Chapter 2 Flashcards
What are the two major debates about justification
Internalism (Mentalist Evidentialism)
and
Externalism (Process Reliabilism)
What is a justifier?
Anything that helps make a belief state justified or unjustified (boosters, defeaters)
Coherentism restricts types of justifiers to
- Beliefs
Beliefs or other doxastic states (remember trepartite model) can be justification for core beliefs exclusively. (not by memories or experiences)
As such coherentism does NOT align with evidentialism as coherentism does not allow conferring to perception/experience (recall isolation objection)
Foundationalism restricts types of justifiers to
- Beliefs
- Experience
Allows justification to be conferred by experiences as well as by other beliefs
What do coherentism and foundationalism agree with when it comes down to justifiers?
Both agree that justifiers are mental states of some sort. In the end only the subjects’ mental states make the difference between as to whether the subject is justified/unjustified in their belief
current-time-slice assumption
Both foundationalism and coherentism believe that the mental states at the time T are the ones that affect the J-status of the subject S’s belief in P at T
Only the current mental state of S affects the justifiedness of their current beliefs. (Even if you at one point believed P, if your state is different now, then you may not believe it now)
(Synchronic reasoning)
How can we legitimately infer outward (to the external world), forward to the future and backward to the past from the indicated/limited dataset?
Skepticism states these questions must be answered by showing all or atleast most of one’s commonsense beliefs can be justified on the basis of one’s own current mental states
Doxastic justification
Beliefs held by the subject. It is the belief itself being judged, not the subject or the epistemic situation. Deals with whether a person’s beliefs are reasonable, well-founded, or justified.
Deals with the overall justification of a person’s beliefs or belief system, taking into account the interconnectedness of beliefs within a person’s cognitive framework.
Propositional Justification
Applies to the subject, epistemic situation, and the proposition itself. Applicable even if they dont believe in the proposition.
Basically claims the person has “appropriate” reason to belief P given their situation
Focuses on the justification of individual propositions or statements. It examines whether a specific claim or belief is justified.
Mentalist Evidentialism
Defended by Earl Conee and Richard Feldman. Represents the broader category of Internalism
Claims all positive/negative justifiers of a belief held by an epistemic agent at time t are “evidential states” (what evidence they have access to(mental states)) the subject is in at time t
What is the Mentalist Evidentialism definition of belief?
The appropriate or fitting attitude to adopt given the evidence (there must be some relation of “fitting” that stems from attitude of belief (doxastic attitude) and S’s total evidential states at time t)
According to Mentalist Evidentialism there are 3 kinds of fittingness
- Inferential (belief based)
- Inductive (explanatory)
And 3. Noninferential
Inferential fittingness (Belief based)
When there is a strong enough “support” relationship between contents of evidential states/beliefs and target hypothesis/belief/conclusion
Inductive (explanatory) fittingness
E1: Smoke means fire (from memory)
E2: Smoke found at location L
H: Fire is at L
E1, E2 = Believed propositions
H = Hypothesis
H is inductively supported by conjunction of E1 and E2.
Non-inferential fittingness
Fittingness with experience/perception (perceptions/sense).
propositional contents
refers to contents expressible by declarative sentences
Problems with non-inferential fittingness
Debated over because there’s the question of whether experiences even have propositional contents.
If vision and touch contradict one another, which do we believe and give greater evidential weight?
Can we always trust the clarity of our sensory experiences?
Does having a sensory “premonition” something bad will happen actually justify the person in believing so?
Problems with evidentialism
While E1 and E2 may lead one to believe H, it may not provide evidence for H. Beliefs shouldnt count as evidence unless they are justified beliefs
Evidentialists will often claim all beliefs are evidence. However evidential states are not sufficient for justification
Wellfoundedness (Evidentialist response to the problem)
Wellfoundedness refers to the epistemic condition in which a belief is considered justified and rational due to its grounding in a causally connected relationship with appropriate evidence. In this framework, a belief is deemed wellfounded when it is not only supported by evidence but also exhibits a causal connection to the cognitive processes or experiences that give rise to it. This departs from earlier perspectives that treated mental causation as isolated from matters of justification, emphasizing instead the importance of understanding the causal underpinnings of belief formation. Wellfounded beliefs are those that can be traced back to reliable cognitive processes and evidential support, acknowledging the crucial role of causation in the justification of beliefs.
