the Pyrrhonian skeptic.

Intellectual Autonomy  299 But there is another way to resolve the latter dissonance: one could become a skeptic. One could give up both natural self-​trust and one’s previous beliefs, but not give up the belief that full reflective justification is impossible. To prevent dissonance with the natural desire for truth, the skeptic would have to give that up also, if possible, or else live with permanent dissonance. I have my doubts that there are such persons, but if such a radical skeptic exists, she does not have the irrationality of dissonance, but she attains harmony by foregoing much of what we do naturally. I have suggested that rationality is, roughly, doing a better job of what we naturally do. The skeptic I have described is not going a better job of what we do naturally because she is not doing what we do naturally. However, I am not going to critique skepticism. My conclusion in this section is that when a person carries self-​reflection as far as she can, and does it honestly and rigorously, she will do the best job of maintaining harmony in the self—​one of the principal goals of the executive self, by maintaining a great many of her prereflective beliefs, and bringing her trust in herself to reflective consciousness. That is, the result of rigorous self-​reflection is to become consciously aware of her natural self-​trust and accepting of it.

17.3.3  The Conscientious Believer and the Nature of Reasons The function of self-​trust in our epistemic lives leads to a way of thinking about reasons for belief that makes them derivative from what we do when we bring our desire for the truth to reflective consciousness. When we want our questions answered, what we typically do is to look for what we call reasons. Something is a reason because, upon reflection, it can be put together with other reasons in such a way that they seem to support a given conclusion, a conclusion that we then take to be true. What we call justification (in one of its senses) is the state we are in when we succeed in finding reasons of that kind. The desire for truth in a self-​ reflective person leads to the search for reasons in this way, and the arguments for epistemic circularity by Foley and Alston make this assumption. We trust that there is a connection between the possession of reasons for belief and getting the truth. A self-​reflective person who desires truth may not search for reasons for every belief. The issue of whether there are beliefs that a self-​reflective person accepts without reasons is an important one, and I am not assuming that there are no such beliefs. What is not disputable is that a self-​reflective person looks for reasons for many of her beliefs, and she considers it a good thing to have reasons for any of her beliefs. I do not think there is any explanation for why she does that or what would justify her in doing so except that that is what self-​reflective

300  Intellectual Autonomy and Authority persons who desire truth do. To have reasons for her beliefs produces psychic harmony, and to fail to have reasons produces psychic dissonance. This leads to the question whether we have reasons to think that our reasons for belief lead to the truth. The same question can be posed in terms of the related notion of evidence.12 Do we have evidence that evidence leads to truth? In any sense of evidence that would eliminate the need for trust in the relation between evidence and truth, the answer is no. For one thing, we do not have evidence that evidence leads to truth. What we have is evidence that evidence for p leads to more evidence for p, enough that at some point we declare p true. But in any case, why should we pay attention to the evidence that evidence leads to truth unless we trust the connection between evidence and truth? No matter how much evidence we have, its connection to truth will always be something that cannot be established without circularity. The answer to the question of why it is rational to trust evidence is the same as the answer to the question of why it is rational to trust reasons. Trusting the connection between evidence and truth is something rational people who desire the truth do. Even the skeptic trusts this connection. In fact, it is because the skeptic trusts this connection that the skeptic becomes a skeptic. It is the failure to complete the search for evidence that leads her to skepticism. Circularity is relevant to the desire for truth because we make certain assumptions about the nature of mind and the universe. We want truth—​our questions answered correctly—​and we notice that the process of attempting to answer those questions can never be completed. But this is a problem because we assume (a) there is a connection between successfully getting the truth and what we do when we attempt to answer our questions (what we call finding reasons or evidence), and (b) what we attempt to do can never be completed. The discovery of epistemic circularity discussed by Alston and Foley is the discovery of (b), but what about (a)? We do not discover (a); we trust it. The need for trust in (a) is independent of (b), and we can see that by looking at what our situation would be like if, per impossibile, we were able to complete the search for reasons in a noncircular way. We would still need trust that there is any connection between reasons and truth. Whether or not we have the reasons we seek, 12 The notions of reasons and evidence are closely connected, but there are some differences. One difference is that we usually speak of reasons for a given belief, whereas evidence can be gathered when any belief for which it is evidence is not yet in play. So we would not normally speak of having reasons without indicating what the reasons support, whereas we might say we have evidence when we have no idea what the evidence indicates. Some philosophers make evidence a narrower category than reasons, limiting evidence to reasons of a certain kind—​for example, propositional beliefs. For instance, Plantinga in “Reason and Belief in God” does this in his well-​known attack on evidentialism. In this terminology, an experience can give a person a reason to believe a proposition, but it is not evidence. Another difference is that evidence is sometimes thought to be objects that point to truth, such as fingerprints. A fingerprint could be evidence, but it is not a reason. I mention evidence in this sense later in the chapter.

Intellectual Autonomy  301 we need to trust that reasons are the sorts of things that give us the answers to our questions, that connect us to truth. So even if strong foundationalism had succeeded, we would need trust that we identified the foundation correctly and that the foundationalist structure reliably gives us truth. This is no less the case if the foundation is certain. We would still need trust in the connection between the state of certainty and truth. We get the same conclusion no matter what notion of evidence or reasons we use. Evidence can be understood as something internal to the mind—​generally, a phenomenal experience or a belief. In contrast, evidence is sometimes understood as public property, the sort of thing to which scientists or lawyers can point in the common project of attempting to answer questions. If reasons are public, they can be either objects, such as fingerprints, or facts (true propositions).13 Alternatively, reasons could be some combination of the public and private, such as facts known by the subject. There are many variations, but in every case, trust is needed. If a reason for belief is internal to the mind, the need for trust in the connection between a reason and something external to the mind is clear. If instead a reason is defined from an external perspective, what in fact indicates truth, that means that what we do when we are attempting to get truth may not be having a reason in the sense defined. That does not remove the need for trust; it just backs it up a step to trust in the link between what we do when we are trying to get truth and having a reason from an external perspective. The same point applies to evidence. Whether or not we define evidence in a way that builds a reliable connection to the truth into the concept, we need to trust the connection between (a) what we do when we make a fully conscious effort to use our faculties the best way we can to get truth and (b) success in reaching truth. Using an externalist notion of reasons or evidence therefore does not remove the need for trust in the connection between our faculties and getting the truth. The fundamental reason we trust evidence or reasons is that looking for evidence is what we do when we are self-​reflective, and we trust that. I call the quality of using our faculties to the best of our ability in order to get the truth epistemic conscientiousness. I think of this quality as the self-​reflective version of the natural desire for truth. It is a natural desire brought to self-​reflective consciousness and accompanied by the attempt to satisfy it with all of one’s powers. I have argued that we need trust that there is a connection between the natural desire for truth and the satisfaction of that desire using the faculties that any person has, reflective or prereflective, but once a person becomes reflective, she thinks that her trustworthiness is greater if she summons her powers in a fully conscious and careful way, and exercises them to the best of her ability. What I am calling 13 See Kelly, “Evidence,” for an excellent summary of the various senses in which people speak of evidence.

302  Intellectual Autonomy and Authority conscientiousness is the state or disposition to do that.14 Conscientiousness is important because we do not think that we are equally trustworthy at all times. We trust that there is a connection between trying and succeeding, and the reflective person thinks that there is a closer connection between trying with the full reflective use of her powers, and succeeding. Conscientiousness comes in degrees. There is probably a degree of conscientiousness operating most of the time since we have some awareness of ourselves and the exercise of our powers most of the time. But higher degrees of conscientiousness require considerable self-​awareness and self-​monitoring. A conscientious person has evidence that she is more likely to get the truth when she is conscientious, but she trusts evidence in virtue of her trust in herself when she is conscientious, not conversely. Her trust in herself is more basic than her trust in evidence, and that includes evidence of reliability. The identification of evidence, the identification of the way to handle and evaluate evidence, and the resolution of conflicting evidence all depend upon the more basic property of epistemic conscientiousness. I think, then, that evidence is what we take to be indicative of truth when we are conscientious, and we trust that that is identical with what is indicative of truth. Norms of reasoning such as the rules of probability are tools for helping us figure out what is most conscientious to believe.15 Likewise, I think that intellectual virtues are qualities that arise out of epistemic conscientiousness. These qualities are those that epistemically conscientious persons endorse and attempt to acquire. But we would not treat them as virtues unless we thought that our cognitive and sensory faculties are generally trustworthy because these qualities are useless in a being whose faculties are not naturally conducive to reaching their end.16 It follows from what I have argued that there are two levels of self-​trust, both of which are more basic than any reasons or evidence we can identify. First, there is the general trust in our faculties that I argued is the most rational response to epistemic circularity. Second, there is the particular trust we have in our faculties when we are conscientious—​exercising our truth-​seeking faculties in the best way we can. Our identification of reasons for belief, norms of reasoning, and the qualities we think are intellectually virtuous are all derivative from what

14 Note that as I define conscientiousness, it does not have any relation to duty. 15 For this reason, trusting my faculties as a whole cannot mean trusting that, taken as a whole, using my faculties makes it more probable than not that I get the truth. That would make it too easy to convince myself that most of my beliefs are true. Believing a faculty is trustworthy does not include making a judgment of probability. My position is that judgments of probability depend upon a prior belief in the trustworthiness of my faculties. 16 In Zagzebski, On Epistemology: 82, I argue that qualities like intellectual attentiveness, carefulness, thoroughness and openness to new evidence are forms of epistemic conscientiousness. But it does not do us any good to be careful, thorough, etc. unless our faculties put us generally on the right track. So we assume the general trustworthiness of our faculties when we treat these qualities as virtues.

Intellectual Autonomy  303 we do when we are epistemically conscientious. My judgment that the evidence supports some proposition p is not trustworthy without trust in my faculties, in particular, the conscientious use of my faculties. That means that trust in my faculties is always more basic than any judgment about the evidence and what it supports. Trust in myself is more basic than trust in my judgment of the reliability of myself or anyone else. This line of reasoning has the consequence that ultimately our only test that a belief is true is that it survives conscientious reflection. That includes reflection on future experiences, and future judgments about the past and present. At any one time, of course, we cannot know what our future experiences will be. Norms of reasoning are the norms that have been adopted by the conscientious judgment that following them makes it likely that beliefs will survive without dissonance into the future—​that they will survive with changes in experience and changes in other beliefs. In section 17.3.1, I proposed that the experience of dissonance unconsciously resolved gives us our first model of what rationality is. Given what I have argued in sections 17.3.2 and 17.3.3, the experience of the conscientious self resolving dissonance gives us our second model of what rationality is. It is rational to trust when it is needed to resolve dissonance, and epistemic self-​trust is rational in this sense. The foundation of rationality is the conscientious self reflecting upon itself in order to resolve dissonance.

17.4 Intellectual Autonomy In section 17.2, I suggested that the rise of the idea of autonomy can be understood in terms of a double shift in the answer to the question, “What has ultimate authority over me?” Before the modern era there were two answers to that question that were not perceived as conflicting and, for the most part, were blended into one answer. The ultimate authority is God, and the ultimate authority is reason, but reason is the divine in the human. I proposed that the two-​ part shift in the answer to the question, “What has ultimate authority over me?” included a shift from the (divine) reason to the (divine) will, and a second shift from reason to the self. Kant did not reject the authority of reason, but he accepted both the shifts from reason to will and from reason to the self, yielding the view that the ultimate authority over me is my own rational will. The defense of this view, according to Korsgaard, is that the norms of reason are the rules of self-​governance. It is important that the rules of self-​governance are not the rules that they are because they are the norms of reason. Rather, the norms of reason are what they are because they are the rules of self-​governance. The self governs itself because of the self-​reflective structure of the self. The self is more basic than

304  Intellectual Autonomy and Authority reason, and the will directs the self. What makes the will crucial for Kant is that the norms of morality come in the form of commands. In my view of autonomy, there are some features of this picture that need to be clarified, and possibly modified. First, the ability of the self to command itself is just a special case of the more general capacity of a self to reflect upon itself and to make adjustments, some of which are unconscious, some of which are conscious but effortless, some of which require effort, and some of which are intended, but the self is powerless to make the change. I see all of these processes as occurring because of the natural desire of a self to be harmonious in its states—​to resolve dissonance, and to adjust in a way that is intended to survive future self-​ reflection without dissonance. It is not obvious that it is the will that performs all these functions. Rather, the self performs these functions upon itself. What gives the self authority to do so is just that that is the nature of the self. It cannot do otherwise than to be a self. I think that also means that the term “self-​governance” is misleading since that term can be interpreted as suggesting that there is an issue that can be answered in more than one way: Does the self govern itself or is it governed by something outside the self? In the sense in which I think the self is self-​governing, there is no alternative, so the question of who governs the self does not arise. In the sense in which I have argued that the self is self-​governing, governance by anything other than the self is an impossibility. We can now see how the problem of epistemic circularity reveals the relationship between the authority of reason over our beliefs and the authority of the self to direct itself. As I argued in section 17.3, trust in ourselves when we are conscientiously directing the self is more basic than anything we call evidence or reasons to believe some proposition. From my first person perspective, I will always need to trust the connection between (a) what I do when I make a fully conscious effort to use my faculties the best way we can to get truth, and (b) success in reaching truth. I am rationally forced to accept that trust in my powers is prior to trust in reasons. That does not mean that I am more authoritative than reason. It just means that my ability to use reason is always derivative from the self-​directing function of my self. The authority of the self also does not mean that I could decide otherwise than to adopt the norms of theoretical and practical reason. The norms of reason are the norms I must use in order to reflectively adjust the self. It is not an accident that the rules I must use in self-​direction are the same as the ones every other self must use. Reason is the set of rules of any self-​reflective being. Finally, the sense in which the self has authority over itself is compatible with governance by God or by another external authority for the same reason it is compatible with being governed by reason. The self is a constantly changing entity that develops under its own direction, but there is nothing in that function

Intellectual Autonomy  305 that rules out accepting beliefs or directives from authority. In fact, I have argued elsewhere17 that the acceptance of both epistemic and practical authority is a rational requirement of a consistently self-​directing self. The modern shift from the authority of reason to the authority of the self therefore does not diminish the authority of reason, but it does show us that the effective use of reason by one self can differ from its use by another self because of differences in the states of the selves upon which the norms of reason are applied. I think also that the argument of section 17.3 shows us the fundamental significance of the self ’s management of itself, even in the intellectual domain. I think that autonomy is this capacity for self-​management and its exercise. Autonomy is sometimes described as a right that can be violated, and sometimes as an ideal to which we should aspire. Both ways of speaking of autonomy make sense on the picture I have described. I have proposed that the basic norm of self-​direction is conscientious self-​reflection. Conscientiousness comes in degrees, and I suggested that it takes a high degree of self-​reflection to use our faculties to the fullest extent of our powers in our attempt to reach the ends of those powers. Self-​direction is also a right that a self has in being a self, and there are ways that that right can be violated, either from the inside or from the outside. As I mentioned in section 17.2.2, Kant argued that a will is heteronomous in one way when it is controlled by a will outside of it. In my picture, a self is heteronomous in this way when there is outside interference in the capacity or exercise of self-​direction. Someone is intellectually heteronomous in this way when there is outside interference in the self ’s direction of its pursuit of truth or other intellectual goods. According to Kant, a will is heteronomous in another way when it is unduly influenced by inclination, or what he called “empirical” causes. In my picture, a self is heteronomous in this way when it is not properly self-​reflective, thereby permitting states of the self to change or continue without conscientious self-​reflection. The self is intellectually heteronomous in this way when it permits states of belief to change or continue without conscientious self-​ reflection. Conscientious self-​reflection can be hampered by both internal and external influences. In my view, autonomy is the right or ideal of managing all parts of the self, not just decisions to act, in order to achieve a harmonious self. Intellectual autonomy is the right or ideal of self-​direction in the acquisition and maintenance of beliefs. The basic ends of acts and beliefs are given by natural desires. I have mentioned the natural desire for truth in particular, but I do not wish to deny that there are other intellectual goods, such as knowledge and understanding. Desire for these goods is probably acquired by the experience of self-​reflection.



17 Zagzebski, On Epistemology.

306  Intellectual Autonomy and Authority The foundation of rationality is the conscientious self attempting to resolve dissonance and produce harmony in the self. I argued in section17. 3 that the self cannot resolve the dissonance that results from conscientious reflection on one’s total set of beliefs without epistemic self-​trust. Since intellectual autonomy is the exercise of self-​management in one’s beliefs, then epistemic self-​trust is a necessary condition for intellectual autonomy. I think that this point can be generalized. Autonomy requires trust in the connection between the conscientious use of all of one’s powers—​perceptual, epistemic, affective, conative—​and success in reaching the basic ends of those powers. Self-​trust is a necessary and critical condition for autonomy, and for the same reason it is a necessary and critical condition for being a self.18

References Alston, William P. “Epistemic Circularity.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 47 (1986): 1–​30. Alston, William P. Beyond Justification:  Dimensions of Epistemic Evaluation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. Davidson, Donald. “How Is Weakness of the Will Possible?” In Moral Concepts, edited by Joel Feinberg. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970. Flood, Anthony. “Self-​Governance in Aquinas and Pre-​Modern Moral Philosophy.” Dissertation in Philosophy, University of Oklahoma, 2003. Foley, Richard. Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Fricker, Eizabeth. “Testimony and Epistemic Authority.” In The Epistemology of Testimony, edited by Jennifer Lackey and Ernest Sosa. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006: 225–252. Hobbes, Thomas. Behemoth, or the Long Parliament. Edited by P. Seaward. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Idziak, Janine. Divine Command Morality:  Historical and Contemporary Readings. New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1980. Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated and edited by M. Gregor. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Kelly, Thomas. “Evidence.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by E.N. Zalta. 2006. http://​plato.stanford.edu/​arhives/​fall2008/​entries/​evidence/​. Korsgaard, Christine. Self-​Constitution:  Agency, Identity, and Integrity. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2009. Lehrer, Keith. Self-​Trust: A Study of Reason, Knowledge, and Autonomy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Locke, John. A Letter Concerning Toleration: Humbly Submitted. New York: Classic Book America, 2009. McMyler, Benjamin. Testimony, Trust, and Authority. New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2011.

18

Parts of this paper are taken from Zagzebski (Epistemic Authority, ­chapters 1, 2, and 11).

