Abstract
To say that evidence is normative is to say that what evidence one possesses, and how this evidence relates to any proposition, determines which attitude among believing, disbelieving and withholding one ought to take toward this proposition if one deliberates about whether to believe it. It has been suggested by McHugh that this view can be vindicated by resting on the premise that truth is epistemically valuable. In this paper, I modify the strategy sketched by McHugh so as to overcome the initial difficulty that it is unable to vindicate the claim that on counterbalanced evidence with respect to P one ought to conclude deliberation by withholding on P. However, I describe the more serious difficulty that this strategy rests on principles whose acceptance commits one to acknowledging non-evidential reasons for believing. A way to overcome this second difficulty, against the evidentialists who deny this, is to show that we sometimes manage to believe on the basis of non-epistemic considerations. If this is so, one fundamental motivation behind the evidentialist idea that non-epistemic considerations could not enter as reason in deliberation would lose its force. In the second part of this paper I address several strategies proposed in the attempt to show that we sometimes manage to believe on the basis of non-epistemic considerations and show that they all fail. So, I conclude that the strategy inspired by McHugh to ground the normativity of evidence on the value of truth ultimately fails.
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Notes
See Matheson (2011) for an explicit recent defense of epistemic value pluralism. One well-known difficulty with the claim that truth is the sole epistemic value is that it is prima facie incompatible with the independently plausible claim that knowledge is more valuable than true belief. This problem for truth value monism is known as the Swamping Problem (see Kvanvig 2003; Zagzebski 2000, 2003). Very roughly, the problem is this. Suppose truth is the sole intrinsic epistemic good, and that any other epistemic good is instrumentally valuable just as a means to truth. It seems independently plausible that the presence of something that is instrumentally valuable as a means to an intrinsic good cannot increase the value of something that already possesses that intrinsic good. Since knowledge is true belief accompanied by some other epistemic valuable thing (e.g. justification, reliability etc.), it seems to follow from the premise that any other epistemic good is instrumentally valuable just as a means to truth that knowledge could not be more valuable than true belief. See Pritchard (2011), Sylvan (2018) and Pettigrew (2019) for an attempt to solve the swamping problem for truth value monism.
One possible difficulty for the view that evidence is normative in this sense derives from the psychological observation that we do not exert direct voluntary control over whether to believe (see Alston 1987; Feldman 2000). In this paper I won’t address this possible difficulty and will just be concerned with the question about whether the normativity of evidence can be grounded on the value of truth. It deserves emphasis, however, that the debate about doxastic voluntarism will be indirectly relevant to my topic. On one reading of it, Williams (1973)’s influential argument for the contention that doxastic voluntarism is necessarily false is premised on the claim that we cannot believe on the basis on non-epistemic considerations. This claim will be relevant for what follows, as it will be relevant to whether non-epistemic considerations counting in favor of having a belief can be regarded as reasons for believing.
For a very useful survey of the literature on these issues, see McCain (2014).
For instance, many of my readers are probably unconcerned about whether (BA) it is now raining in Buenos Aires. So, whether or not they have evidence one way or another, they simply have no attitude toward BA. To suspend judgment about BA is to do more, it is to refrain from believing and disbelieving BA as a result of having addressed the question about whether to believe it.
I assume that bivalence holds.
At this point, the pragmatist could be credited with the following reply. If the evidence E doesn’t favor P over its negation, it cannot be the case that S has the sense of the greater probability of one alternative over another, say of P, described by Alston. For this sense of the greater probability of P––which many contemporary epistemologists would call “the seeming that P is true” (see Tucker 2013)––is (some) evidence that P is true. This reply would miss an important point in the evidentialist’s reply. The evidentialist maintains that when E doesn’t favor P over its negation, and S is aware of practical considerations counting in favor of having the belief that P, S can bring herself to believe that P only if, her appreciation of the evidence notwithstanding, P appears more probable to her. The evidentialist could agree that the sense that P is more probable would be additional evidence that P is true, and simply reformulate her objection by saying that S can bring herself to believe that P only if, her appreciation of the existing evidence notwithstanding, S extends this evidence by coming to have the seeming that P.
It deserves emphasis that while McHugh (2013) approvingly quotes from Nickel (2010) about the possibility of cases in which one exerts discretion over whether to withhold on or believe a given proposition, Nickel himself seems to look at these cases differently, as cases in which one has more than one option with respect to the epistemic weight that one attributes to the evidence. By commenting on a case in which one thinks that is very unlikely that a train is passing by, and in which one seems to hear the sound of a locomotive, for instance, Nickel says: “I may take the sound of the locomotive to provide adequate reason to believe that there is a locomotive, or I may take it not to provide adequate reason for that belief. Both responses are reasonable” (2010, p. 314).
This possible objection seems to assume a form of contextualism about justification-claims, according to which sentences of the form “S is justified in believing P on the basis of E”, keeping E fixed, are true of false depending on how the epistemic standards are contextually determined in light of S’s, or the assertor’s, practical interests. A different variant of the same objection could assume a form of pragmatic encroachment about epistemic justification, according to which it is the very fact that S is or is not justified in believing P on the basis of E that depends on S’s practical interests.
