Good Thinking

A Knowledge First Virtue Epistemology

Christoph Kelp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429847608
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie de la philosophie

This book combines virtue reliabilism with knowledge first epistemology to develop novel accounts of knowledge and justified belief. It is virtue reliabilist in that knowledge and justified belief are accounted for in terms of epistemic ability. It is knowledge first epistemological in that, unlike traditional virtue reliabilism, it does not unpack the notion of epistemic ability as an ability to form true beliefs but as an ability to know, thus offering a definition of justified belief in terms of knowledge. In addition, the book aims to show that this version of knowledge first virtue reliabilism serves to provide novel solutions to a number of core epistemological problems and, as a result, compares favourably with alternative versions of virtue reliabilism both in the traditionalist and in the knowledge first camp. This is the first ever book-length development of knowledge first virtue reliabilism, and it will contribute to recent debates in these two growing areas of epistemology.

1 Process Reliabilism

This chapter’s main focus will be on process reliabilism (henceforth ‘PR’). In the reliabilist camp, PR is arguably the most prominent competitor of virtue reliabilism (‘VR’), the kind of view I favour. More specifically, I will first introduce the view and then look at some of the ups and downs of PR. The ups promise to also constitute motivations for VR. The downs are points at which VR has the opportunity to prove its superiority over PR.

Process Reliabilism in Outline

The core idea of PR is that justified beliefs are beliefs that are produced by processes that tend to produce beliefs with a favourable truth to falsity ratio. In other words, justified beliefs are beliefs produced by processes that reliably produce true beliefs (henceforth also ‘reliable processes’).¹

With the core idea in play, let’s turn to some important qualifications. Note that not all belief-forming processes are created equal. Some belief-forming processes, most notably perception, do not have beliefs among their inputs. For instance, your perceptual belief that you are looking at a book has no beliefs among its inputs. It is not as if you believe that you are looking at a book based on a prior belief that you have an experience as of looking at a book. Rather, the only inputs to the process are non-doxastic. They may comprise an experience as of a book, certain retinal stimuli or perhaps something entirely different. Other belief-forming processes do have beliefs among their inputs. The most prominent example here is inference. When you form a belief that q by inference from a belief that p and a belief that if p, then q, the inferential process that outputs your belief that q has your belief that p and your belief that if p, then q among its inputs. Following Goldman, I will call the former kinds of process ‘belief-independent’ and the latter ‘belief-dependent’.

While it makes sense to require belief-independent processes to be reliable in the sense that in order to deliver justification they must produce beliefs with a favourable truth to falsity ratio, the same does not hold for belief-dependent processes. To see this notice that belief-dependent processes need not be expected to produce beliefs with a favourable truth to falsity ratio when the input beliefs happen to be false. Moreover, they need not be expected to ensure that the input beliefs be true. Process reliabilists will do well, then, to weaken the reliability condition on belief-dependent processes. Rather than requiring that they produce beliefs with a favourable truth to falsity ratio unconditionally, these processes need only be conditionally reliable in the sense that they must produce belief with a favourable truth to falsity ratio given that the input beliefs are true.²

Finally since conditionally reliable processes can only transmit justification but not generate it, belief-dependent processes will produce justified beliefs only if the input beliefs are themselves justified. This gives us PR in Goldman’s classic formulation:

• Process Reliabilist Justification (PRJ). S’s belief that p is justified if and only if (i) it “results (‘immediately’) from a belief-independent process that is (unconditionally) reliable” or (ii) it “results (‘immediately’) from a belief-dependent process that is (at least) conditionally reliable, and . . . the beliefs (if any) on which this process operates in producing S’s belief that p . . . are themselves justified.”
  (Goldman 1979: 13–14)

Even this cannot be the whole story. After all, compatibly with a given belief’s being formed reliably, the justification of the belief can be defeated. For instance, you may have a reliably produced visual perceptual belief that the painting you are looking at is red. According to PRJ, your belief is justified. However, when you are told that you have been given a drug that makes green objects appear red to you, your perceptual belief will no longer be justified. The justification for your belief is defeated.

Goldman proposes a PR-friendly account of defeat along the following lines:

• Process Reliabilist Defeat (PRD). S’s belief in p is defeated if and only if “there is an alternative reliable or conditionally reliable process available to S which, had it been used by S in addition to the process actually used, would have resulted in S’s not believing p . . . ”
  (Goldman 1979: 20)

Whether a belief is genuinely justified depends on whether it is justified in the sense of PRJ and not defeated in the sense specified in PRD. While defeat is an important phenomenon in epistemology, for the purposes of this book, I would like to set it aside, unless otherwise noted. Accordingly, in what follows, I will use ‘PR’ to refer to process reliabilism’s account of justification minus its account of defeat, i.e. PRJ.

