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ABSTRACT

Objectivity and Subjectivity in Epistemology: A Defense of the Phenomenal Conception of Evidence

Logan Paul Gage, Ph.D.

Committee Chairperson: Trent Dougherty, Ph.D.

We all have an intuitive grasp of the concept of evidence. Evidence makes beliefs reasonable, justifies jury verdicts, and helps resolve our disagreements. Yet getting clear about what evidence is is surprisingly difficult. Among other possibilities, evidence might consist in physical objects like a candlestick found at the crime scene, propositions like ‘a candlestick was found at the crime scene,’ or experiences like the experience of witnessing a candlestick at the crime scene. This dissertation is a defense of the latter view. Evidence, we will argue, consists in experiences or mental states called ‘seeming states.’

We begin with a look at why the logical positivists came to abandon the experiential or “phenomenal” conception of evidence and adopted what I call “the courtroom conception.” Despite its appeal, we argue that this latter view is too objective; it has trouble playing the role of subjective reasons-provider. Being more subjective, the phenomenal conception deserves another look. However, many have thought that the phenomenal conception itself is unable to fulfill other important roles of evidence. In Chapter Two we dispute this, arguing that the phenomenal conception can play all four of

the chief roles of evidence.

Examining the religious epistemology of Alvin Plantinga in Chapter Three we

come to see that the phenomenal conception, while attractive, is in danger of being too

subjective. If the phenomenal conception of evidence is to be tenable, it must be offered in conjunction with a conservative epistemic principle which tethers together experiences with the beliefs they evidence in an epistemically appropriate manner. Hence in Chapter

Four we consider a number of conservative epistemic principles and argue for the superiority of one in particular. But these principles have themselves been subject to criticism. For this reason, in Chapter Five we close by responding to a recent and pressing challenge to conservative principles in epistemology (Michael Bergmann’s dilemma for internalism) which might prevent their deployment alongside the phenomenal conception.

If our arguments are correct, the phenomenal conception of evidence is still an attractive account of evidence today.

Objectivity and Subjectivity in Epistemology: A Defense of the Phenomenal Conception of Evidence

Logan Paul Gage, B.A., M.A.

A Dissertation

Approved by the Department of Philosophy

______Michael D. Beaty, Ph.D., Chairperson

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Baylor University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Approved by the Dissertation Committee

______Trent Dougherty, Ph.D., Chairperson

______Alexander R. Pruss, Ph.D.

______Michael D. Beaty, Ph.D.

______Francis J. Beckwith, Ph.D.

______Jonathan Tran, Ph.D.

Accepted by the Graduate School December 2014

______J. Larry Lyon, Ph.D., Dean

Page bearing signatures is kept on file in the Graduate School.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Table of Contents ………………………………………………………………………… v

List of Schemes …………………………………………………………………………. vii

List of Tables ……………………………………………………………………………viii

Acknowledgments ………………………………………………………………………. ix

Dedication ……………………………………………………………………………….. xi

Chapter One: Introduction: Two Rival Conceptions of Evidence ……………………… 12 Introduction …………………………………………………………...………… 12 The Early Logical Positivist Conception of Evidence ………………………….. 14 The Late Logical Positivist Conception of Evidence …………………………... 17 A First Desideratum …………………………………………………………….. 20 A Preview of Things to Come ………………………………………………….. 21

Chapter Two: Can the Phenomenal Conception Fulfill the Many Roles of Evidence? .. 26 Introduction …………………………………………………………………….. 26 The Nature of Seeming States ………………………………………………….. 27 The First Role: Evidence as that which Justifies Belief ………………………... 32 The Second Role: Evidence as that which Rational Thinkers Respect ………… 39 The Third Role: Evidence as a Guide to the Truth ……………………………... 42 The Fourth Role: Evidence as Neutral Arbiter …………………………………. 47 Objectivity ……………………………………………………………… 49 Peer Disagreement ……………………………………………………… 51 Publicity ………………………………………………………………… 56 Conclusion: Thinking about the Logical Space ………………………………… 63

Chapter Three: Reforming the Concept of Experience as Evidence: Plantinga and the Phenomenal Conception ………………………………………………………... 66 Introduction ……………………………………………………………………... 66 Early Plantinga ………………………………………………………………….. 67 The Aquinas/Calvin Model: The Sensus Divinitatis …………………………… 72 The Extended A/C Model: The Inward Instigation of the Holy Spirit …………. 76 Cognitive Faculties vs. Cognitive Processes …………………………………… 82 Reconsidering Experience as Evidence ………………………………………… 96 An Internalist Revision of Plantingian Religious Epistemology ……………… 104 A Second Desideratum ………………………………………………………... 109

Chapter Four: Conservative Principles in Epistemology: How to Tether Experience and Epistemically Appropriate Belief ……………………………………………… 111 Introduction ……………………………………………………………………. 111 Epistemic Conservatism Prior to the Twentieth Century ……………………... 112 Doxastic Conservatism ………………………………………………………... 117 Non-Doxastic Conservatism …………………………………………………... 128 Examining Non-Doxastic Conservatism: Toward a Refined Principle ……….. 139 Tying Together Experience and Belief ………………………………………... 149

Chapter Five: Phenomenal Conservatism and the Subject’s Perspective Objection …. 156 Introduction ……………………………………………………………………. 156 Bergmann’s Dilemma for Internalism ………………………………………… 157 PC to the Rescue? ……………………………………………………………... 164 PC and Bergmann’s Dilemma, Part I: ICPS …………………………………… 166 PC and Bergmann’s Dilemma, Part II: ICPW …………………………………. 170 A Final Worry: The Sociological Nature of Bergmann’s Dilemma …………... 179 Conclusion …………………………………………………………………….. 181

Chapter Six: Conclusion: A Defensible Phenomenal Conception of Evidence ………. 182

Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………... 188

LIST OF SCHEMES

Scheme 1. Varieties of Evidence …………………………………..………..…………. 12

vii

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1. Matrix of Major Conceptions of Evidence …………….…………………….. 65

viii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This dissertation is, of course, the product not only of personal reflection but of

innumerable conversations and (friendly) arguments. I am exceedingly grateful to my

colleagues at Baylor University for all of their time and thoughtfulness over the years. I

am especially grateful to Ross Parker, Scott Cleveland, and Brandon Dahm in this regard.

And to Fr. Timothy Vaverek, the Augustine reading group directed by Mike Foley, and

members of The Manhattan Project, I simply cannot thank you enough. Your friendship

and spiritual support has changed me for the better and will have a lasting impact upon

our family.

I also wish to express my gratitude to Trent Dougherty for his time and sage

advice in the direction of this dissertation. More than a talented philosopher, he is a good

father and an exceedingly generous human being. From our very first argument, I knew

that he would be both a mentor and a friend. And to the others who sat on my committee and gave of their time—Alex Pruss, Michael Beaty, Frank Beckwith, and Jonathan

Tran—thank you so much.

Several of the ideas in this dissertation have been presented at professional conferences. I am grateful to all those at the following universities and professional conferences who gave me valuable feedback: Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ave

Maria University, The 88th Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and The Mind

Association at Cambridge University, The Philosophy of Religion Study Group of the

Tyndale Fellowship at Cambridge University, The 2014 European Epistemology

Network Meeting, The 2011 Graduate Epistemology Conference at the University of

Miami, and the 2013 meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical

Association. I am grateful to the philosophy department at Baylor University—especially

Michael Beaty and Marilyn McKinney—and Baylor University Graduate School for

generous travel support over the years.

But most of all I wish to thank my family for their love and support during this

process. My wife Liz has been a wonderful companion on this adventure. To whom can

I compare this wonderful mother and faithful friend? She has given me more than

support; she has given me three precious boys and two more children in heaven. I wish

to thank them all, especially for all the laughter and wild noises in our little apartment

provided by Wells Augustine and John Simons. And to my parents (Steve and Holly),

my sister and brother-in-law (Megan and Ethan), my in-laws (Jack and Barbara), my

brother- and sister-in-law (Jack and Karen), and my grandparents (Paul and Marilyn, and

Ken and Mary) thank you for all of your love, prayers, and other support. I hope that I

have made you proud. A.M.D.G.

To my father, Steve Gage, with admiration

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction: Rival Conceptions of Evidence

Introduction

Ask someone what evidence is, and you are likely to hear that evidence consists

in such things as the bloody knife used to kill Julius Caesar, the fingerprints found on

Sirhan Sirhan’s gun, or the gloves that failed to fit O. J. Simpson’s hands. Call this

ordinary notion whereby evidence consists of physical objects and perhaps publicly

observable events the courtroom conception of evidence. On this conception, a key

aspect of evidence is its objective or public character: evidence is the sort of thing that

multiple people can observe. This makes such evidence ideal for use in scientific

laboratories and courts of law. And on this view evidence is clearly distinguishable from

one’s subjective preferences or biased opinions. But despite its common use in many

domains, the courtroom conception of evidence has only been one of several conceptions

of evidence in epistemology and philosophy of science during the last century.

The following scheme provides a brief taxonomy of the major varieties of

evidence seen in philosophy:

I. Objectual (The Courtroom Conception) II. Non-Objectual a. Statist i. Non-Factive Mentalism (The Phenomenal Conception) 1. Sense-Data 2. Seeming States ii. E = K (The Williamsonian Conception)1 b. Non-Statist i. Facts ii. Propositions Scheme 1. Varieties of Evidence

The courtroom conception, or what might be more technically labeled as the objectual2

conception of evidence, is only one of two major branches in this taxonomy. Among the

non-objectual views, there are two major camps: conceptions on which evidence is a

mental state of a subject and conceptions on which evidence is not a state of a subject

(and consists in facts or propositions3). Within the statist camp there is a great divide between phenomenalists (those who see evidence as consisting in sense-data or seeming states) and Williamsonians (those who see evidence as consisting in factive mental states). Because we aim to defend a broadly experientialist conception of evidence—and in particular the seeming state version of the phenomenal conception (i.e., II.a.i.2)—from rival views, we will throughout this dissertation have something to say about each of these other views and their advocates’ central criticisms of the phenomenal conception.

The chief exception, however, is that we will have little to say about the non-objectual,

1 Placing Williamson and the disjunctivists here is somewhat awkward in that they think that mental states can be individuated (at least in part) by external, environmental factors. We will have more to say about this at the end of Chapter Two.

2 We are not perfectly happy with this label, as this category could also include not only physical objects but perhaps also publicly observable states of affairs. But it will have to suffice for now.

3 This part of the taxonomy is complicated by the fact that other conceptions of evidence claim to have propositional content even if evidence itself does not consist in propositions.

non-statist views of factualism and propositionalism. These two views are not

necessarily at odds with a broadly experiential view of evidence. The phenomenal

conception still seems workable, for instance, if evidence consists in true propositions

about one’s experiences (i.e., it is true that it seems to S that p). Swinburne (2001a: 137),

for one, appears to hold something like this view. Toward the larger end of defending the

phenomenal conception, in this chapter we begin with a brief look at the logical

positivists’ conceptions of evidence and their transition away from the phenomenal

conception toward the objectual.

The Early Logical Positivist Conception of Evidence

To understand two of the most prominent conceptions of evidence in the last

century, the courtroom and phenomenal conceptions, one must know something of the

work of the logical positivists (later called logical empiricists).4 Their work on the

conception of evidence still provides much of the context for discussions of evidence

today. The evolution of Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970) on evidence and his influence on

other positivists is particularly illuminating. The beginnings of logical positivism lie in

the founding of the Vienna Circle (Der Wiener Kreis) by Moritz Schlick in 1924. Having

been offered, by Schlick himself, a position as instructor in philosophy at the University

of Vienna (where Schlick was Chair for Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences), by 1926

4 It is not easy to distinguish the logical positivists from the logical empiricists. “The term ‘logical empiricism,’” as Creath points out, “has no very precise boundaries and still less that distinguishes it from ‘logical positivism’” (Creath 2013: 2). Still, the empiricists are often associated with incremental confirmation of scientific theories while the positivists’ are typically associated with the earlier principle of verification.

Carnap was in Vienna and part of the Circle.5 He remained there for five years, then

taught at the German University in Prague, and eventually fled to the United States in

1935 in the wake of Europe’s growing darkness.

The Vienna Circle saw itself as dedicated to promoting and advancing (what the

positivists saw as) the scientific conception of the world (wissenschaftliche

weltauffassung). According to A. P. Martinich, “one of its principle projects was to show

how to translate all meaningful language into scientific language, in other words, to

reduce meaningful non-scientific language to scientific language” (Martinich and Sosa

2005: 2). And in his early work, this was precisely Carnap’s concern. Carnap initially

followed Bertrand Russell (1998 [1912]; 2009 [1914]), Ernst Mach, and the larger

empiricist tradition in thinking that evidence must consist in the information derived from

the senses or sense-data—or to be more precise, in the private experience of sensing

sense-data (Carnap 2003 [1928]). Carnap recounts his motivation for this view clearly in

his autobiography:

Under the influence of some philosophers, especially Mach and Russell, I regarded…a phenomenalistic language as the best for a philosophical analysis of knowledge. I believed that the task of philosophy consists in reducing all knowledge to a basis of certainty. Since the most certain knowledge is that of the immediately given, whereas knowledge of material things is derivative and less certain, it seemed that the philosopher must employ a language which uses sense- data as a basis. (Carnap 1963: 50)

Timothy Williamson (2000: 173-174) has labeled views like this, views which

take experience as evidence, the phenomenal conception of evidence. These phenomenal

experiences differ greatly from courtroom evidence. For one thing, phenomenal

experiences (which some have construed as the sensing of sense-data) are not physical

5 Other members of the Circle included Gustav Bergmann, Herbert Feigl, Philipp Frank, Kurt Gödel, Hans Hahn, Viktor Kraft, Karl Menger, Marcel Natkin, Otto Neurath, Olga Hahn-Neurath, Theodor Radakovic, Moritz Schlick, and Friedrich Waismann.

entities.6 For another, phenomenal experiences seem to be privately available to individual subjects, not publically available objects like knives or fingerprints. What

Carnap sought to do in his early work Der Logischer Aufbau der Welt (Carnap 2003

[1928]) was to flesh out Russell’s project of constructing the external world purely from

phenomenal experiences.7, 8 In the Aufbau, Carnap insisted that the protocol sentences

(i.e., “those sentences which are confirmed by observations more directly than others and serve as confirmation basis for others”) must refer to phenomenal experiences (Carnap

1963: 32). He thought that statements about the material world could be reduced to these phenomenal experiences; statements about the material world could be translated into statements which only speak of phenomenal objects or the experiencing of phenomenal objects (Carnap 2003 [1928]: 60). The bases for our construction of the external world,

Carnap argued, are these elementary phenomenal experiences—basic experiences that are not capable of further analysis (Sarkar 2005: 96). In the end, Carnap seems to have seen himself as carrying out the Russellian epistemological program by showing that the external world could be formally constructed using phenomenal language/evidence.9

6 At least on most conceptions of sense-data, sense-data are not physical entities.

7 For a short but helpful summary of the system laid out in the Aufbau see Nelson Goodman (1951: 114-146).

8 N.B., Carnap thought that the realism-idealism controversy is actually a pseudo-problem of philosophy. These theses “have no factual content” and cannot be considered “scientifically meaningful”—i.e., “they have no meaning at all” (Carnap 2003 [1928]).

9 Here we follow the more traditional interpretation. It should be noted however that some— notably Friedman (1992) and Richardson (1998)—have argued that Carnap’s concerns in the Aufbau are purely ontological rather than epistemological. For a brief reply, see Sarkar (2005: 107).

The Late Logical Positivist Conception of Evidence

But almost from the beginning there were worries that this phenomenal

conception of evidence did not fit well in the physicalist “scientific” conception of the

world to which many of the logical positivists were devoted. Carnap’s own reversal in

this matter was very influential, as he helped lead the Vienna Circle away from the

phenomenal conception of evidence and, in turn, much of twentieth century philosophy

away from the phenomenal conception (Kelly 2009: 41). While still with the Vienna

Circle, Carnap became a convinced physicalist through discussions with Otto Neurath

(Sarkar 2005: 98). Carnap subsequently abandoned the phenomenalist project of the

Aufbau. Rather than maintain this notion of evidence consisting in private experiences or

mental states, the later Carnap wished to use physicalistic language in describing

evidence and thus began to advance something like the courtroom conception.

In particular, Carnap became convinced that his former view of evidence made it

difficult to ground the objectivity of the scientific enterprise. Because physicalistic

language is intersubjective, he viewed it as much more amenable to the practice of

science (Carnap 1963: 51-52). For this reason Carnap’s protocol sentences would no

longer refer to basic phenomenal experiences but to physical objects (and their

observable properties). As Ayer put it, Carnap’s considered view was that the protocol

sentences (i.e., the statements of one’s evidence used in incrementally confirming

empirical hypotheses) “must refer, not to private incommunicable experiences, but to

public physical events” (Ayer 1959: 20). Carnap’s physicalism became so complete that

he even argued that psychology could be reduced to physicalistic or behavioralistic

language (Carnap 2011 [1934]).

Also influential in Carnap’s evolution on evidence (and hence the evolution of the

entire Vienna Circle) was Karl Popper. As Carnap recounts it, Popper argued

convincingly that “sentences about observable physical events were more suitable as

protocol sentences, because, in contrast to sentences about subjective experiences, they

can be tested intersubjectively” (Carnap 1963: 32). Hence as Kelly (2009: 41)

summarizes, “the primary motivation for this change of heart [in Carnap] was the

growing conviction that the conception of evidence as private mental states rendered it

inadequate to ground the intersubjectivity of science.” In addition to Popper (2002

[1935]), several other mid-twentieth-century thinkers like Hempel (1952) and Feigl

(1953) also picked up on—and emphasized—this theme of the public nature of evidence.

While this shift about the content of protocol sentences may seem slight, it is important to

remember that protocol sentences are basically a report of one’s evidence. So, as Kelly

has remarked, to change the content of protocol sentences is to change what sorts of

things are available as evidence. The later positivist view, then, “seems to entail that only

public physical events can count as evidence—and in particular, that experiences,

formerly taken to exhaust the category of evidence, are ineligible to count as such” (Kelly

2009: 42). The importance of this shift away from the phenomenal conception of

evidence is difficult to overstate, as the Vienna Circle’s influence only grew when many

of its most prominent members were tragically dispersed by the advent of the Second

World War.

Because the logical positivists were primarily concerned with grounding science

and securing the “scientific” worldview, in hindsight we can see that their conception of

evidence tended to emphasize one very particular function of evidence. Thomas Kelly

(2009) has recently identified four major roles that evidence seems to play. First,

evidence is often taken as that which justifies belief. Second, a key characteristic of

paradigmatically rational people is that they respect their evidence. Third, evidence is

typically taken as a sign of or guide to the truth. Lastly, evidence is often thought to

function as a neutral or objective arbiter in disputes. The later Carnap’s courtroom

conception of evidence appears to fulfill this last function well. Indeed, as we have seen,

this objectivity and intersubjectivity was the main motivation for the courtroom

conception.