Intellectual Autonomy  307 Nozick, Robert. Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981. Plantinga, Alvin. “Reason and Belief in God.” In Faith and Rationality, edited by N. Wolterstorff and A. Plantinga. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983: 16–93. Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques. The Social Contract. Translated by M. Cranston. New  York: Penguin Press, 1968. Schneewind, J. B. The Invention of Autonomy:  A History of Modern Moral Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Taylor, Charles. “Responsibility for Self.” In The Identities of Persons, edited by Amélie Rorty. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976: 281–299. Zagzebski, Linda. On Epistemology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/​Broadview Press, 2008. Zagzebski, Linda. Epistemic Authority:  A Theory of Trust, Authority, and Autonomy in Belief. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

PART VI

SKEPT IC ISM A N D TH E G ET T I E R PROBL E M

18

The Inescapability of Gettier Problems* Gettier problems arise in the theory of knowledge when it is only by chance that a justified true belief is true. Since the belief might easily have been false in these cases, it is normally concluded that they are not instances of knowledge.1 The moral drawn in the thirty years since Edmund Gettier published his famous paper is that either justified true belief (JTB) is not sufficient for knowledge, in which case knowledge must have an “extra” component in addition to JTB, or else justification must be reconceived to make it sufficient for knowledge. I shall argue that given the common and reasonable assumption that the relation between justification and truth is close but not inviolable, it is not possible for either move to avoid Gettier counterexamples. What is more, it makes no difference if the component of knowledge in addition to true belief is identified as something other than justification, e.g., warrant or well­foundedness. I conclude that Gettier problems are inescapable for virtually every analysis of knowledge which at least maintains that knowledge is true belief plus something else. Notice first that Gettier problems arise for both internalist and externalist notions of justification. On internalist theories the grounds for justification are accessible to the consciousness of the believer, and Gettier problems arise when there is nothing wrong with the internally accessible aspects of the cognitive situation, but there is a mishap in something inaccessible to the believer. Since justification does not guarantee truth, it is possible for there to be a break in the connection between justification and truth, but for that connection to be regained by chance. The original “Smith owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona” case is an example of this sort. Here we are to imagine that Smith comes to you bragging about his new Ford, shows you the car and the bill of sale, and generally gives you lots of evidence that he owns a Ford. Basing what you think on the evidence, you believe the proposition “Smith owns a Ford,” and from that you infer its disjunction with “Brown is in Barcelona,” where Brown is an acquaintance and you have no reason at all to think he is in Barcelona. It turns out that Smith is lying and owns no Ford, but Brown is by chance in Barcelona. Your belief “Smith owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona” is true and justified, but it is hardly the case that you know it. In this case the problem arises because in spite of the fact that you have done * The chapter is reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. 1 “ls Justified True Belief Knowledge?,” Analysis 23 (1963):121–​23. Epistemic Values. Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197529171.001.0001.

312  Skepticism and the Gettier Problem everything to reach the truth from your point of view and everything that anyone could expect of you, your efforts do not lead you to the truth. It is mere bad luck that you are the unwitting victim of Smith’s lies, and only an accident that a procedure that usually leads you to the truth leads you to believe the falsehood “Smith owns a Ford.” The fact that you end up with a true belief anyway is due to a second accidental feature of the situation—​a feature that has nothing to do with your cognitive activity. What generates the problem for JTB, then, is that an accident of bad luck is canceled out by an accident of good luck. The right goal is reached, but only by chance. lnternalist theories are not the only ones afflicted with Gettier problems, contrary to a recent claim made by Alvin Plantinga.2 Consider how the problem arises for reliabilism. In this group of theories, believers are justified when their beliefs are formed in a reliable, or truth-​conducive, manner. On this account also there is no guarantee that justified beliefs are true, and a breakdown in the connection between a reliable belief­forming process and the truth is possible. When that happens, even if you manage to hit on the truth anyway, you do not have knowledge. The well-​known fake barn case can be described as an example of this sort. Here we are to imagine that you are driving through a region in which, unknown to you, the inhabitants have erected three barn facades for each real barn in an effort to make themselves look more prosperous. Your eyesight is normal and reliable enough in ordinary circumstances to spot a barn from the road. But in this case the fake barns are indistinguishable from the real barns at such a distance. As you look at a real barn you form the belief “That’s a fine barn.” The belief is true and justified, but it is not knowledge. As in the first case, the problem arises because of the combination of two accidental features of the cognitive situation. It is only an accident that visual faculties normally reliable in this sort of situation are not reliable in this particular situation; and it is another accident that you happened to be looking at a real barn and hit on the truth anyway. Again the problem arises because an accident of bad luck is canceled out by an accident of good luck. Gettier problems cannot be avoided by Alvin Plantinga’s new theory either. Plantinga calls the property that insufficient quantity converts true belief into knowledge “warrant” rather than “justification.” On his proposal warrant is the property a belief B has for believer S when B is produced in S by S’s faculties working properly in the appropriate environment, according to a design plan successfully aimed at truth.3 But Plantinga does not maintain that every 2 Alvin Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993): 48. 3 The wording I have used can be found in Plantinga’s book Warrant and Proper Function. A very similar wording can be found in Alvin Plantinga, “Positive Epistemic Status and Proper Function,” in

The Inescapability of Gettier Problem  313 warranted belief is true anymore than reliabilists maintain that every reliably formed belief is true or internalists maintain that every internally justified belief is true. Let us see if we can form a Gettier case for Plantinga’s theory parallel to the other two cases we have considered. To do so we need to look for a situation in which S’s faculties are working the way they were designed to in the appropriate environment, but S unluckily has a false belief. We can then add a second accident which makes the belief true after all. Suppose that Mary has very good eyesight, but it is not perfect. It is good enough to allow her to identify her husband sitting in his usual chair in the living room from a distance of fifteen feet in somewhat dim light (the degree of dimness can easily be specified). She has made such an identification in these circumstances many times. Each time her faculties have been working properly and the environment has been appropriate for the faculties. There is nothing at all unusual about either her faculties or the environment in these cases. Her faculties may not be functioning perfectly, but they are functioning well enough, so that if she goes on to form the belief “My husband is sitting in the living room,” that belief has enough warrant to constitute knowledge when true and we can assume that it is almost always true. The belief is almost always true, we say. That is because warrant in the degree necessary for knowledge does not guarantee truth, according to Plantinga. If it did guarantee truth, of course, the component of truth in the analysis of knowledge would be superfluous. Knowledge would simply be warranted belief. So it is possible for Mary to make a mistake even though her faculties are functioning properly enough for knowledge and the environment is normal for the faculties. Let us look at one such case. Suppose Mary simply misidentifies the chair-​sitter who is, let us suppose, her husband’s brother. Her faculties may be working as well as they normally do when the belief is true and when we do not hesitate to say it is warranted in a degree sufficient for knowledge. It is not a question of their suddenly becoming defective, or at any rate, more defective than usual, nor is there a mismatch between her faculties and the environment. No one is dressing up as her husband to fool her, or anything like that, so the environment is not abnormal as the fake barn case is abnormal. Her degree of warrant is as high as it usually is when she correctly identifies her husband since even in those cases it is true that she might have misidentified the chair-​sitter if it had been her husband’s brother instead. Of course, she usually has no reason to suspect that it is her husband’s brother and we can imagine that she has no reason to suspect so in this case either. Maybe she knows that her husband’s brother looks a lot like him, but she has no reason to believe that he is in the vicinity, and, in fact, has Philosophical Perspectives 2, ed. E. Tomberlin (Atascadero, CA:  Ridgeview, 1988): 1–​50. In that chapter he calls “positive epistemic status” what he now calls “warrant.”

314  Skepticism and the Gettier Problem strong reason to believe he has gone to Australia. So in the case we are considering, when Mary forms the false belief, her belief is as warranted as her beliefs normally are in these circumstances. In spite of well-​functioning faculties and a benign environment, she just makes a mistake. Now, of course, something has gone wrong here, and that something is probably in Mary rather than in the environment. It may even be correct to say that there is a minor defect in her faculties; perhaps she is not perfectly attentive or she is a little too hasty in forming her belief. But she is no less attentive and no more hasty than she usually is in such cases and usually it does not matter. People do not have to be perfectly attentive and perfectly cautious and have perfect vision to have beliefs sufficiently warranted for knowledge on Plantinga’s theory. And this is not a mistake in Plantinga’s theory. It would surely be unreasonable of him to expect perfectly functioning faculties in a perfectly attuned environment as his criteria for the warrant needed for knowledge. So Mary’s defect need not be sufficient to bring her degree of warrant down below that needed for knowledge on Plantinga’s account. We can now easily emend the case as a Gettier example. Mary’s husband could be sitting on the other side of the room, unseen by her. In that case her belief “My husband is sitting in the living room” is true and has sufficient warrant for knowledge on Plantinga’s account, but she does not have knowledge. In discussing Gettier problems, Plantinga concludes:  “What is essential to Gettier situations is the production of a true belief despite a relatively minor failure of the cognitive situation to match its design.”4 But this comment is problematic on his own account. As we have seen, Plantinga considers warrant a property that admits of degree, but it is clear that the degree of warrant sufficient for knowledge does not require faculties to be working perfectly in an environment perfectly matched to them. In Gettier-​style cases such as the case of Mary, either the degree of warrant is sufficient for knowledge or it is not. If it is not, then a multitude of beliefs we normally think are warranted are not, and there is much less knowledge in the world than Plantinga’s numerous examples suggest. On the other hand, if the degree of warrant is sufficient for knowledge, then Plantinga’s theory faces Gettier problems structurally identical to those of the other theories. Furthermore, even if some aspect of the Mary example makes it unpersuasive, there must still be cases of warranted false belief on Plantinga’s theory if the component of truth in knowledge is not redundant. With such a case in hand a Gettier example can be constructed by adding a feature extraneous to the warrant of the believer which makes the belief true after all. In such a case the degree



4

Plantinga, “Positive Epistemic Status and Proper Function:” 43.

The Inescapability of Gettier Problem  315 of warrant is unchanged, but it is not knowledge since it might just as well have been false. It is not enough, then, to say that Gettier problems arise because of a minor mismatch between faculties and environment. What Plantinga should have said is that the problem is due to a relatively minor failure of the cognitive situation to connect to the truth. As long as the property that putatively converts true belief into knowledge is analyzed in such a way that it is strongly linked with the truth, but does not guarantee it, it will always be possible to devise cases in which the link between such a property and the truth is broken but regained by accident. Such is the nature of Gettier cases. The three examples we have considered suggest a general rule for the generation of Gettier cases. It really does not matter how the particular element of knowledge in addition to true belief is analyzed. As long as there is a small degree of independence between this other element and the truth, we can construct Gettier cases by using the following procedure:  start with a case of justified (or warranted) false belief. Make the element of justification (warrant) strong enough for knowledge, but make the belief false. The falsity of the belief will not be due to any systematically describable element in the situation, for if it were, such a feature could be used in the analysis of the components of knowledge other than true belief, and then truth would be entailed by the other components of knowledge, contrary to the hypothesis. The falsity of the belief is therefore due to some element of luck. Now emend the case by adding another element of luck, only this time an element that makes the belief true after all. The second element must be independent of the element of warrant so that the degree of warrant is unchanged. The situation might be described as one element of luck counteracting another. We now have a case in which the belief is justified (warranted) in a sense strong enough for knowledge; the belief is true, but it is not knowledge. The conclusion is that as long as the concept of knowledge closely connects the justification component and the truth component, but permits some degree of independence between them, justified true belief will never be sufficient for knowledge. It is often observed that in typical Gettier cases the justified belief depends upon or otherwise “goes through” a false belief, so a way to handle these cases is to add what are commonly called “defeasibility conditions” to the analysis of knowledge. This move was especially popular during the 1960s and 1970s. It adds to the requirement that knowledge be justified true belief the restriction that the belief in question must also be justified in certain counterfactual situations. One way to define these conditions is in terms of the psychological effect on the subject, as in Steven Levy’s definition of a defeasibility condition as “a requirement to the effect that for S to know that p there must be no other evidence

316  Skepticism and the Gettier Problem against p strong enough to undermine S’s belief that p, should this evidence come to S’s attention.”5 The three cases I have just described do have the feature that there is a false belief in the neighborhood of the belief in question which is such that, should the subject discover its falsehood, that would undermine the belief in the proposition in question. So your belief that either Smith owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona is undermined if you discover that Smith does not own a Ford. Your belief that this is a barn is undermined if you discover that most objects that look like barns in this vicinity are not real barns. Mary’s belief that her husband is sitting in the living room is undermined if she discovers that that man sitting over there in a particular chair in the living room is not her husband. In each case were S to be advised of the falsity of the underlying belief, S would retract the belief under discussion. The belief would be defeated by such new information. This move puts a strain on the independence of the justification/​defeasibility condition and the truth condition. If S’s belief that p is false, there will obviously be many other propositions which are logically or evidentially connected to p which are false also. Should S become aware of any of these propositions, that may easily undermine S’s belief that p, assuming S is rational. This means that the falsehood of p is incompatible with a strong defeasibility condition, contrary to the hypothesis that the justification and defeasibility components of knowledge do not entail the truth condition. This problem is even more apparent in statements of the defeasibility condition in terms of evidential support rather than a psychological requirement, as in Pappas and Swain’s definition: “the evidence e must be sufficiently complete that no further additions to e would result in a loss of justification and hence a loss of knowledge.”6 Obviously, if the belief is false, further additions to e will result in a loss of justification, and hence a loss of knowledge. Strong defeasibility conditions, then, threaten the assumption of independence between the justification (warrant) condition and the truth condition for knowledge. But weaker defeasibility conditions are subject to Gettier-​style counterexamples following the pattern described here. In each case we find an example of a false belief which satisfies the justification and defeasibility conditions, and then make the belief true anyway due to features of the situation independent of the satisfaction of those conditions. Suppose Dr.  Jones, a physician, has very good inductive evidence that her patient, Smith, is suffering from virus X. Smith exhibits all of the symptoms of this virus, and a blood test has shown that his antibody levels against virus X are

5 Steven Levy, “Defeasibility Theories of Knowledge,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 7 (1977): 115. 6 George Pappas and Marshall Swain, eds. Essays on Knowledge and Justification (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978): 27.

The Inescapability of Gettier Problem  317 extremely high. In addition, let us suppose that the symptoms are not compatible with any other known virus, all of the evidence upon which Jones bases her diagnosis is true, and there is no evidence accessible to her which counts significantly against the conclusion. The proposition that Smith is suffering from virus X really is extremely probable on the evidence. In this case there is nothing defective in the justification of Dr. Jones’s belief that Smith has virus X and no false belief figures causally or evidentially in her justification, nor is there any false belief in the neighborhood. Furthermore, she would have believed that Smith has virus X in a wide range of counterfactual situations. Nonetheless, let us suppose that the belief is false. Smith’s symptoms are due to a distinct and unknown virus rand the fact that he exhibits high antibody levels to virus X is due to idiosyncratic features of his biochemistry which cause him to maintain unusually high antibody levels long after a past infection. In this case Dr. Jones’s belief that Smith is presently suffering from virus X is false, but it is both justified and undefeated. Of course, given that the belief is false, there must be some evidence against it accessible to her in some counterfactual circumstances, so if defeasibility conditions are strong enough, no false empirical belief passes the test. But as said above, that is to impose an unreasonably strong defeasibility condition, one that makes the justification/​defeasibility condition entail truth. The most reasonable conclusion to draw in this case, then, is that Jones’s belief is justified and undefeated, but false. Now to construct a Gettier-​style example we simply add the feature that Smith has very recently contracted virus X, but so recently that he does not yet exhibit symptoms caused by X, nor has there been time for a change in the antibody levels due to this recent infection. So while the evidence upon which Dr. Jones bases her diagnosis does make it highly probable that Smith has X, the fact that Smith has X has nothing to do with that evidence. In this case, then, Dr. Jones’s belief that Smith has virus X is true, justified and undefeated, but it is not knowledge. It appears, then, that no account of knowledge as true belief plus something else can withstand Gettier objections as long as there is a small degree of independence between truth and the other conditions of knowledge. What are our alternatives? We have already seen that one way to solve the problem is to give up the independence between the justification condition and the truth condition. Justification would be defined in such a way that no false belief can satisfy it. Since Gettier cases are based on situations in which the belief is true, but it might just as well have been false, all such cases would be excluded from the class of justified (warranted) beliefs. On this approach the element of truth in the account of knowledge is superfluous and knowledge is simply justified (warranted)

318  Skepticism and the Gettier Problem belief. “S is justified in believing p” entails p. Few philosophers have supported this view.7 So Gettier problems can be avoided if there is no degree of independence at all between truth and justification. A second way to avoid them is to go to the opposite extreme and to make the justification condition and the truth condition almost completely independent. It could still be the case that justification puts the subject in the best position available for getting the truth, but if the best position is not very good, most justified beliefs will be false. Perhaps most justified scientific hypotheses since the world began have been false. Perhaps Plato, Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel were justified in believing their metaphysical theories, but most of their theories (at least) were false. Still, if one of them is true, some theorists might be willing to call it knowledge. On this approach the element of luck permitted in the state of knowledge is so great that alleged counterexamples based on luck do not count against it. From this viewpoint, Gettier cases would simply be accepted as cases of knowledge. After all, if knowledge is mostly luck anyway, there will be nothing bothersome about a case in which the truth is acquired by luck. Perhaps neither of these alternatives will appeal to most philosophers, who find the idea that there is a small but real degree of independence between justification and the acquisition of truth just too attractive to give up. A third reaction to the problem, then, is to accept the fact that no “true belief+ x” account of knowledge will be sufficient, but that it will always be necessary to add the element of luck to the analysis. So knowledge is true belief + x + luck. This approach recognizes the fact that the concept we substitute for “x” ought to be one that has a strong general connection with the acquisition of truth, but that an inviolable connection would be unreasonable. On the other hand, it also recognizes the fact that we are much less forgiving with the concept of knowledge itself. The connection between justification or whatever it is we substitute for “x” and truth must exist in each and every particular case of knowledge. The notion of knowledge requires success, both in reaching the goal of truth, and in reaching it via the right cognitive path. The notion of justification or warrant is less stringent, requiring only that the right path is one that is usually successful at getting the truth. It is this difference between the notion of knowledge and the notion of justification that is responsible for Gettier problems.

7 An exception is Robert Almeder, “Truth and Evidence,” Philosophical Quarterly, 24 (1974): 365–​ 68. Almeder’s reason for maintaining that “S is justified in believing” entails p is that the determination of the fact that a belief p is justified entails the determination of the fact that p is true, I find this implausible, since (1) there are many ways to determine the truth­value of a proposition p independently of the justification of a particular believer in believing p; and (2) even if the act of determining that a belief is justified included the determination of its truth, it does not follow that the fact that a belief is justified entails its truth.