Motivations

Properties of Justified Belief

One initial benefit of PR is that justified belief turns out to have a number of properties it is widely believed to have. To begin with, PR allows for the non-factivity of justified belief. That is to say, it is possible to have justified false beliefs. To see how PR can achieve this, note that a process can be reliable—and thus satisfy PR’s demands—without being perfectly reliable. In fact, nearly all, if not all, of our belief-forming processes are not perfectly reliable. They are fallible. When their fallibility manifests itself, they produce false beliefs. However, since they are nonetheless reliable, according to PR, these false beliefs will turn out justified.

While justified belief is not factive, it is widely agreed that it is not entirely unconnected to truth. On the contrary, it is widely believed that justified belief is truth conducive in the sense that a justified belief is, in some sense to be specified, more likely to be true than not. One crucial advantage of PR is that it can make sense of the truth conduciveness of justified belief while holding on to non-factivity. To see this, note that beliefs produced by reliable processes are more likely true than beliefs that aren’t produced by reliable processes. More specifically, the conditional probability of the belief that p’s being true given that it has been produced by a reliable process is higher than the probability of the belief that p’s being true alone. In this way, PR does establish the desired connection between justification and truth.

Paradigm Cases

PR also makes correct predictions about paradigm cases of justified and unjustified beliefs. Consider paradigm cases of justified beliefs: they include beliefs produced by standard perceptual processes, introspection, memory and good reasoning. Now contrast this with paradigm cases of unjustified beliefs: they include beliefs produced by confused reasoning, guesswork and wishful thinking. What distinguishes beliefs in the first camp from beliefs in the second camp is that the processes producing the former are all reliable or conditionally reliable, while the ones producing the latter are all unreliable or conditionally unreliable. Given that, according to PR, a belief is justified if and only if it is produced by a reliable or, in the case of non-basic beliefs, conditionally reliable process, PR makes the right predictions for both paradigm cases of justified beliefs and of unjustified beliefs (Goldman 1979: 9–10).

Agrippa’s Trilemma

Another noteworthy benefit of PR is that the view promises to offer attractive solutions to a number of key problems in epistemology, including the problem of basic beliefs, the related regress problem and the problem of scepticism. Let’s look at the regress problem and basic beliefs first.

Agrippa’s trilemma famously describes three accounts of the structure of justification: (i) there is an infinite chain of justified beliefs (infinitism), (ii) the chain of justified beliefs circles back to the original belief (coherentism) or (iii) the chain of belief ends with basic beliefs that are not themselves justified by other beliefs (foundationalism).

While infinitism and coherentism have their adherents in the literature, it is fair to say that foundationalism is the most popular view.³ In fact, many take the trilemma to constitute an argument for foundationalism. Even if we agree that the trilemma makes a strong case for foundationalism, foundationalists still encounter a difficult problem. To see how it arises, note that not all basic beliefs are justified. Consider, for instance, an expert and a novice doctor who are currently inspecting an X-ray image. The expert can tell from the picture that the patient has a torn ligament, whereas the novice can’t. Suppose both expert and novice arrive at a true basic belief about the patient’s ailment. Say that the novice did so based on mere guesswork. In this case, the expert’s belief is justified, while the novice’s belief isn’t. While some basic beliefs are justified, other’s aren’t.

Given that this is so, it is incumbent on foundationalists to offer an account of when exactly a basic belief is justified and when it is unjustified. This account should enable us to explain why, in the above case, the expert’s belief is justified, whereas the novice’s isn’t. Reliabilism can offer an attractive answer here. Basic beliefs are justified if they are produced by (unconditionally) reliable processes and unjustified otherwise. The expert’s belief about the torn ligament is justified because it is produced by a reliable belief-forming process, the novice’s is unjustified because the belief-forming process that produced it is not reliable. In this way, PR offers an appealing account of basic justification and an attractive foundationalist solution to the regress problem (Kornblith 1980; Goldman 2008).

Scepticism

Let’s move on to the problem of scepticism, which is one of epistemology’s most venerable problems. A particularly virulent and perhaps the most unsettling version of the problem threatens to show that it is simply impossible for us to have much in the way of justified belief at all. Here is the argument:

• SK1. We cannot justifiably believe the denials of various sceptical hypotheses. For instance, you cannot justifiably believe that you are not the victim of a mad scientist who has taken your brain out of your skull, placed it in a vat with nutrients and hooked it up to a supercomputer that stimulates it in such a way as to produce deceptive experiences as if you were a normal human being with hands.
• SK2. If we cannot justifiably believe the denials of various sceptical hypotheses, then we cannot justifiably believe many ordinary empirical propositions. For instance, if you cannot justifiably believe that you are not a handless brain in a vat that is deceived into believing it has hands, then you cannot justifiably believe that you have hands.
• SK3. Hence, we cannot justifiably believe many ordinary empirical propositions. For instance, you cannot justifiably believe that you have hands.