However, it seems that on the courtroom conception we lack evidence for all sorts

of things we normally take ourselves to know.10 What publicly available let alone physicalisticly describable evidence could one possibly have for the proposition that one currently has a headache or many of the things commonly known via immediate introspection, memory, or rational intuition? That is to say, the courtroom conception seems much better suited to an account of evidence derived from sense perception than an account of the evidence enjoyed by our other mental faculties. Notice too that one can even possess courtroom evidence and yet lack justification for the propositions that it justifies. A detective could physically possess and know about the fingerprints on Sirhan

Sirhan’s gun without having a reason to believe the proposition that Sirhan Sirhan’s fingerprints are on the gun. And this seems a bad result in an account of epistemic evidence, for it means that possessing courtroom evidence does not entail possessing an

10 We unabashedly assume here with Chisholm and others the commonsense view that “we do know most, if not all, of those things that ordinary people think that they know” (Chisholm 1977: 121).

epistemic reason to believe relevant propositions.11 In other words, as we will see in more detail in the following chapter, the courtroom conception may not be able to fulfill

evidence’s role as reasons-provider.

A First Desideratum

Even from this brief overview the late-Carnapian conception of evidence we can

glean our first desideratum for an adequate conception of evidence: Evidence, whatever

it is, must not be so objective that it cannot do the epistemic (i.e., reasons-providing)

work required of it. Evidence must not only be able to function as an arbiter in public

disputes, but it must also be the sort of thing that gives an individual reasons for belief

regarding many common items of knowledge or justified belief. This overemphasis on

objectivity and evidence’s role in science led Carnap and others to a view of evidence

which, even if workable, only applied to the evidence derived from one of our many

mental faculties (viz., our perceptual faculties).

An objection arises naturally at this point, however: Why not be pluralists about

evidence? Perhaps there are different conceptions of evidence to cover different

domains. What might we say to this objection? In reply, note that we can easily explain

why we might naturally call physical evidence “evidence” on the phenomenal

conception. That is, there is a natural reduction of physical evidence down to more

fundamental experiences. Imagine the following conversation:

Defense Attorney: “What is your evidence that Sirhan Sirhan is the assassin?” Police Officer: “Well for one thing, his fingerprints were on the gun.” Defense Attorney: “What is your evidence for that?” Police Officer: “The forensic examiner’s report says so.”

11 Throughout this dissertation we use the standard terminology of ‘epistemic reasons.’ Despite the etymology, this phrase should not be taken to imply that such reasons necessarily put one in a position to know (cf. Kvanvig forthcoming).

Defense Attorney: “Yeah, but what is your evidence for that?” Police Officer: “Umhhh, I saw the report.” Defense Attorney: “And what is your evidence for that?” Police Officer: “Well, I suppose I had certain visual sensations.” Defense Attorney: “So while you at first appeared to claim all the authority and objectivity of forensic science, all you really have to go on at the end of the day is your own subjective experience—is that right?” Police Officer: “I suppose so.”

Through this sort of questioning, we suggest, we will inevitably arrive at some sort of

experience—what Conee and Feldman have dubbed “ultimate evidence” (Conee and

Feldman 2008: 88). If this reduction is at all plausible, which in our view it is, then the

phenomenal conception is more parsimonious than pluralism about evidence; it unites

several possible ways of thinking and speaking about evidence in a natural, unified way.

The problem for the courtroom conception of evidence is that no similar natural reduction

beginning from experience and explaining it in terms of physical objects seems

possible.12 The courtroom conception gains much of its allure from its purported objectivity. But in the end this conception’s ability to provide reasons for belief reveals that this conception is parasitic upon the more basic notion of experience as evidence.

Hence, again, our first desideratum of an adequate conception of evidence: Evidence, whatever it is, must not be so objective that it cannot do the epistemic (i.e., reasons- providing) work required of it.

A Preview of Things to Come

Yet if the courtroom conception cannot play the important role of reasons- provider, the million dollar question is whether any single conception of evidence can play all four of these roles. Harkening back to the earlier views of the Vienna Circle,

12 N.B., we will also indirectly argue against pluralism in Chapter Two when we argue at length that the phenomenal conception of evidence can play all four of the roles that Kelly claims evidence plays in philosophy.

Kelly (2008, 2009) has argued that the phenomenal conception of evidence cannot play

some of the key roles that evidence must play in our epistemic lives. Specifically, Kelly

argues that it is something of a paradox that the courtroom conception plays the first two

roles well and the latter two roles poorly; meanwhile the phenomenal conception plays

the first two poorly and the latter two well. If successful, Kelly could be seen as

advancing a plausible argument for pluralism about evidence. This dissertation will

argue, pace Kelly and others who have (at least partially) taken up the logical positivists’

arguments, that the phenomenal conception of evidence is a viable and attractive option

today.

To this end we begin by arguing in Chapter Two that experience can indeed play

all four evidential roles identified by Kelly. There we begin by clarifying the seeming

state version of the phenomenal conception that we will defend throughout the rest of the

dissertation. As even Kelly admits, the phenomenal conception easily handles the role of

justifier and that which rational thinkers respect. While in these first two sections we

attempt to show that the phenomenal conception also has several advantages over the recently popular Williamsonian conception of evidence, the real burden of the chapter is to show that the phenomenal conception can play the third role of a guide to the truth

(even though phenomenal evidence is, admittedly, non-factive) and the fourth role of neutral arbiter. To accomplish this latter end we argue that the phenomenal conception can not only play the role of neutral arbiter but can even solve difficult philosophical problems related to the objectivity of evidence, peer disagreement, and the need for evidence to be publicly available.

Having argued that the phenomenal conception of evidence can play all four of

the major roles of evidence, we then have great motivation to reexamine the viability of

the phenomenal conception abandoned by the positivists. In Chapter Three we take an

in-depth look at one particular application of the phenomenal conception of evidence in

the work of prominent epistemologist Alvin Plantinga. Plantinga and other Reformed

Epistemologists like Michael Bergmann (the subject of Chapter Five) have borne an

especially interesting and, at times, ambiguous relationship to the phenomenal conception

of evidence; while they are externalists who have been critical of internalism, they both

(surprisingly) have made use of the phenomenal or experiential conception. Most

importantly, Plantinga’s religious epistemology illustrates perfectly the need for a

constraint on the phenomenal conception of evidence if it is to withstand scrutiny. In

Chapter Three we argue that Plantinga’s work on evidence contains a serious oversight

from which we will gain a second desideratum and a more adequate understanding of the

phenomenal conception: Evidence must not be so subjective as to be unable to fulfill the

role of neutral arbiter in disputes. We find that if the phenomenal conception of evidence

is to be tenable, it needs to be offered in conjunction with an epistemic principle which

tethers together experiences with the propositions they evidence in an epistemically

appropriate manner. Hence the burden of this dissertation is to hit a mean, to find a

Goldilocks zone in our conception of evidence—it must be neither too objective nor too

subjective. The final two chapters begin to develop and defend this revised phenomenal

conception.

Because in Chapter Three we found that the phenomenal conception needs to be

offered in conjunction with a conservative epistemic principle, in Chapter Four we

consider a wide range of such principles and argue for the superiority of one principle in

particular. Often times conservative epistemic principles like Michael Huemer’s

Phenomenal Conservatism are thought to be recently invented principles merely used to

advance yet another novel epistemology. But we begin by looking at epistemic

conservatism prior to the twentieth century and argue that more recent conservative

principles have their roots in intuitions that are as old as skeptical arguments themselves.

By the time we reach Reid and the modern period, however, two very different kinds of

conservative principles become clear—kinds of principles that are often run together in

current epistemic discourse. Principles of doxastic conservatism claim that a believed

proposition has positive epistemic status for the believer in virtue of its being believed.

Principles of non-doxastic conservatism, by contrast, claim (roughly) that experiences

(seemings or appearances) provide their relevant beliefs with prima facie justification.

Having detailed the various formulations of non-doxastic conservatism offered by

Chisholm, Swinburne, Huemer, and others, we argue for the superiority of Dougherty’s

Reasons Commonsensism in particular. Furthermore, we advance novel arguments

defending the stronger, bi-conditional version of this principle. This is important to our

project of rehabilitating the phenomenal conception, for only the stronger principle

(which claims not only that seemings provide epistemic reasons for belief but that only

seemings provide epistemic reasons for belief) can truly constrain the phenomenal

conception of evidence. As will become clear, without such a principle, the phenomenal

conception would still be too subjective.

But these non-doxastic conservative principles themselves (even in their

biconditional form)—principles which, we claim, the phenomenal conception requires in

order to keep it from being overly subjective—have been the subject of attack. Thus,

finally, in Chapter Five we examine a recent and pressing challenge to conservative

principles in epistemology: Bergmann’s dilemma for internalism. We conclude that

certain conservative principles—Michael Huemer’s Phenomenal Conservatism and by

extension Dougherty’s Reasons Commonsensism—can be shown to survive this

challenge and hence are a viable option to help chasten the phenomenal conception of

evidence. But for now we must be content to start at the beginning and attempt to show

that the phenomenal conception of evidence—the conception abandoned by Carnap and

the Vienna Circle—is still a viable contender in that it can fulfill all four of the roles of

evidence identified by Kelly.

CHAPTER TWO

Can the Phenomenal Conception Fulfill the Many Roles of Evidence?

Introduction

As I said in the first chapter, the view of experience as evidence that I seek to

defend is a species of what Williamson (2000) calls the phenomenal conception of

evidence. On this conception, one’s evidence consists of one’s (non-factive) mental

states—and in the species I prefer, these non-factive mental states are non-doxastic

seeming states.1 The question of this chapter is whether the phenomenal conception—the

conception explicitly rejected, as we saw in the first chapter, by the logical positivists—is

up to the task of fulfilling the numerous roles that evidence plays in our epistemic lives.

For even if the phenomenal conception is suited to some roles evidence plays, perhaps it

is not suited to all of them. Thomas Kelly (2008), for one, has argued that the

phenomenal conception cannot play all the roles evidence plays and is thus inadequate as

a conception of evidence. In this chapter I will use Kelly’s (2009) own understanding of

the various roles that evidence plays and argue that the phenomenal conception can play each one. Because my larger aim is to show that the phenomenal conception is still viable today (rather than to show that it is the decisive victor among conceptions of

1 The view I have in mind throughout is the view that the mental state or experience itself is the evidence, not merely the propositional content of the experience or extra-mental facts. Given the synonymous nature of ‘evidence’ and ‘epistemic reasons,’ if the latter can be shown to be mental states rather than the propositional contents of one’s mental states, then evidence would seem to consist in the mental state or experience itself. And this is precisely what John Turri (2009) has so persuasively argued. However, as I said in Chapter One, propositionalism and factualism are not necessarily at odds with the phenomenal conception or a commonsense, experience-first epistemology generally. The phenomenal conception still seems workable if, for instance, evidence consists in true propositions about one’s experiences (i.e., it is true that it seems to S that p). For this reason I do not argue here against propositionalism or factualism but focus my attention on the phenomenal conception’s more natural rivals: the objectual/courtroom conception and, to a lesser extent, the Williamsonian E=K conception.

evidence), I will not claim that only the phenomenal conception of evidence can play

these roles but rather that the phenomenal conception is sufficient to do so. Given,

however, that some of its chief rivals (like the courtroom and Williamsonian conceptions

of evidence) will be seen to be unable to play all four roles, the phenomenal conception is

seen to have a significant comparative advantage. But before attempting to demonstrate

that the phenomenal conception—and it particular, its seeming state version—can play all

four roles, I must clarify the nature of these so-called ‘seeming states.’

The Nature of Seeming States

In this section I will attempt to describe the essential features of seeming states.

But it should constantly be kept in mind that seeming states are common experiences that

can be known via simple introspection. We all have this sort of experience and should

not be confused by the fancy moniker ‘seeming state.’ Contra Williamson (2008: 217),

Tooley (2013: 309-314), and others, we know what it is to be in a state where something

seems to be the case.

Advocates of the phenomenal conception claim that we should take ‘experience

as evidence.’ But this locution can be misleading. On this view, some things labeled

‘experience’ are not evidence. For instance, we might say that Samantha underwent the

experience of surgery even though she was anesthetized. But this sort of unconscious

‘experience’ would be a poor candidate for epistemic evidence. Seemings are, then, a

subset of experiences taken in this broad sense.2 Particularly, they are conscious experiences with propositional content. As Tolhurst (1998: 293) argues, seemings are

2 There are, of course, further complications. For instance, the periphery of one’s visual field may contain visual imagery of which one is, in some sense, conscious but not explicitly aware. I take it that one only has seeming states with contents of which one is aware.

intentional states—states that are about something. They are not mere non-intentional

states like an afterimage from a camera flash. Seemings aim at telling us about the world.

To use Searle’s (1983: 8) language, they aim at having a “world-to-mind direction of fit”

(Tolhurst 1998: 293). Put another way, unlike non-intentional states, the content of

seemings has accuracy conditions. Seemings ‘assert’ something about the way that the

world is. Hence it is natural to see them as having propositional content.

Contrary to some accounts of seemings (Tolhurst 1998: 300; Huemer 2001: 58-

79), it is crucial not only to distinguish seemings from non-conscious states but also from

mere sensory states or sensations. Think of the buzz of a bee or a large green visual

impression. Typically when we have sensory impressions they are accompanied by

seeming states (the seeming that there is a bee nearby or that there is a green object

before me), but they need not be. They are conceptually distinct. Think of a baby

receiving visual sensations for the first time. Without concepts under which those

sensations might be organized, classified, and made intelligible, it is difficult to see how

anything particular would seem to the baby to be the case. It is reasonable to think that

for the baby these are mere raw sensations without seemings. Tucker (2010: 530-531)

also distinguishes sensations from seemings with reference to the peculiar phenomenon

of blindsight. In cases of blindsight, subjects with defective visual apparatuses appear to

have no conscious visual imagery in their minds when objects are placed in their visual

blind spots. However, when asked questions about what objects might be in their blind

spots those with blindsight have a surprising amount of success (Stoerig 1997: 225-226).

In this way, we might think that those with blindsight have the seeming that a certain

kind of object is in their blind spot without any visual sensations whatsoever. If this is

the case, seemings are distinct from sensations.3 One helpful way to think of seemings,

then, is that they are not thin experiences but rather thick experiences like a construal

(Roberts 2003: 69-83, 2013) or a seeing-as (Tolhurst 1998: 300). The baby in our

previous example has a visual experience or sees, but she does not construe the visual

imagery this way or that; she does not see the colors out the window as a bird.

Seemings also have a distinctive phenomenological character. Tolhurst (1998:

298-299) describes it as “felt veridicality”; seemings “have the feel of truth, the feel of a

state whose content reveals how things really are.” Huemer (2001: 77-79) calls this same

aspect “forcefulness” while Tucker (2010: 530) refers to it as the “assertiveness” of

seemings. Perceptual seemings, for instance, “represent their contents as actualized”

(Huemer 2001: 77). The point is that seemings differ from other mental states that do not

recommend themselves as representing the way that the world really is. The seeming that

there is a person in front of me is distinguished from merely imagining that there is a

person in front of me precisely by this distinctive phenomenology.

We should not, of course, posit distinct mental states like seemings without need.

Perhaps for this reason some (e.g., Armstrong 1961: 84-87; Lycan 1988: 165-166; Sosa

1998, 2007: 44-69; Swinburne 2001: 135-151; Rogers and Matheson 2011) have thought

that seemings might be reducible to more familiar states like beliefs or

inclinations/dispositions to believe. Many leading advocates of seemings (Huemer 2001,

2007; Tucker 2013b) tend to resist this reduction, however. Seemings do not appear to

be beliefs because, even if seemings and inclinations go hand-in-hand, it seems possible

3 Tucker (2010: 531) also offers associative agnosia as a condition in which one can have sensations without seemings. He further argues that seemings rather than sensations are capable of providing justification. Sensations are evidentially relevant, but this is only because sensations “often affect what I am justified in believing by affecting the way things seem” (Tucker 2010: 531).

that a subject can have a seeming that p without believing (or being inclined to believe) that p (Bealer 1999: 31; Huemer 2001: 99-100, 2007: 30-31; Sosa 2006). Some have argued for the distinction between seemings and beliefs from instances of known illusions. For instance, if I know I am standing in front of a carnival mirror I will not believe that I am as tall as I appear. In fact, I will not even be tempted or inclined to

believe the appearance/seeming, or so the reasoning goes. But this reasoning seems

mistaken. If I am aware of the illusion, then the content of my seeming will be ‘I appear

really tall’ rather than ‘I am tall.’ And I either believe or am inclined to believe the latter.

More persuasive in my view is Huemer’s (2007: 31) argument that seemings often

“provide non-trivial explanations for what we are disposed to believe. I am disposed to accept that there is a white cat on the couch because that is the way things appear to me, and this is not just to say that I am disposed to accept that there is a white cat because I am so disposed.” Advocates of seemings are not alone in viewing evidence as non- doxastic (e.g., Pollock 1986: 87-92; Moser 1989: 88). Viewing seemings as non-doxastic evidential states has a number of benefits: It makes sense of the typical phenomenology of belief formation (where belief tends to be based on the way things seem to the subject); it stops the regress problem in an obvious way; and it helps avoid a number of critiques of evidentialism (e.g., Plantinga 1996).

Cullison (2010: 260) has argued forcefully that “seeming states are not plausibly analyzed in terms of beliefs, partial beliefs, attractions to believe, or inclinations to believe” but only as “irreducible propositional attitudes.” Notice, however, that claiming that seemings are sui generis “propositional attitudes” goes beyond my claim that seemings are a subset of experiences that have propositional content. For one thing, T.

Ryan Byerly (2012: 774) argues that the view that seemings are propositional attitudes

conflicts with the idea that seemings are experiences. It is just a category mistake;

experiences cannot be attitudes. Though I will not take up the issue here, as Werner

(2014: 1770) points out, Byerly’s claim that experiences cannot be propositional attitudes

is not as obvious as it might at first appear.4 At any rate, Cullison’s claim is not that

seemings are just like propositional attitudes such as belief in every respect. Seemings on

this account are supposed to be very unique propositional attitudes. While it might be

helpful to think of seemings as propositional attitudes in the sense that a seeming state is

an assertive, indicative state—a state or stance toward some proposition—in my view this

language is misleading and therefore unhelpful.5 The language of ‘attitude’ may give the mistaken impression that the subject has made a choice, judgment, or endorsement with respect to the propositional content of the seeming; that the subject has somehow affirmed the seeming. But this would be a mistake. As Skene (2013: 542) puts it, seemings “are mental representations of what is to be affirmed rather than what is in fact affirmed.” For this reason, I think it better to conceive of seemings as a subset of non- doxastic experiences with propositional content rather than as propositional attitudes.

What is a seeming state, then? In summary, a seeming state is a conscious experience of which we are aware, with propositional content, distinct from belief and mere sensation, which has the ‘feel’ of revealing the way the world is. If this is the case, there can be various kinds of seemings. Perhaps the most natural way to divide them is to think that there are four basic kinds of seemings which correspond to what philosophers have typically seen as the four basic sources of knowledge: perception, memory,

4 Werner (2014: 1763-1764) also blunts some of Byerly’s other criticisms of seemings.

5 Thanks to Chris Tucker for discussion on this matter.

introspection, and rational intuition (cf. Chisholm 1977: 122; Audi 2013: 182-184). With

the nature of seemings thus clarified, let us put them to work and see if the phenomenal

conception cannot play the four major roles of evidence.

