How is wishful seeing like wishful thinking? Susanna Siegel * draft for Rutgers Epistemology Conference REC readers: If this paper is too long for you, you can shorten the journey in any of these ways: - skip sections 3-5 on responsive dispositions (pp. 9-15) - skip Part II (pp. 15-29) - skip all Part III (pp. 29-end) A Simple Argument It is a commonplace that beliefs can be epistemically appropriate or epistemically inappropriate. Suppose Frank wishfully believes that today, all his best features are evident even to the most casual observation. Passers-by who greet him with neutral expressions are holding back their appreciation of him, because they’re embarrassed to show it. Anyone who seems displeased with him is feeling inadequate in the face of his many assets. These interpretations make sense to Frank given his original wishful belief, but they are unreasonable, and that belief is the source of their unreasonableness. Can a perceptual experience ever be a source of unreasonableness, because of its dependence on a desire? Could wishful seeing compromise the rational support offered by experience, just as wishful thinking compromises the rational support offered by Frank’s wishful belief? Here is a simple argument that it could. Premise: Beliefs can be ill-founded by wishful thinking. Premise: Wishful seeing is possible. Conclusion. Experiences can be ill-founded by wishful seeing. What kinds of considerations could possibly support such a conclusion? The argument’s conceit is that wishful seeing and wishful thinking are sufficiently analogous that they both have ill-founding effects. There are many places to probe the argument, starting with whether the idea of wishful seeing makes sense to begin with. Even if it does make sense, one might strongly suspect that equivocation on “ill-foundedness” between the premise and conclusion is unavoidable because beliefs are ill-founded if they are formed or maintained epistemically inappropriately, but experiences are not governed by epistemic norms. And even if equivocation on “ill-founded” can be avoided, nothing in the argument explains why the fact that wishful thinking can ill-found beliefs should tell us anything about what wishful seeing can do to the epistemic status of experiences. This is a major gap in the argument. Perhaps wishful seeing and wishful thinking are psychologically similar phenomena, but their epistemic effects differ: wishful seeing does not compromise the rational powers of experience at all. But if wishful seeing does compromise the rational powers of experience, then a major consequence follows. Experiences are not uniformly receptive. They are not a 1 landing pad for information (or misinformation) that tumbles in along a-rational channels, naively open to the objects, properties, and events that are there for us to perceive. Experiences can fail to be receptive in these ways, not because they are off the grid of rational assessment, as an undirected ‘raw feel’ would be, but because the grid has a place for experiences that arise in some of the same ways as irrational beliefs do. And that opens the possibility that the notion of ill-foundedness that we use to convict some beliefs might convict some experiences as well. Let me lay some cards on the table, though they are probably showing already. The Simple Argument leaves much to be explained, but it helps us see what additional factors would be needed to clarify the premises and help them support the conclusion. I think those factors can be provided. My aim here is to provide them, by clarifying and defending the premises and giving them the help they need to produce the conclusion. Wishful seeing is clearly coherent. Just imagine that Jill wants Jack to be happy, and as a result, she is subject to an illusion when she looks at him: he looks happy when she sees him – even though you would see his neutral expression for what it is, as would most anyone else who wasn’t subject to any similar distortion. Or imagine that as a result of wanting him to be happy, Jill fails to see his furrowed brow and slumped shoulders, focusing instead on his bouncy step and unfrowning mouth. For all she sees, it seems reasonable to conclude that he is happy. In both cases, Jill ends up with a visual experience of Jack as happy, with her desire for him to be happy playing a key role in producing the experience. What about ill-founding: is the Simple Argument bound to equivocate in applying this notion to both beliefs and experiences? What would it be for an experience to be formed or maintained epistemically inappropriately? At a minimum, factors that explain why the subject has the experience would prevent it from providing any rational support for believing (at least some of) its contents, or from providing as much rational support as an experience could otherwise provide. Ill-founded beliefs have this feature as well: the rational support (propositional justification) they can offer to subsequent beliefs is reduced or eliminated. Beyond this shared core feature, the only leftover thing missing from ill-foundedness of beliefs is their being epistemically inappropriate or doxastically unjustified.1 It seems a potentially merely verbal issue whether we extend this language to experience or not. It’s not in dispute that experiences can have the core feature of ill-foundedness. 