PR allows for an attractive solution to this problem. According to PR, what matters to whether or not a given belief is justified is whether it is reliably produced. And whether or not our beliefs, including beliefs about whether we are radically deceived, are actually produced by reliable processes, it is surely possible that they are. In this way, reliabilists have excellent cause for resisting the key premise in the above sceptical argument, to wit, SK1, as well as its conclusion, SK3. In this way, PR can resist one prominent sceptical argument (Pritchard 2005).

Even if PR escapes the above sceptical argument, it might be thought that it does not serve to solve the sceptical problem fully adequately. After all, to establish an unsettling sceptical conclusion, the sceptic need not make so strong a claim as to say that it is impossible for us to have justified beliefs. Rather, it will be bad enough if he can show that, whether possible or not, we simply do not have much in the way of justified beliefs. And all that is needed for this is the weaker premise that we do not justifiably believe the denials of various sceptical hypotheses.

One issue the sceptic now faces is that, once he has conceded that, on PR, it is possible to justifiably believe both the denials of sceptical hypotheses and ordinary empirical propositions, then the weaker premise that we do not justifiably believe the denials of various sceptical hypotheses affords separate support. To make a plausible case for this, however, sceptics will now have to convince us that the world we inhabit is not one of the possible worlds in which the possibility of justified belief in denials of sceptical hypotheses and ordinary empirical propositions, which PR opens up, is actualised. In order to achieve this, they have to argue that the processes that lead us to beliefs in the denials of sceptical hypotheses are not reliable in the sense at issue in PR. However, sceptics have done precious little to achieve this. (In a way, this is unsurprising because the issue of whether the relevant belief-forming processes are reliable is just the kind of empirical matter that sceptics think we cannot know or have justified beliefs about.) So, while the weaker sceptical argument is in principle still available to sceptics, it comes to light that one of its key premises remains unsupported. As a result, the weaker argument will not be cogent against champions of PR.

These are some of the main considerations that move champions of PR to adopt their view. If PR can be made to work, it offers an attractive and powerful account of justified belief. That said, PR also faces a number of well-known problems. One major aim of this book is to offer an account of justified belief that retains the benefits of PR, while avoiding these problems. In what follows, then, I will outline these problems.

Problems

The New Evil Demon Problem

First, consider once more cases of radical deception. Here is one famous example:

• Envatted. You have become the victim of a mad scientist who has turned you into a brain in a vat (henceforth also ‘BIV’ for short) that is being fed deceptive experiences as if everything were normal. For instance, just now you appear to be waking up in your bed in the morning, appear to see that your alarm clock reads 7:45 and form the corresponding false beliefs.

The beliefs you form based on your experiences in this case are justified. Or, at any rate, they are no less justified than they were before you were turned into a BIV. The problem for PR is that since you are subject to radical deception, the processes that produce your beliefs are highly unreliable. You are a disembodied BIV. You are not lying and surely not in your bed. Your belief about the time is mistaken also. Moreover, it is not as if your beliefs about your bodily orientation and the time are false only on this occasion. No, whenever you form such beliefs, they are going to be false (or so we may assume). What’s worse, the problem is not restricted to beliefs about bodily orientation and time. Rather, your perceptual beliefs in general will be affected. As a result, the processes that produce these beliefs will do so with a highly unfavourable truth to falsity ratio. PR predicts, mistakenly, that the beliefs you form are not justified.⁴

Clairvoyance Cases

PR meets with a similar fate when it comes to cases like the following.

• Clairvoyant. As a result of exposure to radiation, you come to be gifted with a ‘clairvoyance’ belief-forming process that produces true beliefs about distant events with a high degree of reliability. You do not know that you are gifted with such a process. In fact, you have no evidence that there exists a process of this kind or that it should be so much as possible for it to exist. On the other hand, you also do not have evidence that such a process does not exist/is not possible. From your point of view, you spontaneously form beliefs about distant places. Just now, while being on vacation in a faraway country, your clairvoyance process has produced a belief that your house is on fire.

In this case, your belief is not justified. At the same time,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Process Reliabilism
• 2 Virtue Reliabilism: Justified Belief
• 3 Virtue Reliabilism: Knowledge
• 4 Knowledge First Virtue Reliabilism
• 5 The Competition
• Appendix: The Safety Dilemma
• Appendix: Lottery Cases
• Bibliography
• Index