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How You Know You Are Not a Brain in a Vat Alexander Jackson Boise State University

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How You Know You Are Not a Brain in a Vat Alexander Jackson Boise State University View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Boise State University - ScholarWorks Boise State University ScholarWorks Philosophy Faculty Publications and Presentations Department of Philosophy 10-1-2015 How You Know You are Not a Brain In a Vat Alexander Jackson Boise State University This is an author-produced, peer-reviewed version of this article. The final, definitive version of this document can be found online at Philosophical Studies, published by Springer. Copyright restrictions may apply. The final publication is available at doi: 10.1007/s11098-015-0445-x This is an author-produced, peer-reviewed version of this article. The final, definitive version of this document can be found online at Philosophical Studies, published by Springer. Copyright restrictions may apply. doi: 10.1007/s11098-015-0445-x How You Know You are Not a Brain In a Vat Alexander Jackson Boise State University Abstract A sensible epistemologist may not see how she could know that she is not a Brain In a Vat (BIV); but she doesn’t panic. She sticks with her empirical beliefs, and as that requires, believes that she is not a BIV. (She does not inferentially base her belief that she is not a BIV on her empirical knowledge—she rejects that ‘Moorean’ response to skepticism.) Drawing on the psychological literature on metacognition, I describe a mechanism that’s plausibly responsible for a sensible epistemologist coming to believe she is not a BIV. I propose she thereby knows that she is not a BIV. The particular belief-forming mechanism employed explains why she overlooks this account of how she knows she is not a BIV, making it seem that there is no way for her to know it. I argue this proposal satisfactorily resolves the skeptical puzzle. Keywords: skepticism; metacognition; brain in a vat; BIV; Moore’s argument 1. The Puzzle Facing Sensible Epistemologists C.S. Peirce wisely commanded, “Let us not pretend to doubt in our philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts” (Peirce 1992 p. 29). With that in mind, please answer the following question. Are you a massively deceived Brain In a Vat (BIV), whose misleading experiences are produced by a computer simulation run by an evil scientist?1 Hopefully you did not suspend judgement on whether you are a BIV, and so are now suspending judgement on all empirical matters. Freaking out in that manner is not a sensible response to considering the skeptical scenario. Hopefully you did not suspend judgement on whether you are a BIV, incoherently combining that attitude with judging that you have hands, it is a sunny day, etc.2 Hopefully you kept your empirical beliefs, and added the belief that you are not a BIV. Every sensible person who considers the issue believes herself not to be a massively deceived BIV; I assume the reader is in the club. A philosopher who suspends judgement on whether she is a BIV is like a patient suffering from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder who cannot leave the house because she keeps returning to check she really did turn off the stove. The patient with OCD doubts her memories of checking the stove; her doubts are pathological, not epistemically virtuous.3 Similarly, it is pathological to really suspend judgement on whether the skeptical scenario obtains and hence on whether one interacts with real people who should be treated with moral respect, and with some of whom one has a loving relationship. Suspending judgment on those matters has crazy consequences for decision-making. (Consider what one is willing to do in a computer game such as Grand Theft Auto.) Plausibly, if one believes that one might be a BIV then one suspends judgement on whether one is.4 So if a contextualist about “knows” and related words holds that there are special contexts in which one should accept that one “might be a 1 Equivalently: are you the plaything of Descartes’ evil demon, systematically misled by the experiences the demon induces in you? 2 Vogel (1990) and Hawthorne (2004) defend the view that it is incoherent to suspend judgement on whether one is a handless BIV while judging that one has hands (for example). Dretske (2005) and Nozick (1981, ch. 3) dissent. 3 The example of OCD comes from de Sousa (2008). 4 This is the majority view in the literature on epistemic modals; see Yalcin (2011) and the other papers in that volume. The dissenting minority includes Dougherty & Rysiew (2009). 1 This is an author-produced, peer-reviewed version of this article. The final, definitive version of this document can be found online at Philosophical Studies, published by Springer. Copyright restrictions may apply. doi: 10.1007/s11098-015-0445-x BIV”, she is recommending temporary insanity.5 Some people find it easy to say they might be BIVs; their attention should be directed towards the consequences for their attitudes towards what appear to be other people, and then to Peirce’s maxim with which we began. (Sometimes one needs to pull oneself together, and not let a feeling of anxiety overwhelm one. On the way to the airport, I have to tell myself that I don’t need to check again that I have my passport. The same goes if one starts to worry that one might be a BIV.) Sensible epistemologists have already settled that they are not BIVs. Yet the skeptical puzzle continues to tax them. So the puzzle does not concern whether one is a BIV. I suggest the puzzle is to say how one can know one is not a BIV. It can seem that there is no way to know that one is not a BIV—all the suggestions in the literature seem wrong. But that result is unacceptable: believing that one cannot know that one is not a BIV rationally commits one to suspending judgement on whether one is a BIV, and hence to skepticism. I will focus on the puzzle about knowledge; but the same problem arises as to how one could rationally believe that one is not a BIV. (The following footnote sharply separates the puzzle of BIV skepticism from the so-called ‘lottery puzzle’.6) This paper aims to solve the puzzle here facing sensible epistemologists. To do so, it is enough to give an account we can contentedly endorse of how one knows that one is not a BIV. Such an account can assume that one is not a BIV, that one has reliable perceptual faculties, and so on. The problem with existing accounts is that they seem implausible to we sensible epistemologists; the problem is not that they will be rejected by someone who thinks she might be a BIV.7 This paper does not aim to change the mind of someone who believes she might be a BIV (and is not resisting a strong inclination to believe she is not). Such a person is not to be persuaded by presenting an argument; she is to be treated in the same way as patients with OCD—medically. The paper should change the mind of someone who is strongly inclined to believe she is not a BIV, but feels forced not to because she sees no way she could know such a thing. The skeptical puzzle is hard because it seems illegitimate to use one’s empirical knowledge as evidence that one is not a BIV—which does not leave much to appeal to. In particular, the ‘Moorean’ solution seems unacceptable. Sensible epistemologists agree that one has perceptual knowledge that it is a sunny day, for example. For all p, p logically entails it is not the case that: p is false and one is deceived on that score because one is a BIV. The Moorean tells one to infer that logical consequence from what one knows by perception.8 But most of us find the recommended inference repugnant. We are told that one should first settle by perception that it is a sunny day, and that matter having been settled satisfactorily, then infer it is not the case that: one is a BIV and it is not a sunny day. But it seems that one has not settled satisfactorily that it is a sunny day if one leaves it open at that point in inquiry that one is a BIV deceived on that score. It is not appropriate to use one’s perceptual beliefs as an inferential basis for other beliefs until one has answered that skeptical worry. In other words, the Moorean says that one can know one is not a BIV epistemically posterior to one’s perceptual knowledge; but that seems false to most of us 5 Note that contextualists can say that even in the sense operative when considering the skeptical worry, one “knows” one is not a BIV. (See Cohen 1999 esp. p. 85 n. 27, and DeRose 2004.) They would then need to say how that can be so—they need a theory of the kind I propose in this paper. Lewis’ (1996) contextualist theory is naturally taken to imply that one should sometimes suspend judgement on whether one is a BIV. 6 We don’t react to the BIV scenario by dropping our empirical beliefs. By contrast, the so-called ‘lottery puzzle’ concerns cases in which considering a certain worry does cause us to drop a belief. For example, I stop (flat-out) believing that I will teach next Tuesday if I consider the possibility that I will sick that day and have to cancel. The puzzle arises because most of our beliefs are vulnerable in this way to some carefully chosen worry.
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