Abstract
In the last chapter we saw that process reliabilism was confronted with several problems, at the foremost of which were the lack of a good answer to the New Evil Demon Problem and the Clairvoyance Problem. If reliability is indeed necessary and sufficient for the justification of a specific class of beliefs, then subjects misled by an evil demon are unjustified in their perceptual beliefs, while subjects forming beliefs on the basis of an extravagant but possibly reliable process, such as blindsight or clairvoyance, are justified in their beliefs. Given that we have the intuition that this consequence is false, it seems that process reliabilism must also be false. Process reliabilism is thus in need of a good way to accommodate the New Evil Demon Intuition and the Blindsight (and Clairvoyance) Intuition.
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Notes
- 1.
Note that Graham (2012, p. 455) also mentions this type of response to the Clairvoyance Problem.
- 2.
The phenomenon of known hallucination might be more difficult to deal with, although it’s not obvious that hallucinatory subjects do not believe that they are perceiving in the relevant sense if they know that they are hallucinating. But note that I am here only presenting a suggestion to the metaphysical question of the phenomenal distinctness of perception; my epistemic position does not commit me to holding that there is a distinctive phenomenal property of experience that has to do with higher-order beliefs.
- 3.
Also see Schwitzgebel (2012) for more on the idea that introspection consists of a plurality of processes, although Schwitzgebel is also notoriously skeptical about the reliability of these processes.
- 4.
Note that Bob Beddor (2015, pp. 155–6) also uses these problems with the availability of alternative cognitive mechanisms to argue against the idea that having such available mechanisms is necessary for defeat.
- 5.
This suggestion is made in slightly different terms of developmentally moderating processes by Bedke (2010, p. 7).
- 6.
Note that this type of defeat clause will also circumvent the counterexample to Bergmann’s theory provided in Johnson (2011), as it only deems the proper functioning of defeater systems relevant if they would have prevented a belief from occurring had they been functioning properly.
- 7.
Colin Ruloff (2000) also argues that an appeal to defeat can protect Plantinga’s proper functionalism from some of BonJour’s counterexamples. However, to account for the precise way in which defeat occurs Ruloff stresses too much (as Plantinga sometimes does (Plantinga 1996, p. 377)) that we already believe that there can be no such thing as clairvoyance. My account is able to explain how defeat arises without supposing that we have any beliefs of this sort.
- 8.
Note that the way in which I propose that defeat occurs for Norman is importantly different from the way in which defeat occurs in BonJour’s other clairvoyant cases (BonJour 1985, pp. 38–40). The other clairvoyants all believe themselves to have a faculty of clairvoyance, even though they all have some evidence that no such faculty is possible or reliable. Norman, in contrast, does not have any evidence of the sort, and also does not believe himself to have a clairvoyant faculty. Yet still his clairvoyant beliefs are defeated, I propose, because of higher-order mechanisms that should have kept him from trusting the ‘strange’ incoming information.
- 9.
Note that his later beliefs will then also become justified, as his monitoring mechanisms would then presumably accept his later beliefs as stemming from a trustworthy source due to their good track record.
- 10.
I limit myself here to a very brief discussion of the distinction between animal and reflective knowledge, although of course much more could be said about Sosa’s theory in general. Note also that Sosa has developed his views further in ways that are not crucial for the current discussion (Sosa 2011, 2015).
- 11.
- 12.
Of course this depends on how the demon is intervening precisely. But I think that the scenario implicitly assumes that the demon is not changing any of the subject’s psychological processes, it’s just stimulating his sensory faculties in a way that is normally done by external stimuli from the world.
- 13.
Note that Graham (2012, p. 455) also mentions that demon victims can provide justifications for their beliefs, but he does not explain how these justifications could depend on further justified beliefs.
- 14.
- 15.
See the previous chapter, Sect. 5.3.1 for more on this notion of conditional justification.
- 16.
I have presented a way in which higher-order beliefs could influence perceptual phenomenology in Sect. 6.3.1. A more radical position is provided by so-called higher-order theories of consciousness, according to which consciousness has to do with a subject’s higher-order capabilities (e.g., higher-order perception (HOP) of one’s first-order states or higher-order thought (HOT) about one’s first-order states) (Gennaro 2004).
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Ghijsen, H. (2016). A Higher-Order Rejoinder for Reliabilism. In: The Puzzle of Perceptual Justification. Synthese Library, vol 377. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30500-4_6
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