The Inescapability of Gettier Problem  319 Almost every contemporary theory of justification or warrant aims only to give the conditions for putting the believer in the best position for getting the truth. The best position is assumed to be very good, but imperfect, for such is life. Properly functioning faculties need not be working perfectly, but only well enough; reliable belief-​producing mechanisms need not be perfectly reliable, only reliable enough; evidence for a belief need not support it conclusively, but only well enough; and so on. As long as the truth is never assured by the conditions which make the state justified, there will be situations in which a false belief is justified. I have argued that with this common, in fact, almost universal assumption, Gettier cases will never go away.

19

First Person and Third Person Reasons and the Regress Problem* 19.1  Introduction I assume that an epistemic reason is something on the basis of which I can settle for myself whether p in so far as my goal is truth, not benefit, or some other practical aim. An epistemic reason need not be sufficient to settle the question whether p, but it is the sort of thing that can do so, normally in conjunction with other epistemic reasons. I want to argue that there are two kinds of epistemic reasons, one irreducibly first personal, the other third personal, and that attending to the distinction permits us to get a better understanding of the problem of the infinite regress of reasons, and to see how it can be resolved. My position is that most of what we typically call “reasons” are third personal, and although there is no regress of third person reasons, our attempt to access third person reasons leads to a regress. I will also argue that there is a category of reasons that are irreducibly first personal, and epistemic self-​trust is a reason of this kind. It is more basic than any other reasons we can identify, including other first person reasons, and it ends the regress of reasons. Finally, I will argue that the regress of reasons is not the most fundamental problem with finding reasons for our beliefs. Even if we could complete the search for reasons, we would still face the problem that what we call “reasons” may not indicate the truth. Epistemic self-​trust is necessary to solve that more fundamental problem as well.

19.2  The Distinction between First Person and Third Person Reasons I will call the kind of reasons that are irreducibly first personal “deliberative reasons,” and the kind of reasons that are third personal “theoretical reasons.” My use of the terms “deliberative” and “theoretical” is not essential to the distinction I am making, but these terms draw attention to the different functions of the two kinds of reasons in our psychology. As I hope will become clear, it is not an accident that we have two kinds of reasons.

*

The chapter is reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

Epistemic Values. Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197529171.001.0001.

First Person and Third Person Reasons  321 What I mean by theoretical reasons for believing p are facts that are logically or probabilistically connected to the truth of p. They are facts (or true propositions) about states of the world which, taken together, give a cumulative case for or against the fact that p.1 They are not intrinsically connected to believing. We call them reasons because a reasonable person who comes to believe them and grasps their logical and probabilistic relations to p will see them as indicating the truth of p. They can be shared with others—​laid out on the table, so they are third personal. They are relevant from anyone’s point of view. In fact, they do not require a point of view to be reasons. The connections between theoretical reasons and what they are reasons for are among the facts of the universe. What we call evidence is most naturally put in this category of reasons.2 In contrast, deliberative reasons, as I use that phrase, have an essential connection to me and only to me in my deliberations about whether p. Deliberative reasons connect me to getting the truth of p, whereas theoretical reasons connect facts about the world with the truth of p. Deliberative reasons do not simply provide me a weightier reason for p than they provide others. They are not reasons for other persons at all. They are irreducibly first personal.3 To see the distinction I  have in mind, consider experience as a reason for belief. If I have an experience, the fact that I have it is a theoretical reason that supports a variety of propositions. I can tell you about my experience, and if you believe what I tell you, you can then refer to the fact that I had the experience as a reason to believe whatever it supports. You and I can both refer to the fact that I had the experience as a reason to believe something, and so can anybody else who is aware of the fact that I had the experience. The fact that the experience occurred is therefore a theoretical reason. It is on the table for anyone to consider, and anyone can consider its logical and probabilistic connections to other facts about the world. However, I  am in a different position with respect to my experience than you are because I not only grasp the fact that I had the experience; in addition, I and I alone had the experience. That experience affects many of my reasoning 1 In this chapter I do not distinguish facts from true propositions. If there is a difference, the argument of this chapter can be easily amended. 2 The notion of evidence is multiply ambiguous, and it is not necessary to accept any particular view on the nature of evidence in what follows. For a very good overview on the nature of evidence, see the entry on evidence by Thomas Kelly in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 3 This distinction is related to the distinction between agent-​centered and agent-​neutral reasons, but I do not think they are the same distinction. As I understand the latter, the same reason can be a reason for both the agent and others, but it has a special force for the agent that it does not have for others. For instance, everyone has a reason to prevent murders, but we each have a special reason to prevent ourselves from being the agent of a murder. Similarly, the fact that I am hungry gives anybody a reason to get me food, but it gives me a special reason to get food. Of course, there is nothing to prevent someone from distinguishing agent-​centered and agent-​neutral reasons as I am distinguishing deliberative and theoretical reasons here, but I am using different labels to avoid confusion.

322  Skepticism and the Gettier Problem processes, emotional responses, and the way I come to have or give up certain beliefs directly, and that is normal and rational. In contrast, the fact that I had the experience is something you and I and any number of other people can come to believe. So my experience of seeing the yellow daffodils gives me a reason to believe the daffodils are blooming. You cannot have that experience, but you can believe that I had the experience. When you do so, you are not accessing the experience; you are accessing the fact that the experience occurred. Of course, I can access the same fact, but my having a reason to believe the daffodils are blooming does not depend upon my accessing the fact that I had the experience of seeing them in bloom. The seeing itself gives me a reason to believe they are in bloom. My way of describing the contrast is that my experience gives me a deliberative reason to form the belief that the daffodils are blooming, whereas the fact that the experience occurred gives anybody a theoretical reason to believe that the daffodils are blooming. Another type of deliberative reason is what is often called “intuition” in one of its senses. I will not attempt a general account of intuition, but what I have in mind is, roughly, something internal to the mind that responds with an answer to a question, often about a concrete case. For example, I have the intuition that it is not morally permissible to directly kill an innocent person to save five others, but you might have a different intuition. Most philosophers have the intuition that a Gettier case is not an instance of knowledge, but we probably have encountered people who do not have that intuition. I have no position on the strength of an intuition as a reason to believe what the intuition supports. Maybe it is strong, maybe it is not. But insofar as it is a reason at all, it is a deliberative reason. My intuitions are mine alone, and they give me but not you a particular kind of reason for certain beliefs. But again, the fact that I have an intuition can be put out on the table. I can tell you that my intuition is such and such, and that is a theoretical reason supporting some position. The fact that many people have the same intuition can also be used to support a position. So the fact that a large majority of those persons who have carefully thought about the nature of knowledge have the intuition that a Gettier case is not an instance of knowledge supports the position that a Gettier case is not an instance of knowledge. Intuitions, then, are like experiences. An intuition and an experience provide the agent with first person reasons to believe something, but the fact that the experience occurred or that the intuition is what it is can be treated as evidence, as a theoretical reason for the truth of some proposition. Experience and intuition reveal an important feature of deliberative epistemic reasons: They are psychic states of a person that seem to her to indicate the truth of some proposition p. We would expect, then, that other psychic states can have the same function—​for instance, states of emotion. My admiration for an epistemic exemplar can be a reason to believe what the exemplar believes in the

First Person and Third Person Reasons  323 domain of her exemplarity. That is a deliberative reason, not a theoretical one. Of course, it is not a good reason unless my admiration for the epistemic admirability of the exemplar withstands conscientious reflection, including reflection on the responses of other persons. But when it is a reason, it is a reason only for me, not others. Trust in myself and trust in others are also deliberative reasons on the basis of which I reasonably acquire or maintain various beliefs.4 I will argue in section 19.3 that a very basic epistemic self-​trust enjoys primacy in the map of our epistemic reasons, but here I want to mention self-​trust to give a sense of the different kinds of states that are in the category of deliberative reasons. The fact that such a psychic state exists can be a theoretical reason for anyone to have the belief in question when it is conjoined with other facts. So the fact that I trust myself is a theoretical reason for other people to believe what I believe in virtue of trusting myself if it is conjoined with the fact that there is a reliable connection between the product of my disposition to trust myself and the truth. The fact that I admire someone epistemically in a certain domain is a theoretical reason for anybody to believe what that person believes in the relevant domain if it is conjoined with the fact that there is a reliable connection between my disposition to admiration and getting the truth. Similarly, as I said above, the fact that I have a certain experience or a certain intuition is a theoretical reason for anybody to have certain beliefs, assuming it is conjoined with the fact that my faculties of intuition or experience are reliably connected to the truth. The fact that psychic states like experiences, intuitions, and emotions exist can be a theoretical reason for anybody to form various beliefs when appropriately conjoined with other facts about the person. In contrast, those states themselves are reasons only for the person who has them. They are deliberative reasons. The reasons I  have identified as deliberative are psychic states like sense experiences, intuitions, and emotions. Can a belief state also be a deliberative reason? If so, can it be a reason to believe the content of the belief? This question might seem very odd, and although I will say that the answer is yes, it is not important for the thesis of this chapter that the reader accept it. I am using the example of belief states to illustrate the range of deliberative reasons and their contrast with theoretical reasons. I think that a belief can be a deliberative reason in the same way an experience can be a deliberative reason, and the fact that a belief exists can be a theoretical reason in the same way that the fact that an experience exists can be a theoretical reason. Consider theoretical reasons first. The fact that I have an experience 4 I give an extended argument that epistemic self-​trust commits me to trust in others in Epistemic Authority: A Theory of Trust, Authority, and Autonomy in Belief, ­chapter 3. In this chapter I will not discuss trust in others, only basic epistemic self-​trust.

324  Skepticism and the Gettier Problem of seeing daffodils blooming can give anybody (including myself) a theoretical reason to believe the daffodils are blooming when conjoined with the fact that I am visually reliable in the relevant circumstances, know what daffodils are and what they look like in bloom, etc. Similarly, the fact that I believe that the daffodils are in bloom gives anybody (including myself) a theoretical reason to believe that the daffodils are in bloom when conjoined with the fact that I am a reliable believer as just described. So anybody can reason as follows: L. Z. believes p, L. Z. is reliable in the relevant domain containing p, so p is probably true. I am quite capable of such reasoning, and it is perfectly reasonable for me to engage in such reasoning, even though I already believe p and have whatever reasons I already have for believing p. But the more interesting way in which a belief state can be a reason is that it can be a deliberative reason for the person who is in that state. This point is easier to see if we start with the case of a memory of a past belief. My memory of believing yesterday that the daffodils were blooming gives me a deliberative reason to believe now that the daffodils were blooming, just as my memory of seeing the daffodils blooming gives me a deliberative reason to believe now that the daffodils were blooming. Of course, in both cases the reason is a good one only if it is reasonable for me to trust the relevant faculties—​my memory, my sensory experience, and my belief-​forming faculties, and I will argue in section 19.3 for the centrality of self-​trust, but that does not distinguish the reasonableness of belief based on my memory of seeing from the reasonableness of belief based on my memory of believing. Given the relevant self-​trust, it is as reasonable for me to believe the daffodils were blooming yesterday based on my memory of believing they were in bloom as it is for me to believe they were blooming based on my memory of seeing them in bloom. But notice next that if my memory of seeing flowers in bloom is a reason to believe they were in bloom, that is (partly) because seeing them in bloom was a reason to believe they were in bloom. Similarly, if my memory of believing they were in bloom is a reason to believe they were in bloom, believing they were in bloom was a reason to believe they were in bloom. Believing gives me a reason to continue believing, a deliberative reason that is distinct from whatever reason I had for forming the belief initially. The same point applies to beliefs that were originally based on theoretical reasons. I may have formed the belief that driving while talking on a cell phone is dangerous, based on a study I read. My belief state is itself a deliberative reason to continue to believe that talking while driving is dangerous, if I reasonably trust my powers in the relevant domain. Notice that I am not making the absurd claim that my state of belief adds to my theoretical reasons. The evidence I access by reading the study gives me theoretical reasons for my belief, and those reasons do not increase once I settle for myself that the conclusion of the study is correct.

First Person and Third Person Reasons  325 But once I start to believe the study’s conclusion, I acquire a deliberative reason for the belief that I did not previously have.5 Why is it important to distinguish theoretical and deliberative reasons? Is the distinction merely nominal, or is there a real distinction that leads to confusion if not recognized? I think there are at least two reasons that it is a mistake to confuse the two kinds of reasons. First, theoretical and deliberative reasons do not aggregate. As far as I know, no one has ever figured out how to reduce the first person perspective to the third person perspective or vice versa, and nobody has figured out how to reduce the two perspectives to some other perspective. What is a reason for me is not the same as what is a reason for anybody, and what is a reason for anybody does not exhaust the reasons for me. Second, I have the control of an agent over my deliberative reasons, but I have no control at all over theoretical reasons. I am not proposing that I decide what my deliberative reasons are going to be the way I decide whether to get into my car and drive to the store, but what I believe, what I trust, and what I admire are in an important sense up to me. I can reflect about those states, and the results of that reflection often result in change. In fact, I reflect upon them because I think that they may need to change. That is recognized by others because there are norms for believing, admiring, and trusting, and the fact that there are such norms presupposes that we have ways to manage those states in ourselves. Self-​reflection is the process through which the self guides itself. The sense in which my experiences are up to me is somewhat different. Generally, it is not up to me that I have a certain experience, but its being a deliberative reason for me to believe something is up to me. In the same way in which it is up to me that I have certain beliefs, it is up to me that certain experiences are deliberative reasons for me to have certain beliefs. It is up to me that my experiences are integrated in a certain way into my total psychic structure, including my beliefs and emotions. The way they do so is something that responds to the reflection I exercise as an agent. In contrast, it is not up to me at all what the theoretical reasons are. All I can do is attempt to figure them out. I think, then, that it is a mistake to confuse the two kinds of reasons, but what makes the distinction really interesting is its usefulness in illuminating and helping us solve philosophical problems.6 In the rest of this chapter I will focus 5 In Epistemic Authority, c­ hapter 10, I argue that the popular problem of reasonable disagreement is easier to resolve if we use the distinction between theoretical and deliberative reasons. If we focus only on theoretical reasons, my beliefs are no different than anyone else’s. That explains the temptation to say that the reasonable response to peer disagreement is skepticism. However, my belief state gives me a deliberative reason to continue to have the belief, a reason that nobody else has. 6 In other work I  have argued that this distinction can explain the perennial problem of how experience—​a state that is qualitatively different from any belief state—​can be a reason for beliefs. I have also argued that it illuminates the way testimony works, the problem of reasonable disagreement (mentioned in note 5 above), the justification for acting or believing on authority, and the justification of conversion. I discuss most of these issues in Zagzebski, Epistemic Authority. I mention

326  Skepticism and the Gettier Problem on a particular problem. I will argue that epistemic self-​trust is a deliberative reason that is more basic than any other reasons we have, whether theoretical or deliberative. It is a reason that does not generate a regress of reasons, and it stops the regress of the theoretical reasons we can identify, as well as the regress of other deliberative reasons.

19.3  Epistemic Self-​Trust and the Regress of Reasons Since theoretical reasons are independent of me, they do not operate as reasons for me to believe anything until I take them on board. But my taking a certain set of theoretical reasons for p as reasons for me to believe p is not sufficient in itself to make it likely that p is true. That is because my taking something to be a set of theoretical reasons to believe p is irrelevant to the actual connection between those reasons and p unless I am taking them properly, have accurately identified certain facts, have figured out the correct logical and probabilistic relations between those facts and p, have appreciated the significance of individual facts, and have not left anything out. But my reasons to believe that depend upon the more basic belief that my epistemic powers are conducive to getting me the truth. And that raises the question of what reasons I have to believe that my powers, or what is usually in this context called “faculties,” connect me to the truth. It has been pointed out by others—​e.g., Richard Foley (Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others) and William Alston (“Epistemic Circularity” and Beyond Justification)—​ that any such reasons are circular. That is, I have no way of telling that my faculties in general get me to the truth without using those faculties. This seems to me to be correct. I certainly do not wish to deny that I can often tell that I  am untrustworthy. In fact, I  have ways to distinguish between the occasions in which I am trustworthy from those in which I am not. But all of that could be an illusion. I cannot even trust my ability to tell when I am untrustworthy without a general trust in myself on the basis of which I distinguish epistemic behavior that gets me the truth from that which does not.7 The difficulty is not that third person reasons are circular. A  third person reason is something to which anyone can point in support of some proposition p. these issues as they apply to religious belief in Zagzebski, “First Person and Third Person Epistemic Reasons and Religious Epistemology.” 7 I discuss conscientious self-​reflection and argue that we use it to distinguish those aspects of the self we can trust from those we cannot trust in Epistemic Authority. I argue that we need two levels of self-​trust: basic self-​trust, and a particular trust in ourselves when we are conscientious in the use of our faculties. Any reason we have for thinking that our faculties will get us to their ends is derivative from the use of these faculties or dispositions. I introduce the idea of conscientious self-​reflection in ­chapter 2 and use it repeatedly in the book.

