Epistemology

Ernest Sosa

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781400883059
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

One of the world's leading epistemologists provides a sophisticated, revisionist introduction to the subject In this concise book, one of the world's leading epistemologists provides a sophisticated, revisionist introduction to the problem of knowledge in Western philosophy. Modern and contemporary accounts of epistemology tend to focus on limited questions of knowledge and skepticism, such as how we can know the external world, other minds, the past through memory, the future through induction, or the world's depth and structure through inference. This book steps back for a better view of the more general issues posed by the ancient Greek Pyrrhonists. Returning to and illuminating this older, broader epistemological tradition, Ernest Sosa develops an original account of the subject, giving it substance not with Cartesian theology but with science and common sense.Descartes is a part of this ancient tradition, but he goes beyond it by considering not just whether knowledge is possible at all but also how we can properly attain it. In Cartesian epistemology, Sosa finds a virtue-theoretic account, one that he extends beyond the Cartesian context. Once epistemology is viewed in this light, many of its problems can be solved or fall away.The result is an important reevaluation of epistemology that will be essential reading for students and teachers.

CHAPTER ONE

Descartes’s Pyrrhonian Virtue Epistemology

A. THE METHOD OF DOUBT AND ITS OBJECTIVES

What is Descartes up to in the Meditations? On one level at least, he is not engaged in a project of determining what he should believe, what it would be reasonable for him to believe. Consider, for example, the following two passages:

[When] it is a question of organizing our life, it would, of course, be foolish not to trust the senses, and the skeptics who neglected human affairs to the point where friends had to stop them falling off precipices deserved to be laughed at. Hence I pointed out in one passage that no sane person ever seriously doubts such things. But when our inquiry concerns what can be known with complete certainty by the human intellect, it is quite unreasonable to refuse to reject these things in all seriousness as doubtful and even as false; the purpose here is to come to recognize that certain other things which cannot be rejected in this way are thereby more certain and in reality better known to us.¹

My habitual opinions keep coming back, and, despite my wishes, they capture my belief, which is as it were bound over to them as a result of long occupation and the law of custom. I shall never get out of the habit of confidently assenting to these opinions, so long as I suppose them to be what in fact they are, namely highly probable opinions—opinions which, despite the fact that they are in a sense doubtful, as has just been shown, it is still much more reasonable to believe than to deny. In view of this, I think it will be a good plan to turn my will in completely the opposite direction and deceive myself, by pretending for a time that these former opinions are utterly false and imaginary. (First Meditation, CSM II: 15; emphasis added)

If we take Descartes at his word, then, no one sane ever seriously doubts his habitual opinions, which are much more reasonably believed than denied.

What else might be involved in the Cartesian method of radical doubt beyond pretending our customary opinions to be doubtful and even false? Let us examine the method more closely. Here, first, is a crucial passage:

[Those] who have never philosophized correctly have various opinions in their minds which they have begun to store up since childhood, and which they therefore have reason to believe may in many cases be false. They then attempt to separate the false beliefs from the others, so as to prevent their contaminating the rest and making the whole lot uncertain. Now the best way they can accomplish this is to reject all their beliefs together in one go, as if they were all uncertain and false. They can then go over each belief in turn and re-adopt only those which they recognize to be true and indubitable. Thus I was right to begin by rejecting all my beliefs. (Replies to the Seventh Set of Objections, CSM II: 324)

Near this passage Descartes invokes the famous apple-basket metaphor. Upon discovering some rot in one’s basket, what is one to do? His answer: dump out all the apples and readmit only those that pass inspection. Only thus can we be sure that no rot will continue to spread undetected.

The apples are beliefs or opinions, among them old familiar ones, stored since childhood. Once the beliefs in our basket are found to contain the rot of error, we are to dump them all. But how do we understand this metaphor? What is it to “remove” a belief from the basket? What is it to reject a belief?

In a familiar view, to reject a belief is to give it up, to withhold or suspend judgment on its content.² In any case, it would be to replace believing with not-believing. The ground by the empty basket would then be free of believings, because in the present view to dump a believing is to destroy it. Strewn there would be found believables, contents earlier believed. Concerning all of those contents, the subject would now be suspending judgment. That is the view.

That view is highly problematic for several reasons. For one thing, rejecting all our beliefs that way would entail believing nothing, replacing belief universally with unbelief. What would that require? Could one bring up each content separately, replacing acceptance of it with suspension? Surely not. The contents would need to be handled in manageable clusters, for collective suspension in one fell swoop.

