Abstract
An epistemologist who treats one’s having a justified belief that p as a requirement for one’s knowing that p typically maintains that at least sometimes that justified status arises in virtue of (possessing/appreciating/deploying) reasons for which one believes that p. It continues to be controversial whether there must be a causal aspect of the relationship—call it the epistemic basing relationship—between (possessing/appreciating/deploying) those reasons and believing that p. Previous causal accounts of epistemic basing have overlooked a candidate for such a causal aspect that I shall explore. I shall argue that by requiring this aspect we avoid certain puzzles faced by prior accounts formulated in terms of causes, including Peter D. Klein’s worry that those accounts run an empirical risk of allowing general skepticism, since we still understand so little about what causes believing. I shall also consider how the requirement that I propose relates to several well-known attempts by Keith Lehrer to construct counterexamples to various conditions of basing that mention causation. My goal is not to present a full analysis of epistemic basing but only to highlight the merits of one candidate for a necessary condition that specifies a causal aspect of it, that is, an aspect whose description refers at some point to causation.
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Earlier, E. H. Madden and Peter H. Hare (1971) maintained that we sometimes perceive causation, and they referenced the work of the psychologist Albert Michotte (1963). Harré and Madden point out (Harré and Madden 1975, 49, 60, 113; cf. 68n13) that ‘radical empiricists’ such as Sterling P. Lamprecht (1967) had defended the position.
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A reason for employing the apparent double negative will be explained below.
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Anscombe may be regarding a privation as a cause when she discusses “causalities of various kinds” that may contribute to a traveler’s arriving (or not arriving) at his destination, and writes, “The causalities will for example include negations. Because this man did not know this language, he went this way rather than that…” (Anscombe 1983, 190).
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These standards presumably require that the interaction does not involve what philosophers call wayward or deviant causal chains. I have taken a stab at characterizing such chains in Shope (1999).
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A presumption of opposing forces is involved in Kant ’s examples of simultaneous causes, which Jay Rosenberg (1998) speaks of as sustaining causes.
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If we imagine a slave who never plans to run away, or a horse that never tries to get outside the barn, it seems proper to say that the tether or shut door will prevent escape if an attempt is made, but not that they are preventing escape.
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There are, in addition to examples that I shall discuss, a wide variety of situations that illustrate Anscombe ’s point. Consider, for instance, relevant contexts for the following comments: ‘The roughness of the road was enough to set off the nitroglycerine, so we were lucky on the drive;’ ‘What you just said is enough to make me angry, but I’m controlling my temper;’ ‘You’re smart enough to have realized it, so why didn’t you?’ and ‘In that academy, most of the behavior of the students is enough to get them expelled, but the administration is so clueless that it isn’t aware of what is going on.’
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Compare Haldane’s example concerning the window, where the domain throughout which the wall materials extend is specifiable without making statements about the spatial domain that is the hole.
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Understanding the horse examples requires considering a privation that consists in the barn’s having the characteristic of possessing contents none of which is the horse. Again, when engaging in causal selection and judging x to be (one of) the cause(s) of y, we imagine a specific causal contrast situation as a privation —in Haldane’s sense—where the situation is individuated as involving such-and-such a variety of details and has the characteristic of possessing contents none of which in the course of its development are x or y.
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The wording of C employs the phrase, ‘a presence of a privation,’ rather than merely ‘a privation,’ in order to discourage an impression that in every instance satisfying C one’s possession of the reasons postdates one’s believing that p. Such an impression would construe C as unfulfilled in type 1 cases.
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I am tempted to construe satisfaction of condition C as involving a causal power to prevent the obtaining of a privation of the belief that h, a power belonging to one’s having the relevant reasons, and to consider satisfaction of C as involving what Harré and Madden call a state of readiness to manifest such a power (cf. Shope 1988). Nonetheless, I anticipate Klein ’s raising the concern that taking a stand on those issues involves risky empirical speculations. Although people do understand mechanics sufficiently to tell whether a lock on the barn door is in a state of readiness to prevent the horse’s getting out, it is unclear what similar information we have concerning the mental nexus involved in epistemic basing.
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This is the extent to which I take account of the view, of Keith Allen Korcz (2015, 9), that when seeking to specify conditions of epistemic basing, it would be odd to suppose that “the conscious evaluation and acceptance of the evidential import of a potential reason for a belief was, in principle, completely irrelevant to whether the belief was based on the reason.” Even though the statement of condition C does not mention such evaluation and acceptance, spelling out the ways of applying condition C to some examples will mention it.
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In clarifying this matter in the second edition, Lehrer speaks of the usefulness of considering belief as accompanying acceptance, adding, “but we shall recall that it is acceptance aimed at truth that is genuinely required for knowledge, not the belief that accompanies it” (Lehrer 2000, 14; cf. 124–125).
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It is not one of my present goals to explore the intricacies of Lehrer ’s views concerning what he calls acceptance, so I leave open whether his account does permit an acceptance variant of this case. Perhaps in his terminology, any change in what counts as a basis for Supp’s accepting the existence of the phenomenon by definition involves a new instance of accepting it, replacing the prior instance, so that when her supplementary basis is acquired, there exist two, mutually independent, causes of the new instance of the relevant acceptance state, whether or not the latter did possess existential inertia.
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Beliefs fail to satisfy the condition if they are psychologically insulated from relevant evidence in a way that renders it really impossible that were a privation of such a belief to be prevented, it would have been by evidence or information encountered by the person. This still leaves open the possibility of such a “teflon” belief’s “changing, or even being given up upon the receipt of some information unrelated to the content of the belief” (Lipson and Savitt 1993, 57n3).
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Shope, R.K. (2019). A Causal Aspect of Epistemic Basing. In: Fitelson, B., Borges, R., Braden, C. (eds) Themes from Klein. Synthese Library, vol 404. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04522-7_7
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