First Person and Third Person Reasons  327 Reasons in this sense are facts of the universe that are connected to other facts of the universe by logical or probabilistic relations. Some fact q indicates the truth of some fact p. I am calling these facts “reasons” because a reasonable person who identifies a fact q and who also identifies the appropriate logical relation between that fact and some other proposition p, will see a belief that q as a reason to believe p. Third person reasons are related to each other in as many ways as there are logical support relations between any two or more propositions. Some relations are circular. For example, some proposition p supports some proposition q, and q supports some proposition r, and r supports p. There is nothing problematic about that. Furthermore, if there are an infinite number of propositions, there are no doubt also infinite sequences of propositions that logically or probabilistically support some proposition p. There is nothing mysterious about that either. The fact that such support relations are either circular or infinite raises no difficulties for the reasonableness of anybody’s beliefs. But we are interested in third person reasons in part because we use them as reasons for what we believe. This leads to a prior question: Why do we want to identify theoretical reasons at all? If p seems to me to be true, and I trust that feeling of seeming to be true, why do I  need reasons? This is a question that deserves an extended answer, but all I will say is that searching for third person reasons for a belief is one of the things that reflective persons who want the truth do. An important way we find out whether p is true is to find other true propositions that point to the truth of p. So we want to access the theoretical reasons. Since theoretical reasons are accessible to many other people, we think that referring to them makes us less vulnerable than if we were left entirely to our own devices. We also think we are less vulnerable in our believings by referring to theoretical reasons because theoretical reasons have a structure. When we think about the different alternative structures the sets of facts can have, we come to the conclusion that there are no facts unsupported by other facts. If some alleged fact is unsupported by any other facts, then it is probably not a fact. That is why we look for reasons for our reasons. The desire for truth leads us to attempt to complete the search for reasons, and the preferred kind of reason is theoretical. But this gets us to the problem of the regress of reasons. The structure of theoretical reasons is infinite, and the attempt to trace the reasons for some proposition p leads either to a circle or to infinity, In neither case is the search for reasons completed. This is a problem because we assume (a) there is a connection between successfully getting the truth and what we do when we conscientiously attempt to answer our questions—​what we call finding reasons, and (b) our attempt to find reasons can never be completed. Attention generally focuses on (b), and the ancient Pyrrhonian problem of skepticism brought this problem to our attention. But notice that because of (a), there would be a problem whether or not the search for reasons could be completed. We assume there is a connection

328  Skepticism and the Gettier Problem between successfully getting the truth and what we do when we attempt to answer our questions by using our faculties and other resources as well as we can. We think we have answered our questions when we identify theoretical reasons, but on what grounds do we think we have identified the theoretical reasons? We need trust in our faculties not only because of (b); the fundamental reason we need self-​trust is because of (a). The need for trust in (a) is independent of (b), and we can see that by looking at what our situation would be like if, per impossibile, we were able to complete the search for reasons. We would still need trust that there is any connection between what we think the theoretical reasons are and the truth. Whether or not we have the reasons we seek, we need to trust that what we are calling “reasons” are the sorts of things that give us the answers to our questions, that connect us to truth. This means that even if strong foundationalism had succeeded, we would need trust that we identified the foundation correctly and that the foundationalist structure reliably gives us truth. This is no less the case if the foundation is certain. In that case, we would still need trust in the connection between the state of certainty and truth.8 We are vulnerable no matter what we find when we attempt to identify theoretical reasons and identify a structure for those reasons. The structure could end in a particular foundational proposition, or it might instead be circular or linearly infinite. In no case have we escaped the need for self-​trust by finding reasons because we need self-​trust to find reasons. If reasons are supposed to eliminate vulnerability to falsehood and eliminate the need for self-​trust, we are bound to fail. On the basis of epistemic self-​trust, I take it that what I identify as theoretical reasons for some proposition p do in fact point to the truth of p. If a reason to believe p is a state in virtue of which it is reasonable to think some proposition p is true, self-​trust is a reason because it is in virtue of self-​trust that I believe that what I take to be theoretical reasons for believing some proposition are truth-​ indicators, and I think that I have the theoretical reasons in the particular case. Self-​trust is a reason, but a reason of a distinctively first personal kind. My self-​ trust is a reason for me and me alone. It is because of a deliberative reason that any theoretical reasons I can identify are reasons for me to believe anything. Self-​ trust solves the problem that I assume (a) in order to identify theoretical reasons, and hence I cannot claim that there are theoretical reasons for (a). I do not have a theoretical reason for (a), but I have a reason, a deliberative reason for (a). Self-​trust also solves the problem of (b), the problem that the search for reasons can never be completed. The search for theoretical reasons cannot be 8 See Klein. “Human Knowledge and the Infinite Progress of Reasoning,” for a similar argument that foundationalism will not get us out of the regress problem.

First Person and Third Person Reasons  329 completed, but there is a completion of the search for reasons as long as epistemic self-​trust is a reason, and self-​trust is a reason for taking the reasons we think are theoretical to be reasons for p. Basic epistemic self-​trust is deliberative, not theoretical. It is not part of the structure of theoretical reasons.9 Notice also that self-​trust has a feature that makes it clear that the regress ends with self-​trust. Why do we think that a reason needs a reason and there is a problem if the search for reasons for our reasons can never be completed? I think the answer is that there is a kind of doubt that drives us to search for reasons for our beliefs and reasons for our reasons. But self-​trust is a state that ends the kind of doubt that makes us continue to search for reasons. It is an intrinsic feature of self-​trust that it blocks the state that makes us look for more reasons. Self-​trust is opposed to doubt in the relevant sense of “doubt.” The argument I have just given also applies to our deliberative reasons. As I have said, deliberative reasons are states like sensory experience, intuition, and emotion. These states can be reasons for my belief states. My experience of seeing the daffodils blooming gives me, and only me, a reason to believe the daffodils are blooming. My intuition that a Gettier case is not an instance of knowledge gives me, and only me, a reason to believe that a Gettier case is not an instance of knowledge. My epistemic admiration for an exemplar in some domain gives me, and only me, a reason to believe what the exemplar believes in that domain. But the connection between any of my powers and the world outside my mind can be doubted. The problem that our search for theoretical reasons can never be completed is not escaped by reference to an experience or an intuition or an affective state. Those states may or may not properly connect me to the world outside, just as my belief states may or may not properly connect me to the world outside. It is not usual to say that an experience or intuition needs a “reason,” but the question reasons are supposed to answer arises as much for experience, intuitions, and emotions as for the beliefs for which we seek reasons. Insofar as my aim is truth, I will want to know how experience or intuition or emotion helps me in that aim. Upon reflection, I will realize that I do not have any kind of reason to believe my powers of sense experience or intuition or admiration connect me to the truth about the world without using those powers directly or indirectly. Just as my search for theoretical reasons cannot be completed, my search for deliberative reasons cannot be completed, with one exception. Furthermore, the problem 9 In Epistemic Authority I argue that trust is a three-​place relation, and in standard cases it has three components: A believes B is trustworthy in respect X, A feels trusting of B in respect X. and A  behaves in a way appropriate to having that belief and feeling. Epistemic self-​trust has these components. A believes her faculties are trustworthy with respect to getting the truth. A feels trusting of her faculties for that purpose, and A treats her faculties as trustworthy for that purpose. I introduce my view of the nature of trust in c­ hapter 2.

330  Skepticism and the Gettier Problem that we must assume that what we consider to be the reasons when we attempt to answer our questions conscientiously are in fact truth-​indicators applies at least as much to experience, intuition, and emotion as it does to theoretical reasons. That is, there is an analogue of (a) and (b) for deliberative reasons as well as for theoretical reasons. The exception is epistemic self-​trust. We need basic epistemic self-​trust to complete our search for reasons of any kind, whether deliberative or theoretical. Nothing that we call a reason indicates the truth unless we are right to trust ourselves. That means that either self-​trust is a reason or there are no reasons. If there are reasons, then self-​trust is the most basic reason there is. The most basic kind of epistemic reason is irreducibly first personal. Epistemic self-​trust has the features that distinguish first person from third person reasons. First, self-​trust does not aggregate with third person reasons. My theoretical case for some proposition p stops with the total set of theoretical reasons for p which I possess. So if I am collecting evidence that talking on a mobile phone while driving is dangerous, I will gather my facts, or what I take to be facts, and present them to anyone who is interested in my findings. I would argue that studies show that people who drive while talking on the phone have slower response time, reduced peripheral vision, and a higher accident rate than those who do not. But I will not add that I trust myself in my ability to get these facts. If I do mention that, I will not expect my hearer to think that the theoretical case has thereby been enhanced. I might mention that I am reliable in the domain pertaining to obtaining such information, and that is a theoretical reason. But what I feel and believe about myself is irrelevant to the facts connecting mobile phone use and vehicle safety. Although theoretical and deliberative reasons do not aggregate, both kinds of reasons can increase my confidence in a belief. The more I trust myself regarding some issue, the greater my confidence will be that I got it right. Similarly, the more theoretical evidence I get regarding some proposition, the greater my confidence in it. But it does not follow that theoretical and deliberative reasons aggregate. The two kinds of reasons cannot be put together to form a cumulative case that includes reasons of both kinds. I have already indicated one reason why that must be so: No one has figured out how to put the third person and first person perspectives together. There is another reason that theoretical and deliberative reasons do not aggregate. As I have said, deliberative reasons are up to me, whereas theoretical reasons are not. The state of self-​trust is up to me in the relevant sense. When the self reflects upon itself, it does not merely read off its states of trust as it reads off facts of the universe. Reflection upon the self creates and modifies the states upon which it reflects, including trust or the lack of trust, and this is reasonable. I have argued that if there are reasons at all, it is reasonable for me to trust my

First Person and Third Person Reasons  331 epistemic powers. If it were not for the reasonableness of epistemic self-​trust, it would be useless for us to refer to any other reasons, whether theoretical or deliberative. Anything else that is an epistemic reason is a reason because self-​trust is a reason. It is because of self-​trust that I can settle for myself whether p, whatever p may be. It follows that ultimately it is reasonable for me to believe anything I believe because of something that is up to me.

19.4  Foundationalism, Coherentism, and Infinitism The distinction between first person and third person reasons gives us a different way to approach the traditional options of infinitism, coherentism, foundationalism, or skepticism as a response to the problem of the regress of reasons. The regress arises from certain assumptions: (1) A belief needs a reason, (2) a reason needs a reason, and (3) the total set of reasons for a belief form a single structure that is either infinite in length, circular, or ends in a reason that does not need a reason. In this chapter I have rejected (3) and have argued that there is an exception to (2). Epistemic self-​trust is the exception to (2). The third one, (3), is false because there are both first personal and third personal reasons, and so the total set of reasons a person can have for a given belief may not form a single structure. If we consider theoretical reasons alone, there are only two possible structures: a circular structure and an infinitely long one. If there is an infinitely long structure of facts, there is nothing wrong with attempting to access it. If there is a circular structure, some people will find that problematic, but my concern has nothing to do with whether there is anything wrong in particular with coherentism or circular reasons. Why have I left out foundationalism? Notice that if theoretical reasons have a foundational structure, it could not be anything like the foundationalism that is intended in discussions of the regress problem. There would have to be some basic theoretical fact of the universe. I have said nothing to rule out that possibility, but if there is such a fact, I have never heard it mentioned in discussions of foundationalism. Nobody thinks that a foundational belief is a grasp of the basic fact of the universe. That is why I say that the structure of theoretical reasons is limited to either the linearly infinite or a circular structure. Neither structure is problematic, as far as I can see, because theoretical reasons are independent of human minds. When the discussion turns to our attempt to access theoretical reasons, the situation changes. I have argued that it does not matter what structure of theoretical reasons we can access in our attempt to find reasons for p because the fundamental problem is not actually that we cannot complete the search for reasons, but that we have no way of knowing that what we call reasons when we are doing

332  Skepticism and the Gettier Problem our conscientious best has anything at all to do with truth. The problem would exist even if we could “complete” the search for reasons. If what we call reasons are the wrong kind of thing, it would not matter whether they are complete or not. My conclusion is that we should admit that we are helpless in our search for reasons in the sense of actual truth-​indicators unless there is a reason of an entirely different kind, a reason that applies to me and me alone as a subject attempting to get the truth. If epistemic self-​trust is reasonable, it makes all of the other reasons I can identify reasonable, both the theoretical reasons I think I have found, and my deliberative reasons. I said at the beginning of the chapter that I think of a reason for p as something on the basis of which I can settle for myself whether p is true. On that definition of a reason, basic self-​trust is a reason. But it is clearly a reason of an entirely different kind from theoretical reasons. It is a state of a kind that could not have a reason; indeed, it is a state that does not need a reason. But it is a reason for all our other reasons.

References Alston, William. “Epistemic Circularity.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 47, no. 1 (1986): 1–​30. Alston, William. Beyond Justification:  Dimensions of Epistemic Evaluation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. Foley, Richard. Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Kelly, Thomas. “Evidence.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2008. http://​plato.stanford.edu/​archives/​fall2008/​entries/​evidence/​. Klein, Peter. “Human Knowledge and the Infinite Progress of Reasoning.” Philosophical Studies 134 (2007): 1–​17. Zagzebski, Linda. “First Person and Third Person Epistemic Reasons and Religious Epistemology.” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 3, no. 2 (2011): 285–​304. Zagzebski, Linda. Epistemic Authority:  A Theory of Trust, Authority, and Autonomy in Belief. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

20

The Moral Transcendental Argument against Skepticism* 20.1  Introduction Transcendental arguments aim to reveal the necessary conditions for something that is not in dispute. In transcendental arguments against skepticism it is argued that a necessary condition for something the skeptic needs to formulate his skeptical argument—​for example, having a concept, being aware of a sequence of mental states, being the subject of an experience—​is the falsehood or, more weakly, the unbelievability of the skeptical hypothesis (SH). What makes transcendental arguments particularly interesting is that they attempt to show that the mental states whose existence requires the existence of an outer world are not states directed toward such a world. In Kant’s classic version of this form of argument, one’s awareness of the temporal order of one’s states of mind requires a temporally ordered world outside the mind, and thus to regard a temporal ordering of the world as a dubitable hypothesis is to use that same order to deny its existence.1 In recent philosophy, it has been proposed that there are yet other mental states or capacities presupposed by the skeptic that require an external world.2 All these arguments propose that there is a path from mental states to an external world other than the path from representational states to what they are allegedly representations of. Most of the arguments I will try out in this chapter are in that category. Transcendental arguments come in different degrees of strength. Barry Stroud argued in “Transcendental Arguments” that they succeed at best in showing the necessary conditions for thought—​roughly, they show how we have to think about things, not how things have to be. Nevertheless, Stroud and others * The chapter is reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. 1 See Immanuel Kant, “Refutation of Idealism,” in Critique of Pure Reason (2nd edition). Kant did not apply the term “transcendental argument” to the form of argument he presents there, but it is common to call it a transcendental argument in contemporary philosophy. 2 A famous variation of the Kantian-​style argument is Hilary Putnam’s anti-​skeptical argument in “Brains in a Vat.” Putnam uses his semantic externalism to argue that a being that can raise the question, “Am I a brain in a vat?” is not a brain in a vat. When we think “brain” or “vat” we are thinking about brains and vats in an external world because we are causally connected to that world. But a being that has never had contact with external objects is not asking a question about those objects when thinking “brain” and “vat.” Epistemic Values. Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197529171.001.0001.

334  Skepticism and the Gettier Problem maintain that a weaker kind of transcendental argument is still useful (see Stroud, “The Goal of Transcendental Arguments” and The Quest for Reality). Some of the arguments that follow are weak transcendental arguments. They aim at demonstrating that a person cannot consistently think of the SH as grounds for doubting her own beliefs. Others have the more ambitious aim of demonstrating that the skeptic’s position is inconsistent; it entails two propositions that cannot both be true. However, the latter is not the strongest anti-​skeptical argument, since it is possible that the SH is self-​inconsistent even though there is no external world. Perhaps the nonexistence of an external world arises from something independent of the SH. At least one of the arguments that follow aims at demonstrating the existence of an external world. The arguments of this chapter therefore have three degrees of strength. Since transcendental arguments involve a careful look at the SH, it is important to get clear on what the skeptic is proposing. In a general way, the strategy of the SH is clear: It is possible that our access to the external world is veiled. Everything could be exactly as it seems to me even if there is nothing behind the veil. I could be living in a virtual reality machine—​or in standard philosophical parlance, I could be a brain-​in-​a-​vat (BIV)—​and if I were a BIV I would have no way of finding out that I am a BIV. The way in which the skeptic moves from the possibility that I am a BIV to doubting my beliefs varies. Sometimes the SH is used to attack my knowledge of an external world; sometimes the SH is used to attack my justification for believing an external world exists. In any case, the intent is to undermine the supposed epistemic status of my beliefs in such a way that the appropriate response is to doubt them. There is a connection between understanding the skeptic’s argument and accepting it, and between accepting it and doubting. Descartes maintained that the reason for doubt grounded in the hypothesis of a deceiving God “is very tenuous and, so to speak, metaphysical” (Meditation III.36). Presumably, a tenuous reason for doubt grounds only a tenuous doubt. Nonetheless, a doubt is a doubt: the SH would not be interesting were it not for the fact that we are supposed to change our epistemic attitude toward our beliefs in response to it. I assume, then, that skepticism in its more interesting form is a practical problem.3 In any case, that is the form I will be considering. 3 There are widely differing views about the practical relevance of skepticism. At one extreme, John Greco argues that the real skeptical problem is purely theoretical and has nothing to do with doubt (Putting Skeptics in Their Place). But doubt is the focus of most ancient and modern skepticism, although there is dispute about the relevance of skeptical doubt to ordinary life. Some commentators claim that for the ancient skeptics, doubt was a practical matter, whereas it was purely methodological for Descartes. Gail Fine disputes this position in “Descartes and Ancient Skepticism: Reheated Cabbage?,” arguing that Descartes and the Pyrrhonists were much closer to each other in their views than is generally realized. Both understood skepticism as affecting practical life, and both attempted to prevent skeptical doubts from leading to inaction.

The Moral Transcendental Argument  335 We need one other assumption to set up the moral transcendental arguments I want to explore in this chapter. Given that the skeptic wants me to doubt, the skeptic assumes I  am a subject capable of entertaining the SH and doubting. At the outset, we may assume that I am the thinnest subject capable of understanding the SH and doubting, but we will need to investigate the issue of how thin the subject can be, consistent with the SH. In proposing the SH, the skeptic must have a conception of the subject whose position in the world (or the vat) is given by the SH. This includes the conditions under which a subject such as I can perform the mental acts and operations the skeptic acknowledges I  perform. The issue is whether my doing that is compatible with its being the case that my beliefs about an external world are not of such a world. The purpose of section 20.2 will be to identify the minimal conditions for being a subject that are needed to use the SH as grounds for doubt, and to use these conditions as a first step in undermining the skeptical project.

