Scepticism in St Andrews
I’m just back from the Arche Scepticism Conference, and my photos are here. A very successful event with many fine talks. I was particularly interested in Crispin Wright’s offering, which tackled the topic of entitlement and included some engagement with the kind of problem that I was trying to press in this paper. That’s the problem of explaining how entitlement has anything to do with epistemic rationality (as opposed to, say, practical rationality). It’s a point Duncan Pritchard has also discussed.
As far as I could tell, Wright’s move was a version of the kind of dominance-involving strategy I discuss in section 3 onwards: accepting certain things is epistemically rational because doing so maximizes epistemic good.
The major problem with that strategy is that one could be visited by the truth fairy. She asks you to name your epistemic goods, then promises to maximize them all for you tomorrow if you will just accept p today. It’s pretty clear to me that her actions do nothing to make acceptance of p epistemically rational. (I think in the paper the truth fairy is some kind of goddess; her new name only occured to me while listening to Wright’s talk.)
Why not? In the paper I suggested that it has something to do with the irrelevance of maximizing epistemic goods with regard to propositions other than p. Now, I would like to say more about why that stuff is irrelevant. (I have an idea; maybe the subject of my next blog post.) And, in the light of some other remarks of Wright’s, I would like to say more about why we should think a defence of the epistemic rationality of accepting certain propositions is what’s required in response to sceptical arguments.
As I said in the talk, I think what’s wrong with the truth fairy is the same thing as is wrong with someone who betrays a friend, because she knows that if she does not, 10 other people will betray their friends. It’s very hard to shake the feeling in epistemic contexts that what we care about is respecting the evidence, not, say, maximising how much we respect the evidence.
Wright has a footnote in a JPhil paper from late last year in which he suggests what seems to be a quite different way of robbing the objection he’s not delivering *epistemic* warrant of its sting. It sounded really interesting, if in great need of further development (as Wright himself acknowledged in the fn). I was quite surprised to discover he’d changed tack so radically for the talk.
Carrie (and others),
It sounds like a fantastic conference. I’ve been thinking some about truth fairy sorts of cases lately. In particular, I’ve been thinking that these sorts of cases cause trouble for a certain argument of Rich Feldman’s where he seems to argue that we ought to be evidentialists because when we follow the evidence we maximize something of epistemic value. My worry about his suggestion as to how we might derive an account of the epistemic right/justified from a description of epistemic goods is basically that there’s nothing available to him to explain why epistemic assessment is local in the sense that the effects (e.g., believing more truths, getting better at fitting beliefs to the evidence, etc…) of believing p won’t justify that belief when that belief isn’t itself true, doesn’t fit the evidence, doesn’t constitute knowledge, etc…
If there’s something that needs to be read on this sort of subject, I’d love to know what it is. (I printed off a copy of your Synthese paper on entitlement last week and hope to get a chance to read it soon.)
Aidan: Interesting – what\’s the paper called?
Brian: I guess the main reason I don\’t want to say that in epistemic contexts we just care about evidence is that I think evidence and epistemic support come apart when we have a priori knowledge/justification. I think these are cases where experience is relied upon to secure knowledge/justification (via grounding of concepts), but there is no reliance on empirical evidence. (This is basically what I think gives me the wiggle room to describe this stuff as \’a priori\’ despite its being empirical).
Clayton: Sounds spot on about Feldman; if that\’s what he says he\’s got truth fairy trouble. Some of the things that might be useful to read, besides my Synthese paper obviously
, are the Percival and Foley items that I reference there.
Carrie, I’m sure I’ve mentioned this to you before, but the truth fairy objection (as Brian indicates above) looks like an objection to epistemic *act-*consequentialism. In order to defeat the consequentialist view altogether, you’d need it to work against epistemic rule-consequentialist.
The rule-consequentialist will say: sure, we have the (epistemic) intuition that it would be wrong to make the deal with the truth fairy. And a good thing too, because that evidentialist intuition will have good epistemic consequences in most situations which are actually likely (though not in the counterfactual situations where truth fairies predominate). Since we should select intuitions (internalised rules) which have the best expected epistemic consequences (rather than acts with the best consequences), the rule-consequentialist makes the right prediction about the truth fairy example.
PS :”truth fairy” is much better than “quirky goddess”.
Hi Daniel,
I’m not trying (and wasn’t trying in the Synthese paper) to defeat epistemic consequentialism per se (though as it happens I do suspect it’s at least unilluminating), only versions of it which could save Wright from the charge of giving a pragmatic rather than epistemic defence of accepting propositions we are merely entitled to.
Are you thinking there is a version of epistemic rule-consequentialism which could save Crispin while avoiding the truth fairy problem? Maybe the thought would be that the rule of trusting in Wrightian presuppositions (‘My senses are working pretty well’, etc.) is a good rule because it has the best expected epistemic consequences, whereas the rule of taking the deal with the truth fairy doesn’t?
Perhaps that would be a better option for Crispin. But imagine the uber-truth fairy setting up a regular state of affairs in which taking crazy propositions on trust whenever she asks you to leads to better overall epistemic consequences overall the next day. Wouldn’t that make the rule of taking the uber-truth fairy’s deals a good rule? Still doesn’t seem epistemically rational to do any such thing.
Carrie: The paper’s called ‘Internal-External’. Can’t remember the subtitle. The sketched line seemed to be along the lines of we could play down the epistemic/pragmatic rationality distinction with appeal to constitutive norms of belief.
Clayton: I was talking to someone a couple of weeks ago about Wright’s view and a variant of the seriously-ill subject who ought to believe she’ll recovered because it’s likely to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The point of the variant was that it didn’t help to add that staying alive maximized some epistemic value, or that the agent believed that it will maximize some epistemic value – these still aren’t genuinely epistemic reasons for her to form the belief. My copy of Conee & Feldman papers is much closer to you than to me right now so I can’t check, but I was under the distinct impression I had lifted the case straight from that volume. So if my memory is correct (which I can’t make any promises about), it might be worth looking again to see if C&F preempt this kind of worry and discuss it – I’d be surprised to learn they hadn’t.
Carrie, yes, that was the idea. I’m inclined to bite the bullet on the uber-truth fairy case (because I bite similar bullets in the analogous ethical cases). It would go like this: in the uber-truth fairy world, it would indeed be right to have the rule of dealing with the truth fairy. I wouldn’t say that that would be epistemically rational, because epistemic rationality seems to be the kind of thing that applies to acts rather than rules (I won’t rely on that point though). You suggest that it is counter-intuitive to endorse the deal-making rule for the uber-truth fairy world. The rule-consequentialist will say: sure, we have intuitions that deal-making is never epistemically rational, and we naturally infer that a deal-making rule is never ok. But this doesn’t suffice to show that the deal-making rule *is* never ok; perhaps it is best to have intuitions which give incorrect verdicts about what to do in distant possible worlds because these intuitions have excellent actual worlds consequences, and they are easier to internalise than intuitions which have equally good actual world consequences but don’t get things wrong concerning the distant worlds. The underlying idea here is that a good overall theory should explain our intuitions, but need not vindicate all of them, and to the extent that it aims to vindicate them it attaches more weight to intuitions concerning the actual and close worlds, since they are the worlds that our intuitions are designed to cope with.
Hey Aidan,
My memory isn’t all that reliable, but I recall the view that seems susceptible to the objection being defended at one point and the objection being put forward at a different point. I’ve been known to throw that particular volume across the room from time to time.