The First Role: Evidence as that which Justifies Belief

Reconciling the many philosophical accounts of evidence with how evidence is

conceived and spoken of in other disciplines or even by lay folk generally is exceedingly

difficult. Evidence just seems to play numerous, distinct roles. Achinstein (2001), for

instance, has argued that epistemologists’ conceptions of evidence simply cannot account

for how scientists actually use and conceive of evidence (an issue that we return to at the

end of this chapter). Thomas Kelly (2009) has helpfully called attention to four of the

most important roles that evidence plays. The first such role is that of justifying beliefs.

Many philosophers are convinced that the concept of evidence “is inseparable from that

of justification” or that which makes belief reasonable (Kim 1988: 390-391). Typical

evidentialists, of course, believe that evidence is the only thing that epistemically justifies

belief. The phenomenal conception of evidence, I will argue in this section, accords well

with this role of evidence.

Notice first that while evidence is that which justifies propositions or beliefs,

evidence is typically (if not always) defeasible. That is, for any piece of evidence e1 had by S for some proposition p, there may be future evidence e2 that S could gain which

would either (i) undercut the support e1 was thought to give p or (ii) simply outweigh the strength of the support e1 continues to give to p such that the conjunction of e1 and e2

does not support the proposition that p (cf. Pollock 1974: 42-43; Hempel 1960). The

phenomenal conception of evidence makes perfect sense of the defeasibility of evidence.

In conscious experience it seems to us that certain propositions are true and that they bear

on the truth of other propositions. But it is perfectly possible that further experience may

make it seem as though a certain proposition was never really well-supported or that the

previous experience is now outweighed in light of further experience.

But if evidence consisted, for instance, of physical objects or publicly observable

states of affairs, in what sense could evidence be defeasible? In what sense is a knife

defeasible evidence that Smith committed the murder? Say that detective Reagan finds

what appears to be Smith’s knife in a victim’s back. Later on, however, Reagan finds

Smith’s actual knife. On the phenomenal account, it is quite easy to understand the first

piece of evidence as misleading evidence. Misleading evidence is not to be confused

with apparent or fake evidence. Misleading evidence is genuinely evidence for a

conclusion that turns out to be false. Apparent or fake evidence, however, never really

supports the conclusion in the first place (Kelly 2009: 52n9). As Kelly explains:

While counterfeit money is not money, and fool’s gold is not gold, misleading evidence is evidence, no less than non-misleading evidence is. The fact that misleading evidence is genuine evidence is why beliefs based on misleading evidence can be reasonable, given that what it is reasonable to believe depends on one’s evidence. (Kelly 2008: 937)

It appeared to Reagan that this was Smith’s knife, so he in fact had evidence at that time that Smith was the murderer. But upon finding the second knife, he had a second seeming state in which Smith did not appear to be the murderer. The phenomenal account, then, makes sense of Reagan’s initial seeming state or evidence. The appearance of Smith’s knife at the crime scene is objectively good evidence that Smith is the murderer (i.e., it raises the probability that Smith is the murderer). This evidence can be outweighed, however, by learning that the appearance of Smith’s knife was only an

appearance and nothing more. So Smith’s total evidence does not support the proposition

that Smith is the murderer. The courtroom conception of evidence, however, has the

awkward entailment that Reagan never really had evidence for Smith’s guilt in the first

place. If evidence does not consist in the appearance of things but in the objects

themselves, then finding someone else’s knife at the crime scene is in no way evidence

for Smith’s guilt. So the courtroom conception seems to collapse the rather intuitive

distinction between misleading evidence and apparent or fake evidence.

Similarly, on a Williamsonian view of evidence (Williamson 2000: 184-208) in

which one’s total evidence is simply the collective body of propositions one knows

(E=K, as the formula has it), the defeasible nature of evidence is difficult to

comprehend.6 On such a conception, evidence must be factive. After all, to know a proposition p, p must be true. On Williamson’s view one must say, as on the courtroom conception of evidence, that detective Reagan never had any evidence that Smith was guilty if Reagan’s evidence was the false proposition that ‘Smith’s knife was found at the crime scene.’ Williamson would likely protest that Reagan still had as evidence the

known proposition that ‘I [Reagan] was in such a state that it appeared to me that I found

Smith’s knife at the crime scene.’ There are two vexing problems with this approach.

First, a proposition must be believed to be known. And despite Williamson’s (2000: 198-

199) assertion to the contrary, it seems psychologically implausible that we typically

have beliefs about our appearance states rather than about the world itself. It seems much

6 We will treat Williamson a great deal in this chapter because, like the late positivists, he opposes the phenomenal conception and in its stead offers an externalist conception of evidence in which evidence does not supervene on internal/phenomenal features of one’s mental states (Williamson 2000: 191). Susanna Schellenberg (2013; 2014) offers a sophisticated view of evidence which shares a number of similarities with Williamson’s position. I will not deal with her view directly however, as in the end she advocates the phenomenal conception of evidence.

more likely that Reagan believed that Smith’s knife was found at the scene rather than

that he believed he was appeared to Smith-knifely at the scene or some such. Second, even if Reagan did believe this higher-order proposition about his experience, what

justifies this belief? For Williamson, only the other propositions Reagan knows can

constitute Reagan’s evidence. So, given that the phenomenal character of the experience

itself cannot justify, and given that it would be absurd for the believed higher-order

proposition to justify itself (as we will see in Chapter Four), which of Reagan’s other known propositions could possibly justify this higher-order belief that he is having an experience in which it seems to him that such-and-such (cf. Brueckner 2009: 8)?

If the courtroom and Williamsonian conceptions of evidence end up implying that

Reagan had no evidence—and thus, presumably, that he was unjustified in believing

Smith guilty—then the phenomenal conception clearly has the advantage in concluding that Reagan was indeed justified in his false belief because he possessed good, if misleading evidence. Indeed, it is precisely this consideration in regard to the misleading evidence of illusions and hallucinations which led prominent empiricists of the early- twentieth century like Russell (1998 [1912], 2009 [1914]) to adopt the phenomenal

conception of evidence in the first place. However, recent ‘disjunctivists’ like McDowell

(1982, 1995, 2011), Williamson (2000), and Pritchard (2012) maintain that me and my

counterpart in the New Evil Demon thought experiment (Lehrer and Cohen 1983; Cohen

1984) do not share the same evidence. But if a fundamental role of evidence is to justify, and my counterpart in the evil demon scenario appears to be justified in holding his mistaken beliefs,7 then there is some pressure on the disjunctivists to also revise their

7 See Madison (forthcoming: sect. 3) for three reasons to think that victims of the New Evil Demon are justified.

conception of justification and rationality. For this reason Williamson writes, “Rational

thinkers are not always in a position to know what their evidence is; they are not always

in a position to know what rationality requires of them” (Williamson 2000: 164).

Following in Williamson’s footsteps Clayton Littlejohn (2012: 121-156) has been forced

to the radical conclusion that justification itself must be factive. After all, if false beliefs

are not evidence, then what kind of guide for belief and action could they be? And if

false beliefs cannot appropriately guide belief and action, then false beliefs cannot justify

belief and action. Hence justification is itself factive (i.e., one can only be justified in

believing true propositions). So the Williamsonian view of evidence comes at double

cost: not only does it offer a revisionist view of evidence but it also faces pressure to

offer a revisionist view of rationality and justification. We should not, then, follow

Williamson and the disjunctivists in their initial revision of evidence. The phenomenal conception has the edge.

However, at this point, one might worry that the claim that the phenomenal conception of evidence can play the role of justifier depends upon an internalist conception of justification. Externalists often seem unconcerned with the justifying role of evidence and evidence’s connection to justification/warrant/rationality. In reply, while most advocates of seemings—“seeming realists” as Tucker (2013b: 6) calls them—are internalists about justification, it should be noted that some recent work has begun to incorporate seemings in an externalist-friendly manner (e.g., Bergmann 2013b). It must be admitted, however, that first-person evidence (like seemings) has in general been given a much more prominent role in internalist theories of justification than in externalist accounts of warrant. However, while an externalist like Plantinga thinks of

warrant in terms of proper function, even he affirms that having evidence for one’s

beliefs, being internally justified in one’s beliefs, and being internally rational are

epistemic virtues (Plantinga 1993b: 3; Plantinga 2000: 203-204, 241). Additionally, on

externalist accounts like Plantinga’s, evidence is often necessary to justification in that

one will often need defeater-defeaters, i.e., evidence against potential defeaters (see

Plantinga 2000: 357-373). So even externalists recognize an important role for evidence

in justifying belief. In a similar vein, Kelly (2009: 10) notes that many reliabilists have

felt the weight of the clairvoyance challenge to reliabilism and have modified their

externalist models accordingly (e.g., Goldman 1986: 109-112). In attempting to account

for why one must be at least somewhat responsive to evidence these reliabilists further bolster the commonsense connection between evidence and justified belief. As we have

seen, the phenomenal conception of evidence not only accounts for this fact but does so

better than several rivals.

The phenomenal conception of evidence also accords very well with the common

notion that a subject must possess evidence for p if that subject is to be justified in

believing that p. If evidence itself consists in seeming states then this would make

perfect sense. We ‘possess’ our seemings in the sense that they are our conscious states;

we have direct, privileged, first-person access to them. If, however, evidence were to

consist in physical objects or public states of affairs (as on the late-Carnapian view) this

seems impossible. In what sense does the jury have the evidence of the knife or the

fingerprint in a murder trial? Perhaps this makes some sense in that they were once in a

room with those physical objects. But think then of our evidence for our belief that

Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 B.C. Surely we have evidence for this proposition

without ever having access to the relevant archaeological material or the initial state of

affairs.

Defenders of the courtroom conception might respond as follows. They might

say that while all evidence consists in physical objects or public states of affairs, in order

to have a justified belief a subject must have access to the relevant physical object or

public state of affairs and have some sort of experience with the object or public state of

affairs. So, properly speaking, evidence consists in objective things or states while

justification requires the addition of subjective experience. But first, note the cost:

Evidence itself, on this view, does not justify beliefs—not without an experiential state.

In other words, strictly speaking this view does not account for the role of evidence as

that which justifies belief. Furthermore, consider again the case in which detective

Reagan believes he has seen Smith’s knife at the crime scene but, in fact, it was not

Smith’s knife. On the view under consideration it is still difficult to see how Reagan was

justified in his false belief that Smith is the murderer, even though Reagan surely seems

justified. After all, on the view under consideration Reagan needs evidence and an

appropriate experiential state for justification. But if the knife was not Smith’s—or even

worse, say there was no physical knife but Reagan was the victim of an ingenious

illusion—then, because he had no evidence, Reagan’s belief was unjustified (despite all

appearances to the contrary). So on this view too there is pressure to heavily revise our

conception of justification. Better, then, to admit that appearance states can justify, even

in the absence of the relevant physical objects or states of affairs. We conclude, then, not

only that the phenomenal conception of evidence can play the first role of evidence but

that some other prominent views face trouble in this first and most obvious task of

evidence.

The Second Role: Evidence as that which Rational Thinkers Respect

The second major role played by evidence that Kelly identifies is similar to, yet

perhaps distinct from, the first. It has long been thought that a hallmark of rationality

consists in responsiveness to one’s evidence—whether this responsiveness consists in

conditionalizing on new evidence, proportioning the strength of one’s belief to the

strength of one’s evidence, seeking out additional evidence, etc., etc. With regard to

conditionalization, I would argue the phenomenal conception is in concord with recent

developments in epistemology. Kelly (2009: 7-8) himself notes that several

epistemologists—most prominently Putnam (1975)—have argued that the introduction of

a new rival alternative hypothesis, even in the absence of any independent evidence for it,

should lower our credence in our original hypothesis. This would make little sense on the

courtroom conception of evidence. After all, by hypothesis we have no independent

evidence for the rival hypothesis; so we have no physical evidence for it. Why then

would it be rational to lower one’s credence in her original hypothesis? The phenomenal

conception, on the other hand, can make sense of all this. The introduction of the rival

hypothesis will tend to induce some doubt and decrease the strength of the seeming that

the original hypothesis is true. The original hypothesis will, in other words, tend to have

slightly less evidence in its favor. So the phenomenal conception makes sense of why

one’s confidence should generally reflect the space of relevant alternative hypotheses of

which one is aware.

We seem to have a duty (perhaps an epistemic duty, if indeed there are

specifically epistemic duties) to respect our evidence. But notice that our duty here is not

to believe the truth. Consider again, for example, a New Evil Demon scenario in which

my counterpart and I have all the same phenomenal experiences (qualitatively speaking)

but my counterpart has no veridical experiences of an external world. Many have

suggested that because we would seem to have the same justification for believing the

same propositions, we both ought to believe the same set of propositions (Cohen 1984).

That is to say, there is something fundamentally good, correct, and perhaps praiseworthy

about heeding our evidence, even if it all turns out to be misleading. My deceived twin is

no less epistemically virtuous for having been systematically deceived. As rational

creatures we are to do our epistemic best vis-à-vis our evidence regardless of whether we

ultimately have access to the truth.

As I said in the last section, against this widely held view of evidence and

justification Williamson (2000), McDowell (1982, 1995, 2011), Pritchard (2012), and

other disjunctivists argue that evidence consists in factive mental states. If this is right,

then my demon-deceived counterpart and I simply do not share the same evidence since

only mine consists in factive mental states. And because my counterpart believes

numerous propositions about the material world without any evidence, he would seem far

and away less rational than I am despite our shared phenomenological and doxastic life. I

just got lucky; and in doing so I became more rational than my counterpart.8 What is worthy of attention here is that the way to reject the disjunctivist claim that my

8 Silins (2005) also argues that there is a problem lurking for evidential externalists (like disjunctivists) in the other direction. On evidential externalism, it is possible for my demon-deceived counterpart to sometimes be more justified than me depending on how closely we align our credences with our total evidence.

counterpart is irrational (or even less rational) is to accept a view of evidence according

to which we share the exact same evidence. But what exactly do my counterpart and I

share? We do not share the same knowledge, as my counterpart is systematically

deceived. We do not share access to the same physical objects, as my counterpart may

not have access to a material world at all. As the case stipulated at the outset, what my

counterpart and I share are our phenomenal appearances. Given that this is all we share,

if we are to retain (i) the commonsense intuition that we are equally rational, and (ii) the

commonsense view that responsiveness to evidence is a hallmark of rationality, it is

difficult to see our evidence as consisting in anything other than our phenomenal

appearances. As Kelly writes:

Indeed, it is natural to describe the bad case as a world in which the thinker’s evidence is systematically misleading. The trick to being a good Evil Demon (one might think) is to be effective at planting misleading evidence. Intuitively, the Demon misleads his victims by exploiting their rationality, inasmuch as he trades on the sensitivity of their beliefs to misleading evidence. …But the Demon misleads by providing his victims with misleading experiences. Hence the temptation to simply identify one’s evidence with one’s experiences: once again, the phenomenal conception of evidence looms. (Kelly 2009: 14)

Even Kelly has to admit that the phenomenal conception is at its strongest when it comes

to fulfilling the second role of evidence as that which rational thinker respect.

Still, critics of the phenomenal conception might worry that it has won the battle

vis-à-vis the New Evil Demon but lost the war. If one can be perfectly justified and have

good evidence even when one is nearly completely deceived about the nature of reality,

then what good is evidence? That is to say, the critic might claim that the value of being

a rational agent lies precisely in getting at the truth, or in at least having a propensity or

likelihood of arriving at the truth (Kelly 2009: 15). In a world where the truth is

completely hidden, one might rightly say the deceived subject is irrational (or at least

arational) or unjustified even if non-culpable (Pritchard 2012: 38-45). The critic could

insist that rationality is not ultimately a matter of responsiveness to the evidence but

fundamentally a matter of cognitive success in (or high probability of) getting at the truth.

But this would be a mistake. When in Plato’s Meno Socrates thinks of knowledge as true belief with a rational account, Socrates is seeking to find something more valuable than true belief alone. The most plausible candidate is a first-person responsiveness to evidence or reasons. That is to say, if the critic is right that rationality is fundamentally a function of success in getting at the truth (or likelihood of such success) rather than the possession of epistemic reasons, then respecting one’s evidence would seem to add nothing to the value of true belief. This cannot be a proper account of rationality. For, on its basis, it would seem that a person who is wholly unresponsive to evidence (or even disdainful of it), but who is still successful in getting at the truth, would be a fully rational creature. The phenomenal conception is, then, fully capable of playing this second role of evidence as that which rational thinkers respect.

The Third Role: Evidence as a Guide to Truth

As we have seen, the phenomenal conception easily fulfills the first two roles of evidence and squares with common intuitions about justification and rationality.

However, it is less than clear that the phenomenal conception can fulfill the other two roles. In its third role, Kelly observes that evidence appears to function as a sign or mark of the truth. Evidence is often thought of as that which indicates the truth of something else. On the standard and most straight-forward model, evidence e is thought of as that

which confirms (or disconfirms) a hypothesis h by making the truth of h more (or less) probable.9

With this in mind, some might concede that reasons-responsiveness or justification adds value to true belief but still worry about totally severing the link between evidence and truth. In a demon world where that connection is totally severed, one might worry that phenomenal evidence is of very little value. As we mentioned in the previous section,

plausibly, much if not all of the value of respecting one’s evidence consists in the putative link between doing so and believing the truth. Given this, one might worry that a view according to which perfectly following one’s evidence is compatible with a more or less completely mistaken view of one’s situation threatens to render obscure why following one’s evidence would be a good thing to do relative to the goal of having true rather than false beliefs. (Kelly 2009: 15)

The advocate of the phenomenal conception has at least a few responses here. First, on the phenomenal conception there is no reason to concede that the truth connection is totally severed. The phenomenal evidence my deceived counterpart has that ‘the Sun is in the sky’ represents the truth of that proposition, even though that proposition turns out

to be false. My demon-deceived counterpart’s phenomenal evidence does make the

evidenced propositions probable. This is an epistemic probability, not a statistical

probability. Yet this epistemic probability is no less objective for being epistemic. As

far back as the beginning of modern probability theory in the seventeenth century we can

distinguish two quite distinct kinds of probability, the first dealing with statistical

frequencies and the second dealing with the degree to which an evidence set confirms or

disconfirms a given proposition—what Hacking (2006) calls the “aleatory” and the

9 More technically, e is evidence for h iff the probability of h given e (in conjunction with background information i) is greater than unconditional the probability of h. Although I do not have space to evaluate his arguments here, Achinstein (1983, 2001) is perhaps the most significant critic of this probabilistic model.

“epistemological.” The latter kind can be given an objective or subjective interpretation

(Swinburne 2001a); and I see no reason why the phenomenalist cannot take the objective

interpretation. The contents of the phenomenal states objectively evidence the truth of

beliefs with the same propositional content (even if the latter turn out to be false).

Some have thought that there are counterexamples to the necessity of such

evidential relationships. Ted Poston helpfully summarizes Michael Bergmann’s (2006:

118-121) purported counterexample to the thesis that “the fittingness of doxastic response

B to evidence E is an essential property of that response to that evidence” this way:

The counterexample Bergmann presents involves possible cognizers who experience olfactory sensations of the type [normal humans] experience when [normal humans] smell a meadow full of flowers whenever they pick up a billiard ball and [naturally and non-inferentially] form the belief that there is a smallish hard round object in my hand…. This belief is fitting, so Bergmann claims…. However, the same belief is an unfitting response to the same evidence in actual cognizers…. (Poston 2008: 572)

The phenomenal conception can account for Bergmann’s intuition and yet uphold the

necessity of evidential relationships. Now we have already distinguished between

sensations and seemings above. While sensations often trigger seemings (and hence

evidence), they are not themselves evidence; they are not the bearers of propositional

content that can easily stand in these objective evidential relationships. Given that design

plans can vary, it certainly seems possible for different sensations to trigger or suggest

different seemings. The phenomenal view, however, is committed to an objective,

necessary relation between (i) seemings and what they evidence but not between (ii)

sensations and seemings or sensations and beliefs. This counterexample only affects the

latter.