20.2  The Transcendental Argument from Rational Agency When the skeptic proposes the SH to get me to doubt my beliefs, the skeptic makes a number of assumptions, some of which are as follows: I have beliefs, I can understand what the SH is, I can understand that the SH possibly applies to me now, I can understand the connection between the possibility that the SH is true and doubting my beliefs, I ought to believe that I ought to doubt my beliefs, it is true that I ought to doubt my beliefs, and I can doubt my beliefs. So I am a being who is able to think rationally to the degree necessary to perform the above mental operations, and who has beliefs. Some of the above assumptions rely upon a further assumption about the nature of belief. Unlike such states as pain, hunger, sensations, and passing thoughts, I am not the passive subject of my beliefs. This is not to say that I choose my beliefs. Nonetheless, the way I have a belief differs from the way in which I have a pain or a passing thought. If the skeptic assumes that a belief is the sort of thing it can be reasonable to doubt, the skeptic must also assume that it is the sort of thing it can be reasonable (in principle) not to doubt. There are norms for believing and doubting, whereas there are no norms for feeling pain or hunger. The skeptic assumes that norms for belief exist and that I am capable of grasping those norms and their application to my own beliefs. In proposing the SH, then, the skeptic assumes that I have a degree of both theoretical and practical rationality. This is not an optional assumption that the hypothesis merely permits and which could be altered without serious harm to the SH. Granted, there are many things about myself and my own mental states about which I could be mistaken and which could be eliminated from the class

336  Skepticism and the Gettier Problem of beliefs in front of the veil without jeopardizing the skeptic’s strategy. Perhaps I can be mistaken in believing that I have certain sensations, emotions, desires, or intentions. If so, the set of beliefs in front of the veil shrinks. But there must be something left that is sufficient to permit me to understand the skeptic’s hypothesis and to act in response to it in the way the skeptic regards as rational. Notice that it is not the content of the SH that requires that I be rational, since we can imagine a scenario in which the beliefs in front of the veil shrink to less than the minimum necessary for me to grasp the hypothesis, thereby making it the case that I am not rational. Rather, it is the use of the SH by the skeptic to get me to doubt my beliefs or to alter my beliefs or my attitude toward my beliefs in some other way that requires that I satisfy the conditions for undertaking the project. In fact, for my initial argument in this chapter, it is not even required that I believe that I satisfy these conditions. The skeptic, however, is committed to the assumption that I satisfy these conditions. Here, then, is my initial transcendental argument. In proposing the SH as a reason to get me to doubt my beliefs or to change my behavior in some way as a rational response to the SH, the skeptic presupposes that (1) I am a rational agent. The sense in which the skeptic is committed to (1) can be minimalist. The skeptic has no reason to assume I must be a rational agent in a robust sense. But a being to whom oughts apply and who is capable of understanding rational grounds for believing and doubting is a certain kind of being. When I say the skeptic assumes I am a rational agent, I just mean that the skeptic thinks I am that kind of being. According to the SH, I should do a particular thing: (2) I ought to doubt my beliefs about the external world. Why should I  doubt my beliefs, according to the SH? If the reason is that I ought to have true beliefs and on the SH I do not have true beliefs, then since “ought implies can,” it follows that I can have true beliefs, and hence I am not a BIV. This answer gives us a short transcendental argument against skepticism. To block that route, what the skeptic must have in mind is that I ought to doubt my beliefs not because I ought to have true beliefs, but because I ought not to have false ones, and I can avoid having false beliefs by doubting. This seems to be Descartes’s position when he says, “Even if it is not within my power to know anything true, it certainly is within my power to take care resolutely to withhold

The Moral Transcendental Argument  337 my assent to what is false.”4 Descartes seems to think, then, that I can avoid falsehood and that I ought to do so by withholding assent. Now the skeptic will admit that the logic of ought requires that sometimes if I ought to do x, I ought to do y, and if I am a rational agent, I understand that. For instance, there are logical connections between the ought that applies to beliefs and the ought that applies to acts, and this is no less true if the only acts I can perform are mental acts. This point can be put in terms of justification. I am not justified in acting unless I am justified in the beliefs upon which my act is based. In any case, (1) requires that (3) I ought not act on any belief I ought to doubt. This needs to be qualified. I can rationally act on what I ought to doubt if I can rationally judge that there is much to be gained and little to be lost by acting on a dubitable belief. When I am in a desperate situation, for instance, one in which it appears almost certain that I will die no matter what I do, it can be rational to attempt to save myself by acting in a way that has an extremely low chance of success. So it is rational to act for ends under the assumption that I can weigh the probability of success as well as the value of what is gained and what is lost in acting. But when I entertain the SH, I am not in that situation. It is not that I judge the SH to be probable and I am desperate, but neither can I judge the SH to be improbable, since one of the things the SH does to me is render me unable to judge the probability of anything external to the mind. Doubt need not rest on a judgment of probabilities. But since the skeptic wants me to conclude that the appropriate response to the SH is to doubt my beliefs, the skeptic must also think that I should doubt that my acts have the external consequences I intend. But that is not all I should doubt. When I act, my act is not only based upon beliefs about the ends of the acts, it is also based upon beliefs about what it is I am doing, any practical or moral norms governing the act, and the trustworthiness of any other state motivating my act, such as an emotion of trust, fear, compassion, or admiration. If I engage in practical reasoning before acting, there will also be beliefs used in such reasoning. Almost all these states are beliefs about an external world or emotions directed at such a world. So, (4) On the SH, virtually every act I perform except the act of doubting my beliefs is based upon beliefs about the external world or emotional states whose intentional object is putatively something in the external world.



4 Descartes, Meditation I.24.

338  Skepticism and the Gettier Problem It follows from (2) and (4) that (5) On the SH, virtually every act I perform except the act of doubting my beliefs is based upon beliefs I ought to doubt or untrustworthy emotional states. Either I do act on the beliefs the skeptic argues I should doubt, or I do not. If I act, I am violating (3) and I am not a rational agent because I am not rational. If I do not act, I am not a rational agent because I am not an agent. It follows that according to the SH, (6) I am not a rational agent except in the performance of the acts specifically required to entertain the SH and to doubt my beliefs. But (6) is highly problematic. The problem is that the skeptic must explain the conditions under which an ought applies to me without also committing himself to oughts that apply to me at other times. At a minimum, the SH must be described in a way that removes the puzzling feature of how it is that the skeptic can propose the SH to someone who, by the skeptic’s lights, is not a rational agent in advance and will not be a rational agent once she follows through with the project the skeptic proposes to her. The skeptic’s position at this point is mysterious, although perhaps not incoherent. At a minimum, its peculiarity is something the skeptic should address. The SH should include a determinate conception of me as the subject of doubt that is not itself in doubt, in addition to a determinate conception of that which I am called to doubt on the hypothesis. There is also a weak version of the above argument. One could argue that whether or not I can consistently be a rational agent and a BIV, I cannot consistently think of myself as a rational agent and as a BIV. In entertaining the SH, I am entertaining the possibility that I am not a rational agent. But if I think of myself as not a rational agent, I cannot simultaneously think of myself as a being who is required by rationality to doubt, as a being who ought to doubt. If I cannot consistently entertain the SH and think of myself as a being who ought to doubt, the skeptic fails in his purpose. This argument does not show that I am not a BIV, since we have not ruled out the possibility that this is a world in which I am a BIV who should not doubt. It is even possible that I am a BIV who is a skeptic of a certain kind. I have argued that the SH appeals to the rational agency of a person, but the modes of the Pyrrhonists do not. The natural outcome of thinking through the ancient modes is a state that they found desirable, even pleasant, and arguably they found it pleasant precisely because it is a state of nonagency. They were freed from the anxiety of making and acting on judgments. Consistency might constrain our

The Moral Transcendental Argument  339 conception of ourselves even when we are not attending to it, so it is not clear that the Pyrrhonian strategy will succeed, but I am not ruling it out. Dedicated to the memory of William P. Alston a friend, mentor, and exemplary philosopher I will return to the topic at the end of this chapter as an attempt to make skepticism immune to the arguments of the chapter.

20.3 Vat Morality The argument of Section 20.2 gets us some distance toward identifying the necessary conditions for being the kind of being to whom the skeptic proposes his argument, but it does not uncover some of the most important features of rational agency that the skeptic cannot ignore. Many philosophers have thought that there is a strong connection between rational agency and moral agency. A being that is not a moral agent is not a rational agent, is not the kind of being to whom the skeptical argument is addressed. In this section, I want to investigate what happens to moral agency in the vat. What I mean by value externalism is the view that a state/​motive/​intention/​ act of a person gets its value at least in part from something outside the person’s mind. What I  mean by value internalism is the position that value-​making conditions are wholly internal to the person’s mind. If I am a BIV, then according to the usual vat scenario, my acts/​states/​motives have no externalist moral value. I  assume that the connections between my mind in the vat and the external world are not the right ones to give my mental states/​acts externalist value. Vat designers may not all have the same purposes, but the interesting vat scenarios are ones in which the world either is not at all what I think it is, or it is not related to me in the way I think it is. So if my acts/​motives/​states in the vat have any value, it is internalist. The issues I want to raise next are these: What are the conditions under which my acts, intentions, and motives have internalist value? Can the skeptic consistently propose the SH to me as grounds for doubting my beliefs without destroying vat morality along with morality? Can the skeptic do that consistently while maintaining my rational agency?

20.3.1 Moral Obligation Let me begin with some observations about morality. I assume that to be a moral agent includes being under moral obligation, and although there are many views about the scope of moral obligation, everyone agrees that it is not limited to the obligation to have future mental states, the only thing I can do in the vat. If I am in a vat, I believe I have obligations to act in a world outside the vat, but I cannot

340  Skepticism and the Gettier Problem do so. I may think that I have performed an act that is a moral duty or a virtuous act by, say, helping a suffering person, but I clearly have not, because there is no suffering person and I have not helped anyone. The only acts I can perform in the vat are mental acts. I can form intentions, but I cannot be obligated to form the intentions I can form in the vat since they are the wrong ones, and they are the wrong ones whether or not semantic externalism is correct.5 Suppose first that semantic externalism is the correct interpretation of what the vat inhabitant means when she thinks that she ought to help this suffering person and forms the intention to do so.6 In that case, what she means is what we (the nonvat persons) mean by saying she ought to have certain brain images (or other vat events). But it is false that she ought to have certain brain images. Hence, she thinks something false when she thinks she ought to help this suffering person and she is mistaken in what she directs her intentions toward when she forms the intention of helping the person. It cannot be the case that she ought to form intentions to do something that it is false that she ought to do. Suppose instead that when she thinks to herself that she ought to help this suffering person, she means what we call helping another person. Again she is mistaken if that is what she thinks, because she cannot help anybody and she is not obligated to do what she cannot do. And again, she is not obligated to even form the intention to help a suffering person, since she is not obligated to intend to do what she cannot do. To do it she would have to climb out of the vat. So whether or not semantic externalism is true, it is false that she ought to do what she thinks she ought to do and it is false that she ought to form the intention to do so. In the vat, all her beliefs about acts she morally ought to do overtly (in an external world) are false, and there is no overt act she morally ought to do. For the same reason, she cannot violate a moral obligation to act overtly or to intend to act overtly in the vat. But there is more to moral obligation than obligation to do or to intend to do specific overt acts. Kant argued that the only thing valuable in itself is a certain state of the inner self. The idea is that the truly morally valuable thing cannot depend upon any external circumstances, but only upon what I control—​myself, stripped of all contingency. There is a self that a tyrant cannot reach, nor, presumably, can Descartes’ Evil Genius or the vat designer. What is valuable in itself and knowable as valuable a priori is a good will—​fulfilling what that self commands me to do, to obey the Categorical Imperative (CI). An imperative can be right or 5 What I mean by semantic externalism is the view that the meaning of a term is determined in part by factors external to the speaker’s mind, such as the way the world is. Two persons could be in the same mental state and use the same term in thought or speech, yet they could be thinking about and talking about different things. 6 This option is modeled on the argument of Hilary Putnam mentioned in footnote 2 of this chapter.

The Moral Transcendental Argument  341 wrong, but not true or false. I assume that this is what Kant meant by autonomy, which he considered an intrinsic feature of rationality. This move asks us to take the controversial position that moral value is internalist, but my interest in this chapter is not to argue against what I have called value internalism. Instead, I  want to examine the issue of whether the skeptic can use Kantian internalism to save morality in the vat and preserve my rational agency. Suppose that the skeptic admits that the moral ought in the vat does not apply to overt acts or to intentions to perform particular overt acts, but he maintains that there is still moral obligation in the vat. The skeptic might maintain that vat morality is the same as morality; both are internalist. Alternatively, the skeptic might agree that morality is externalist, but maintain that vat morality is internalist. Vat morality is fundamentally a matter of having a Kantian Good Will. Perhaps I can have a Good Will in the vat since I can will to be moral for the sake of the moral even though I cannot act on it. Since the moral ought is a command, not something that can be true or false, it is not subject to the doubt that applies to beliefs or to any propositional attitude threatened by the SH. I apprehend the Categorical Imperative in a way I cannot doubt. The CI commands that I follow the CI motivated by my understanding of what the CI is. As Kant understands the CI, it commands me to act on universalizable maxims, to respect rationality wherever I find it, including rationality in myself, and to form a kingdom of ends with other rational agents. The CI commands autonomy: the adoption of the CI as a governing principle of acting. Surely I can do that in the vat. Or can I? The BIV can never correctly will any instance of the CI involving overt action, although it can have the general will to do its duty from a motive of duty. If that is sufficient to have a Good Will as Kant understands it, then Kant’s formulations of the CI should apply to it. Even though the vat inhabitant does not perform overt acts, what she takes to be overt acts have maxims which may or may not be universalizable, and she can will to treat what she takes to be rational beings as ends in themselves. But this brings out some ambiguities in the Categorical Imperative. Consider first Kant’s Formula of Humanity, his second formulation of the Categorical Imperative. There is more than one way to interpret this formula. On one interpretation, a being has a Good Will if, given that someone is a rational being, she wills to treat him as an end in itself. On this interpretation nobody can have a Good Will in the vat. The only rational being the BIV encounters in the vat is herself, and it is even doubtful that she can treat herself as an end, given that one of her duties to herself is to get morality right, and she cannot do that. On the second interpretation, a being has a Good Will if, whenever she believes someone is a rational being, she wills to treat that being as an end. She can do that

342  Skepticism and the Gettier Problem in the vat. On this interpretation, then, the BIV can have a Good Will provided that she believes that she encounters rational beings in an external world. The same ambiguity appears in the formula of universalizability, Kant’s first formulation of the CI. On one interpretation, the formula reads: Given that a person performs overt acts, she has a Good Will just in case she can will the maxim of her act to be a universal law. On this interpretation, the BIV cannot follow the formula of universalizability, since she does not perform overt acts. On the second interpretation, the formula reads: Given that a person believes she performs overt acts, what she takes to be overt acts have maxims, and she has a Good Will just in case she can will such a maxim to be a universal law. The BIV can satisfy this formula as long as she believes there is an external world and she acts in that world. In order to save moral obligation in the vat, suppose someone maintains that all the CI obligates us to do is to have the general will to do what is morally right because it is morally right, not to do any particular thing at any particular time. Systematic and radical ignorance about the external world would make most of what I will in particular cases miss its moral target, but perhaps my will would be autonomous, not because its maxims are universalizable or because it is a will to treat other particular persons in certain ways, but just because my will is directed toward nonspecific duty. The BIV could will something like this:  If there are any rational beings, I will to treat them as ends in themselves. Similarly, she can will: If I perform any overt acts, I will that their maxims be universalizable. That turns the Categorical Imperative into a Hypothetical Imperative, the antecedent of which is never satisfied in the vat. If that is sufficient for a Good Will, then the will of a BIV can be good. But there are some serious problems with taking this line. For one thing, a will that is good in this nonspecific sense cannot be part of a kingdom of ends. Kant’s crucial fifth formulation of the CI, which sets out the point of morality from the Kantian perspective, cannot be followed in the vat. The vat inhabitant is not part of a community of rational beings. She is cut off from them entirely. But more importantly, the general “Good Will” is not the will of an agent if it is never the governing principle of any act. If it is the governing principle of an act, then in some particular case the BIV determines that this is a rational being or this is an act governed by the principle of universalizability. In that case, the CI reduces to one of the other two interpretations. Either she has a good will because she treats actual rational beings as ends in themselves, or she has a good will because she treats beings she believes to be rational beings as ends in themselves, and the parallel point applies to the formula of universalizability.7 7 The preceding argument applies to any interpretation of the Categorical Imperative that is de dicto. For example, I might will the following: Help suffering people. But even though my will in that case is good in a sense—​clearly it is better than having the de dicto will that suffering people be harmed—​nonetheless, such a will is not the will of an agent unless it governs particular acts.

The Moral Transcendental Argument  343 I conclude that acts and intentions to act have no externalist moral value in the vat, and whether the BIV can have a Kantian Good Will depends upon the way we interpret the Categorical Imperative. If the Kantian Good Will is externalist in value, the BIV does not have a Kantian Good Will. If the BIV can have a Kantian Good Will, its value is internalist, but its having internalist value depends upon her belief that there is externalist value. So she cannot have a Good Will unless she believes the SH is false.

20.3.2  Virtue Moral obligation does not exhaust morality. Motives and virtues are also bearers of moral value. Can a BIV have good or bad motives? Good or bad traits of character? Motives are the best candidate for bearers of internalist moral value, and for that reason they are the best candidate for a correspondence between morality and vat morality. What I mean by a motive is not an aim, but an emotion state that is operating to bring about an act, and I believe that emotion dispositions are components of virtues and vices.8 Examples of motives are envy, anger, fear, love, compassion, and pride. This section will address the value of a BIV’s emotions and traits of character. Although I will make some assumptions about the structure of emotion and virtue, the general approach does not depend upon these assumptions. Every account of the value of emotion and virtue requires that its value be either externalist or internalist. My arguments are designed to cover both possibilities and a wide range of views about the nature of virtue. I take it that emotions have an intentional structure. They are states of feeling a characteristic way about something before the mind. The vat inhabitant’s emotions are directed toward her own mental states, although she takes those states to be states of something outside her mind, and she has emotions directed at such objects. The character of her compassion is shaped by her taking the object to be in an external world. If she discovered that what she thought was outside her mind was really her own mental image, she would no longer feel the same compassion. The same thing holds for fear, love, and any emotion that she has under the assumption that the object of the emotion is something in the external world. This is not to deny that emotions can be directed toward fictional characters or make-​believe creations of the imagination, as in movies and in children’s play, but the BIV is not making believe. She is making a mistake because her emotion is directed toward something she takes to exist in the external world and she is making a mistake about that. Her emotion is the wrong one for 8 I have argued that a virtue has a motivational component that is an emotion disposition in several places, including in my books, Virtues of the Mind and Divine Motivation Theory.

