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Process Reliabilism and Its Classic Problems

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The Puzzle of Perceptual Justification

Part of the book series: Synthese Library ((SYLI,volume 377))

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Abstract

So far we have looked at versions of experientialism and versions of epistemological disjunctivism that agree in their analysis of perceptual justification as being importantly connected to evidence. Where experientialism takes perceptual beliefs to be evidentially justified by experience, epistemological disjunctivism takes perceptual beliefs to be evidentially justified by factive reasons of the form “I see that p”. Both experientialism and epistemological disjunctivism faced difficult challenges. Experientialism is confronted by a version of the Sellarsian dilemma: either the posited evidential relation between experience and belief is mysterious, or the distinctive justificatory force of experience is left unexplained. Epistemological disjunctivism makes perceptual justification too hard to come by, thereby precluding cognitively unsophisticated believers as well as demon-deceived subjects from having it.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Feldman and Conee recognize this and therefore also provide a notion of well-foundedness that incorporates a causal aspect in the form of a basing requirement (see Chap. 2).

  2. 2.

    It is of course difficult to spell this out precisely. Nevertheless, I think it’s clear that our intuitive idea of a reliable process is not connected to the actual frequency of successes of that process.

  3. 3.

    Note that the ‘immediately’ is probably meant to exclude tracing back beliefs to very distal causes.

  4. 4.

    Take sense-datum theorists like Price (1932) as an example, see Chap. 1

  5. 5.

    I will have more to say about this defeat-condition in the next chapter.

  6. 6.

    Cf. Goldman’s (1988) approach, and also see the discussion of blamelessness in Sect. 4.3.2.1

  7. 7.

    Note that Majors and Sawyer do provide a rationale for their home-world-reliabilism: because the content of perceptual states and beliefs is individuated with respect to the home world in which their subjects developed, the process of going from a certain perceptual state to a certain belief should be reliable in that same home world. Although this is a good start, such a strategy will not help with the Clairvoyance Problem of the next section, and it is also unable to respond to a Reversed Evil Demon scenario (for more on this, see Sect. 5.6.2).

  8. 8.

    Note that I will pursue a different version of explaining (away) the New Evil Demon Intuition in the next chapter.

  9. 9.

    In the passage left out Goldman refers to Goldman (1986, pp. 111–2) as the place where he introduces such a condition. But a general anti-defeater condition is already present, as we saw, in Goldman (1979).

  10. 10.

    I will pursue this solution further in the next chapter.

  11. 11.

    See Sect. 2.3 for more on the distinction between evidential and non-evidential justification.

  12. 12.

    Cognitive penetration of beliefs on perceptual experience would, on this account, have to be interpreted as a causal rather than evidential process (see e.g. Lyons (2011) and Siegel (2012) for discussion of cases of cognitive penetration). But it’s not really clear that this is problematic.

  13. 13.

    The example is from Susanna Siegel (2012).

  14. 14.

    Lyons is not adverse to dropping the etiological constraint if it turns out to be unprincipled, and suggests that our intuitions about clairvoyance-type cases might be mistaken (Lyons 2009, p. 164–5). I think it should be recognized that the etiological constraint is unprincipled, but I also think there is another way to accommodate our intuitions about clairvoyance-type cases. I will present this proposal in the next chapter.

  15. 15.

    James Beebe (2004) uses this variation on the Truetemp case to show that the original case is actually underdescribed and therefore leads to the mistaken conclusion that Truetemp is unjustified in his beliefs. I think this response focuses too much on the contingencies of human belief acquisition to work as a general response against Truetemp-style cases.

  16. 16.

    To be precise, Plantinga defends a view about warrant (the property that added to truth is sufficient for knowledge) and Graham a view about entitlement (which can be contrasted with the warrant one gets from reasons, called ‘justification’ in his terminology). I will simply discuss their views in terms of justification for ease of exposition. The points against these theories will still stand when translated to points about warrant and entitlement.

  17. 17.

    Although Plantinga (1996, p. 333) attempts to explain this case as one in which Truetemp’s beliefs are defeated, his specific explanation appeals to beliefs that are not really up to the job of defeat. For instance, Plantinga mentions that Truetemp might have a defeater in his belief that he is constructed like other people who all lack his precise temperature-reading ability. But surely all people with extraordinary belief-forming abilities have these kinds of beliefs, and we shouldn’t suppose that all these abilities are thereby incapable of leading to justified beliefs (think of, e.g., brilliant mathematicians or people with extraordinary eyesight).

  18. 18.

    Also see Simion (2016) for more difficulties with spelling out the exact requirements for Swampman’s having the right kind of consequence etiology.

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  1. Centre for Logic and Analytic Philosophy, Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Harmen Ghijsen

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Ghijsen, H. (2016). Process Reliabilism and Its Classic Problems. In: The Puzzle of Perceptual Justification. Synthese Library, vol 377. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30500-4_5

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