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Experience and the Space of Reasons: The Problem of Non-Doxastic Justification

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Abstract

It is not difficult to make sense of the idea that beliefs may derive their justification from other beliefs. Difficulties surface when, as in certain epistemological theories, one appeals to sensory experiences to give an account of the structure of justification. This gives rise to the so-called problem of ‘nondoxastic justification’, namely, the problem of seeing how sensory experiences can confer justification on the beliefs they give rise to. In this paper, I begin by criticizing a number of theories that are currently on offer. Finding them all wanting, I shall then offer a diagnosis of why they fail while gesturing towards a promising way of resolving the dispute. It will be argued that what makes the problem of nondoxastic justification a hard one is the difficulty of striking the right balance between a notion of normative justification that is content-sensitive and truth conducive and the possibility of error while acknowledging the fact that our experiences can justify our beliefs in cases we are hallucinating.

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Notes

  1. Davidson (1986, p. 310). See also BonJour (1985) and Rorty (1980).

  2. Davidson (1986, p.311).

  3. Van Cleve (1985).

  4. Ibid., p. 101.

  5. See, for example, Kim (1993, p. xi).

  6. See, for example, various essays in Gunther (2003).

  7. McDowell (1994, pp. 48–49).

  8. Ibid., p. 7.

  9. Ibid., p. 165.

  10. Ibid., p. 53.

  11. Ibid., p. 165.

  12. Here, I shall ignore the controversial issue of the psychological reality of such beliefs.

  13. Brewer (1999)

  14. Ibid., pp. 50–51.

  15. Ibid., p. 50.

  16. Ibid., p. 56 (my emphasis).

  17. Ibid., p. 75.

  18. Ibid., pp. 76–77.

  19. Ibid., p. 78.

  20. Ibid., p. 33.

  21. Ibid., pp. 204–205.

  22. Ibid., p. 206.

  23. Ibid., p. 330.

  24. Brewer (2001, p. 451).

  25. In his response to Fumerton (2001), Brewer further elaborates his position by denying that we are appeared to in the same way in a veridical perception and a qualitatively identical hallucination. He argues that a person can tell the difference between perception and hallucination if and only if “perceiving that p puts her in a position to know that her experience that p is not a hallucination” (Brewer, p. 451). This argument, however, hinges on the controversial premise that when we grasp the content of our experience, we also recognize our “epistemic openness to the world”, that is, we recognize that our entertaining that content is a response to how things actually are (independently of us). But why does one’s representing an object as being mind-independent provide a reason for believing that it actually exists independently of mind? Moreover, as Markie (2005) points out, the recognition involved is itself an intentional attitude. Either it has no epistemic dimension in which case it cannot turn perceptual experience into a reason or it does possess some epistemic status in which case one needs a non-circular account of how it acquires such a status.

  26. Millar (1991).

  27. Heck (2000, p. 509).

  28. Ibid.

  29. Ibid., p. 511.

  30. Ibid., p. 512.

  31. Heck’s invoking of appearance judgments also renders his account susceptible to the objection I raised earlier against McDowell’s account for now such judgments might be thought to be better placed to play the role of justifiers.

  32. Moser (1991).

  33. See Vahid (2001) for a survey and analysis of the problems involved.

  34. Moser (1991, p. 98).

  35. Ibid.

  36. Reynolds (1991).

  37. Ibid., p. 285.

  38. Ibid., p. 283.

  39. Marr (1982).

  40. Reynolds (1991, p. 288).

  41. Pollock (1986).

  42. Reynolds (1991, p. 274).

  43. A somewhat similar account to Reynolds’ has been recently proposed by Markie (2004, 2006) according to which a particular perceptual experience confers justification on a belief as a result of our having learned to identify objects and their characteristics by experiences of that phenomenological sort. On this account, as in Reynolds’, knowing how to do something (e.g., reasoning or riding a bike) consists in introducing norms that describe certain goal-directed behaviors. Markie’s proposal is subtle and seems to escape some of the objections that were leveled against Reynolds’ account, in particular, the problem concerning the link between justification and truth. But there is still a worry here. Unlike others, Markie rightly recognizes that an adequate account of nondoxastic justification should explain why perceptual experience justifies beliefs in normal as well as demon world scenarios. But Markie goes on to distinguish three ways in which a perceptual belief might be epistemically appropriate (justified) and takes the beliefs of the demon-worlders to be justified in an ‘undefeated evidence’ (EU), rather than a ‘reliably based’ (R), sense. On both conceptions one has internalized appropriate epistemic norms but only in R’s sense does one’s evidence also make the truth of belief objectively likely. This seems to suggest that EU (which Markie takes to be “the most basic” form of epistemic appropriateness) expresses something like a deontological conception of justification while R is a truth conducive sense. (This strategy resembles Goldman’s distinction between weak and strong justification in order to account for the justification of the beliefs of the demon-worlders (1988).) Given the widely held view that deontological justification is not truth conducive, we have, once again, the problem of the nature of the link between justification and truth resurfacing at a different level. I do not have space to thoroughly examine Markie’s account which seems to be on the right track. I thank a referee of this journal for drawing my attention to Markie’s papers.

  44. Reynolds (1991, p. 274).

  45. Gibbard (1994).

  46. Thanks are due to a referee of this journal for pressing this point on me.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Alex Byrne, Ernest Sosa and a referee of this journal for comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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Correspondence to Hamid Vahid.

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Vahid, H. Experience and the Space of Reasons: The Problem of Non-Doxastic Justification. Erkenn 69, 295–313 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-008-9121-2

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