344  Skepticism and the Gettier Problem the circumstances, and she would agree if she became aware that there is no external object. One way of proceeding would be this. There is no value or disvalue in fearing a nonexistent threat, being angry at a nonexistent person, or being generous toward nonexistent beings, and a trait of character in which a person characteristically fears the nonexistent, is generous toward the nonexistent, and so on, is not a virtue or vice. In addition, if we assume that a person does not have a virtue or vice unless he reliably brings about the aim of the motivational component of the virtue or vice, there is another reason the BIV would not have a trait of character.9 Hence, on an externalist account of motives and virtues and vices, a BIV has no character. But as I mentioned, internalist intuitions about value are most likely to appear in an account of the value of emotions and their operation as motives. It does seem as if the BIV’s motives can be good and that she can have a good character even though she does not have virtues and good motives in the sense attributed by the externalist to persons outside the vat. If the BIV has motives that are good, given the way the world appears to her, surely there is a sense in which her motives are good. She deserves moral credit for them. We can even imagine a scenario in which the world is a skeptical scenario by design. Suppose God decides to judge people by their behavior in the vat world. This could even be a solution to the problem of moral evil, because if we are all vat inhabitants, nobody does anything that hurts other people. It just seems that way.10If so, our eventual judgment by God could depend upon what we do in the vat. One could argue that what is vat-​good is not good, and what is vat-​evil is not evil, but whether or not vat morality coincides with morality, vat morality on this scenario is sufficient to ground what is often taken to be one important purpose of morality—​reward and punishment. Notice that what makes my motives vat-​good is ignorance. I cannot have vat-​ good motives while I entertain the SH and conclude that it succeeds in undermining the justification for my beliefs. The internalist value of my motives depends upon my believing that there is an external world to which I respond in my emotions and the acts they motivate. I argued in section 20.3.1 that I cannot have a Kantian Good Will in the internalist sense of a Good Will if I think of myself as a BIV. For the same reason, I cannot have motives good in the internalist sense if I think of myself as a BIV. This leads to a weak moral transcendental argument that I will present in section 20.4.

9 I defend this view in Virtues of the Mind. 10 Matthew Hodge suggested to me that it could also be a partial solution to the problem of natural evil. The only natural evil any of us would have to worry about in the vat would be our own.

The Moral Transcendental Argument  345 To summarize section 20.3, if I am a BIV, my acts and intentions have no externalist value or disvalue. What I take to be overt acts are not overt acts, and my intentions to perform overt acts are not intentions directed at what has externalist moral value, so my intentions lack externalist moral value. All beliefs I have about what I am obligated to do overtly are false, and there are no true propositions about what I  am obligated to do overtly. I  can have a Kantian Good Will in the sense that I can have the general will to do whatever morality commands, but I cannot correctly will any instance of the CI that involves overt acts. If it is sufficient for a Good Will that the maxims of what I take to be my acts are universalizable and that I treat those I take to be rational beings as ends in themselves, then I can have a Good Will provided that the value of a Good Will is internalist and I believe that the value of my acts is externalist. Similarly, if motives and traits of character are good only if they have externalist value, I do not have good motives in the vat and do not have virtues or vices. My motives can have internalist value, and I can have that part of virtue that includes vat-​good motive-​dispositions, but only if I believe that the intentional objects of my motives are outside my mind. I must believe that the objects of my emotions as well as the acts to which those emotions give rise are in an external world. Internalist value depends upon the belief in an external world.

20.4  The Moral Transcendental Arguments 20.4.1  The Weak Moral Transcendental Arguments The skeptic allows that I think of myself as a moral agent. In fact, I must think of myself as a moral agent if I am a rational agent. Believing that I am a moral agent includes the belief that there are moral oughts that apply to me. Moral agency is an intrinsic component of my sense of the self who allegedly ought to doubt by reflecting upon the SH. This would be the case even if I have a perverse sense of morality. The skeptic does not deny that. So the skeptic accepts that (1) I think of myself as a moral agent. From Section 20.3 we get this: (2) If I am a BIV, no externalist moral properties apply to me. I can have at best internalist moral properties such as a Good Will (on one interpretation) and vat-​good motives. If there is vat-​morality, it is internalist.

346  Skepticism and the Gettier Problem (3) But I have internalist moral properties only if I believe that there are externalist moral properties. I must believe that there is an external world in order to have the motives and intentions that have internalist moral value. (4) Hence, I cannot consistently think of myself as a moral agent who is a BIV. The argument supports an even stronger conclusion: I cannot think of my beliefs about the external world as systematically false. I cannot consistently think of myself as a moral agent and as a BIV, and if I think of myself as a moral agent, I cannot consistently think of my belief in the existence of an external world as false for some reason other than the SH. It follows that the skeptic cannot use the SH as a way to get me to doubt my beliefs without destroying vat morality as well as morality. Since at least vat morality is required for me to think of myself as the subject of doubt, and since the skeptic cannot succeed if he prevents me from thinking of myself as the subject of doubt, the skeptic cannot succeed in using the SH as a way to get me to doubt my beliefs. A parallel argument can be given about vat practical rationality. I need vat practical rationality in order to doubt, but vat practical rationality is destroyed by the SH. So the skeptic cannot use the SH as a way to get me to doubt my beliefs. There is a second weak transcendental argument against skepticism from the assumption that I think of myself as an agent capable of acting out of a sense of the moral or practical ought. To the extent that I take the SH seriously, I lose my motivation to act, and hence I lose my agency. The problem is that there is not only an alethic connection between the rationality or justification of acts and the rationality or justification of the beliefs upon which the acts are based, as argued in section 20.2: There is a psychological connection as well. We are not motivated to act unless we have confidence in the beliefs upon which the act depends. The beliefs upon which an act depends include beliefs about the way the world is and how a given act will causally affect that world. Without confidence in the truth of these beliefs, we will not be motivated to act. Further, as argued in section 20.3, unless I believe in an external world, I will not be motivated to act out of motives whose appropriateness to the circumstances depends upon an external world, nor will I be motivated to act for ends whose value depends upon the existence of an external world. As a rational agent, I must act. In order to act I must be reasonably confident that the SH is false. Paralysis in action is not compatible with rational agency. Hence, it is not rational to take the SH as a ground for doubt. In the second weak moral transcendental argument, if I take skepticism seriously I lose my moral agency by losing my agency. In the first argument, if I take skepticism seriously I  lose my moral agency by losing the moral value of my

The Moral Transcendental Argument  347 mental states and acts. It is not rational to lose my moral agency. Hence, I should not take skepticism seriously.

20.4.2  The Strong Moral Transcendental Argument We can see next that the SH is inconsistent with what the skeptic herself takes to be the truth about me or the subject of the hypothesis. According to the picture the skeptic is presenting to us, if I am a BIV, virtually none of my beliefs about the external world is true. The skeptic assumes that truth is an externalist value and falsehood an externalist disvalue, since that is why doubt is appropriate, but there is no externalist value in the vat. So either there is no value in the vat, or it is internalist. But now the skeptic has a dilemma. She must decide whether the value of the subject’s motives, acts, and aims is externalist or internalist. If it is the former, she must think that under the SH no state or act of the subject of the hypothesis has value. If it is the latter, she must think that whereas the value of the subject’s beliefs depends upon an external world, the value of her motives, acts, and aims is wholly internal to her mind.11 Suppose first that the skeptic thinks of beliefs, acts, emotions, intentions, and aims as all having externalist value if they have any value at all. That is, their value depends, at least in part, upon there being the right connection between the subject and an external world. On the SH, none of the subject’s states has value because none of them has externalist value. Recall that the argument of section 20.2 relied on the idea that acts rest upon beliefs, so doubt about the latter ought to lead to doubt about the former. The issue I am bringing up here does not depend upon that assumption. The question is whether the skeptical scenario gives the subject a reason to doubt her beliefs on the grounds that they might be false if nothing she does, believes, feels, intends, or aims at has any value on the SH. How can should apply to her if nothing she can do has or results in either positive or negative moral or practical value? In fact, if no state of the agent has value on the SH, then it is very hard to see how the subject can be either a practical or a moral agent. If the skeptic does think she is an agent, more needs to be said in describing the skeptical scenario. Suppose instead that the skeptic takes the other option. Can the skeptic consistently think of the SH as grounds for the subject to doubt because the value of beliefs is externalist, while also maintaining that the subject’s acts, emotions, intentions, and aims have only internalist value? To take this line the skeptic must say that the value of true belief is independent of the value of nonepistemic 11 Of course, beliefs have value other than their truth-​value, but it is the truth-​value that is the focus of the skeptical attack.

348  Skepticism and the Gettier Problem states, since the latter do not depend for their value on anything external. But notice that if the skeptic says the subject’s reasons for action are internalist in value, then the truth of a belief has no bearing on whether she should act on the belief or whether she is right or wrong in her emotions/​motives, or whether she is aiming at the right thing, or whether her act expresses a good will. If the skeptic takes this option, she is saying the subject has no reason to take truth into account when interacting with the world she takes to be external. The skeptic would have to say to the subject, “It’s good to be in tune with external reality and I am proposing to you a hypothesis in which you are not in tune with external reality. But that has nothing to do with your practical or moral judgment about your acts or the appropriateness of your emotions.” If the subject cares about the value of truth, then she will care that her beliefs might be false, but the SH thus interpreted is a far cry from the type of hypothesis that most philosophers consider a threat.

20.4.3  The Strong (Non-​Transcendental) Argument from the Categorical Imperative (CI) According to Kant, a rational agent is necessarily a moral agent. Many philosophers have been persuaded of this position, whether or not they are Kantians. Given this position, if the skeptic allows that the subject is a rational agent, or at least is rational enough to know whatever can be known a priori, then if Kant is right that the Categorical Imperative can be known a priori,12 we can formulate a different strong moral argument against skepticism. This argument is not transcendental. It can be varied in many different ways for those who are not Kantian but who believe that a significant number of the demands of the moral law can be known a priori. I will give only the Kantian form of the argument here. (1) I apprehend the CI by reason alone. The CI obligates me unconditionally. I ought to obey the CI no matter what I think or believe and no matter what I feel or choose. (2) If I ought to obey the CI, I can do so. (3) Therefore, I am able to obey the CI. (4) If the CI applies in some situation, I must be able to truly believe that the situation has the features that make it such that the CI applies (e.g., this is

12 Since the Categorical Imperative is not a proposition, the sense of knowledge used here must be broader than propositional knowledge.

The Moral Transcendental Argument  349











the kind of being who deserves to be treated as an end in itself; if I say p, I am lying; S is suffering and in need of aid, and so on). (5) Therefore, I am obligated to obey CI, and if CI obligates me in some situation, all the factual propositions that are necessary conditions for the application of CI in that situation are true and I must be able to believe them. (6) If CI obligates me in some particular situation, I must also be in a position to have the degree of confidence in the truth of these propositions necessary for the capacity to act upon them. (7) Therefore, if morality comes in the form of a Categorical Imperative, either the CI never applies in any particular circumstance, or I must be able to believe the CI, to have a number of true factual beliefs, and I must be in a position to be confident of their truth. (8) The CI applies in many particular circumstances if it applies at all. The CI is not the hypothetical imperative: If I ever encounter a situation of a certain kind, I am obligated to do x (discussed in section 20.3.1). (9) Therefore, I  must be able to have many true beliefs about the external world and I must be in a position to be confident of their truth.

This argument suggests that my awareness of myself as a rational agent under a categorical imperative is simultaneously an awareness of myself as engaged with a world outside my mind. The skeptic can abandon the latter awareness only by abandoning the former. This point also appears in different guises in the transcendental arguments. In brief, it is this: The skeptic cannot consistently endorse the subject’s sense of practical necessity (to which she appeals to get the subject to doubt her beliefs) while also denying the truth of the beliefs and the appropriateness of the motivating emotions and sense of obligation that underpin practical action. I have chosen to give the argument of this subsection in terms of a Kantian Categorical Imperative because it is so clear and well known, but the argument could be recast in terms of obligations of virtue or other obligations purportedly known a priori. My purpose is to call attention to the connection between the a priori judgments of moral agents and the capacities of those agents to which the skeptic appeals.

20.5  Can the Skeptic Retreat to Pyrrhonism? In this chapter, I  have proposed a series of arguments for discussion. These arguments have been directed at modern skepticism, the type of skepticism intended to lead to massive doubt about our beliefs. But there are other historically important forms of skepticism. The ancient Pyrrhonists used skeptical

350  Skepticism and the Gettier Problem arguments not to convince a person that she ought to doubt her beliefs, but to put her in a state of ataraxia, or quietude, a state thought to be blissful because the agent no longer feels the anxiety that accompanies the need to make judgments.13 The skeptical modes do not appeal to the rational agency of the subject but function as a sort of medicine for the soul. When the medicine works, the skeptic lives a life “in the appearances,” without the commitment to the truth of the appearances that characterizes the behavior of ordinary persons. The Pyrrhonian skeptic therefore lives a very different kind of life than the normal one; indeed, that is the point of Pyrrhonian arguments. The Pyrrhonian skeptic may act, but she is untouched by the sense of practical necessity that motivates ordinary people to act in the characteristic way we describe as “out of duty” or out of a sense of what ought to be done. Is Pyrrhonian skepticism immune to the arguments of this chapter? It depends upon whether the Pyrrhonist makes judgments at the meta-​level. He may suggest that we ought to make no judgments because we can never tell when we have got a judgment right. Arguably, the Pyrrhonists used the “ought implies can” rule to argue from the fact that we cannot tell reality from appearances to the judgment that we ought not to try. That is why we ought to live a life in the appearances. Philosophers ought to go through their standard modes and end up in a state of ataraxia. We who go through the skeptical modes may not be asked to conclude that we ought to doubt; nonetheless, the Pyrrhonists produce the modes because they think we ought to doubt. We ought to take our medicine. If this is what the Pyrrhonists are doing, they would be fair targets of the arguments of this chapter. But perhaps they are not doing that. Pyrrhonian skeptics may not think that anybody ought to live a life in the appearances. They may simply see it as a pleasant life, one they would like to see others live also. If it is possible to live such a life and to desire it for others without a sense of ought, then we can live a type of skeptical life free from doubt and also, I have argued, free from agency. The psychological possibility of such a life and its coherence raise some very interesting questions, but the pertinent question for this chapter is whether we can escape morality and practical necessity even if we can make ourselves believe that there is no such thing. If there is either a Categorical Imperative or hypothetical imperative whose antecedents are satisfied by the Pyrrhonian skeptic, or if identity-​ conferring practical necessities of the kind described by Bernard Williams apply to the Pyrrhonist,14 then the transcendental argument against skepticism or the argument from the Categorical Imperative cannot be avoided by the Pyrrhonist. If a contemporary Pyrrhonist thinks that that form of skepticism is immune to

13 14

See Sextus, 1:25–​30. See Williams, Shame and Necessity, especially c­ hapter 4.

The Moral Transcendental Argument  351 the arguments of this chapter, he should make it clear that he is proposing moral nihilism along with skepticism. And, of course, the nihilism is not only in the realm of the moral, but extends to one’s entire practical life. I don’t know if it is possible to live without morality, but it is worth noticing that a person who lives without morality must also live without radical doubt. But whether or not it is possible for someone to live without morality, we should not think that morality is undermined by the SH. I am operating with the assumption that the sense of moral or practical necessity does not derive from any states the veridicality of which can be attacked by the SH. My position is that morality is not a deliverance of our epistemic states or any operation of theoretical reason. I think that it follows that its source is something independent of the states that are the object of attack in the standard skeptical arguments. If I am wrong about that, then the strong forms of the arguments of this chapter cannot get going, but even if I am wrong and morality depends upon states that are vulnerable to skeptical attack, the skeptic must defend that position in his argument. The skeptic must walk a very thin line, addressing the SH to a rational agent, but one whose rational and moral agency is in jeopardy if that being takes the hypothesis seriously. However, if I am right, morality is immune to the moves by which reason subverts itself in the best of the skeptical challenges. The truth of many beliefs is required by the authority of practical necessity; the latter does not derive from the former. Giving up morality is not an option, and it is our moral and practical sense that demands that there be true epistemic states.

References Descartes, R. Meditations on First Philosophy, translated from the Latin by Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1979. Fine, G. “Descartes and Ancient Skepticism: Reheated Cabbage?” Philosophical Review 109, no. 2 (2000): 195–​234. Greco, J. Putting Skeptics in Their Place: The Nature of Skeptical Arguments and Their Role in Philosophical Inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kant, I. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. by Marcus Weigelt. London: Penguin Books, 2007. Kant, I. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. and edited by Mary Gregor and Jens Timmermann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Putnam, H. “Brains in a Vat.” In Reason, Truth, and History. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1981. Sextus Empiricus. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, translated by R. G. Bury. Loeb Classical Library No. 273. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Stroud, B. “Transcendental Arguments.” Journal of Philosophy 65, no. 9 (1968): 241–​56. Stroud, B. “The Goal of Transcendental Arguments.” In Transcendental Arguments: Problems and Prospects, edited by R. Stem, 203–​ 23. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1999.