Suppose, accordingly, that we identify the beliefs in question indirectly, as for example “beliefs I hold” or “old and customary opinions learned since childhood.” If we pick them out only so generally, however, no mental operation available to us would seem to result in the desired universal suspension. It is doubtful that we can suspend judgment de re on each content thus picked out—just as, say, “long-held opinions”—simply by taking it de dicto that these contents are all doubtful or supposing that they are all false.

And there is a further reason why Descartes’s “rejection” cannot plausibly amount to suspension or withholding. Recall how the process is supposed to go. The beliefs dumped out of the basket must undergo inspection. Only those that pass will be readmitted. But the relevant inspection will have to involve some process of reasoning. It is through such reasoning that we will determine whether a certain condition is satisfied, which will earn that belief readmission. And how could we possibly perform any such reasoning while deprived of beliefs? Note well: the reasoning in question cannot be just conditional. The desired conclusion is that the belief under examination passes inspection. Thus would we obtain the assertoric basis for a practical syllogism that warrants readmission. An asserted conclusion (an asserted categorical, not something unasserted or conditional) requires asserted premises, however, explicit or implicit. That is to say, we can attain epistemic status for such an assertoric conclusion through a bit of reasoning only if our reasoning has premises with such assertoric status of their own.

We have found three weighty reasons to think that Descartes has no intention of “rejecting” his beliefs by abandoning them all, replacing the attitude of belief with that of suspension. First, we have seen his outright statement that no one sane would ever do such a thing. Second, doing so de re, for each belief in turn, lies beyond our psychological capabilities. Third, if he were to accomplish such universal suspension, he would necessarily block his own project! His project requires inspecting the “rejected” beliefs so as to determine whether they deserve readmission. And this inspection, this determination, must be done through reasoning that, in turn, would seem to require beliefs.

Given how problematic it is to understand rejection as abandonment, let us set aside that view of rejection and explore an alternative.

Descartes’s project is, I submit, on the second order. Taking a belief out of the basket is declining to endorse it epistemically in a certain way. (This is the “rejection” that he performs while “pretending” that the rejected beliefs are false. This pretense is itself on the second order; it picks out clusters of beliefs under a certain description and under that description pretends, about them generally, that they are false.) Whether one had earlier endorsed them or not, one now declines to do so. But what is the relevant way in which Descartes declines to endorse his “rejected” beliefs? Recall the special importance of the status of certainty, whereby one is in no doubt whatsoever that one’s belief is true. Here is perhaps the key to how we should understand endorsement. Proper Cartesian endorsement of a belief requires one to have no reason, not the slightest, for any doubt about its truth. This is, then, the proper endorsement of a belief as doubtless true.

Cartesian rejection, when proper, would thus involve forbearing from such endorsement: that is, from endorsement of a belief as doubtless true, not just as true. To dump a belief from one’s basket of beliefs is to forbear from thus endorsing it. One may or may not have previously endorsed it. One may have failed to so much as consider whether to endorse it. In any case, the belief is dumped when one now forbears to endorse it. And now the dumping of a belief, its relevant “rejection,” seems compatible with undiminished confidence in its content. So we would surmount two of the three key problems encountered earlier. If our account is correct, Descartes need not reduce his confidence in order to engage in his project of Cartesian doubt. Nor must he be deprived of beliefs in terms of which to conduct the inspection. On our account, Descartes retains sufficient confidence on the first order that his first-order beliefs can all remain in place, even when on the second order he forbears consciously endorsing those first-order beliefs. By retaining his first-order action-guiding animal confidence, he can sanely go on about his everyday business, adroitly avoiding deadly jumps off high cliffs, and he can continue to engage in first-order reasoning in terms of those retained beliefs.

However, we still face the third of our problems. How can Descartes access his beliefs individually de re so as to reject (forbear endorsing) them or, eventually, so as to endorse them? The answer is that his project requires no such distributed access to his beliefs separately, one by one. He explicitly notes how hopeless that would be.³ The relevant rejection and the correlative endorsement must be under a description, de dicto. We must be able to pick out beliefs in clusters so as to reject them or endorse them as “those that satisfy condition C” for some given condition. Thus, for example, if we find that doubt inevitably clouds any belief based (directly or indirectly) on perception, then we may be able to dump all “beliefs based essentially on perception” by forbearing to endorse them under that description. That is perhaps how the project is supposed to go. But we must next consider a further twist.