Second, concede for the moment that some prominent philosophers like BonJour

(1985:7-8) are right to think that evidence and justification only has instrumental value;

that is, it is only valuable insofar as it is likely to get us at the truth.

Evidence/justification would still be valuable for being a necessary condition for

knowledge quite apart from the truth connection. In a similar vein, we might also note

that evidence/reasons/justification makes possible other valuable states like

understanding. Understanding is not just having a true belief but rather seeing the

conceptual and/or explanatory connections between things and setting one’s beliefs

accordingly (Kvanvig 2003; Pritchard and Turri 2012). The value is in the seeing for

one’s self. True belief is not our ultimate goal; true belief alone cannot explain the value

of rational inquiry. Rather, true belief where we have reasons and see the connections

between propositions and states of affairs, one might maintain, is the true telos of the rational animal. Even if we are in a demon world, our only hope of attaining factive states like knowledge and understanding lies in gathering and heeding reasons/evidence.

Third, however, we might question whether having evidentially grounded or justified belief is only of instrumental value. B. J. C. Madison (forthcoming: sect. 3) calls our attention to an unsavory implication of viewing justification as only of instrumental value relative to the goal of having true beliefs. Consider: A and B are both demon- deceived, yet A is an excellent reasoner given how things seem to him, while B is an extremely poor reasoner given the way things seem to him. The question Madison poses is whether the beliefs of A and B have equal epistemic value. After all, if following evidence or holding justified beliefs is only of value relative to attaining the truth, and neither A nor B has any hope of attaining the truth because of the evil demon, then neither

of their beliefs seem to have epistemic value. But intuitively this is not the case.

Madison thinks that this is because A’s beliefs, even though false, can still be

appropriately based on A’s seemings, not overly hasty, not overly confident, can cohere

with each other, can display sensitivity to defeaters, etc. If this is correct, then there is

value in having justified beliefs (beliefs appropriately based on one’s evidence)

independently of whether our evidence leads us to the truth. Appropriately basing beliefs

on evidence is intrinsically valuable.

Lastly, even if the foregoing has been incorrect, it is not at all clear that those who

think evidence is factive really do secure the truth connection better than phenomenalists.

First, recall that Williamson (2000: 198-199) thinks that one can know the proposition

that ‘it seems to me that p,’ and hence this proposition can be evidence for the demon-

deceived even if p is false. I argued against this view above. If my argument was

correct, then the demon-deceived would not typically believe this proposition and hence

would not know it or have it as evidence. But if my argument failed and Williamson is

correct, then his factive view of evidence is at no advantage over the phenomenal

conception regarding the truth connection. The demon-deceived with this known

proposition about experience will be led to innocently believe many false propositions.

So the factivity of evidence does not secure the truth connection. Likewise, Williamson

(2000: 174) thinks that we are not always in a position to know what our evidence is (i.e., we are not always in a position to know which propositions we really know and which we only think we know). If so, then what must guide our thoughts and actions is the way things seem. Appearances—even for disjunctivists—are the very guide of life.10

10 As I will explain in the next section, this should not be taken to imply that we only have access to perceptions rather than objects themselves.

Setting aside those who think of evidence as factive, what about the claim that

‘evidence for h must be a generally reliable indicator of the truth of h’? Well, seeing as

we have no access to God’s book of objective statistical correlations, again, our only

guide to reality is the way things seem. Consider a scientist exploring an extrasolar

planet years from now. She lived in the northern hemisphere of this distant planet for a

decade. While there she took meticulous measurements on everything she could. As it

turns out, smoke followed upon the presence of fire 100 percent of the time after many

observations. When she went to the southern hemisphere, she fully believed that this

correlation would continue. But as it turns out, for reasons unknown to the scientist,

smoke never follows fire in the southern hemisphere. The moral of our story should be

clear. While some might want to treat ‘e is evidence for h’ as synonymous with ‘e is a

reliable indicator of h’ so as to secure the connection between evidence and truth, this is a

mistake. We are never in a position to know for sure that such statistical correlations will

hold in distant lands or even in the future (just think of Goodman’s (1983 [1955]) grue

paradox). Surely, however, this does not mean that we never have evidence or reasons to

believe which follow from what seems to us to be true. We gain good reasons to believe

from appearances. This being the case, the phenomenal conception and the third

(signifying) role of evidence, far from being incompatible, intertwine nicely.

The Fourth Role: Evidence as Neutral Arbiter

With this fourth major role, we return to many of the chief concerns that Carnap

and company raised concerning the phenomenal conception of evidence (see Chapter

One). It is here that the phenomenal conception’s greatest challenge lies. When it comes

to serving the role of justifying individuals from their own first-person point of view, the

phenomenal conception is more than up to the task. The more difficult question is

whether phenomenal evidence can serve the role it often does in science—the role of

neutral, public, intersubjective arbiter. And it is far from clear that the phenomenal

conception fares well in this task.

Listen to common usages of ‘evidence’ and you will notice that it is often a

contrastive notion. The person who has evidence for her belief is contrasted in literature,

film, and everyday discourse with the person who blindly follows tradition, untested

prejudice, ancient texts, or ideological (and especially theological) dogma. One key

feature of this role of evidence is its public or intersubjective nature which is thought to lead to converging opinion over time (Kelly 2009: 30). In fact, “the logical positivists tended to simply identify ‘objective’ questions with those that are susceptible to intersubjective resolution” (Kelly 2009: 55ff26). Especially in science we have come to expect consensus opinion which outstrips the consensus-forging powers of, for instance, religion. For this reason, the word ‘evidence’ itself is most readily identified in the public imagination with science while ethics and religion have come to be identified with

‘opinion,’ indicating largely that such questions are not susceptible to intersubjective resolution.

Kelly mentions at least three potential problems for the phenomenal conception of evidence lurking in this fourth role: objectivity, intersubjectivity/peer disagreement, and publicity. I will treat each in turn. It should be kept in mind that these challenges have been thought to be the most serious—the very reason cited by the logical positivists as to why they rejected the phenomenal conception, and one of the key reasons that prominent philosophers like Kelly and Williamson reject it today. If it can be shown that the

phenomenal conception can indeed meet this fourth role of evidence, then I maintain that

the phenomenal conception is worth another look (a task that we will undertake

beginning in the next chapter).

Objectivity

The first problem in this vicinity harkens back to thinking of evidence in terms of

objective, empirical statistical correlations. We already began to treat this aspect of

evidence in the previous section in regard to the truth connection and saw that the

phenomenal conception can easily maintain that evidential relationships are objective. So

we will only briefly address the issue here with reference to a common example in the

evidence literature—the example of Koplik spots—in order to gain further insight into

the phenomenal conception’s ability to handle the seeming objectivity of evidence. Kelly

(2009: 34-35) asks us to consider two individuals A and B. A sees the proposition that

(i) the patient has Koplik spots on her skin

as evidence for

(ii) the patient has measles

while B does not. B is ignorant of the fact that Koplik spots typically indicate the

presence of measles—i.e., that (i) statistically correlates with (ii). The potential problem

is that (i) seems to be evidence for (ii), objectively speaking. That is, (i) is evidence for

(ii) regardless of whether B is ignorant of the relevant correlation. In this sense of

evidence, we might say that smoke was evidence for fire well before anyone knew of the

correlation. The phenomenal conception of evidence, it might be alleged, has trouble

here since it thinks of evidence as being possessed by a given individual. So while it sure

seems that by virtue of being aware of (i) B has evidence for (ii), on the phenomenal

conception it would be natural to say that B lacks evidence for (ii) since (i) does not

prompt the seeming that (ii) is the case. The phenomenal conception has trouble

accounting for this objective sense of evidence.

In response, first note that it is open to the advocate of the phenomenal conception

to claim that ‘evidence’ is simply used in more than one way. It seems that, as

Dougherty and Rysiew suggest, there may be a scientific use of the word ‘evidence’ in

which “we are adopting an idealized third-person perspective” (Dougherty and Rysiew

2013: 19). The epistemological sense of ‘evidence’ in which we are interested, however,

is one in which a person’s evidence (her first-person perspective) supports some

proposition or propositions. Kelly himself admits that ‘evidence’ in the latter sense is

basically synonymous with ‘reasons for belief’ (Kelly 2008: 953n4). Given this, the

phenomenal conception gets the correct answer in this case: B does not possess reasons

to believe the patient has measles. Surely it is unreasonable for B to believe that the

patient has measles given what he knows (and does not know)—i.e., given the way things

seem from his perspective. In fact, the phenomenalist should not agree that B has (i) as

evidence at all. B is not in a mental state with (i) as its content. He knows nothing about

Koplik spots. He only knows the patient has red spots on her skin. This being the case,

neither (i) nor (ii) is justified for B given the evidence he possesses. What

epistemologists are interested in is what propositions are justified for A and B. Unless A

and B know of the statistical correlation between (i) and (ii), that correlation is not

currently part of their perspective/evidence—even if we can see that it is potentially part

of their evidence from a third-person perspective. The phenomenal conception thus

renders the right verdict and has little to fear from this first challenge regarding the

objectivity of evidence.

Peer Disagreement11

A second problem for the phenomenal conception vis-à-vis this fourth role of

evidence may be thought to arise from peer disagreement.12 A theory of evidence must

account for how it is that two seemingly rational and well informed people—what

philosophers call ‘epistemic peers’—can come to widely divergent positions. An

important condition of peerhood is that peers share the same (relevant) evidence. As

Catherine Elgin writes, “Disagreement per se does not jeopardize epistemic standing.

More problematic are cases in which opponents are, and consider themselves to be,

epistemic peers. Then they have the same evidence…” (Elgin 2010: 53, emphasis added;

cf. Kelly 2005: 174-175, Christensen 2009: 756-757, King 2012: 252). One might be

tempted to think that at least one of the peers must be having a lapse of rationality if they

disagree. But as Kelly (2009: 35) rightly remarks, since at least Kuhn (1996 [1962])

there has been an increasing realization of just how often fully informed scientists have

disagreed. So one either has to say that scientists are not engaged in the rational

enterprise we thought they were, or else one must account for rational peer disagreement.

A variety of solutions have been offered. Kuhn (1996 [1962]) argued that rationality is

relative to a paradigm, and so two scientists coming to divergent opinions could be fully

11 In this section I draw on Gage (2014).

12 There are at least two distinct problems of peer disagreement. One concerns how it is possible (if it is indeed possible) for peers with the same (or nearly the same) evidence regarding p to reasonably diverge in their doxastic attitudes toward p. Another problem concerns whether and to what extent they should revise their doxastic attitudes (or perhaps their degrees of belief) upon learning of the evidence, credentials, and doxastic attitudes of the other party or parties. In what follows, I am only concerned with the former problem.

rational if working within different frameworks. Carnap (1952) held that the two

scientists might both be rational if they employed two different inductive methods.

Bayesians often appeal to the fact that the two scientists may have very different prior

probability distributions. While there are limitations to disagreement in that one’s priors

can simply be swamped by overwhelming evidence, these distributions can lead to reasonable disagreement.

Kelly asks us to note that each of these approaches to rational peer disagreement has a similar structure:

what it is reasonable for one to believe depends not only on one’s total evidence but also on some further feature F (one’s prior probability distribution, paradigm, inductive method). Because this further feature F can vary between different individuals, even quite different responses to a given body of evidence might be equally reasonable. On such views, the bearing of a given body of evidence on a given theory becomes a highly relativized matter. For this reason, the capacity of evidence to generate agreement among even impeccably rational individuals is in principle subject to significant limitations. (Kelly 2009: 36, emphasis added)

In other words, any view of evidence which must appeal to some further extra-evidential

factor to explain rational peer disagreement seems unable to fulfill this fourth role of

evidence as neutral-arbiter; the extra-evidential factor would be doing the explanatory

work. I would like to suggest that a serious advantage of the phenomenal view is its

ability to account for rational disagreement without appealing to extra-evidential factors.

If this is right, what has been a severe liability of many views of evidence becomes an

asset of the phenomenal conception.

In order to explain rational peer disagreement, these rival conceptions of evidence

tend to appeal to the view that evidence is one thing and what we ‘make of it’ is quite

another. As Kvanvig (2011: 53) writes, “it is something close to a truism that there is

both the evidence and what we make of it.” Many Bayesians, for instance, implicitly

affirm this distinction when they distinguish between conditional probabilities on

observations and unconditional probabilities of observations. If we want to affirm the

courtroom conception of evidence and yet deny that irrationality in science is rampant,

we might appeal to this distinction between evidence and what we make of it. We might

say that while two scientists share the same evidence, they make different things of the

evidence—perhaps they conceptualize or construe it in different ways, make different

connections to other pieces of literature, etc.

To illustrate this view of evidence, say two equally well-informed and talented

arborists, Amy and Adam, are walking through a forest unfamiliar to either of them.

Though the same evidence is available to both, Amy and Adam disagree over the proper

classification of a tree species they have both just encountered for the first time. Again,

we see that in this common construal of evidence the same evidence is shared by both

Amy and Adam, and yet they use their individual knowledge and skill (each of which is

comparable to the other’s knowledge and skill) to form the common evidence into

support for incompatible propositions.

I would like to suggest that the seemingly commonsense distinction between

evidence and what we make of it rests on a faulty notion of what evidence is in the first

place. Again, according to the phenomenal conception, evidence does not exist in the

form of objects or events which are ‘out there’ in the world but in the mental states of

individuals. It does not consist merely in what is out there to be perceived but in one’s

perceptions. We do not have access to raw (i.e., unperceived) data, whatever that might

mean. We have, for better or worse, our own “mental states, events, and conditions”

(Huemer 2011b: 28). Given the phenomenal conception of evidence, it makes little sense

to speak of evidence and what we make of it. Now, must the phenomenalist about

evidence maintain that this distinction is completely mistaken? If so, that seems a bad

outcome; the distinction does seem, as I have said, commonsensical. Fortunately, the

phenomenalist need not think this distinction too far off the mark. There is still a great

role that each one of us, along with our background beliefs, plays in shaping or arranging

data coming at us from the external world. Yet, the phenomenalist could insist that this

role is pre-evidential—it comes before the mental states which constitute one’s evidence.

Background beliefs, for instance, are not merely static evidence but shape further

evidence for a subject S by affecting which mental states S has.

Here’s how things might look on the phenomenal conception. Our two arborists

have very similar visual fields. But Amy, due to her particular background knowledge,

actually has different mental states than Adam while out in the forest. Amy and Adam

will amass all sorts of different evidence (in the form of seemings) because of their

different background beliefs, conceptual frameworks, prior experiences, etc. Their

background beliefs and experiences have affected not merely what Amy and Adam have

done with their common evidence; rather, given their background beliefs, they simply

have different evidence in the form of different seeming states. It seems to Amy as

though the tree is of one species while to Adam it genuinely seems to be another.

Now, how exactly does the fact that Amy and Adam are in different mental states

solve the problem of rational peer disagreement without relying on extra-evidential

factors to do the explanatory work? In short, the solution is to recognize that even when

it appears that two subjects have similar evidence for a given proposition p, they often do not; for, they may have very different evidence in the form of different seemings. If

mental states are evidence, then Amy’s evidence itself is different than Adam’s, even

though they shared the same visual field or sensations—neither of which is evidence.

The mystery of how Amy and Adam can be justified in believing different propositions

only arises if we assume that they both have the same evidence. The phenomenalist can

deny that this is the case. Even if we posit that they have extremely similar relevant

background information, there is no reason to assume that they will share the exact same

seemings. So, it is true that there is a common starting place (here, Amy and Adam’s visual field). It is also true that there is a sense in which the arborists have ‘affected’ or

‘made something of’ the raw data; they bring something to the table which accounts for

why they perceive the data differently. But it is crucially important to see that on this

view they affect or shape the data pre-evidentially (i.e., before their conscious seemings)

by bringing their background beliefs and other factors to the perception of the data in the

first place. This is not an active or inferential ‘shaping’ or ‘making of’ the evidence but a

passive and unconscious one.

In sum, despite their peerhood and similar visual images, the evidence possessed

by Amy and Adam differs because their mental states differ. I do not have the space to

argue that this solution is superior to all others; but I hope to have at least shown that the

phenomenalist has at least one plausible way to handle Kelly’s quandary regarding peer

disagreement (without appealing to extra-evidential factors to explain the disagreement).

This solution has the advantage of not needing to deny the so-called Uniqueness Thesis

(UT) so prevalent in the peer disagreement literature. UT says that for any proposition

and body of evidence, some doxastic attitude toward that proposition is uniquely

supported by that evidence (cf. White 2005; Feldman 2007; Kelly 2010). It is especially

good that we do not have to deny this thesis since, as seen above, we are already

committed to the objectivity of evidential relations. Our explanation of rational

disagreement in terms of different mental states/evidence also has the advantage of being

non-trivial. One way to deny the same evidence condition on peerhood is to simply

maintain that the purported peers’ total evidence differs because of even a single, barely

relevant background belief. This solution makes it difficult to understand how two

subjects with nearly identical relevant background beliefs can reasonably believe quite disparate propositions. If background beliefs affect seemings—and hence affect evidence

itself—however, then it is much easier to see how substantial disagreement could arise.

If the foregoing has been correct, then the phenomenal conception of evidence holds up

well against this aspect of the fourth role of evidence as neutral arbiter.13

Publicity

Third, and finally, we must return to Carnap’s chief concern which led him from the phenomenal conception of evidence to something more akin to the courtroom conception. One might see a problem for the phenomenal conception of evidence as regards the role of neutral arbiter because the phenomenal conception posits that evidence is essentially private and subjective. These private mental states are the sort of thing that is only accessible to a single individual. Thus it is difficult to see how this conception of evidence would allow for neutral arbitration between individuals. Public objects or events seem to be a better candidate for evidence when it comes to science and intersubjective arbitration.

13 While I will not explore it here, I have argued that the phenomenal conception of evidence— with its recognition that two subjects may not share the same evidence even when at first glance it might appear otherwise—can also lead toward a satisfactory resolution of other philosophical quandaries like DeRose’s (1992) Bank Cases (Gage 2013).

But is it true that the phenomenal conception of evidence cannot account for this

function of evidence? Here we might distinguish between mental state types and mental

state tokens. It is certainly true that two individuals A and B cannot share the same token

mental states, insofar as each must have his own mental states. But there seems no

reason to think that two individuals cannot have the same propositional content within

their two, admittedly different token mental states. As Kelly (2009: 39-40) says, the publicity of evidence has been a defining feature of science since its earliest days. Robert

Boyle, for one, was adamant that the witnessing of experimental results was to be a communal affair (Shapin 1984). The public nature of evidence in science has also been championed by Hempel (1952: 22), Feigl (1953), Popper (2002 [1935]), and more recently by Railton (1991: 764) and Williamson (2000: 193). But surely Boyle and the others are not insisting that there must be no difference in perspective even among those gathered to observe an experiment. Surely they are not suggesting that the objectivity of science is lost if different observers possess different token mental states when gathered to observe an experiment. This being the case, multiple token mental states do not, at least in principle, pose a problem for the objectivity of science. If the concern is that there seems to be nothing that is shared between multiple observers on the phenomenal conception of evidence, phenomenalists should simply deny the charge. There is something common between the observers: they are likely to share the same type of mental state. Each observer can have the same (or similar) propositional content within his or her own seeming state.14 And as we noted in an earlier section, even if the

courtroom conception of evidence is correct, in order for an individual to have the

14 The witnessing of experimental results, then, is never really communal except in the sense that several scientists might gather together to each individually receive external stimuli. What is especially communal and intersubjective is the comparison of each individual’s observations after the fact.

evidence, to gain a reason for belief, the evidence would need to be appropriated by an

experience.