352  Skepticism and the Gettier Problem Stroud, B. The Quest for Reality:  Subjectivism and the Metaphysics of Colour. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Williams, B. Shame and Necessity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Zagzebski, L. Virtues of the Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Zagzebski, L. Divine Motivation Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Index Abraham (prophet), 211 Act Itself, The (Bennett), 40n1 acts belief versus, 5 causation of, 39–​43 classifying,  39–​40 evaluation of virtuous, 29–​32 motives in, 156–​7 Ad Infinitum (Turri, Klein), 7 Adams, Robert, 179, 278n9 Aeschylus, 272 agency counterfactual conditions and, 2, 40, 43–​5 evaluation of perceptual beliefs by, 52–​6 responsibility and, 47 agent causation discussion,  39–​40 epistemic credit and, 52 event causation versus, 40–​2 views of Aristotle on, 41n3 agents, 43–​4,  51–​2 agnosticism, 192 akrasia, 295 Alexander, Stephon, 86–​7 Algoe, Sara, 95–​6 alignment problem discussion, 142–​3, 172 rationality and, 234–​5, 241 Allston, William, 234n5 Almeder, Robert, 318n7 Almeida, Claudio de, 8 Alston, William P., 2, 18n17, 64, 112–​14, 187n2, 197, 209, 250, 297–​8, 326, 339 Altered Epistemic Frankfurt Case, 48–​51 Altered Frankfurt Case example in machine-​product model, 50, 53–​4 overview,  46–​7 “Alternative Possibilities and Causal Histories” (Pereboom), 46n13 analogical reasoning, 85–​9 Analysis of Knowing, The (Shope), 22n22 Annis, David, 16n10 Aquinas, Thomas, 42, 56, 88, 157n17, 169, 290n2

“Aquinas’s Account of the Mechanisms of Intellective Cognition” (Stump), 42n5 Aristotle, 17, 21n20, 31–​2, 41n3, 59, 61–​2, 80, 217, 219 ataraxia, 350 Atonement (McEwan), 195 Audi, Robert, 41n3 Augustine, 12–​13, 217 authority, 291–​2. See also epistemic authority “Authority and Obligation” (May), 284n20 autonomy, 289–​92. See also intellectual autonomy Axtell, Guy, 4–​5   Baehr, Jason, 2 Baier, Annette, 109 Barrett, Justin, 257n10 Barwise, John, 65, 70–​1 Basic Writings of St. Augustine (Oats), 12n4 Battaly, Heather, 2 Beaty, Michael D., 46n13 because-​of relation, 201 Behemoth (Hobbes), 292n6 belief. See also justified true belief (JTB); true belief acts versus, 5 admiration and, 247 deliberative reasons and, 251–​2, 255–​6 deliberative versus theoretical reasons in,  323–​5 guessing in, 219–​20 impermissibility in, 158–​9 knowledge as, 12–​13 memory and, 247 motives in, 156–​8 objects of, 12 propositional structures and, 12 as thinking with assent, 12 truth and, 5 Bennett, Jonathan, 40n1 Between Authority and Interpretation (Raz), 280n16 Beyond Justification (Alston), 112, 250n4, 297, 326

354 Index Blackburn, Simon, 132 BonJour, Laurence, 156 Borges, Rodrigo, 7–​8 Bower, Bruce, 191n5 Boyd, Craig, 3 Boyer, Pascal, 257n10 Braden, Cherie, 7 Brady, Michael, 4 brain-​in-​a-​vat (BIV) argument discussion, 333n2, 334, 338–​9 moral obligation and, 339–​43 rational agency and, 335–​9 strong moral transcendental argument and,  347–​8 virtue and, 343–​5 weak moral transcendental arguments and,  345–​7 Bruntrup, Godehard, 5 Burnyeat, Miles, 60, 62   Calvinism discussion, 211 externalism in, 214 individualism in, 214–​15, 217 Reformed Epistemology and, 214 revelation in, 215 theistic belief in, 213–​14 view of cognitive voluntarism, 214 Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, The (Audi), 41n3 caring discussion, 5, 186–​8, 203 epistemic demands and conflicts in, 197–​200 epistemic demands, conscientiousness and,  188–​92 epistemic demands, morality and, 193–​6 epistemic demands, opinion and, 198–​200 knowledge and, 200–​3 religious epistemology and, 192 Cassandra,  271–​2 Categorical Imperative (CI), 340–​3 Catherine of Siena, 93–​4 Catholicism,  214–​15 “Causal Theory of Knowing, A” (Goldman), 17 certainty discussion,  58–​9 end of domination of, 2–​3 justification and, 71 understanding versus, 59–​63 Chisolm, Roderick, 26n27, 41, 60, 207, 209 Christian Theism and the Problems of Philosophy (Beaty), 46n13 Chrstiano, Tom, 275n1

civic discourse, 132, 136–​8 Clifford, W.K., 195–​6, 234 Cobb-​Stevens, Richard, 4 Code, Lorraine, 60n5 cognitive acts reliabilism and, 220 true belief and, 173–​4, 184–​5 true belief, consequentialist value and, 170–​3 true belief, intentional teleology and, 174–​8 true belief, value of knowledge and, 181–​4 true belief, value of motives and, 178–​81 cognitive voluntarism Plantinga’s rejection of, 210–​11 Reformed Epistemology and, 214–​15 coherentism discussion, 7, 68 first person reasons and, 331–​2 Companion to Epistemology (Dancy, Sosa, Steup), 8, 62 Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Kierkegaard), 11n2 conscientiousness epistemic demands, caring and, 189–​92 epistemic demands, morality and, 193–​6 knowledge and, 200–​3 opinion and, 198–​200 reflective self-​consciousness and, 301–​2,  304 reflective self-​trust and, 114–​15 consequentialist value cognitive acts and, 170–​3 reliabilism and, 171–​2 Considered Judgment (Elgin), 63n19 Content-​Independence, 279, 285 Content-​Independence Thesis, 279, 287 contextualism, 16, 190–​1, 201–​2 “Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions” (De Rose), 16n10 “Contextualist Theory of Epistemic Justification, A” (Annis), 16n10 counterexamples, 7, 16 counterfactual conditions agency and, 2, 40, 43–​5 Altered Epistemic Frankfurt Case and,  49–​51 Altered Frankfurt Case and, 46–​7 epistemic credit and, 44–​5, 47, 49 Epistemic Frankfurt Case and, 47–​8 Frankfurt thought experiments and, 44–​5 Standard Frankfurt Case and, 45–​6 Craig, Edward, 16 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 333n1 cultural relativism, 230–​1, 233

Index  355 Cultural Sensitivity (CS) principle, 232, 240, 242 Cultural Sensitivity principle (CS), 242 Curie, Marie, 94   Dalí, Salvador, 79 Dancy, Jonathan, 8 David, Marian, 284n18 De Paul, Michael, 4, 160 De Rose, Keith, 16n10, 190 death-​of-​epistemology theory,  57–​8 defeasibility conditions discussion, 73 to JTB theory, 23–​4 psychological effects of, 315–​16 strong form of, 26n27 “Defeasibility Theories of Knowledge” (Levy), 316n5 Definition (Robinson), 16n8 deliberative reasons. See also first person reasons; self-​trust attacks on, 254, 256 belief and, 251–​2, 255–​6 circularity and, 250–​1 for community beliefs, 253 confusing theoretical reasons with, 325–​6 discussion,  245–​9 regress of, 329–​31 self-​trust and,  259–​60 theoretical reasons versus, 320–​5 unable to aggregate with theoretical reasons, 255 Dependency Thesis, 280–​1 Dependency Thesis for the Authority of Another’s Belief, 281 Descartes, Rene, 58n3, 59, 264, 334 “Descartes and Ancient Skepticism: Reheated Cabbage?” (Fine), 334n3 Descartes’ Metaphysical Reasoning (Florka), 59n4 Dewey, John, 185 Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge, The (Zagzebski), 1, 46n13 direct reference theory, 4, 236–​7 Divine Command Morality (Idziak), 291n3 Divine Command Theory, 278n9, 290–​1 Divine Motivation Theory (Zagzebski), 343n8 division of linguistic labor, 4, 126–​9 division of moral linguistic labor discussion, 4, 130–​1 linguistic networks and, 132–​5 stereotypes in, 131–​3 term usage decline and, 131–​3

“Does Libertarian Freedom Require Alternate Possibilities?” (Zagzebski), 46n13 “Does Warrant Entail Truth?” (Ryan), 24n25 double luck strategy discussion, 7 examples of, 21–​2, 31 Gettier problems and, 35n35, 311–​12 Dretske, Frederick, 207, 209 Drunkard’s Walk, The (Mlodinow), 284n18   Effective Altruism movement, 101n21 egotism, 263n1 elenchus, 70 Elga, Adam, 285 Elgin, Catherine, 69, 80 Ellis, Steve, 203n17 Elshof, Gregg Ten, 4 Elugardo, Ray, 194n7, 199n12 “Elusive Knowledge” (Lewis), 16n10 “Enthusiasm” (Mavrodes), 211 epistēmē technē and, 64, 67, 70 understanding and, 70–​1 various translations of, 60, 62 epistemic authority author theses on Raz’s conditions of, 281–​2,  285–​7 discussion,  275–​8 preemptive reasons and, 277–​8, 282–​5 Raz’s conditions of, 278–​83, 285, 287 strong form of, 6 Third Person JAB 2 Thesis of, 285–​7 Epistemic Authority (Zagzebski), 6, 93n1, 110n4, 251n5, 252n8, 275n2, 325n5, 325n6 epistemic autonomy discussion, 6 epistemic egoism and, 263–​5 moral autonomy and, 272–​4 rejection of, 272 trust and, 264–​5 understanding and, 272 epistemic circularity deliberative reasons and, 250–​1 discussion,  296–​7 reasons and, 300–​1 reflective self-​trust and, 111–​15 skepticism and, 298–​9 “Epistemic Circularity” (Alston), 250n4, 297, 326 epistemic credit agent causation and, 52 counterfactual conditions and, 44–​5, 47, 49 perceptual beliefs and, 54

356 Index epistemic demands caring, conflicts and, 197–​200 caring, conscientiousness and, 188–​92 caring, morality and, 193–​6 caring, opinion and, 198–​200 discussion, 186–​8, 203 morality and, 193–​6 “Epistemic Desiderata” (Alston), 18n17 epistemic egoism discussion, 6, 264 egoist’s own standards and incoherence of, 268 epistemic autonomy and, 263–​5 epistemic universalism and incoherence of,  269–​70 extreme,  263–​5 extreme epistemic egoism and, 269 incoherence of, 267 nonegoism versus, 271 rejection of, 271–​2 reliance on, 266–​7 self-​trust and incoherence of, 269–​70 strong,  265–​6 trust and, 264–​5 weak, 266 weak epistemic egoism and, 268 Epistemic Frankfurt Case, 47–​8 epistemic imperialism Cultural Sensitivity principle (CS) and, 232 discussion,  230–​1 Epistemic Justification (Alston), 187n2 Epistemic Responsibility (Code), 60n5 epistemic universalism, 269–​70, 274 epistemic virtue belief and, 217–​18 components of, 222 epistemological method in, 216–​17 motive for truth and, 219–​20 objections to Reformed Epistemology raised by, 222–​4,  226–​7 phronesis and, 220–​1, 225 social relations and, 220–​2 truth and, 218 epistemically happy life, 170–​2 “Epistemological Contextualism” (Bower), 191n5 Epistemology: 5 Questions (Hendricks, Pritchard), 8 Epistemology and Cognition (Goldman), 17n15 Epistemology Futures (Hetherington), 8 Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke), 275n3, 276n4 Essays on Knowledge and Justification (Pappas, Swain), 316n6 Etchemendy, John, 65, 70–​1

ethical egoism epistemic autonomy and, 263–​5 extreme,  263–​5 nonegoism versus, 270–​1 rejection of, 271 strong,  265–​6 trust and, 264–​5 weak, 266 ethical universalism, 270 ethical virtue theory, 28 eudaimonia Aristotle on, 21 true belief and, 173–​4 virtue and, 163–​6 event causation, 39–​42 evidence, 300–​2, 321n2 “Evidence” (Kelly), 301n13 Evidence and Inquiry (Haack), 143n2 evidentialism, 142–​3, 147–​8, 234 evolutionary theory, 257–​9 exemplarism, 8 Exemplarist Moral Theory (Zagzebski), 3–​4 experience,  321–​3 Explaining Knowledge (Borges, Almeida), 8 “Exploring the Natural Foundations of Religion” (Barrett), 257n10 externalism Calvinism and, 214 discussion, 209 luck in, 210 skepticism and, 210 extreme epistemic egoism discussion,  263–​5 epistemic autonomy and, 263–​5 epistemic egoism and, 269 epistemic universalism versus, 270 incoherence of, 267–​70 rejection of, 271 trust and, 264–​5 extreme ethical egoism, 263–​4   faculty reliabilism, 143 Fairweather, Abrol, 2 Faith and Rationality (Plantinga, Wolterstorff), 207n1, 211 Fibonacci sequence, 86. See also golden ratio Fine, Gail, 60, 64, 334n3 Finite and Infinite Goods (Adams), 179n14, 278n9 “First Person and Third Person Epistemic Reasons and Religious Epistemology” (Zagzebski), 325n6 first person reasons. See also deliberative reasons

Index  357 coherentism and, 331–​2 discussion, 7, 245 foundationalism and, 331–​2 infinitism and, 331–​2 regress of, 320, 329–​31 religious belief attacks and, 6 self-​trust and, 320, 325–​6 Fischer, John Martin, 45n10, 45n12 Fitelson, Branden, 7 Flood, Anthony, 290n2 Florka, Roger, 59n4 Foley, Richard, 58n3, 112–​14, 161, 250, 263n1, 266n6, 269–​71, 273–​4, 297–​8, 326 Formula of Humanity, 341–​2 foundationalism, 7, 68, 112, 331–​2 Fragmentation of Reason, The (Stitch), 13n6 Frankfurt, Harry, 44, 137 Frankfurt thought experiments Altered Epistemic Frankfurt Case, 48–​51 Altered Frankfurt Case, 46–​7 discussion, 2, 44–​5 Epistemic Frankfurt Case, 47–​8 Standard Frankfurt Case, 45–​6 Freud, Sigmund, 257 Freudian hypothesis, 257–​9 Fricker, Elizabeth, 264, 266, 273, 289–​90 Fricker, Miranda, 131, 133 Fundamental Attribution Error, 99n13 Future of an Illusion (Freud), 257n11   Gallistel, C.R., 284n18 Gettier, Edmund, 21n20 “Gettier Problem and Infallibilism, The” (Howard-​Snyder),  24n25 Gettier problems author definition of knowledge and, 34–​5 avoiding,  316–​18 constructing,  315–​18 defeasibility conditions and, 315–​16 discussion, 2 double luck strategy and, 35n35, 311–​12 examples of, 31 inescapability of, 311, 319 internalism and, 311–​12 to JTB theory, 20–​4, 27 to knowledge, 20–​2, 27 luck in, 35n35 reliabilism and, 312 value problem and, 154–​5 warrant theory and, 8, 145, 312–​15, 318 Glendon, Mary Ann, 134n9 golden ratio, 78, 86. See also Fibonacci sequence Goldman, Alvin, 17, 26n27, 187n2, 207, 209

Greco, John, 2, 35, 146, 154, 160, 172, 202, 334n3 Gregory XI (pope), 94 Grimm, Stephen, 3 Guide to Epistemology (Greco, Sosa), 2, 145n5 Gutting, Gary, 213   Haack, Susan, 143n2, 146 Haidt, Jonathan, 95–​6 Hart, H.L.A., 279 hedonistic utilitarianism, 170–​2 Hendricks, B, 8 Hensel, A., 100 heterogeneous reasoning, 65, 70 Hetherington, Stephen, 8 Hick, John, 235 Hobbes, Thomas, 292 Hodge, Matthew, 344n10 How the Mind Works (Pinker), 257n10 Howard-​Snyder, Daniel, 24n25 Howard-​Snyder, Frances, 24n25 Human Knowledge (Russell), 21n22 Hunt, David, 46n13 Hypothetical Imperative, 342   Ideal Agent Theory, 8 “Ideal Agents and Ideal Observers in Epistemology” (Zagzebski), 8 Ideal Observer Theory, 8, 202 Idziak, Janine, 291n3 immanentism of Cultural Sensitivity principle (CS), 232 discussion,  228–​30 of Need to Resolve Conflict principle (NRC), 233, 235 of Rational Recognition principle (RR), 232 of reason, 5–​6 transcendence versus, 228, 235 impermissibility,  158–​9 “Incompatibilism and the Avoidability of Blame” (Otsuka), 45n11 “Inescapability of Gettier Problems, The” (Zagzebski), 24n24 infinitism, 7, 331–​2 “Intellect, Will, and the Principle of Alternate Possibilities” (Stump), 46n13 intellectual authority. See epistemic authority intellectual autonomy author view of, 303–​6 discussion, 2 heteronomous, 292–​4, 304 reflective self-​consciousness and, 294–​303 self-​reliance versus,  289–​90 intellectual coercion, 292

358 Index Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others (Foley), 250n3, 263n1, 266n6, 297, 326 Intellectual Virtue (De Paul, Zagzebski), 5 intellectual virtue terms civic discourse and, 132, 136–​8 division of linguistic labor in, 126–​9 division of moral linguistic labor in, 130–​5 natural kind terms and, 124–​6, 133–​4 similar to moral virtue terms, 135–​8 social linguistic network and, 4, 137–​8 stereotypes in, 136–​7 intellectual virtues as character traits, 103–​6 discussion, 1–​3, 93, 97–​9, 238 Exemplarist Moral Theory and, 3 moral virtue and, 3 motivation and, 99–​101 motives in, 158 natural versus acquired, 94–​7 as property of persons, 28 reflective admiration of, 95–​6, 102–​3 self-​trust and, 3, 120–​2 structure of, 29–​32 success and, 100–​2 trust and, 3, 119–​22 truth and, 3 Intellectual Virtues and the Life of the Mind, The (Kvanvig), 60n5 intentional teleology, 174–​8 internalism, 4, 209, 311–​12 “Internalism and Epistemically Responsible Belief ” (Greco), 172n9 internalist externalism, 209 intuition, 247, 322–​3 Invention of Autonomy, The (Schneewind), 291n3 irrationality, 231n3 “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge” (Gettier), 21n20   James, William, 171 Jazz of Physics, The (Alexander), 86–​7 Jones, Karen, 116 Jones, Ward, 5, 203n17 judgment,  168–​9 justification certainty and, 71 discussion, 59–​62, 156 end of domination of, 3, 63 in externalist theories, 209 individualism in, 213 theories of, 72–​3 Justification Thesis for the Authority of Belief 2 (JAB 2), 281–​2, 285

justified true belief (JTB) discussion, 17, 188 Gettier problems to, 20–​4, 27 knowledge as, 21   Kane, Robert, 45n11 Kant, Immanuel, 273, 289–​91, 333n1 Kantian Good Will, 341–​4 Kekulé, Auguste, 66 Kelly, Thomas, 301n13, 321n2 Kepler, Johannes, 86–​7 Kierkegaard, Søren, 11n2 Klein, Peter, 7, 26n28 knower,  11–​12 knowledge. See also Gettier problems according to reliabilism, 14 author definition of, 27–​8, 32–​5, 184 caring and, 200–​3 causal definition of, 17, 26n27 common criteria in defining, 18–​20 conscientiousness and, 200–​3 as credit for true belief, 152–​5 difficulties in defining, 2 discussion, 2 divisions of kinds of, 18 early definition of, 26n27 as form of belief, 12–​13 further questions in defining, 35–​7 Gettier problems to, 20–​4, 27 a good epistemic state, 2 as JTB, 21 memory, 14, 18, 33–​4 methodology in defining, 16–​17, 27 as moral good, 13–​14, 27 as natural good, 14, 16–​17, 27 as nonaccidental true belief, 24–​6 objects of, 11–​12 perceptual, 14, 18, 33–​4, 42 Plato’s definition of, 2, 12n3, 14 propositional structures and, 12 purpose of defining, 15, 27 real definition, 15–​18 reliabilism value problem and, 141–​5 requirements in defining, 19–​20, 24 strong defeasibility theory of, 26n27 superior value of, 182 true belief and, 3, 81 as true belief plus something else, 7, 12, 22–​3,  72–​3 truth and defining, 27–​8 truth condition analysis and, 20 understanding and, 68–​9, 81–​5 value of, 162–​4, 166