Example of wellfoundedness: Imagine you have a belief that the temperature outside is 25 degrees Celsius. To assess the wellfoundedness of this belief, we can break it down:
Appropriate Evidence:
You have checked the reading on a reliable and well-calibrated thermometer.
Causal Connection:
Your belief is causally connected to the perceptual experience of reading the thermometer. Your cognitive process involves visually inspecting the thermometer, interpreting the numerical value, and forming a belief about the temperature based on this observation.
Reliability of Cognitive Process:
The cognitive process involved in reading the thermometer is generally reliable under normal conditions, assuming the thermometer is functioning correctly.
Another problem of evidentialism
It is not required that a persons belief has inferential nor noninferential evidence to be justified. (Maybe the source of the information is correct but they simply forgot the source). This would mean that a belief “fitting” is not a necessary condition for the belief being justified
The problem of evidence and evidentialism
Evidentialism ironically gives no clear examples of what they consider to be “evidence”.
In part they dont because they
- dont want a definition that goes beyond only mental states as justifiers and
- they dont want a circular argument where they are arguing justification is based on evidence but justification is in the definition of evidence
Justification it then seems is not just a matter of being in the right states, but it matters how they are used to contribute to belief, the pRocess is important
Process reliabilism
Represents the broader category of externalism in the text.
It is another theory of what makes beliefs “justified”.
Justification is formed by reliable processes, a reliable process is a process that has a tendency to produce beliefs that are usually true.
“trash in, trash out” within reliabilism
If you start with bad beliefs it can lead to creating more wrong beliefs
P: Moon is made of cheese
C: If man moon made of cheese, then maybe the sun is made of cheese.
Note if you start with justified beliefs and use a reliable process then you are much more likely to form justifiable beliefs
There are two types of processes within reliabilism, what are they?
- Takes no input beliefs, only generates output beliefs. As such only needs to be unconditionally reliable. This means that the belief is justified if it is created under an unconditionally reliable process. This implies that the process tends to produce true beliefs regardless of the specific situation or context (as its not based on input, but simply on the amount of true propositions it generates). Eg.) maybe beliefs formed on perception or feeling?
- Takes input beliefs and outputs beliefs. This needs to be conditionally reliable. Conditionally reliable meaning that the process should have a high proportion of true outputs in which the inputs are justified, not necessarily true)
What is principle R?
A belief B (at time t) is justified if and only if (at t) is the output of a series of belief-forming or belief-retaining processes each of which is either unconditionally or conditionally reliable, and where the conditionally reliable processes in the series are applied to outputs of previous members of the series
Does principle R require co-present evidence for beliefs? (Are past beliefs justified under principle R?)
Yes! Beliefs are justified as long as when they were originally created it was done using a reliable process. If that was done, then it doesn’t matter under principle R if you forgot the original source of the belief or the context, just that the belief was created using a reliable process is enough be justified and as such does not require co-present evidence for beliefs
Under process reliabilism, what is a justifier?
The belief-forming and belief-retaining processes themselves are the justifiers! (J-factors). As such the psychological processes used in creating/retaining beliefs are critical to their J-status.
They are not in of themselves evidence, but can be used for creating justification for the beliefs they create (if reliable -> creates justification for belief)
Theyre justifiers simply because they are relevant to the j-status of the beliefs they create (which is all you really need to be a justifier)
How does process reliabilism handle propositional justification
If someone has not directly counted if a mountain has 3 peaks but believes so anyways because he saw the mountain he will not be justified under principle R as the proposition has no causal history.
Instead we should ask whether the subject is in mental states that could be used for a reliable process and if it would output a belief in the designated proposition