But this almost seems too easy. While the inability to share token mental states

seems to be the worry for Kelly (2008: 949-950), perhaps the concern of Carnap and his

other cohorts lies elsewhere. Recall that the phenomenal conception of evidence that

they were originally working with was imported from early sense-data theorists like

Russell. As Carnap explained his early view of evidence:

Since the most certain knowledge is that of the immediately given, whereas knowledge of material things is derivative and less certain, it seemed that the philosopher must employ a language which uses sense-data as a basis. In the Vienna discussions my attitude changed gradually toward a preference for the physicalistic language…. In my view, one of the most important advantages of the physicalistic language is its intersubjectivity, i.e., the fact that the events described in this language are in principle observable by all users of the language. (Carnap 1963: 50-52)

Ayer also describes the positivists’ shift away from the phenomenal conception of the

sense-data theorists. He writes:

it was held, following Russell and ultimately Berkeley, that perceiving physical objects was to be analyzed in terms of having sensations, or as Russell put it, of sensing sense data. Though physical objects might be publicly accessible, sense data were taken to be private. There could be no question of our literally sharing one another’s sense data, any more than we can literally share one another’s thoughts or images or feelings…. [T]he most serious difficulty [with this view] lay in the privacy of the objects to which the elementary statements were supposed to refer…. Because of such difficulties, Neurath, and subsequently Carnap…argued that if elementary statements were to serve as the basis for the intersubjective statements of science, they must themselves be intersubjective. They must refer, not to private incommunicable experiences, but to public physical events. (Ayer 1959: 17-20)

Perhaps the key idea here is that these sensations are not just private in that a subject

possesses a token mental state that no one else can literally possess. Perhaps the key idea

is that we cannot simply point to or share our sensory experiences in a way that could

lead to resolving disagreements. Kelly seems to agree with this criticism. On the

phenomenal conception, he writes,

according to which one’s evidence is limited to one’s experiences or sense data…evidence consists of essentially private mental states, accessible only to the relevant subject. This picture of evidence stands in no small measure of tension with the idea that a central function of evidence is to serve as a neutral arbiter among competing views. For it is natural to think that the ability of evidence to play this latter role depends crucially on its having an essentially public character, i.e., that it is the sort of thing which can be grasped and appreciated by multiple individuals. Here, the most natural contenders would seem to be physical objects and the states of affairs and events in which they participate, since it is such entities that are characteristically accessible to multiple observers. (I ask what evidence there is for your diagnosis that the patient suffers from measles; in response, you might simply point to or demonstrate the lesions on her skin.) On the other hand, to the extent that one’s evidence consists of essentially private states there would seem to be no possibility of sharing one’s evidence with others. But it is precisely the possibility of sharing relevant evidence which is naturally thought to secure the objectivity of science. (Kelly 2009: 39)

So again, perhaps the problem is not exactly that two subjects cannot share the exact

same token seeming but that to fulfill the fourth, public role of evidence, evidence must

at least be sharable and communicable (cf. Kelly 2008: 949-950, Williamson 2000: 193).

Let us begin with the former. Why should the phenomenalist need to deny the

ability to share evidence? Take Kelly’s own example: “I ask what evidence there is for

your diagnosis that the patient suffers from measles; in response, you might simply point

to or demonstrate the lesions on her skin” (Kelly 2009: 39). This makes perfect sense on

the phenomenal conception. You point to the lesions because you are attempting to get

me to have a type-identical seeming with the same (or similar) content. Carnap thought it

a big advantage of his physicalist conception of evidence that “the events described in

this language are in principle observable by all users of the language” (Carnap 1963: 52).

Yet what does this mean except to say that if another person were in the same position at

the same time with the same relevant background beliefs and concepts, etc., then they

could also observe that p. The phenomenalist need not deny this. All she claims is that

the evidence itself is not the event but the witnessing of the event; and this witnessing of

the event is “in principle observable by all users of the language.” Scientists who attempt

to replicate each others’ experiments, for instance, are attempting to witness or observe

the same states or events.

The phenomenalist can even explain why, despite overblown rhetoric to the

contrary, the public nature of scientific evidence is not as public as advertised. That is,

the phenomenal conception of evidence accounts for the fact that not just anyone can

easily gain the relevant scientific evidence (which is why, I take it, that Carnap qualified

his statement to say that evidence is “in principle” publicly observable; cf. Carnap 1966:

225-226). Consider the words of Hanson (1961: 19):

…the layman simply cannot see what the physicist sees…when the physicist looks at an X-ray tube, he sees the instrument in terms of electrical circuit theory, thermodynamic theory, the theories of metal and glass structure, thermionic emission, optical transmission, refraction, diffraction, atomic theory, quantum theory and special relativity.

This difference obtains not only between experts and non-experts, according to Hanson

(1961:13), but between two experts like Amy and Adam or Hooke and Newton. The

nature of scientific evidence, then, is not exactly publicly available or ‘there for anyone to see’—at least not in the most straight-forward sense. Rather, as we saw above in the case of peer disagreement, because evidence consists in seemings a lowly philosopher could view the same physical objects (e.g., the X-ray tube) and not have reason to believe the same propositions about that tube that the trained scientist does. Two observers’ evidence can differ without any physical fact before them differing. The phenomenal conception accounts for this. The courtroom conception does not. But this is not to deny

that scientific evidence is uniquely objective in some sense. In order to have evidence

like that of my scientist counterpart standing in the same situation I need to undertake

some specialized training, read the same books and journals, etc.—which is surely

possible in principle. The direct evidence of my truly private states like a headache or an

inner, private religious experience is, however, not so easy for another to observe. In

addition, the phenomenal conception does not need to claim that observations are theory- laden in a way that prohibits one peer from potentially ever observing what another peer observes (cf. Fodor 1992: 251).

One can also in principle communicate the content of their evidence, on the phenomenal conception, because it has propositional content. The only reason I can see as to why Carnap, Ayer, and others15 would think otherwise is if they think (as they seem to indicate above) that the phenomenal conception is wedded to sense-data theory. Given classical sense-data theory, one has foundational sensations from which one infers various propositions. Sense-data theory is, then, an expression of indirect realism. We do not have foundational evidence for external-world, object-level propositions. Instead, we have sensations as our evidence. And this sort of evidence does indeed seem very difficult to communicate. It is very difficult, for instance, to know what sort of content sensations might have; classically sense-data has been considered non-propositional

(Kelly 2008: 940). Now, recall again Kelly’s example: “I ask what evidence there is for your diagnosis that the patient suffers from measles; in response, you might simply point to or demonstrate the lesions on her skin” (Kelly 2009: 39). Perhaps the worry is that on an indirect realist, sense-data view, one’s evidence is neither the lesions themselves nor

15 Kelly (2008: 945) at least links the phenomenal conception to indirect realism and sense-data theory.

the direct perception of the lesions. Rather, one’s evidence—and that of which one is

directly aware—is the given, non-propositional content of the sensory experience. That

experience, its content, and how one tacitly inferred certain propositions from the sensing

of the non-propositional sense-data may prove hard to communicate indeed.

In reply, note that we have already distinguished sensations form seemings, and

the phenomenalist need only take the latter as evidence. More importantly, the

phenomenalist need not be an indirect realist. Whereas the indirect realist sense-data

theorist thinks we only have direct access to sensory experience, the phenomenalist might

maintain that we have access to objects by having mental states. That is to say, the phenomenalist can accept direct realism which claims that “in cases of normal perception, we are directly aware of something in the external world” (Huemer 2000:

398). True, as Huemer notes, “we cannot perceive external objects without having perceptual experiences that represent them.” But it is a mistake to conclude, as some do,

that we are not really, or not directly, perceiving external objects at all, but only our representations. In fact, perceptual experiences are the “tool” with which we perceive external objects. Their existence no more precludes us from perceiving those objects than the use of an axe precludes the woodcutter from chopping his wood. And just as it would be a mistake to conclude that the man is really chopping his axe, so it is a mistake to conclude that we are really perceiving (or otherwise enjoying awareness of) our perceptual experiences. We perceive external objects by having perceptual experiences—in the sense that those experiences partly constitute our perceiving of external objects…. (Huemer 2001: 81; cf. Adler 1985: 5-53)

The direct realist can claim that she is directly aware of physical objects and that (non-

inferential) evidence for those objects exists in the form of seeming states. The claim that

one can be directly aware of a blue light, for example, in no way negates the claim that

the evidence for there being a blue light is that one seems to see a blue light.

There may be interpretations of the fourth, neutral arbiter role of evidence other

than those Kelly mentions (objectivity, intersubjectivity/peer disagreement, and

publicity). However, having assessed arguments in each of these areas to the effect that

the phenomenal conception cannot play this fourth role, we see no reason to think that the

phenomenal conception is not up to the task. More positively, we have seen how the

phenomenal conception can play the role of neutral arbiter by providing a level of

objectivity, by explaining how two peers can maintain rational disagreements, and by

providing for the publicity of evidence as sharable and communicable.

Conclusion: Thinking about the Logical Space

In Kelly’s final estimation, there is ultimately a paradoxical tension between two of the four roles of evidence (Kelly 2009: 44). On the one hand, evidence is that which justifies belief. In this regard, introspective, first-person phenomenal evidence fares quite well while the courtroom conception fares poorly. After all, my first-person experience can easily be seen as providing me reasons to believe while public objects or events of which I am unaware cannot. On the other hand, evidence is often seen as that which might lead to consensus opinion and can be shared by multiple individuals. Here, Kelly thinks, the courtroom conception fares well while the phenomenal conception fares poorly. But surely Kelly’s conclusion is a perplexing and dissatisfying one. If the arguments of this chapter have been successful, we need not accept that conclusion. The phenomenal conception can play both kinds of role equally well.

But we are now in a position to think about the logical space of the conceptions of evidence we have surveyed. This allows us to see more clearly why the phenomenal conception is able to play both fundamental kinds of role (i.e., that of personal justifier

and that of intersubjective arbiter). Following the terminology of Silins (2005) we can

now see why Williamson and the late-logical positivists might be lumped together despite

their unique views of evidence. Both of them are expressions of ‘evidential externalism.’

That is, both think that evidence is not merely a matter of inner, subjective states but also

of the subject’s external environment. Similarly, we can see why Carnap, Ayer, and

Kelly were tempted to lump together the phenomenal conception with sense-data theory

since both are expressions of ‘evidential internalism’ which sees evidence as consisting in

wholly internal mental states. But as Kelly (2008: 940) himself notes, the

propositionalist/non-propositionalist distinction cuts across the evidential

internalist/externalist divide. A propositionalist, here, is someone who thinks that

evidence consists of propositions or at least has propositional content. Hence we have

four basic views. We have propositionalist internalists and non-propositionalist

internalists; and we have propositionalist externalists and non-propositionalist

externalists. Here are some examples in each of the four categories which show that the

logical space in the debate over the proper conception of evidence has been staked out by

the major views:

Table 1. Matrix of Major Conceptions of Evidence

Propositional Content No Propositional Content Evidential Internalism Seeming State Conception Sense-data Conception Evidential Externalism Disjunctivist Conception Courtroom Conception

Now, why was the phenomenal conception able to play both the role of individual

justifier and intersubjective arbiter while the other views had such trouble? Considering

the logical space reveals why. In order to play both roles, a proper conception of

evidence must have the proper subjective and objective features. Particularly, on the one

hand it must be person-relative and subjective (or internalist) in order to be the kind of thing that can adequately justify individual beliefs for particular subjects. On the other

hand, it must have propositional content that can easily exist in objective evidential relationships. The other three options fail to meet both of these requirements at the same time. As we have seen, while the sense-data theory is subjective it has difficulty accounting for the objectivity of evidential relationships. While the courtroom conception was thought to yield objectivity, as even Kelly admitted it has little chance of playing the role of justifier. Lastly, one might be tempted to think that the disjunctivist conception of evidence provides the best of both worlds. But while it has propositional content which can stand in objective evidential relationships, it was seen above that it is too objective and yields intuitively incorrect conclusions about justification and rationality. The phenomenal conception can play all of the various roles of evidence because it is subjective and objective in the right ways.

Given the fact that momentum shifted away from the phenomenal conception precisely because it was thought unable to play the role of neutral arbiter, if the phenomenal conception is far stronger than its critics have admitted and is able to play all four of the major roles evidence plays, then we have good reason to reverse the momentum and see if we can hammer out the details of a workable phenomenal conception of evidence. In the next chapter we will begin by scrutinizing one particular variant of the phenomenal conception. We ultimately deem this variant inadequate, but

from it we gain a second important desideratum for a more adequate conception of

evidence.

CHAPTER THREE

Reforming the Concept of Experience as Evidence: Plantinga and the Phenomenal Conception

Introduction

In Chapter One we saw the logical positivists’ gradual shift away from a

conception of evidence whereby evidence for propositions consists in experience, mental

states, or phenomenal appearances toward a conception of evidence whereby evidence for

propositions consists in either external-world objects or publicly observable states of

affairs. There we gleaned our first desideratum for an adequate conception of evidence:

Evidence, whatever it is, must not be so objective that it cannot do the reasons-providing

work required of it. Evidence must not only be able to function as an arbiter in public

disputes, but it must also be the sort of thing that gives an individual reasons for belief

regarding many common items of knowledge. We require, then, a more subjective

account of evidence. And in Chapter Two we saw that, despite what some have thought,

the phenomenal conception is capable of playing all four of the major roles of evidence.

Hence, we now have good reason to re-examine the phenomenal conception—a natural

contender for a more subjective account.

It will be helpful in our investigation of the nature of evidence to consider an

important application of the notion. Alvin Plantinga’s religious epistemology will serve

as an excellent example. Though an externalist, Plantinga has been surprisingly aware of

(and influenced by) internalists like Roderick Chisholm.1 In this third chapter I chronicle

Plantinga’s evolution on evidence which gradually became more subjective, moving away from a more public notion. Still, we argue that his mature conception of evidence, which includes room for subjective experience, remains inadequate. From this we draw general lessons for the theory of evidence.

We begin by examining in detail Plantinga’s understanding of the warrant enjoyed by theistic and Christian belief before turning to critique the details of this model. Having seen that Plantinga’s program will not work as an externalist account of warrant, I then emphasize and accentuate some of the internalist-leaning elements of his model to give an internalist, evidentialist account of the justification enjoyed by theistic and Christian belief that is compatible with the core of his account. Most importantly we will glean a second desideratum for an adequate conception of evidence. In the end we will see that if experience is to function as evidence, then it must be grounded in a principle that specifies which experiences are evidence for which beliefs. Evidence must be subjective—but not overly so. In short, this more subjective account of evidence requires objective constraints.

Early Plantinga

Since at least the publication of God and Other Minds in 1967, Alvin Plantinga has been concerned to show that, despite the ascendance of philosophical naturalism in the twentieth century, it can be rational to believe in God. The typical charge has been that theistic belief is irrational or subpar because it lacks adequate evidence. As leading

1 In fact, Plantinga read and commented on a manuscript of Chisholm’s most enduring work. He was one of only three philosophers thanked by Chisholm in the canonical second edition of his Theory of Knowledge, a bulwark of twentieth-century internalism.

positivist Bertrand Russell is reputed to have said, if when he dies and arrives at the

Pearly Gates only to find God scolding him for his unbelief, he will reply: “You didn’t

give us enough evidence!” (Searle 1999: 37). Early Plantinga’s ambitious project aimed

to show that theistic belief is fully rational even if the believer lacks “reason or evidence”

(Plantinga 1990a [1967]: 270). Throughout this early work Plantinga identifies having

evidence for God’s existence with the possession of a compelling inductive or deductive

argument “from propositions that are obviously true and accepted by nearly every sane

man (e.g., Some things are in motion) together with propositions that are self-evident or

necessarily true” (Plantinga 1990a [1967]: 4). With this excessively stringent standard it

is no wonder that Plantinga concluded that the classical arguments for theism

(cosmological, ontological, and teleological) fail miserably. But there is a catch. He

further argued that the best arguments against God’s existence (the problem of evil, the verification criterion of meaning, Mackie’s omnipotence paradox, and Findlay’s ontological disproof) fare no better. What is more, Plantinga maintained that none of the arguments for the existence of other minds succeed according to this criterion. But if belief in other minds is rational without evidence, then so too, he reasons, theism can likewise be rational without the believer having reasons or evidence.

Note the conception of evidence which appears to be at work. At this point in time, evidence for Plantinga seems to be identified with at least the potential for making arguments with premises others would accept (i.e., publicly available evidence).2

Describing the book years later, Plantinga writes, “I thought a good argument (either

2 In point of fact, in God and Other Minds Plantinga accepts a great many pieces of evidence which consist in one’s own interior mental states. However, these mental states are typically about pain which seems to be evidence not because it is an experience but because it constitutes an incorrigible belief (a very restricted class of experiential evidence).

theistic or antitheistic) would have to be more or less conclusive, appealing to premises

and procedures hardly any sensible person could reject” (Clark 1993: 74). Perhaps this

emphasis on publicity was picked up from the positivists. As Beilby (2005: 140-141)

observes, during Plantinga’s graduate studies in the 1950s “logical positivism still had a

firm grip on the philosophy departments of America, either directly through those who

thought that logical positivism was pretty close to the sober truth, or indirectly through

those who allowed some of the ideas of the logical positivists to set the agenda and define

the terms of philosophical and theological discussion” (cf. Clark 1993: 62-63, 81). But

whereas many logical positivists accepted the identification of evidence with publicly

available evidence and concluded that theists thereby lack evidence for God’s existence,

early Plantinga grants this conception of evidence but concludes nearly the opposite: one

probably does not need compelling evidence to be rational in believing in God, other

minds, etc.

This conclusion that “belief in God and belief in other minds are in the same

epistemological boat” is obviously a rather limited claim (Clark 1993: 74). What

Plantinga is really driving at in God and Other Minds comes to fruition in his 1983 essay

“Reason and Belief in God” which aims to show how belief in God can be positively

rational—and that, again, “without any evidence or argument at all” (Plantinga 1983: 17).

Here, however, we see a slight shift in his conception of evidence. Evidence no longer

has to be public evidence, let alone public evidence that nearly anyone would accept.

Nor does evidence have to be in the form of a deductive argument with self-evident

premises. Still, evidence for Plantinga at this time consisted in believed propositions

which are used to support conclusions through conscious inferences or arguments

(Plantinga 1983: 24, 39).

