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Acquaintance and Assurance Philos Stud DOI 10.1007/s11098-011-9747-9 Acquaintance and assurance Nathan Ballantyne Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011 Abstract I criticize Richard Fumerton’s fallibilist acquaintance theory of nonin- ferential justification. Keywords Acquaintance Á Noninferential justification Á Assurance Á Skepticism Á Regress Á Richard Fumerton Should the acquaintance theorist be committed to fallibilism or infallibilism? Richard Fumerton (2010) and Ted Poston (2010) have recently discussed that question. Poston has argued that there is trouble for the acquaintance theorist either way—the theory faces a dilemma—and Fumerton has responded to Poston by defending a fallibilist acquaintance theory of noninferential justification. Here, I shall offer a new objection to the theory Fumerton defends. Fumerton claims that ‘‘[w]hen everything that is constitutive of a thought’s being true is immediately before consciousness, there is nothing more that one could want or need to justify a belief’’ (2001, p. 14). ‘‘What more,’’ asks Fumerton, ‘‘could one want as an assurance of truth than the truth-maker before one’s mind?’’ (2006a, p. 189). Yet Fumerton also grants that false beliefs can enjoy noninferential justification. This admission, I’ll contend, brings trouble for the acquaintance theorist whenever she asks whether she has assurance for a belief. In what follows, I shall outline Fumerton’s notion of philosophical assurance (Sect. 1) before turning to state his account of noninferential justification (Sect. 2), describing how assurance is a critical motivation for the acquaintance theory. Then I will argue that if the acquaintance theorist endorses fallibilism, as Fumerton does, N. Ballantyne (&) Philosophy Department, Fordham University, Collins Hall 101, 441 E. Fordham Road, Bronx, NY 10458, USA e-mail: [email protected] 123 N. Ballantyne acquaintance provides no assurance (Sect. 3). I’ll conclude by considering an objection to my argument (Sect. 4). 1 Assurance Central to Fumerton’s notion of philosophical assurance is a particular conception of the philosophical enterprise. Fumerton observes that in commonplace inquiry, we assume that we know about the past by memory, the future by inductive inference, and the external world by perception. But once we turn to philosophy, Fumerton continues, ‘‘we stop getting gifts. We must justify what we normally do not bother to justify’’ (2001, p. 19). What is involved in having philosophical assurance that a particular belief is true? According to Fumerton, satisfying philosophical curiosity yields assurance. To see what is involved in satisfying curiosity, consider Fumerton’s example of a child pestering a parent with ‘why’ questions (e.g., ‘‘Why is the sky blue?’’ or ‘‘Why can’t you tickle yourself?’’): The looming regress of ‘‘Why?’’ questions inevitably ends with an impatient parent responding ‘‘That’s just the way it is,’’ a response that, no doubt, did little to satisfy the child’s curiosity. The epistemologist…wants to know why we can legitimately conclude that a certain way of forming a belief is legitimate, and the epistemologist’s philosophical curiosity isn’t going to be satisfied by being told at any stage of the game that it just is. (2006a, p. 184) Fumerton connects satisfying one’s curiosity about the truth of a belief and obtaining assurance. Someone has assurance if her curiosity is satisfied. Fumerton’s thought is that if someone is acquainted with the truth-maker for a belief, then her curiosity is fully satisfied and she thereby has assurance. ‘‘What is relevant to getting the assurance one wants as a philosopher,’’ Fumerton says, is getting the truth-maker for the belief ‘‘before one’s consciousness’’ (2006a, p. 189). Consider a representative passage from Fumerton (where the proposition in question is his pet example, I am in pain): The fact that I am acquainted with is the very fact that makes P true. The very source of justification includes that which makes true the belief. In a way it is this idea that makes an acquaintance foundation theory so attractive. I have no need to turn to other beliefs to justify my belief that I am in pain because the very fact that makes the belief true is unproblematically before conscious- ness… Again, everything one could possibly want or need by way of justification is there in consciousness. (2001, p. 15, cf. 2006a, p. 189, 2004, pp. 81–82) Let us say that someone is philosophically satisfied, in Fumerton’s sense, with respect to believing P only if she has an answer to the question, Why think that P is true?; someone is philosophically unsatisfied so long as she has no answer to that question. Even if this question about the truth of P is answered, the answer itself may raise a new question—Why think this answer is true? And the new question 123 Acquaintance and assurance brings with it further curiosity. If the chain of ‘why’ questions ends with the confession, ‘‘That’s just the way it is, kid,’’ curiosity remains. Fumerton makes it clear that he seeks assurance that precludes curiosity: ‘‘the epistemologist’s philosophical curiosity,’’ he says, ‘‘isn’t going to be satisfied by being told at any stage of the game that it just is.’’ If someone is fully satisfied, then she has philosophical assurance for believing that P. The notions of philosophical satisfaction and assurance raise some questions. Is the satisfaction of curiosity an objective or a subjective, thinker-relative matter? Different philosophers seem to have different thresholds for satisfaction, and what satisfies one might not satisfy another. What satisfied Thomas Reid1 or G.E. Moore, for instance, won’t satisfy the likes of Descartes or a Pyrrhonian skeptic. Is someone seeking to be completely satisfied more likely to reach truth or avoid error than someone who isn’t? Why would anyone want assurance? I will leave these questions aside, turning now to Fumerton’s account of noninferential justification and its connection to assurance. 2 Fallibilist noninferential justification by acquaintance Fumerton’s account of noninferential justification has two main parts. First, he proposes a condition for noninferentially justified belief that entails truth. According to this condition, someone is noninferentially justified in believing that P if (but not only if2) she is acquainted with the following: the belief that P, the fact that P, and the relation of correspondence between the belief that P and the fact that P. Fumerton says that acquaintance is a sui generis relation that holds between a thinker and a fact or property; and correspondence is also a sui generis relation. Neither notion can be analyzed using other (simpler) concepts.3 It is important to appreciate how this first part is linked with assurance. Imagine that Buxtehude is in pain and that he believes as much. And suppose he is acquainted with the belief that he is in pain, the pain itself, and the relation holding between the belief and the pain. Buxtehude is then ‘‘directly aware’’ of the truth- 1 A common foil in Reid’s writings, the Skeptic, sounds downright Fumertonian at moments: ‘‘There is nothing so shameful in a philosopher as to be deceived and deluded; and therefore you ought to resolve firmly to withhold assent, and to throw off all this belief of external objects, which may be all delusion’’ (An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense VI, xx). For more on Reid’s Skeptic, see Wolterstorff (2001, chapter VIII, esp. 185–192). 2 Some commentators have taken Fumerton to offer a necessary condition for justification—not merely a sufficient condition, as I’ve stated it. These commentators read the ‘‘if’’ as ‘‘only if’’ (see Plantinga (2001, p. 60)) or ‘‘if and only if’’ (see Poston (2006, p. 332)). Given that Fumerton notes that false beliefs can enjoy noninferential justification in many of the places he expounds his theory, however, a maximally charitable reading of his account’s first part will include only a sufficient condition—otherwise the admission of noninferentially justified false belief is a straightforward counterexample to his view. We can do better than to state Fumerton’s theory so that it faces a counterexample that’s due to his own handiwork. In email correspondence on 15 February 2008, Fumerton wrote to me that he has been ‘‘torn’’ on the issue of whether to include a necessary condition as well as a sufficient one; cf. Fumerton (2010, pp. 379–380) and Poston (2010, pp. 370–371). The arguments below do not hinge on the way I have stated the acquaintance theory. 3 Fumerton (1995, pp. 74–76). 123 N. Ballantyne maker for the belief; the pain is ‘‘there’’ before his mind. He has a ‘‘completely satisfying way’’ of assuring himself that he is in pain (Fumerton 2006a, p. 189). Therein lies a key motivation for Fumerton’s acquaintance theory. ‘‘The very source of justification,’’ Fumerton says, ‘‘includes that which makes true the belief. In a way it is this idea that makes an acquaintance foundation theory so attractive’’ (2001, p. 15). What apparently motivates the acquaintance theory is this: acquaintance allegedly explains how we can get assurance. And there is more. Fumerton thinks that externalist theories—and presumably all kinds of non-acquaintance views— lack precisely this virtue of his theory: such theories can’t provide assurance. The proponent of simple reliabilism, for example, says roughly that the reliability of a belief-producing process is sufficient to generate justified output beliefs. Given reliabilism, someone is noninferentially justified in believing he is in pain if the belief is caused by a reliable process. According to Fumerton, the philosopher must ask the obvious next question: Is my belief caused in the right way? ‘‘The question is irresistible,’’ says Fumerton, ‘‘because having a belief caused in a certain way when we don’t know whether or not it is caused in that way is clearly not something that would give us assurance of truth’’ (2006a, pp.
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