Index  359 Knowledge, Belief, and Character (Axtell), 4–​5 Knowledge, Truth, and Obligation (Steup), 2 Knowledge and Perception (Prichard), 13n5 Knowledge and the State of Nature (Craig), 16n10 Knowledge In Perspective (Sosa), 18n16 Kornblith, Hilary, 16 Korsgaard, Christine, 54, 291 Kowalski, R., 100 Krioukov, Dmitri, 86 Kripke, Saul, 124, 236 Kvanvig, Jonathan, 60n5   Lehrer, Keith, 54n22, 111, 297 “Lesson of Gettier, The” (Zagzebski), 8 Levy, Steven, 315 Lewis, David, 16n10 “Libertarianism and Frankfurt’s Attack on the Principle of Alternate Possibilities” (Widerker), 45n11 Locke, John, 15–​16, 234, 264, 275–​6 Lust: The Seven Deadly Sins (Blackburn), 132   machine-​product  model Altered Frankfurt Case example of, 50,  53–​4 discussion, 4, 154 Mavrodes, George, 1, 207, 211–​13, 215, 222–​3 May, Thomas, 284n20 McEwan, Ian, 195 memory, 14, 18, 33–​4, 247 Metaphysics (Aristotle), 219 methodological solipsism, 230–​1 Methods of Ethics (Sidgwick), 172n8 Meyer, Susan Sauvé, 41n3 Mill, John S., 170–​1, 171n5 Mlodinow, Leonard, 284n18 Moral and Epistemic Virtues (Pritchard, Brady), 4 moral autonomy, 6, 272–​4 moral luck, 30, 210n8 Moral Luck (Nagel), 210n8 “Moral Responsibility and Unavoidable Action” (Hunt), 46n13 moral transcendental argument Pyrrhonian skepticism and, 349–​51 against skepticism, 333–​9 strong,  347–​8 strong (non-​transcendental) argument from categorical imperative (CI), 348–​9 vat morality and, 339–​44 weak,  345–​7

moral virtue intellectual virtues and, 3 as property of persons, 28 structure of, 29–​32 moral virtue terms, 135–​8 morality autonomy and, 289–​90 epistemic demands and, 193–​6 true belief and, 195–​6 Morality of Freedom, The (Raz), 278–​9, 283 Moravcsik, Julius, 60, 64, 68 Mortal Questions (Nagel), 30n32, 210n8 Moses (prophet), 211 motives in belief, 156–​7 deficiency of, 223–​4 in intellectual virtues, 158 truth and, 148–​51, 219–​20 value of, 178–​81 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 94   Nagel, Thomas, 30n32, 210n8 natural kind terms, 124–​6, 133–​4 natural teleology, 173–​4 Need to Resolve Conflict principle (NRC), 233, 235, 240, 242 Newman, John Henry, 238 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 174 nonegoism,  270–​1 nonpropositional structures discussion, 3, 68–​9 understanding and, 81–​5 Normal Justification (NJ) Thesis, 281–​2, 285 Nozick, Robert, 207, 209, 292   Oats, Whitney, 12n4 “obedience of the judgment,” 277 On Bullshit (Frankfurt), 137 On Epistemology (Zagzebski), 302n16 opinion, 198–​200 Organization of Learning, The (Gallistel), 284n18 Original Sin doctrine, 214, 243 Otsuka, Michael, 45n11   Pappas, George, 316 Paul (apostle), 211 perceptual beliefs agency evaluation of, 52–​6 epistemic credit and, 54 Pereboom, Derk, 46n13 Phaedo (Plato), 18 Philosophical Explanations (Nozick), 293n7

360 Index Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Rorty), 57n1 phronesis discussion, 5, 220–​1, 225, 244 as model for defining rationality, 236–​9 Principles of Rational Belief (PRB) and,  239–​40 religious belief and, 241–​4 as test for rational belief, 226 value of, 181 Plantinga, Alvin, 1, 6–​7, 22n23, 63n20, 64, 115n13, 143–​6, 192, 207, 213, 215, 243–​4, 312, 314 Plato, 12n3, 14, 59–​61 political authority, 6, 275, 278–​80 Pollock, John, 16n9 positive epistemic status, 207 Possibility of Practical Reason, The (Velleman), 168n2 practical wisdom. See sophia Predestination of the Saints (Schaff), 12n4, 217 Preemption Thesis, 279–​80, 282–​3 preemptive reasons discussion,  277–​8 evidence,  282–​5 resistance,  284–​5 prereflective trust, 114 Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP), 2,  44–​7 Principles of Rational Belief (PRB), 239–​42 Prisoner’s Dilemma situations, 276n5 Pritchard, Duncan, 4, 8 problem of reasonable disagreements, 325n5 Problems of Philosophy, The (Russell), 89 process reliabilism, 142–​3, 147–​8 proper function theory, 143–​5, 147 “Proposed Definition of Propositional Knowledge, A” (Klein), 26n28 propositional structures belief and, 12 discussion, 3, 11, 66 knowledge and, 12 theory of understanding and, 81–​5 true belief and, 81 Pury, C.L.S., 100 Putnam, Hilary, 4, 124, 126–​7, 228, 231, 234, 236, 333n2 Putting Skeptics in Their Place (Greco), 334n3 Pyrrhonian skepticism Descartes, Rene and, 334n3 discussion, 298n11, 327, 349–​51 moral transcendental argument and, 349–​51

Pythagoras, 78, 88 Quest for Reality (Stroud), 334   “Raft and the Pyramid, The” (Sosa), 68n26 rational agency, 335–​9 Rational Faith (Zagzebski), 1, 5, 7 Rational Recognition principle (RR), 232, 240, 242 rational will, 291–​2 rationality constraints on, 233–​6, 241 cultural relativism and, 230–​1, 233 discussion, 226–​7, 244 formal properties of, 229–​33 phronesis as model for defining, 236–​40 resolved dissonance and, 294–​5, 303 substantive properties of, 229–​33 transcendence and immanence of, 228–​33,  235 virtue and, 5 Rationality of Theism, The (Bruntrup), 5, 172n7 Raz, Joseph, 6, 275, 278–​83, 285 Raz’s political authority conditions, 278–​80 real definition, 15–​18 real solipsism, 230–​1 reason authority and, 291–​2 immanence of, 5–​6, 228 transcendence and immanence of, 5–​6, 228 Reason, Truth, and History (Putnam), 231n2 reasons, 300–​1, 320. See also first person reasons; third person reasons Reed, Baron, 6 “Reflection and Disagreement” (Elga), 285n21 reflective self-​consciousness conscientiousness and, 301–​2, 304 discussion, 6–​7, 289 intellectual autonomy and, 294–​6, 299–​303 intellectual autonomy, beliefs and, 296–​9 intellectual autonomy, evidence and, 300–​1 self-​trust and,  297–​9 Reformed Epistemology. Calvinism and, 214–​15 cognitive voluntarism and, 214–​15 discussion, 5, 207–​8 epistemic objections to, 222–​4, 226–​7 externalism and, 209–​13 individual beliefs and, 208–​9 individualism and, 213–​15, 226

Index  361 nonvoluntarism and, 210–​11, 226 Original Sin doctrine and, 214 origins of, 214–​15, 226 regress problem deliberative reasons, 329–​31 discussion, 326 first person reasons, 320 theoretical reasons, 326–​9 third person reasons, 320, 326–​7 Reid, Thomas, 41 reliabilism cognitive acts and, 220 consequentialist value and, 171–​2 discussion, 209 Gettier problems and, 312 knowledge according to, 14 motive for truth and, 148–​51 properties of persons and, 28 value problem, agent reliabilism and, 146–​7,  153 value problem and, 4, 141, 152–​3 value problem, faculty reliabilism and, 143 value problem, first moral and, 153, 156 value problem, process reliabilism and, 142–​3,  147–​8 value problem, proper function theory and, 143–​5,  147 value problem, second moral and, 154 value problem, third moral and, 155 value problem, transferability and, 142 “Reliability and the Value of Knowledge” (Riggs), 44n9 “Religions, Thought, and Behaviour as By-​Products of Brain Function” (Boyer), 257n10 religious belief alignment problem and, 242–​3 attacks on, 254 constraints on, 243 Cultural Sensitivity principle (CS) and, 242 evolutionary hypothesis and, 257–​9 first person reasons and, 6 Freudian hypothesis and, 257–​9 Need to Resolve Conflict principle (NRC) and, 242 not privileged, 243 phronesis and, 241–​4 Principles of Rational Belief (PRB) and,  241–​2 problems in, 243–​4 Rational Recognition principle (RR) and, 242

self-​trust and, 6, 257–​60 theistic and, 254–​6 third person reasons and, 6 religious epistemology, 2, 192 Religious Faith and Intellectual Virtue (Callahan, O’Connor), 6 religious knowledge, 210 religious skepticism, 210 repeating structures analogical reasoning and, 85–​9 discussion, 3 Republic (Plato), 18 responsibility, 47, 175–​7 “Responsibility and Control” (Fischer), 45n10 revelation, 212–​13, 215 Revelation in Religious Belief (Mavrode), 212 Riggs, Wayne, 2, 43n6, 44n9, 154, 160, 183n16, 202, 203n17 Robinson, Richard, 16n8 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 134n9 Rorty, Richard, 57 Rosa, Evan, 4 Routledge Handbook of Virtue Epistemology (Battaly), 3 Rowe, William, 41n3 Russell, Bertrand, 21n22, 89 Ryan, Sharon, 24n25   Scheffler, Israel, 22n22 Schneewind, J. B., 291n3 Scotus, Duns, 291 Search, The (Snow), 94 “Search of the Source of Epistemic Good, The” (Zagzebski), 197n10 “Self Movement and External Causation” (Meyer), 41n3 Self-​Constitution (Korsgaard), 291n4 self-​governance, 289–​90,  304 “Self-​Governance in Aquinas and Pre-​Modern Moral Philosophy” (Flood), 290n2 Self-​Motion (Gill, Lennox), 41n3 self-​reflection,  249 self-​reliance,  289–​90 self-​trust attacks on, 245, 254, 256–​7 components of, 251–​3 conscientiousness and reflective, 114–​15 critical reflection and, 297–​8 deliberative reasons and, 259–​60 discussion, 7, 245 dissonance and reflective, 115–​17 epistemic circularity and reflective, 111–​15

362 Index self-​trust (cont.) epistemic egoism and, 267–​70 as first person reasons, 320, 325–​6 first person reasons and, 320, 329–​31 intellectual virtues and, 3, 120–​2 levels of, 326n7 primacy of, 249–​50 reflective, 111–​12,  297–​9 regress of reasons and, 326 religious belief and, 6, 259–​60 third person reasons and, 326–​9 trust in others and, 117–​19 truth and, 110–​11 Self-​Trust (Lehrer), 54n22, 111n6 semantic externalism, 333n2, 340 sensible social evidentialism, 213 Shame and Necessity (Williams), 350n14 Shaw, Brian, 94 Shope, Robert, 22n22 Sidgwick, Henry, 172n8 Significance of Free Will, The (Kane), 45n11 skepticism discussion, 2, 57–​9 epistemic circularity and, 298–​9 evidence and, 300 externalism and, 210 moral transcendental argument against skepticism against, 333–​9 Pyrrhonian,  349–​51 rise of, 59–​62 understanding and, 69–​71, 75–​6 Snow, C.P., 94 Socha, Leopold, 94, 98 social linguistic network, 4, 137–​8 Society of Christian Philosophers, 1 Socrates, 19n18, 21n19 Sosa, Ernest, 2, 8, 18n16, 68n26, 143, 154, 160, 174–​7,  202 Sources of Normativity (Korsgaard), 54n21 Spearman, M.J., 100 Spinoza, Baruch, 59 Standard Frankfurt Case, 45–​6 stereotypes division of linguistic labor and, 126–​9 division of moral linguistic labor and, 131–​3 overview,  136–​7 Steup, Matthias, 2, 8 strong (non-​transcendental) argument from categorical imperative (CI), 348–​9 strong epistemic egoism, 265–​6, 270 strong ethical egoism, 265–​6 strong moral transcendental argument, 347–​8

Stroud, Barry, 333–​4 structure, 78–​81. See also nonpropositional structures; propositional structures; repeating structures Stump, Eleonore, 42n5, 46n13 Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, The, 169n3 Swain, Marshall, 316   Taylor, C.C.W., 61 technē discussion, 61 epistēmē and, 64, 67 understanding and, 64–​7, 70–​1, 75 Testimony, Trust, and Authority (McMyler), 290n1 “Testimony and Epistemic Authority,” 290n1 “The Goal of Transcendental Arguments” (Stroud), 334 Theaetetus (Plato), 17, 19n18, 21n19, 60 theistic belief Calvinism and, 213–​14 theoretical reasons for, 254–​5 Themes from Klein (Fitelson, Borges, Braden), 7 theoretical reasons. See also self-​trust; third person reasons attacks on, 254 belief and, 255–​6 circular reasons and, 250–​1 for community beliefs, 253 confusing deliberative reasons with, 325–​6 deliberative reasons versus, 320–​5 discussion,  245–​9 regress of, 326–​9 for theistic belief, 254–​5 unable to aggregate with deliberative reasons, 255 Theory of Knowledge (Chisolm), 26n27 “Theory of Moral Reasoning, A” (Pollock), 16n9 Third Person Justification for the Authority of Belief 2 (JAB 2) Thesis, 285–​7 third person reasons, 6–​7, 245–​6, 320. See also theoretical reasons Timpe, Kevin, 3 Trachtenber, Zev, 292n6 transcendence of Cultural Sensitivity principle (CS), 232 immanentism versus, 235 of Need to Resolve Conflict principle (NRC), 233, 235 of Rational Recognition principle (RR), 232

Index  363 of rationality, 228–​30 of reason, 5–​6 transcendental arguments, 7, 228 “Transcendental Arguments” (Stroud), 333 Transcendentals, 168 Trojan horse, 271–​2 true belief cognitive acts and, 184–​5 cognitive acts, consequentialist value and,  170–​3 cognitive acts, intentional teleology and,  174–​8 cognitive acts, natural teleology and, 173–​4 cognitive acts, nonteleological approach and, 179 cognitive acts, value of knowledge and,  181–​4 cognitive acts, value of motives and, 178–​81 conditional value of, 160–​2 discussion, 159–​60, 164–​5, 168 eudaimonia and, 173–​4 first-​order level of, 169 good of, 168–​70 instrumental value of, 161–​2 intrinsic value of, 162 knowledge and, 3, 81 knowledge as credit for, 152–​5 morality and, 195–​6 nonaccidental,  24–​6 plus something else, 7, 12, 22–​3, 72–​3 propositional structures and, 81 reliabilism value problem and, 141–​5 responsibility and, 175–​7 second-​order level of, 169, 175 understanding and, 81–​5 trust components of, 108–​11 discussion, 108, 251 epistemic autonomy and, 264–​5 epistemic egoism and, 264–​5 intellectual virtues and, 3, 119–​22 in others, 117–​19, 253–​4 prereflective, 114 truth and, 110 truth belief and, 5 gap between warrant and, 8 intellectual virtues and, 3 knowledge and, 27–​8 self-​trust and,  110–​11 trust and, 110 “Truth and Evidence” (Almeder), 318n7

truth condition analysis, 16–​17, 20 Turri, John, 7 understanding ambiguity of term, 63–​4 analogical reasoning and, 85–​9 author proposed definition, 66–​7 autonomy and, 272 certainty versus, 59–​63 commonalities of, 64–​5 discussion, 2, 57–​9 epistēmē and, 64, 67, 70–​1 epistemic autonomy and, 265 knowledge, structures and, 81–​5 nonpropositional structures and, 3, 68–​9, 81–​5 propositional structures and, 81–​5 relationship between knowledge and, 68–​9 repeating structures and, 85–​9 skepticism and, 69–​71, 75–​6 structure and, 78–​81 technē and, 64–​7, 70–​1, 75 theory of, 67–​8 true belief and, 81–​5 virtue in, 72–​5 “Unity of Epistemic Virtues, The” (Goldman), 187n2 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 134,  137–​8 universal reason, 292 Unnatural Doubts (Williams), 57n2 Utilitarianism (Mill), 171n5   value externalism, 339 value internalism, 339 value problem agent reliabilism and, 146–​7, 153 discussion, 2 faculty reliabilism and, 143 first moral and, 153, 156 Gettier problems and, 154–​5 in process reliabilism, 142–​3, 147–​8 in proper function theory, 143–​5, 147 in reliabilism, 4, 141, 152–​3 second moral and, 154 third moral and, 155 transferability and, 142 Vanier, Jean, 94 Varieties of Understanding (Grimm), 3 vat morality discussion, 339 moral obligation and, 339–​43 virtue and, 343–​5

364 Index Velleman, David, 168n2 Vinci, Leonardo da, 94 virtue brain-​in-​a-​vat (BIV) argument and,  343–​5 discussion, 2 eudaimonia and, 163–​6 rationality and, 5 structure of, 29–​32 understanding in, 72–​5 Virtue and Voice (Elshof, Rosa), 4 Virtue Epistemology (Fairweather, Zagzebski), 2, 174n11, 187n2 “Virtue Epistemology” (Zagzebski), 28n30 Virtues and Their Vices (Timpe, Boyd), 3 Virtues of the Mind (Zagzebski), 1–​2, 7, 28n29, 31n33, 33n34, 52n20, 68, 74, 104, 183, 238   Warrant and Christian Belief (Plantinga), 243–​4 Warrant and Proper Function (Plantinga), 22n23, 143n3, 192n6, 312n2 Warrant: The Current Debate (Plantinga), 63n20 warrant theory discussion, 63n20, 154, 207 gap between truth and, 8 Gettier problems and, 145, 312–​15, 318

individualism in, 213 internalism and, 209 luck in, 210 Plantinga criterion in, 207, 210, 225 weak epistemic egoism discussion, 266 epistemic egoism and, 268 epistemic universalism versus, 270 reasonableness of, 268 weak ethical egoism, 266 weak moral transcendental, 345–​7 weak moral transcendental arguments, 345–​7 “What Are the ‘Chances’ of Being Justified?” (Riggs), 43n6, 183n16 Widerker, David, 45n11 Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, The (James), 171n6 Williams, Bernard, 210n8, 350n14 Williams, Michael, 57 wisdom, 3, 61, 75 Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 1, 207, 211, 213, 215, 222 Woodruff, Paul, 61, 64, 75 World Made New, A (Glendon), 134n9 Wright, Sewall, 66 Wykstra, Stephen, 212–​13, 223