He briefly considers the relationship between experience and evidence. He

quickly dismisses the idea that when I believe there is a tree before me I believe it on the

basis of evidence—even experiential evidence. This is, again, because he conceives of

evidence as believed propositions. Thus he argues that, because I do not believe there is

a tree before me on the basis of the experiential proposition ‘I see a tree,’ I do not believe there is a tree on the basis of evidence (Plantinga 1983: 51-52). One does wonder why I cannot believe there is a tree before me on the basis of the experience itself rather than a conscious, reflective belief about and inference from my experience. But because at this point Plantinga conceives of evidence as consisting in believed propositions used in a reflective argument, he claims that, “A necessary condition for S’s believing A on the basis of B is S’s believing both A and B, and a sufficient condition is S’s believing A, believing B, believing that B is good evidence for A, and believing that he believes A on the basis of B” (Plantinga 1983: 52). If ever there was a hyper-reflective conception of evidence or ‘believing on the basis of’ surely this is it.

Still, what typically goes unnoticed by Plantinga’s friends and foes alike is that this essay also contains the seeds of an internalist way of thinking which becomes even more pronounced in the Warrant trilogy. Plantinga has a Chisholmian moment in which

he claims that my being appeared to in a certain way gives prima facie justification for my belief that I perceive a tree (Plantinga 1983: 77, 86). But one wonders how I have a prima facie justified belief when I have no “evidence” for it and do not believe it “on the basis of” anything. The natural thing to think is that the experience itself justifies or

makes evident that proposition. But then the experience itself would be evidence,

something Plantinga seems loathe to admit at this point. Still, he claims that such a belief

(i.e., one connected to an appearance state) is not groundless:

Upon having experience of a certain sort, I believe that I am perceiving a tree. In the typical case I do not hold this belief on the basis of other beliefs; it is nonetheless not groundless. My having that characteristic sort of experience—to use Professor Chisholm’s language, my being appeared treely to—plays a crucial role in the formation of that belief. It also plays a crucial role in its justification. Let us say that a belief is justified for a person at a time if (a) he is violating no epistemic duties and is within his epistemic rights in accepting it and (b) his noetic structure is not defective by virtue of his then accepting it. Then my being appeared to in this characteristic way (together with other circumstances) is what confers on me the right to hold the belief in question; this is what justifies me in accepting it. We could say, if we wish, that this experience is what justifies me in holding it; this is the ground of my justification, and, by extension, the ground of the belief itself.

If I see someone displaying typical pain behavior, I take it that he or she is in pain. Again, I do not take the displayed behavior as evidence for that belief; I do not infer that belief from others I hold; I do not accept it on the basis of other beliefs. (Plantinga 1983: 79)3

In passages like this it appears that—even without evidence, as he construes it—beliefs can be grounded and (deontologically) justified by experience. However, it is not always clear that it is in virtue of the phenomenology of the experience that a particular belief is

“grounded” in a particular experience. At times Plantinga writes as though if a subject S is in certain circumstances C, then a particular belief p will be justified for S in C (e.g.,

Plantinga 1983: 79-81). What is most unclear is whether the grounding relationship is an objective one in which any rational agent would be justified in taking this experience or appearance state to justify the associated belief or whether it is a contingent feature of our nature (one which could have been otherwise) by which we happen to believe p upon

3 Plantinga (1983: 93) clarifies in a footnote that the “justification” he speaks of here is not necessarily sufficient to turn a true belief into knowledge; “that is a different (and stronger) sense of the term.”

being in circumstances C while other rational agents designed differently could just as

rationally take q (or perhaps even not-p) to be justified in C. Unfortunately, we must wait

until Plantinga’s trilogy to receive a modicum of clarification here. What is clear is that

in his earliest work Plantinga held to a public conception of evidence but denied that this

constitutes a problem for theistic belief. At the same time, he seems open to the idea that

experience has an important role to play in justifying or grounding beliefs.

The Aquinas/Calvin Model: The Sensus Divinitatis

Alston points out that by the time of “Reason and Belief in God” Plantinga had

only attacked a view he called “evidentialism” (quite distinct from the standard use of the

term since at least Feldman and Conee (1985)) and attempted to answer objections to the idea that belief in God could be properly basic (Tomberlin and van Inwagen 1985: 294).

In his more mature work Plantinga develops a model for how belief in God can be

properly basic and, if God exists, warranted. In Warranted Christian Belief (2000),

Plantinga tackles head-on the challenge to theistic belief posed by those like Marx and

Freud. These critics have not so much argued that theistic belief is false as that it is

somehow intellectually suspect, subpar, or second-rate due to its origin in either irrational

cognitive processes or cognitive processes which are not aimed at producing true beliefs.

Hence, roughly, Marx argued that theistic belief is a cynical tool of the economic elite to

keep the masses in line; and, again roughly, Freud argued that theistic belief has its origin

in the longing to find emotional stability in this lonely cosmos.

To respond to this long-standing de jure critique of theistic belief, Plantinga develops what he calls the Aquinas/Calvin model. The model is an attempt to show that

it is epistemically possible (i.e., possible given the common knowledge of those debating

theism) that theistic belief is not irrational but has warrant (Plantinga 2000: 168-169).4 If successful—that is, if it can be shown that theistic belief has warrant for all we know—

Plantinga will have pushed the debate over theism back to what he sees as its proper place: the de facto question of whether or not theism is true. No longer will it suffice to tell a story from one’s armchair which, if true, entails that theistic belief is irrational without addressing the actual merits of theism. Put another way, if theism is true, and theism entails something like the Aquinas/Calvin (A/C) model of theistic belief formation, then one cannot hold that theism is irrational without giving reason to think that theism is false, or so Plantinga (2000: 169) claims.

He begins by pointing to the unlikely pair of Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin, who, despite their many theological differences, both believed that humans can possess natural (as opposed to revealed) knowledge of the existence of God. Beyond this feature of Thomas’s theology, it is unclear what relation he bears to the model Plantinga develops. At any rate, it is really Calvin’s view in particular which Plantinga seeks to develop and extend. In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin writes:

There is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity. This we take to be beyond controversy. To prevent anyone from taking refuge in the pretense of ignorance, God himself has implanted in all men a certain understanding of his divine majesty…. Since, therefore, men one and all perceive that there is a God and that he is their maker, they are condemned by their own testimony because they have failed to honor him and to consecrate their lives to his will…there is, as the eminent pagan says, no nation so barbarous, no people so savage, that they have not a deep-seated conviction that there is a God…. Therefore, since from the beginning of the world there has been no

4 For Plantinga’s extended look at epistemic possibility/probability, see Plantinga (1993b: 137- 175). Also, my discussion of the warrant enjoyed by theistic/Christian belief will throughout ignore a certain distracting complication. Plantinga (1993b: 47; 2000: 156) notes that he is only developing a core notion of warrant—one which applies only perfectly to paradigmatic cases of warranted belief. Given this, Plantinga might maintain that the warrant had by theistic/Christian belief is a sort of analogical extension of the paradigmatic notion of warrant. This complication will be ignored, however, because as Dole (2002: 34, 45) points out, when Plantinga (2000: 257-258) himself tells us that Christian beliefs have warrant he justifies this claim by noting that they meet the paradigmatic requirements for warrant.

region, no city, in short, no household, that could do without religion, there lies in this a tacit confession of a sense of deity inscribed in the hearts of all men. (Calvin 1960 [1555]: 44)

Calvin’s central claim here, according to Plantinga (2000: 171), “is that there is a sort of

instinct, a natural human tendency, a disposition, a nisus to form beliefs about God under

a variety of conditions and in a variety of situations.”

Even more specifically, Plantinga (2000: 172) maintains that Calvin holds that

each of us has a sensus divinitatis, “a kind of faculty or cognitive mechanism…which in a

wide variety of circumstances produces in us beliefs about God.”5

These circumstances, we might say, trigger the disposition to form the beliefs in question; they form the occasion on which those beliefs arise. Under these circumstances, we develop or form theistic beliefs—or, rather, these beliefs are formed in us; in the typical case we don’t consciously choose to have those beliefs. Instead, we find ourselves with them, just as we find ourselves with perceptual and memory beliefs. (Plantinga 2000: 172)

For our purposes, the thing to note is that the sensus divinitatis is a simple input-output mechanism. God, according to Plantinga, has designed us in such a way as to instantly form theistic beliefs when we are placed in certain circumstances. For instance, when we behold starry skies, beautiful flowers, or majestic mountains, many of us simply find ourselves believing in God (or perhaps in his goodness or power).

On the A/C model, these sense inputs simply trigger, by way of a cognitive mechanism which is part of our design plan, theistic beliefs. As Plantinga explains, “The sensus divinitatis is a disposition or set of dispositions to form theistic beliefs in various

5 While Plantinga sometimes claims not to be attempting Calvin exegesis, it is worth noting that Calvin appears not to have championed anything like the input-output mechanism that is central to Plantinga’s model. Calvin does not appear to see the apprehension of a starry sky, for instance, as the occasion for the working of a cognitive mechanism which triggers theistic belief. Rather he seems to think that we can “discern” the divine workmanship when we see the works of nature (see Calvin 1960 [1555]: 52). Michael Sudduth (2002) argues persuasively that Plantinga’s A/C Model greatly revises both Calvin and the Reformed tradition. That tradition, he argues, insisted upon two kinds of natural knowledge of God: an inborn, non-inferential sense that God exists (cognitio Dei insita) and an acquired, inferential knowledge of God (cognitio Dei acquisita).

circumstances, in response to the sorts of conditions or stimuli that trigger the working of

this sense of divinity” (Plantinga 2000: 173). As part of our design, this simple

mechanism pairs inputs/sensory stimuli with belief outputs. To aid the reader’s

understanding, Plantinga likens this faculty or mechanism to his view of human

perception, memory, and a priori belief formation—none of which have anything to do

with evidence (as he understands it). The sensus divinitatis, we are told,

resembles other belief-producing faculties or mechanisms. If we wish to think in terms of the overworked functional analogy, we can think of the sensus divinitatis, too, as an input-output device: it takes the circumstances mentioned above [experiences of the grandeur of nature] as input and issues as output theistic beliefs, beliefs about God. (Plantinga 2000: 174-175)

In the background here is a generally Reidian account of perception whereby upon

perceiving, say, an oak tree, I immediately and non-inferentially form a conception of and belief in the tree.6 I do not infer the tree, for instance, from tree-like images or

appearances in my mind. Rather, belief in the tree just seems to arise spontaneously upon

seeing it.

Similarly, on the A/C model, we do not infer God’s existence from the intricate

beauty of a wild flower. Such an argument, Plantinga fears, would be ridiculously weak.

Rather, the perception of the flower serves as the occasion on which theistic beliefs are formed: “these beliefs just arise within us” (Plantinga 2000: 175). They are not conclusions arrived at via evidence. They are spontaneous doxastic responses to circumstantial stimuli. Because of this, Plantinga considers theistic belief on the A/C model to be basic, that is, “not accepted on the evidential basis of other propositions”

(Plantinga 2000: 175).

6 See Buras (2009) on Reid’s view of the relation between sensations or “natural signs” and belief outputs.

Importantly, because theistic belief formed in this manner is non-inferential,

immediate, and a product of our natural constitution, Plantinga maintains that such a

belief is not only basic, but properly so. After all, he reasons, perceptual, memorial, and

a priori beliefs are not formed by way of inference from propositional evidence either.

Rather, they arise naturally when we are in certain circumstances. But they are not

suspect on this account. Therefore, neither should theistic belief on the A/C model be

suspect. What makes a belief properly basic for Plantinga is that the belief is accepted in

a basic way and has warrant for the believer. Warrant, in turn, is enjoyed if the belief in

question is “produced by cognitive faculties functioning properly in a congenial

epistemic environment according to a design plan successfully aimed at truth” (Plantinga

2000: 178).7 Theistic belief is thus properly basic on the A/C model because it meets these criteria. One might argue that the sensus divinitatis is not really ordered toward the production of true beliefs—that, say, it is solely an unintentional byproduct of other cognitive mechanisms which are aimed at truth, or alternatively, solely a product of cognitive mechanisms aimed at survival rather than truth.8 But this only brings us back

to the de facto question rather than the de jure one. If theism is true, then theistic belief

could easily possess warrant. And this is all Plantinga endeavored to establish.

The Extended A/C Model: The Inward Instigation of the Holy Spirit

Plantinga goes on to extend this model to address the warrant had by specifically

Christian beliefs such as belief in the Trinity or in the divinity of Jesus. This ‘extended

7 For Plantinga’s extended account of warrant, see Plantinga (1993b). I take it that this is really only the criteria for prima facie warrant. As is clear throughout Plantinga (2000), warrant is only enjoyed when there are no undefeated defeaters.

8 For a discussion of these sorts of mechanisms, see Schloss and Murray (2009).

A/C model’ adds the notion of sin to the equation. That is, each of us possesses a sensus

divinitatis by nature, but its operation can be obscured or damaged by sin. Wanting to be

the center of the universe, we have a natural tendency to ignore the presence/existence of

God. As Plantinga writes, “sin induces in us a resistance to the deliverances of the

sensus divinitatis” (Plantinga 2000: 205). It damages the natural working of our native

cognitive faculties. If it were not for sin, according to the extended model, God’s

existence and glory would be as obvious to us as the existence of physical objects or

other minds (Plantinga 2000: 214). Among the noetic effects of sin, therefore, is a sort of

intellectual blindness.

According to the extended model, to remedy this defect God sent the Holy Spirit to perform a unique operation of illumination in at least some individuals. He gives some the gift of faith. Plantinga writes:

In giving us faith, the Holy Spirit enables us to see the truth of the main lines of the Christian gospel as set forth in the Scripture. The internal invitation of the Holy Spirit is therefore a source of belief, a cognitive process that produces in us belief in the main lines of the Christian story. (Plantinga 2000: 206)

The point of introducing the work of the Holy Spirit is to show that if indeed there is such a person as the Holy Spirit who performs this work of illumination in some people, then these beliefs would have warrant (from an infallible source, no less).

But here we must take a closer look at this operation or process by which the Holy

Spirit works to produce Christian belief; for, as we will see in the next section, much

hangs on the specifics of this account. If prelapsarian humanity enjoyed knowledge of

God rather easily through the proper function of the sensus divinitatis, according to

Plantinga (2000: 205-206, 243) the deformation of sin requires a mechanism or process

by which we can know God once again. We need this proper function restored or at least

the damage overridden by the production of faith in us by the Holy Spirit. In fact,

Plantinga contrasts the working of the sensus divinitatis with the working of the Holy

Spirit (Plantinga 2000: 180, 246). He does not think that Christian belief is formed by the

Holy Spirit restoring function to the sensus divinitatis; perhaps to Plantinga the Calvinist

this would smack of ‘Romanish’ synergism or infused virtues. But even if the Holy

Spirit restored the sensus divinitatis, this mechanism produces mere belief in God’s

existence rather than the faith we need to be healed from our sinful state. So the Holy

Spirit, on the extended model, constitutes a second, reactionary mechanism or process

which accomplishes largely the same function as the sensus divinitatis (i.e., to produce

belief in God) but goes beyond it by producing specifically Christian (and not just

theistic) beliefs.9

It is important to see that on Plantinga’s extended model the Holy Spirit somehow

“gets us to accept” or “causes us to believe” the gospel of Jesus Christ, which of course entails God’s existence (Plantinga 2000: 245). Again, the “immediate cause of

[Christian] belief” is not in one’s natural epistemic faculties; it is caused by “the Holy

Spirit’s inducing, in us” such beliefs (Plantinga 2000: 256). It seems, then, that on this model faith is the result of a cognitive process—in a very broad sense of the term—rather than a cognitive faculty even though Plantinga still compares it to beliefs produced by the faculties of perception and memory. This faith produced by the Holy Spirit is both cognitive and volitional. The gift of faith includes a knowledge of God’s existence

9 Interestingly, Plantinga briefly notes at one point that, on his model, once we have faith and are “regenerated” the sensus divinitatis is also “repaired” or restored to health (Plantinga 2000: 280-281). But the restored sensus divinitatis does not appear to play any role in Christian belief formation. It seems then that the role of the restored sensus divinitatis is to prevent the believer from having conflicting evidence (or defeaters) to the effect that God’s handiwork is not evident in the universe. Plantinga (2000: 285) is clear that “belief in the main lines of the gospel is produced in Christians by a special work of the Holy Spirit, not by the belief-producing faculties and processes with which we were originally created.”

(which of course entails belief in God’s existence) and his plan of salvation available to

all who believe, but also a commitment to live one’s life in accord with God’s will

(Plantinga 2000: 244). But what is the epistemic status of these Christian beliefs given

that they stem from this faith-producing process of the Holy Spirit?

Throughout his more mature work (as seen in his Warrant trilogy), Plantinga

grants that having reasons or evidence for beliefs may be epistemically valuable yet

claims that it is only one among many epistemic virtues and should not to be identified

with being reasonable or rational (Plantinga 1993b: 3; Plantinga 2000: 203-204, 241).

But the later Plantinga wisely avoids taking the further step of saying that reasons or

evidence are completely missing from Christian belief, even quoting Jonathan Edwards to

the effect that believers have “a kind of intuitive and immediate evidence” (2000: 259).10

To see this more clearly, consider what Plantinga takes to be a typical belief-forming

process in a Christian believer. “Christian belief in the typical case,” according to

Plantinga, “is not the conclusion of an argument…or accepted on the evidential basis of

other beliefs, or accepted just because it constitutes a good explanation of phenomena of

one kind or another” (Plantinga 2000: 258). He is clear that typical Christians do not

form their most fundamental Christian beliefs by way of an argument from religious

experience. Plantinga (2000: 182-183), like Alston (1991: 34) before him, eschews the

label “religious experience” for this activity of the Holy Spirit which produces faith. For

this terminology may suggest an experience with mystical qualia that Plantinga does not

wish to imply. Furthermore, Plantinga wishes to make clear that he does not advocate an

argument from religious experience. “It is rather that (as in the case of perception) the

10 Edwards (1959 [1746]: 298) seems perfectly happy to speak of Christians as gaining something like immediate, non-inferential evidence for Christian truth claims via an experience with the Holy Spirit. Plantinga, however, is more guarded.

experience is the occasion for the formation of the beliefs in question, and plays a causal

role (a role governed by the design plan) in their genesis” (Plantinga 2000: 258-259). It

is clear that Plantinga thinks Christian belief is formed in an immediate, properly basic

way. Believers need not know anything about Christian apologetics for their beliefs to be

justified or warranted.11

It remains unclear, however, how the experience involved in this “process”

(modeled as it is on perception) works and whether the experience itself is a kind of evidence (even if not in the form of believed propositions) for Christian truth claims. In

Plantinga’s considered view, this experience—an encounter with the Christian Scriptures, for instance, which leads to belief in Christian truth claims—“carries its own evidence with it” (2000: 259). But what exactly does this carefully worded phrase mean?

Plantinga resists the notion that religious experience is evidence for God’s existence (in the sense of being a premise in an argument for it). For Plantinga the experience of reading the Scriptures does not cause belief in God. The Scripture-reading experience is part of the complete story of typical Christian belief-formation, but the experience does not function as evidence (a premise) for a conclusion. Rather, the experience of reading the Scriptures “is the occasion for the formation of” theistic belief; “the Holy

Spirit…causes us to believe that that teaching is both true and comes from God” (2000:

259, 260). Ultimately, for Plantinga experience is epistemically important but not because it constitutes evidence. Rather, this experience with the Holy Spirit is important because this interaction constitutes a reliable process akin to our other reliable mental processes.