B. CREDENCE VERSUS JUDGMENT

Recall Descartes’s insistence that no one ever seriously doubts the deliverances of the senses and that his habitual opinions are highly probable opinions that it is much more reasonable to affirm than to deny. But how, then, could he ever “reject” such opinions as doubtful, or false, even when engaged in the project of determining the extent of possible human certainty?

Well, there is something he clearly can do. He can “feign” anything he likes while still harboring his old and customary opinions with undiminished assurance. In the second passage considered above (from Meditation One), feigning is what he explicitly proposes to do (from the Latin fingem, French feignant). Moreover, he can still use his belief that not-p in reasoning he performs even while making believe (feigning) that p. Thus, at the movie theater I can appropriately forbear shouting a warning even when I make believe that I see someone about to be hit over the head from behind. Here I seem to rely through implicit reasoning on an assumption that no one within earshot really needs any such warning. And this action-guiding reasoning can be perfectly appropriate despite my concurrent feigning of the contrary. Make-belief is one thing, real belief quite another.

That does, however, bring up a further question. Why should Descartes have thought that pretending that not-p would help him resist the temptation to continue to believe that p while endorsing one’s belief? It helps here to distinguish between two attitudes that might be called “belief.” One is an implicit confidence that suffices to guide our action, including action on practical options, such as whether to shout a warning. The other is an act of judgment made freely and voluntarily or a disposition to so judge upon considering the relevant question. In his philosophical meditation, Descartes is clearly concerned with the second of these. He emphatically distinguishes two faculties. There is first a faculty of understanding, whose deliverances, received passively, are “perceptions” with some degree of clarity and distinctness. And there is second a faculty of judgment based on the subject’s free will.

A possible explanation thus opens up as to why Descartes may have thought that by pretending that p one might be helped to avoid believing that not-p. At the theater one might feign (through visual imagination) that someone is about to be hit with a hatchet. Surely one would not then also freely judge that no-one is about to be hit. In particular, one is unlikely to judge consciously that the scene before one is unreal. The “suspension of disbelief” involved in such imagination tends to block one’s consciously disbelieving by affirming the opposite of what one imagines (the two of which may even fail to cohere).

Note, however, that this can leave one’s underlying subconscious credence still in place with undiminished confidence. One certainly does not lose one’s confidence that one is sitting in a darkened theater viewing a screen (and not seeing a gory murder instead). Despite making it harder to judge that not-p, moreover, pretending that p does not constitute an insurmountable obstacle. That might thus be how Descartes thought pretense would help in his project. It would counteract our normal automatic tendency to judge in line with our stored credences, but it would not make it impossible for us to so judge. However, we would now be more free to judge in line with true reason and not just custom.

Accordingly, we can also see how our everyday guiding attitudes, such as the appearances of the Pyrrhonists, can remain in place below the surface of consciousness and do their guiding, even if one forbears endorsing them, and also suspends conscious assent. One can sustain highly confident credence that p even while suspending any conscious endorsement of that attitude, and even while suspending any correlated conscious judgment that p.

Consider the Cartesian “perceptions” that can have various degrees of clarity and distinctness. These are not just sensory perceptions. Indeed, the most clear and distinct of them include a priori intuitions involving rational rather than sensory awareness. These are rather seemings, including not only sensory seemings but also a priori seemings. Moreover, we should focus not just on initial seemings that might enter ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface for Readers and Instructors
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One: Descartes’s Pyrrhonian Virtue Epistemology
• Chapter Two: Dream Skepticism
• Chapter Three: Regress Skepticism
• Chapter Four: Knowledge: What It Is and How We Might Have It
• Chapter Five: Knowledge as Action
• Chapter Six: Varieties and Levels of Knowledge
• Chapter Seven: The Value of Human Knowledge
• Chapter Eight: Mind-World Relations: Action, Perception, Knowledge
• Chapter Nine: Two Forms of Virtue Epistemology
• Chapter Ten: Knowledge, Time, and Negligence
• Chapter Eleven: Virtue Theory against Situationism
• Chapter Twelve: Virtue Epistemology and a Theory of Competence
• Chapter Thirteen: Knowledge and Justification
• Further Reading
• Index