1 I’ll use “doxastically unjustified” to mean, formed or maintained epistemically inappropriately. On this usage it is a substantive question whether a belief’s being formed and maintained in proper response to one’s evidence suffices to make it doxastically justified. 2 On behalf of the Simple Argument, the charge of equivocation could be answered by insisting at the outset that there’s no bar to considering experiences epistemically inappropriate or doxastically unjustified. That answer is a bit jarring. Two less jarring answers are available. First, the equivocation on “ill-foundedness” is avoidable, by scaling back to the common status that ill-founded beliefs can share with experiences: an experience or belief provides less rational support for subsequent beliefs, as a result of ill-founding factors, than it could without those factors. Second, the equivocation is harmless, because it doesn’t matter whether wishful seeing produces in experiences the “extra” aspect of ill-foundedness that uncontroversially applies to beliefs – namely, epistemic inappropriateness.2 In any case, any residual discomfort produced by applying even the scaled-back notion of ill-foundedness to experiences could be avoided, by reformulating the conclusion of the Simple Argument in terms of belief. A belief that P is formed by endorsing an experience, if the belief is formed on the basis of an experience that includes P in its content. The conclusion could then be reformulated like this: Conclusion*. Beliefs formed by endorsing experiences are ill-founded when those experiences are ill-founded by wishful seeing. The two conclusions are not equivalent, because the reformulated one limits the beliefs that can be ill-founded in the relevant way to beliefs formed by endorsing experiences. In contrast, the original conclusion allows that any beliefs formed primarily on the basis of experience to be ill-founded, if the experience is itself ill-founded by wishful seeing.3 Although the major gap in the Simple Argument is a defense of the idea that experiences and beliefs are symmetrically vulnerable to ill-founding by desires, trying to close the gap might seem premature, so long as a different pre-emptive worry is unaddressed. What if in wishful seeing, wishful experiences depend on desires in ways that are completely different from the ways in which beliefs depend on desires, when desires ill-found beliefs? If desires ill-found beliefs by controlling them in ways that can have no analog for experiences, then the basic reasoning behind the Simple Argument can’t get off the ground. In contrast, if beliefs and experiences can depend on desires in analogous ways, then we can go on to ask whether those analogous modes of dependence have similar epistemic effects on beliefs and experiences. If desires can in 2 It would be useful to have a word that isolates the core feature of ill-foundedness. I call experiences with this feature “epistemically downgraded” in Siegel (2013). 3 Both the original conclusion and the reformulated ones fail to specify that the ill- foundedness of an experience (its downgrade) may be specific only to some contents, such as those specifying shape but not those specifying color. We’ll see examples later. Self-ascriptions of ill-founded experiences may not themselves be ill-founded, even if beliefs formed by endorsing the experiences are, when the contents of the belief are the contents relative to which the experience is downgraded. 3 principle influence experience in the same way as it influences and ill-founds beliefs, then the Analogy thesis is true: Analogy thesis: It is possible in principle for an experience to depend on a desire, in ways that are structurally analogous to modes in which a belief that P depends on a desire, where that mode of dependence makes the belief ill-founded. Is the Analogy thesis true? If ill-founded wishful thinking were simply a matter of a belief causally depending on desire, then the question would reduce to whether experiences can causally depend on desires. But many beliefs that are not ill-founded causally depend on a desire (even a desire with the same content as the belief). You might hope that a hypothesis P is true, and for that reason be motivated to investigate whether it is true, and then end up believing P on the basis of the strong evidence that you find for it once you look into the matter.