11 They might, however, need defeater-defeaters. See Plantinga (2000: 357-373).

While clearly favoring an externalist understanding of warrant to an internalist

understanding of justification, Plantinga maintains that on the extended model Christian

beliefs are both internally justified (and rational) and externally warranted. That is, as

Plantinga understands internalism, these beliefs are internally justified in that the believer

does not necessarily violate any epistemic duties in adopting Christian beliefs.12 If these beliefs are adopted because upon reflection (and perhaps serious reflection in light of defeaters), then surely one has not violated any epistemic obligations in adopting these beliefs (Plantinga 2000: 252-253). After all, one surely cannot have a duty to disbelieve what seems wholly compelling upon reflection. These beliefs are also, Plantinga argues, internally rational in that they are “an appropriate doxastic response” to the believer’s evidence and experience; the believer could easily do her level best to assess the evidence, consider defeaters, etc. (Plantinga 2000: 246, 255). Christian beliefs are, lastly, externally rational on the extended A/C model. These beliefs possess warrant for the believer because they are produced by a “cognitive process”—viz., the activity of the

Holy Spirit13—working properly in the absence of defeaters and in an appropriate epistemic environment whose design plan is successfully aimed at truth. Not only do such beliefs have warrant, claims Plantinga, but they can easily have the degree of warrant sufficient for knowledge when held firmly (Plantinga 2000: 206, 258). In what follows I will turn to a critique of the extended A/C model as it stands and offer a reinterpretation along evidentialist lines which accentuates certain features of Plantinga’s

12 Plantinga thinks of internalist justification as merely deontological justification, or being beyond blame in that one has not violated any epistemic duties (Plantinga 1993a: 3-29). Importantly, however, this is not how many leading contemporary advocates of internalist justification think of the matter. For a response to Plantinga by such internalists, see Conee and Feldman (2004: 61-64).

13 Plantinga explicitly speaks of the Holy Spirit as the process involved here (Plantinga 2000: 206). See also Plantinga (2000: 256) where, I take it, Plantinga speaks loosely of faith as a process but really means that faith is produced by a process chiefly involving belief production by the Holy Spirit.

model and builds upon his claim that beliefs caused by the Holy Spirit are internally

rational.

Cognitive Faculties vs. Cognitive Processes

There is much that could be said in response to Plantinga’s basic externalist

project; and much of it has been said (e.g., Zagzebski 1994; Kvanvig 1996). I will not

retry the basic merits of Plantingian externalism here but instead argue that Plantinga’s account of the beliefs caused by the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit do not appear to be warranted on Plantinga’s own terms. If correct, this gives us motivation to develop an internalist, evidentialist model of the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit which utilizes the basic features that Plantinga outlines throughout Warranted Christian Belief

(a project I undertake in the next section).

It is important to observe up front that what plausibility there is in the claim that

the deliverances of the sensus divinitatis possess warrant rests upon the further claim that

it is akin to our other cognitive faculties.14 While it becomes explicit in his later work, as

far back as God and Other Minds Plantinga’s strategy has been to argue via a

comparative thesis: if x has warrant, then so does y. Recall Plantinga’s Reidian

argument that the belief outputs of the sensus divinitatis can enjoy warrant: The non-

inferential belief outputs of the sensus divinitatis are responses to stimuli in the same (or

nearly the same) way that the non-inferential belief outputs of our perceptual faculties are

automatic responses to stimuli of various kinds. Plantinga describes cognitive design

14 Numerous critiques of Plantinga’s theory have directly challenged the analogy (Grigg 1990; Martin 1992). Interestingly, Koons (2011) argues that if we do accept analogy between the sensus divinitatis and cognitive faculties like perception or memory there is reason to think that the belief outputs of the sensus divinitatis lack warrant. But in what follows I will just assume that Plantinga is right and the outputs of the sensus divinitatis have warrant.

plans as not only “circumstance-response pairs” but “a set of triples: circumstance,

response, and purpose or function” (Plantinga 1993b: 22); the latter element is meant to

capture what makes the response an appropriate one to the circumstance. For instance,

upon being appeared to treely I automatically and without inference believe that there is a

tree before me given the way my faculties are designed. This belief seems to enjoy

warrant even without inference, argument, or ‘evidence’—or so says Plantinga. He

extends this idea to argue that any belief which is the result of my native faculties

properly functioning in an appropriate epistemic environment in accordance with a good

design plan will also enjoy warrant in the absence of defeaters.15 In Plantinga’s official formulation from Warrant and Proper Function:

…a belief has [prima facie] warrant for me only if (1) it has been produced in me by cognitive faculties that are working properly (functioning as they ought to, subject to no cognitive dysfunction) in a cognitive environment that is appropriate for my kinds of cognitive faculties, (2) the segment of the design plan governing the production of that belief is aimed at the production of true beliefs, and (3) there is a high statistical probability that a belief produced under those conditions will be true. (Plantinga 1993b: 46)

Plantinga reaffirms the substance of this account of warrant in Warranted Christian

Belief:

Put in a nutshell, then, a belief has warrant for a person S only if that belief is produced in S by cognitive faculties functioning properly (subject to no dysfunction) in a cognitive environment that is appropriate for S’s kind of cognitive faculties, according to a design plan that is successfully aimed at truth. We must add, furthermore, that when a belief meets these conditions and does enjoy warrant, the degree of warrant it enjoys depends on the strength of the belief, the firmness with which S [sic] holds it. (Plantinga 2000: 156)

For our purposes it is crucial to see that the plausibility of Plantinga’s account of warranted theistic belief depends upon an analogy to the workings of other faculties

15 I will not discuss it here, but Plantinga may well have a serious problem with his account of defeaters. See Kvanvig (2007a).

(Plantinga usually mentions three: faculties which produce perceptual, memorial, and a

priori beliefs). And indeed it seems quite plausible that if God exists he would create a

way for all people (not just learned people) to know that he exists, perhaps by way of

creating a simple cognitive faculty, akin to our other faculties, designed for this purpose.

Plantinga seeks to extend this warrant plausibly enjoyed by perceptual beliefs not

only to theistic belief but to specifically Christian belief. Let’s assume for the moment

that Plantinga’s basic account of warrant is correct and that the sensus divinitatis meets

the conditions for warrant. It is still the case that Plantinga’s extended model moves

swiftly past what appear to be crucial differences between the proper functioning of the

sensus divinitatis and the working of the Holy Spirit. Notice how Plantinga’s account differs markedly when it comes to the formation of Christian belief, how different the account of the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit (IIHS) is from both the workings of our perceptual and memorial faculties and the alleged working of our God-made sensus

divinitatis. True, both the sensus divinitatis and the IIHS have God as their ultimate source and involve true beliefs produced in the subject. But here is where the similarities seem to end. As Plantinga candidly admits of the IIHS in a footnote, “this belief- producing process isn’t exactly like the others” (Plantinga 2000: 246).16 To see this, recall that Plantinga recognizes that the IIHS is not a cognitive faculty or internal

cognitive mechanism but rather a process (Plantinga 2000: 257-258). The word process

here covers over a multitude of sins, for processes can be either internal to an agent—like

one’s cognitive faculties—or external to an agent. And in this case the so-called process

16 Here he seems to back off of his stronger claim in his Stob lectures at Calvin College. There he says that, “The Sensus Divinitatis and the Testimony of the Holy Spirit are…belief producing processes or mechanisms, as we might say; in this regard they are just like memory, perception and other belief producing systems” (Plantinga 1990b: 56, emphasis added).

is not internal to the agent except insofar as it involves a new belief in the agent. It is

certainly not a cognitive process internal to an agent in the way that a cognitive faculty is

internal to an agent. Thus it is clear that the IIHS is not a properly functioning process of

the agent, let alone a well-designed process functioning in its proper epistemic environment, etc (cf. Dole 2002: 45). And yet, as I will argue, the plausibility of my beliefs having warrant because they derive from properly functioning faculties very much depends upon the fact that they are my faculties rather than an external process.

To see this, consider a benevolent but paternalistic professor named Dr. Black who notices that one of his students is having difficulty grasping Einstein’s special theory of relativity as the mid-term is quickly approaching. The other students accept the theory, but this student alone is having trouble. Black does not want this student to be embarrassed about the extra help she needs. So one day when she dozes off in class and all the other students have left, Black seizes his chance. He grabs the Belief-O-Maker he has carefully designed for such circumstances and meticulously shoots X-rays at the proper regions of her brain, thereby causing her to believe the special theory of relativity upon waking. Assume that the student has no defeaters for this belief, that the theory of special relativity is true, and that the Belief-O-Maker has enjoyed past success and never produced a false belief. Even so, this belief being externally caused, it seems clear that the belief is not the result/product of her functioning, let alone her proper functioning.

Rather, it is an external process involving another agent immediately implanting a belief into her noetic structure. Consequently, it seems doubtful that this induced belief has warrant for her. Given that the “process” of the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit seems to consist of nothing but the causation of Christian beliefs in the agent by the Holy

Spirit, it seems more akin to the case of Dr. Black than to the proper functioning of

internal, native cognitive faculties and thus also lacks warrant.

This grace of the Holy Spirit (i.e., the IIHS), if you will, appears so disanalogous

to ordinary cases of proper function precisely because it does not appear to build on

nature but instead circumvents it. Just like the IIHS, Black’s “process” is well-designed

to achieve its purpose; Black is fully benevolent; and Black imparts only true beliefs. Yet

the belief induced by Black seems to lack warrant despite meeting Plantinga’s conditions

for warrant: The belief is caused by a cognitive faculty or cognitive process operating in

its proper environment (the one for which it was designed) according to a reliable design

plan aimed at truth. To see the problem more clearly, recall the difference between internalists and externalists. Both groups want to understand what it is that epistemizes true belief; they want to know what valuable thing is added to a given subject’s true belief which transforms it into knowledge (in the absence of Gettier problems, at least).

Typical internalists point to the subject’s evidence or first-person reasons to believe.

Typical externalists, on the other hand, point to the fact that the subject’s true belief results from a reliable belief forming process in the subject or the proper functioning of the subject’s reliable cognitive faculties. But notice that this externalist feature seems wholly absent in the cases of Black’s student and the Christian neophyte, and hence they seem to lack warrant. In other words, it is highly questionable whether their beliefs— even if produced by a process in some sense—have the valuable epistemic status that externalists like Plantinga are after.

As another example, imagine a caring and talented psychiatrist who produces only true beliefs in me over a period of some months via a carefully planned regimen of

hypnosis which is designed for my very particular epistemic environment.17 As in the

case of Black, beliefs are formed in the agent which bypass the normal belief-forming

faculties of the agent (just as the IIHS bypasses the broken sensus divinitatis). They are

directly implanted. Surely these true beliefs implanted via hypnosis lack warrant. In

fact, Plantinga (2000: 366) himself refers to hypnotically induced beliefs as being formed

“in an irrational way.” But how are beliefs directly induced by the Holy Spirit formed

any more rationally? It seems then that beliefs caused by the internal instigation of the

Holy Spirit, contrary to what Plantinga claims, also lack warrant on his own account;

these beliefs are not produced by a properly functioning cognitive faculty but rather by a

“process” which is external to the believer.

Two objections might arise at this point. First, one might object to the previous

case and claim that the “process” of the IIHS differs significantly from that of hypnosis.

Beliefs formed by hypnosis, it might be thought, are only irrational because they violate

the subject’s design plan; perhaps hypnosis utilizes a broken cognitive mechanism or an

accidental byproduct of some other properly functioning mechanism. This objection will

not work. To begin with, it is not at all clear (to me at least) that hypnosis utilizes a

broken mechanism, a byproduct of another cognitive mechanism, or otherwise violates

our design plan. More importantly, Plantinga (2000: 286; cf. 1993b: 26) specifically says

that God can utilize a broken process or one which is designed for another purpose and

17 Plantinga distinguishes between more global features of an epistemic “maxi-environment” and more particular features of an epistemic “mini-environment” (Kvanvig 1996: 326-329; Plantinga 2000: 158). But we can assume in the cases of Black and the psychiatrist that they have taken both into account in their plan to produce true beliefs in their subjects. One might worry, for instance, that the mini- environment of a subject sitting on the hypnotizing psychiatrist’s couch is an improper one. But Plantinga (2000: 158-159) seems to define a proper cognitive environment as one in which the subject can reliably form true beliefs. Hence the mini-environment is a proper one in this case.

repurpose it so that it is then functioning properly according to the new design plan.18

The psychiatrist could be seen as doing the same thing.

Second, one might object to both of my cases by claiming that the process of the

IIHS is much more than the mere causation of Christian belief in a subject. Often when

Plantinga writes of this process, for instance, he claims that it is a three-step process

(Plantinga 2000: 243-244). First, the subject reads the Bible. Second, the Holy Spirit

acts. Third, the subject has faith or knowledge of the great things of the gospel. But

notice that Plantinga is trying to describe what he takes to be a typical Christian experience of faith formation.19 Perhaps if he were being more careful he would only

claim that this is a typical experience of Christian faith formation today in particular

kinds of Christian communities (e.g., Evangelical Protestant communities). Surely this is

not the typical process by which most Christians throughout history have come to

Christian faith. Most believers have not been able to read let alone had the privilege of

owning a Bible. So I take it that he is not claiming that it is a necessary condition of the

IIHS producing faith that one read the Christian Scriptures. As he notes, the apostles

themselves (and the patriarchs) may have come to faith in a different way (Plantinga

2000: 243). Given that they wrote much of the New Testament after already coming to

faith, it seems that the Holy Spirit caused the apostles’ beliefs without the reading of the

Christian Scriptures. What is more, Plantinga sometimes broadens ‘Scripture’ to include

interaction with another person merely speaking about the truths of the gospel (Plantinga

18 Plantinga also seems to grant that Mr. Truetemp meets the basic conditions for warrant, even though scientists have implanted a mechanical device into his brain (Kvanvig 1996: 333). So even if the psychiatrist does not utilize any previously existing cognitive mechanism of his patient, he would still not necessarily violate his patient’s design plan.

19 Plantinga makes clear throughout chapter eight that he is concerned with the “typical” Christian case vis-à-vis the extended model, using the word in this regard at least six times.

2000: 250). But I do not think that Plantinga wants to claim that this is a necessary part

of the IIHS either. So the first “step” is surely not a proper part of the “process” of faith

production, even if it often precedes it. Yet what is left of this process except the Holy

Spirit causing Christian beliefs to arise in the neophyte? The second step does not appear

to be separate from the Holy Spirit causing beliefs to arise. So the “process” reduces to

the causation of Christian beliefs in a subject. Plantinga even cites the following as a

cognitive process: “God instills a true belief in you, intending in doing so to instill in you

a true belief” (Kvanvig 1996: 338). “Why can’t I think of his doing that [i.e., God

causing a subject to have a belief] as itself a belief-producing process…?” (Kvanvig

1996: 338).

Two things are worth noting here. First, this appears to make seemingly anything

that produces a belief a ‘cognitive process.’ At one point Plantinga says that a cognitive

process “is a cognitive device, a means by which belief, and belief on a certain set of

topics, is regularly produced in regular ways” (Plantinga 2000: 256). This seems to

restrict the class of what counts as a cognitive process. Moments later, however, he takes

this back: “Although this regularity is typical of cognitive processes, it isn’t really

necessary” (Plantinga 2000: 256). So nearly anything that produces a belief seems to be

a cognitive process for Plantinga. Second, it is surely odd that on Plantinga’s view a

“cognitive process” for an agent S can consist of only one step—let alone a step which is

not cognitively internal to S. For instance, would anyone claim that the process by which

Black produces belief in his student is a cognitive process of the student even if it

involves the sudden appearance of a belief in the student? The belief is internal, but the process is not. One indication that the IIHS is not a process of the believer is that

Plantinga claims that this process “cannot fail to function properly” (Plantinga 2000:

246). This seems correct, but only because the process has nothing to do with the

functioning of the fallible human subject at all. A fortiori if God zaps a subject with a belief, surely this is not a display of proper functioning on the subject’s part—or if it is, then Black’s student also functions properly. The problem is not just, as Plantinga admits, that Christian belief is not the result of the Christian’s native epistemic equipment

(Plantinga 2000: 256, 258); the problem is that it is not the result of her cognitive equipment at all. In the end, the “properly functioning cognitive process” of the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit turns out to be like the old saw about the Holy Roman

Empire—it is neither a properly functioning part of the subject’s design plan nor a cognitive process.

Attentive readers will have noticed that Plantinga’s formulation of warrant cited above never specifies that the cognitive faculties producing the believer’s belief must be the believer’s own (Plantinga 1993b: 46). Hence there is room for an objection at this point. One could argue that the beliefs in question are caused by a properly functioning cognitive faculty or process, but one which occurs in Black, the psychiatrist, or the Holy

Spirit rather than in their subjects. However, notice that according to Plantinga warranted beliefs must be formed in a proper epistemic environment. The problem is that whenever

Plantinga distinguishes proper from improper cognitive environments he does so by reference to the believer’s faculties; in describing warrant he refers to the believer’s faculties as the relevant ones (Plantinga 1993b: 7). This indicates that the first clause of the Plantingian analysis of warrant refers to the proper functioning of the believer’s faculties. Perhaps for this reason Keith Lehrer worries that even God cannot produce

knowledge in a believer apart from the believer’s natural belief forming mechanisms,

surely a counter-intuitive consequence (Kvanvig 1996: 35-36). Yet perhaps Plantinga

could amend his analysis of warrant to say that the cognitive faculties in question need not be the believer’s. Indeed, at one point he considers something like this (Kvanvig

1996: 338). If the cognitive faculties in question need not be the believer’s, we could then take the faculties in question regarding the IIHS as God’s faculties. Yet in addition to requiring a plausible warrant transfer principle, this strategy raises a host of difficult questions as to what God’s faculties are, or whether he has faculties at all; what his proper cognitive environment is, or if he has one at all; what God’s design plan is, or if he has one at all; etc. Transferring warrant from God’s beliefs initially seems like a wise strategy. Without clear answers to these questions, however, one might wonder if even

God’s beliefs—surely a paradigm of knowledge—possess Plantingian warrant. In fact,

Plantinga (2001: 384) at one point acknowledges that God does not seem to have a design plan. He infers that God must not have knowledge in the ordinary sense but only in an analogous sense. But this thesis seems a strange result if, as Plantinga holds, God is the quintessential knower and we are created as rational knowers in his image.

Returning to our basic line of argument, we can put the problem for Plantinga in terms of a dilemma. Either the beliefs produced in the cases I have laid out (i.e., Dr.

Black and the benevolent psychiatrist) meet the Plantingian criteria for warrant or they do not. If Plantinga argues that the cases of Black and the benevolent psychiatrist are cases of proper functioning akin to a cognitive faculty in the agent and thus have warrant, then the Plantingian analysis of warrant is in deep trouble. After all, intuitively these are not cases of warranted belief. In fact, when Plantinga considers external manipulation cases

(by evil demons, Alpha Centarians, etc.), he judges them unwarranted because they

supposedly violate the subject’s design plan (e.g., Plantinga 1993a: 44). And as noted

above, even Plantinga thinks that beliefs produced by the process of hypnosis do not have

warrant because they are produced “in an irrational way” (Plantinga 2000: 366). Hence,

if our two cases meet the criteria for warrant, then those very criteria are mistaken. Yet if

on the other hand Plantinga argues that the cases of Black and the psychiatrist are not

cases of proper functioning and thus fail to meet his criteria for warrant, then his account

of the IIHS is in trouble. After all, the “processes” detailed above seem structurally

analogous to the process of the IIHS. Both are caused by external agents; both involve

implanting/causing beliefs apart from the believer’s native faculties; and both stem from

benevolent agents who have devised a way to cause these beliefs in the epistemic

environments of their subjects. But if the structure of these processes is isomorphic and

Black and the psychiatrist do not produce warranted belief then it stands to reason that

the IIHS does not produce warranted belief either.

