Abstract
In a series of papers, Adam Leite has developed a novel view of justification tied to being able to responsibly justify a belief. Leite touts his view as (i) faithful to our ordinary practice of justifying beliefs, (ii) providing a novel response to an epistemological problem of the infinite regress, and (iii) resolving the “persistent interlocutor” problem. Though I find elements of Leite’s view of being able to justify a belief promising, I hold that there are several problems afflicting the overall picture of justification. In this paper, I argue that despite its ambitions, Leite’s view fails to solve the persistent interlocutor problem and does not avoid a vicious regress.
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Notes
For an argument that justification must be more than blameless believing, see Oliveira (2018).
Leite’s ontology of epistemic reasons contains beliefs. He allows, in his (2011), that experiences can be reasons as well. For purposes here, I will assume that only beliefs can be epistemic reasons. Permitting experiences as possible epistemic reasons would merely complicate some of the points I make.
This is a quote from Leite (2005: 402, 410). Leite calls this principle (3*). I have changed the title to be more informative. Notice that this principle only applies to cases where one’s reason is another belief. A more complicated principle would need to be provided for cases where one was appealing to an occurrent experience.
Cf. Leite (2008: 422). Leite actually formulates a more general version concerning any “positive epistemic status Ø.” The principled I formulated is just an instance of the more general one.
What follows is not universally accepted. However, as it is common ground between Leite and myself, I will not defend it.
At least, not epistemically inappropriate. It might be rude, unseemly, or redundant given a particular conversation. Like Leite, I believe we can distinguish between these ways of being inappropriate and a relevant epistemic sense. Further, I follow him in leaving these notions of appropriateness/correctness at an intuitive level and will not offer an analysis of it.
This is a quotation from (2005: 410). I have done some minor rewriting of referring terms.
Putting the point in terms familiar from Robert Audi’s work (1993: 118ff.), Leite’s has a foundationalist solution to the dialectic regress but not to the structural regress.
If you dispute this, add further details to the case to get one where it is more convincing to you that this belief was reasonably arrived at and there is no reason to doubt it.
Notice that I am here concerned with Leite’s account of justified beliefs not his account of assertions justified in a conversational context. Thus, the argument here does not require indexing to a conversation context. Further, since we are concerned with beliefs, and not assertions in a context, Leite’s claims about terminating claims and the like are not relevant.
See Huemer (2014) for a discussion of non-vicious regresses.
I have made this point at greater length in my (Perrine, Evidentialism, Knowledge, and Evidence Possession, under review).
This argument does not assumption foundationalism. It does assume that two things are co-possible—an agent has a finite set of justified beliefs and an agent can sequentially base those beliefs on adequate reasons. But that assumption does not imply foundationalism. For it is consistent with Leite’s view and Leite’s view implies that foundationalism is false.
The kind of ability under discussion is (crudely put) an ability that can be exercised reflectively, without gathering additional information about the world or suddenly gaining intellectual skills one lacks. I circumscribe this kind of ability at greater length in my (Perrine, Being Able to Justify a Belief, unpublished manuscript).
For what it is worth, I think Leite would concede the generating of such a regress, merely contesting its viciousness.
For a defense of the difference between a disposition to believe and a non-occurrent belief, see Audi (1994).
For some appropriately chosen p. After all, some of the time, we already have formed the relevant beliefs and dispositions to justify. We are here focusing on some limit case where that has yet to happen.
Notice that there may be an infinite number of supervenience bases even if an infinite number of dispositions supervene on the supervenience base of a single disposition. (For instance, if the dispositions that are at level 3, 5, 7, etc. all supervened upon the supervenience base of disposition 1, there may still be an infinite number of supervenience bases, those corresponding to the dispositions that are at levels 2, 4, 6, etc.) While it may be logically consistent to hold that (i) there is an infinite number of dispositions, and (ii) for any two in the sequence such that one follows the other, they have different supervenience bases; nevertheless, (iii) all of the dispositions supervene on a finite number of supervenience bases, I cannot see any reason for thinking this would be true.
For a different response to Turri’s objection, see Smith and Podlaskowski (2013: 126-127).
Recall that appealing to iterated “there is no reason to doubt” is Leite’s only suggestion for securing an infinite number of propositions that can serve as adequate reasons.
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Acknowledgements
For helpful feedback and conversation, I thank Dylan Black, Dave Fisher, Hao Hong, Tim Leisz, Nick Montgomery, Tim O’Connor, and Harrison Waldo. Special thanks to both Adam Leite, for a number of helpful conversations, and an anonymous reviewer, for very detailed comments.
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Perrine, T. Justification, Justifying, and Leite’s Localism. Acta Anal 33, 505–524 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-018-0365-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-018-0365-4