The suggestion under consideration bears some similarity to one strand in Goldberg (2019)’s rejection of epistemic partiality in friendship. Goldberg argues that the demands of friendship are not inconsistent with the demands of epistemic rationality by suggesting that the value one attaches to friendship generates practical and epistemic reasons––what he calls “value-reflecting reasons”––which make what would otherwise appear partial doxastic practices entirely acceptable from the point of view of ordinary epistemic standards. Goldberg focusses, in particular, on a situation in which A is aware of evidence E indicating that A’s friend S is guilty of some terrible deed. The advocate of epistemic partiality in friendship would say that, although epistemic rationality would demand of A that she believe that S is guilty, the demands of A’s friendship with S misalign with those of epistemic rationality and require of S a different and more favorable doxastic response. Goldberg rejects this explanation by contending that the value attached by A and S to their friendship generates a series of value-reflecting (practical and epistemic) reasons that make the difference with respect to S’s epistemic situation vis-à-vis the proposition that S committed the deed. One such reason is a practical reason to re-open inquiry, which is a practice that may lead A to extend her evidence in such a way that the belief that S is innocent, on A’s extended evidence, is epistemically justified. Another is a practical reason to “to see whether or not there are alternative […] construals of our evidence […] consistent with belief in our friend’s innocence”. A similarity between Goldberg’s suggestion and the one I have detailed above is that they both rest on the contention that, at least sometimes, one can have different legitimate views on what the same body of evidence justifies, and that both are not committal to the claim that the same evidence may justify more than one attitude. A difference is that while I maintain that the practical (friendship-related) considerations bearing on the accusation against A may psychologically move A to have a different and more favorable view on what the evidence justifies, Goldberg suggests that those practical considerations supply A with a reason to double-check whether such an alternative and more favorable assessment is available. It deserves emphasis, however, that the both of us treat the resulting belief in our friend’s innocence as based on purely epistemic reasons. I claim this because I credit the practical considerations with the psychological role of making A alert of different construal of the epistemic bearing of the evidence. Goldberg is clear that it this is so when he maintains that the (friendship)value-reflecting reason to double-check for alternative interpretations of the evidence is just an injunction to live up to the epistemic standards of justified belief and responsible belief formation.
McCormick does not commit herself to the truth of doxastic voluntarism that Ginet’s example is meant to vindicate. Later on in her book, she also illustrates some doubts that examples of this kind might be successful in that respect (2015, p. 80). She limits herself to highlight the features of Ginet’s example that, according to her, are germane to the possibly related thought that practical considerations can be part of the reasons we deliberate upon.
In his review of McCormick’s book, Bermudez (2016) also identifies in it (and to some extent challenges) the following argument for the contention that practical considerations can be reasons for which we entertain a belief. This argument, according to Bermudez, is premised on McCormick’s notion of guidance control over what we believe, which in turn is the notion of control that she takes to be necessary for attributions of doxastic responsibility. According to McCormick, S exercises guidance control over the belief that P provided that the following dual condition is satisfied: (1) the mechanism that produces the belief that P is reason-responsive, and (2) it is S’s own mechanism, it is one over which S exerts ownership. As an example of when a mechanism satisfies condition (1) and fails to satisfy condition (2), McCormick invites to think of someone who has been kidnapped and implanted a reason-responsive mechanism. But what does it take exactly for S to exert ownership over a belief-forming mechanism? For McCormick, it involves regarding it as the proper target of reactive attitudes such as blame and praise, or of self-reactive attitudes such as pride, shame or guilt. This in turn involves the disposition to adjust what one believes in a way that is responsive to one’s reactive attitudes, or to the reactive attitudes of others, “which are themselves responsive to the belief” (Bermudez 2016, p. 944). The fundamental feature of this disposition which is key to the argument reconstructed by Bermudez is that it also includes the disposition to adjust our beliefs to non-epistemic reactive attitudes such as blame or guilt. It may centrally include, for instance, the disposition to refrain from believing of one’s brother that he stole some money as a response to one’s feeling of moral guilt for so believing (McCormick 2015, p. 114). When one adjusts one’s belief in this way, one would not be responding to some epistemic consideration but to one’s appreciation of the moral impropriety of one’s belief. I don’t believe that this argument successfully establishes its conclusion. Take again McCormick’s example. The subject’s evidence either adequately supports the belief that the brother stole the money, or it doesn’t. In the first case, I cannot see how the subject might end up abandoning the belief, no matter how intensely she feels guilty for having the belief, if she remains aware of the evidence and correctly estimates its significance. So, the scenario described in the argument must be one in which the evidence does not adequately support the belief. But in this case, I cannot see how her doxastic output can be seen as a response to non-evidential reasons. For it seems more plausible to say that the subject’s feeling of guilt would act as a motivation for the subject to reassess the epistemic credentials of her belief; and even if it would be out of this motivation that the subject would come to appreciate that her evidence poorly supports the belief, it would be nonetheless solely by responding to these considerations that the subject would come to abandon her belief.
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I am extremely grateful to two anonymous referees of this journal for their insightful and helpful comments.
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Piazza, T. The value of truth and the normativity of evidence. Synthese 198, 5067–5088 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02389-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02389-1