So how might Plantinga respond? A clue comes in the way that he handles

another purported counter-example to his analysis of warrant. Keith Lehrer has argued

that his famous character Mr. Truetemp constitutes a counterexample to Plantinga’s

analysis (Kvanvig 1996: 31-33). Mr. Truetemp has a mechanical device implanted in his

brain which is well designed by scientists to make him have accurate beliefs about his

internal body temperature. Upon waking from the operation, Mr. Truetemp “remarks that he has very little pain, and then suddenly says, ‘you know I am suddenly convinced that my temperature is 98 degrees, but I do not have the slightest idea why I believe that’”

(Kvanvig 1996: 32). Nonetheless, his belief is accurate and meets the other conditions

for warrant. Lehrer’s point is that something important—namely the first-person

perspective—is missing from externalist accounts of knowledge like Plantinga’s.

In reply, Plantinga appears to grant that Mr. Truetemp meets all of the basic criteria for warrant except for the final no-defeater clause.20 He writes:

As I see it, Truetemp has a defeater for his belief in the fact that (as he no doubt thinks) he is constructed like other human beings and none of them has this ability; furthermore, everyone he meets scoffs or smiles at his claim that he does have it. Truetemp’s defeater means that his belief does not meet the conditions for warrant; hence (contra Lehrer) he doesn’t constitute a counterexample to my analysis of warrant. (If Truetemp doesn’t have the defeater here, he also lacks warrant, since proper function, in his situation, requires that he have a defeating belief.) (Kvanvig 1996: 333)

Notice, however, that these defeaters would take some (perhaps small) amount of time

even for a properly functioning subject to acquire. So Plantinga should maintain that

Truetemp holds a prima facie warranted belief but one which is defeated before too long,

or ultima facie unwarranted, if he is functioning properly.21 Then again, he might also

take his temperature on a few occasions and find that his beliefs are amazingly accurate

and acquire a defeater-defeater for the scoffers. So it is not clear that Truetemp possesses

an undefeated defeater. His temperature beliefs could still be held in a basic way; only

his defeater defeater need be inferential. But put these two worries aside. The thing to

notice for our purposes is that a similar Plantingian reply is not available in the cases of

Black and the psychiatrist. Take the case of Black’s student, for example. Everyone else

20 The inclusion of a no-defeater clause makes Plantinga’s theory not purely externalist. The asymmetry involved in positing that (i) first-person reasons for p are not necessary for belief that p to be warranted and (ii) first-person reasons against p can block warrant is, well, awkward. Thanks to Trent Dougherty for discussion on this matter.

21 Plantinga’s exact view of defeaters remains unclear. It is unclear, for instance, if one possesses defeat only if she consciously holds a defeating belief and is aware of the fact that it defeats the belief in question or whether one’s belief is defeated merely by it being the case that if she were to reflect upon her other beliefs she would then see that she has a defeater for the belief in question. For a closer look at the no-defeater condition see Bergmann (1997).

in her class accepts the theory, and thus she will not run into others in class and discover

that she has some wild ability that they do not share; her belief will not be met with scoffs and smiles. In other words, she does not appear to have a defeater. Similarly in the case of the psychiatrist we need not posit the sorts of extraordinary beliefs in the believer which create Mr. Truetemp’s defeaters. This avenue of reply is thus closed to Plantinga.

A second line of reply available to Plantinga is suggested by John Greco (2001).

Greco notices the discrepancy between faculties and processes and wonders if Plantinga should maintain that the Holy Spirit simply repairs a natural faculty or creates a new one to give the believer Christian beliefs (Greco 2001: 465-466). This proposal has the virtues of (a) involving the believer in the belief-forming process and (b) maintaining an active role for the Holy Spirit. But there are problems with such an approach. For one thing, what natural faculty would the Holy Spirit repair? Even on Plantinga’s account the sensus divinitatis does not inherently produce Christian beliefs but only theistic ones.

The positing of the sensus divinitatis is not wholly ad hoc in that many people from different times and cultures do form theistic beliefs quite naturally upon having similar sorts of experiences. But to posit a latent Christian belief producing mechanism would seem quite ad hoc. It might be the case, however, that the Holy Spirit creates a brand new faculty. But in addition to seeming ad hoc, can there really be one cognitive faculty which produces Trinitarian beliefs, incarnational beliefs, Scriptural beliefs, sacramental beliefs, etc., etc.? These beliefs are quite disparate and it would be a stretch to claim that

they all result from a single faculty.22 It appears, then, that Plantinga and allies have not

given a sufficient reply to the kind of counterexamples I have offered above.

But if Plantinga’s externalist account of warranted Christian belief fails due to

this great disanalogy between cognitive faculties and cognitive processes, perhaps it is

still possible to save Plantinga’s project by construing it along internalist lines. That is,

given the details of Plantinga’s account of warranted Christian belief, might we be able to

see this “process” as producing internally justified beliefs? Plantinga gives some reason

to look in this direction. As far back as “Reason and Belief in God” he has contended

that while belief in God is not based on evidence, we should not infer that it is

“groundless” (Plantinga 1983: 78-79). Similarly, as we saw above Plantinga argues in

Warranted Christian Belief that if Christianity is true then Christian belief is very likely

not only to be warranted but also internally rational and justified (Plantinga 2000: 252-

253). Here internalists have something to work with, even if Plantinga’s official

externalist account of warranted Christian belief is in trouble. In what follows I will

argue that an internalist, evidentialist model of justified Christian belief is tenable if only

one accentuates certain peripheral features of Plantinga’s account and construes evidence

in a proper manner. Those like Plantinga who believe that knowledge requires something

like externalist proper functioning might still worry that while my construal yields

justified, true belief it does not yield the Christian believer knowledge. I obviously do

not have space here to argue for internalism over externalism. But it is at least worth

noting that if the foregoing has been correct, Plantinga’s externalist account of the

warrant enjoyed by Christian belief is seriously flawed. And a workable account of

22 There might also be trouble accounting for the wide disagreement among Christians on these issues if they result from a faculty repaired by the Holy Spirit himself. Other problems arise, here—e.g., what inputs prompt these diverse belief outputs?—but I think I have said enough.

justified Christian belief is greatly preferable to an unworkable account of warranted

Christian belief. After all, Plantinga himself concedes that justification is still a desirable

epistemic virtue (Plantinga 1993b: 3; Plantinga 2000: 252).

Reconsidering Experience as Evidence

Plantinga’s repeated railing against the need for evidence throughout his career

can be very misleading. Even though we saw his conception of evidence soften, even in

his Warrant trilogy he claims that believers do not need evidence (believed propositions

used to inferentially support another proposition) for fully rational Christian belief. Yet

as his conception of evidence weakened, his claim that Christian belief does not need

evidence to be rational strengthened and became less plausible. It is one thing to say that

Christian belief might be rational without there being an argument from nearly

indubitable premises which would convince anyone and quite another to say that

Christian belief need not be supported by the believer’s other beliefs. But as we saw in

Chapter Two, Plantinga’s conceptions of evidence are not the only ones available. Many

epistemologists conceive of evidence as consisting broadly in experience—appearances,

phenomena, seemings (Conee and Feldman 2004: 15; Kelly 2009: 39; Tucker 2013a).

In Plantingian epistemology, the relationship between experience and evidence is

tortuous to discern. Plantinga sometimes speaks of the operation of the sensus divinitatis

as an “experience” but does not see this experience as providing warrant or justification

for its belief outputs (Plantinga 2000: 182-183). Plantinga also thinks that the typical

Christian believer has a significant encounter or experience with the Christian Scriptures

prior to having faith; but he makes very little of this experience or its evidential value.

Still, as we will see, Plantinga seems to have moved toward the phenomenal conception

of evidence, as he concedes that experience can indeed be some sort of evidence. In that

he connects experience and evidence at all I want to make common cause with Plantinga.

I will argue in this section that while his account of the reasons-giving function of

experience is flawed, if we broaden his conception of evidence by heeding little-noticed

passages in Warranted Christian Belief, his magnum opus provides the resources

necessary to show that Christian belief can be internally well-justified.

When one begins to think of Plantinga’s model in terms of providing reasons and

evidence through an experience with the Holy Spirit it is immediately apparent that there

is an important ambiguity in Plantinga’s account of the IIHS. One could easily see

Plantinga as arguing that the Holy Spirit could cause—and importantly—confer

reasons/evidence on theistic belief from any experience at all. After all, if the Holy Spirit directly implants beliefs in the noetic structure of a believer, then it seems that the Holy

Spirit can do this at any time or place and with any attendant experience (even if the Holy

Spirit typically chooses to work in certain regular ways). As Plantinga writes, “the experience is the occasion for the formation of the beliefs in question” (Plantinga 2000:

259). From an internalist, evidentialist vantage point, this is a serious problem. Beliefs produced in this manner may not be evidence (in the sense of a first-person reason to believe) for Christian belief at all. As Jonathan Kvanvig (2007b: 169) writes, evidence,

by its very nature, must be “evidence for certain claims and not for others.” In other

words, it cannot be that the experience in question is evidence for the target proposition if

the experience has no intrinsic or rational connection to that proposition. The experience

itself, if it is to be evidence, must tip the scale in favor of one belief rather than another.

The experience cannot be the mere occasion of belief formation and yet remain evidence.

To illustrate this, say that instead of an encounter with the Christian Scriptures the subject

in question observes a large heap of refuse in her neighbor’s yard. Upon having this

perceptual experience the Holy Spirit uses it as an occasion for the formation of the belief

that Jesus is Lord. There is something quite awkward in trying to take this experience as

evidence for this Christian belief, even if it stems from an infallible source. Just imagine trying to tell your neighbor about your new religion. What about the character of that experience could possibly justify or give reason to believe that Jesus is Lord?

The situation is similar as regards theistic beliefs formed by the sensus divinitatis.

The belief outputs of a subject’s sensus divinitatis must bear some rational or intelligible connection to the input/experience of the subject if they are to be reasonable beliefs (cf.

Lee 1994: 145; Kvanvig 1996: 64). Hence there must be a proper relationship between the experience and the resultant belief. As noted above, Plantinga (2000: 172-173) likens the functioning of the sensus divinitatis to the functioning of our perceptual faculties.

But notice that in the functioning of our perceptual faculties it is not (ceteris paribus) reasonable to form the belief that an elephant is present upon seeming to perceive a tree.

Such a belief formation process is not merely malfunctioning in the sense of failing to form beliefs in accordance with our contingent design plan. Other things being equal, we would view such a belief forming process in an alien species as internally irrational, even if it did meet their design plan.23 As James Sennett (1992: 115) observes, the idea that a particular belief can be properly basic “when based on a certain kind of experience” does nothing to license the further notion “that any other kind of experience could confer it.”

In other words, not just any belief—even if caused by a natural, God-designed faculty—

23 This contention requires that we carefully distinguish between seemings and sensations (as we did in the previous chapter).

is made reasonable by the having of just any experience. It seems the height of

irrationality, for example, that (other things being equal) upon seeming to perceive a

bucket of manure one should thereby claim to have evidence for the existence of God,

even if one is functioning according to a design plan aimed at truth. One might perhaps

object that there certainly could be a connection of the kind I am alleging is required

between experience and belief even in this extreme case. And no doubt, one might be

able to tell a story which rationally connects the experience and the belief (say, that the

smell of manure reminds you of childhood memories of horseback riding with your

father, which in turn causes the memory of a beautiful and seemingly well-designed

landscape which makes God seem very real indeed). But that is just the point. Without

some sort of rational connection like this (however tenuous), the belief outputs of the

sensus divinitatis seem outright irrational and unjustified. It is difficult to see how just

any experience lends rational support to or provides evidence for a particular perceptual

belief, belief that God exists, or belief in the great things of the gospel. So while

Plantinga claims that beliefs formed by the sensus divinitatis or IIHS are internally

rational and justified, this seems to depend on the character of the experience involved.

It is not difficult to see why Plantinga passes over this vexing issue. His examples

of experiences which trigger the belief outputs of the sensus divinitatis are not chosen at

random but inevitably bear some rational connection to the belief that God exists. His

examples include the beauty of a tiny flower, a sense of disapproval over one’s own sin,

thankfulness for a spring morning (Plantinga 2000: 174). These experiences cry out for

answers to questions like How did this magnificent artistry arise, by a magnificent artist?

Who is disapproving of my sin, a morally superior being? Whom should I be thankful to

for this spring morning, its maker? The connection between these experiences and God’s

existence is natural and rational, even if the believer never reasons in a discursive manner

such as: I feel disapproved of; if I feel disapproved of then probably God disapproves of me; therefore probably God exists. Examples like these lead C. Stephen Evans (2011; cf.

Gage 2012) to argue that externalist, Reformed epistemology and traditional,

argumentative natural theology (and evidentialist epistemology more generally) are not at odds but can be reconciled. After all, there might be inferential and non-inferential routes to theistic belief from the very same experiences. And this is very plausible—so long as there is a rational connection between the experiential input and the belief output of the sensus divinitatis in the first place.

What is clearly needed is some sort of connection between experience and belief; some sort of proper connection. While it is often the case that Plantinga writes as if phenomenology can be completely disconnected from rational belief (Plantinga 1993a:

62; 1993b: 92-99) it is worth noticing that Plantinga sometimes lends his account another reading. That is, at times he indicates that the particular phenomenal character of the

experiences themselves could constitute a kind of evidence, though not one that he thinks contributes to warrant. In Warrant and Proper Function Plantinga describes what he

calls “impulsional evidence” (Plantinga 1993b: 92, 104-106, 190-193). He observes that

there is a certain sort of experience each of us has when a proposition p seems true or

fitting whereas q or r does not. He refers to this as a “felt attractiveness” of the

proposition (Plantinga 1993b: 92, 190). This non-sensuous experience is one that we

have all the time but rarely reflect upon; it “is hard to describe, but familiar to us all”

(Plantinga 1993b: 191). What Plantinga describes is akin to what we have called a

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seeming state. Plantinga tends to dwell upon this phenomenology when considering

memorial and a priori beliefs that ‘just feel right’ but admits that it is also present in

ordinary cases of perception (Plantinga 1993b: 190-191). He considers and rejects the

notion that these experiences truly constitute evidence. But intriguingly he acknowledges

that if we were to think of this non-sensuous phenomenology as evidence, “then whenever it seems to you that something is so, you do indeed have evidence for it….and the stronger the seeming, the stronger the evidence” (Plantinga 1993b: 192). But in his view “it is also sometimes quite right to say that someone who has this kind of impulsional experience has no evidence” (Plantinga 1993b: 192). Yet if “we construe evidence in this broad fashion,” Plantinga observes, “then it is indeed true that we always or nearly always form beliefs upon the basis of evidence” (Plantinga 1993b: 192). The catch is that Plantinga thinks “no amount of evidence of this sort is by itself sufficient for warrant” (Plantinga 1993b: 192). Yet because we have seen that there are problems for

Plantinga’s account of warrant vis-à-vis the IIHS, this is precisely how I suggest we begin to think about evidence.

Plantinga continues this line of thought in Warranted Christian Belief, this time referring to such non-sensuous phenomenology as a “doxastic experience” or “doxastic evidence” or even a “seeming” (Plantinga 2000: 110-112, 183, 203-204, 264, 333-335,

365-366, 451-453).24 Here Plantinga makes the further claim, which we will follow, that

this doxastic experience “always goes with the formation of belief” (Plantinga 2000:

111). He even grants that doxastic experience always accompanies the beliefs one holds

due to the working of the sensus divinitatis (Plantinga 2000: 183). Note the vagueness

24 In a footnote Plantinga makes clear that impulsional and doxastic evidence are synonymous (Plantinga 2000: 111).

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here, however. He refuses to say whether the seeming involved in theistic belief occurs

before the belief and forms its basis or whether it merely attends such belief

simultaneously or after the fact. This gives rise to Plantinga’s fear that if seemings count

as evidence, then on evidentialism all beliefs will be justified (Kvanvig 1996: 357-361).

But note two things. First, it is not at all clear that that S is ultima facie justified in

believing that p merely by having the seeming that p. S could of course possess counter- evidence such that she is only prima facie justified in believing that p. Second, if

doxastic voluntarism is false, as Plantinga (1993a: 24) maintains, then we need not worry

about having seeming-evidence by merely adopting any belief willy-nilly. Besides, in

ordinary cases we first have an experience with certain content prior to belief formation.

You ask me if 2,222 plus 2,222 equals 4,444. I reflect on the matter briefly, and this

seems correct. Hence I form the belief that it is indeed 4,444 and relay my belief to you.

The seeming forms the basis or evidence for the proposition; I do not merely have the

seeming because I already believe the proposition. Plantinga appears to think of

seemings as mere inclinations to believe a proposition rather than as an

experience/mental state with propositional content (Kvanvig 1996: 357-361). Given this

thin view of seemings, it is no wonder he is reluctant to admit them as evidence, or at

least as strong evidence. But, as we saw in Chapter Two, the inclinations interpretation

of seemings is deeply problematic (Huemer 2007: 31; Cullison 2010).

Given Plantinga’s fame as an externalist, these passages on impulsional/doxastic

evidence are easy to overlook. They have, in fact, received very little attention.25 But they are a crucial, if neglected, part of his religious epistemology—one that just might save his account of the positive epistemic status of theistic and Christian belief by

25 An exception is Trent Dougherty (ms.).

102 providing a bridge to internalist evidentialism. Plantinga himself treats this internal experience as evidence at crucial moments in his argument for the rationality of Christian belief. In one such episode Plantinga considers the charge that his externalist religious epistemology amounts to nothing more than a fideistic, blind leap of faith; that on his view one forms Christian beliefs for no reasons at all, out of the blue, willy-nilly. After all, it will be recalled that it is no part of the model that the believer must know that the

Holy Spirit has caused her belief. He argues that Christian beliefs are not exactly blind or arbitrary because they constitute a proper response to one’s evidence (Plantinga 2000:

263-264). Which evidence exactly? He crucially relies upon the evidential or reasons- giving nature of the particular phenomenology of the believer’s experience—her doxastic evidence. This is a successful reply to an objection; but its success only comes with the admission that the particular phenomenal character of an experience has evidential, reasons-giving value. In another passage Plantinga considers Mackie’s charge that he does not have evidence which entails that Christian beliefs are true. Plantinga replies that while this sort of evidence is lacking it should not be inferred that the believer is wholly without evidence. The Christian believer has plenty of non-entailing evidence in the form of doxastic experience (Plantinga 2000: 334-335). Plantinga only seems to make use of the particular character of these experiences for the purpose of responding to problems for his externalist account of warrant. One might easily see these examples as the selective use of the phenomenal conception of evidence merely to rebut attacks on his model. And it is telling that when push comes to shove even Plantinga relies upon phenomenal evidence to help ground the rationality of Christian belief. Regardless, this

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is an official part of his account—a part that our internalist, evidentialist construal will

emphasize.

An Internalist Revision of Plantingian Religious Epistemology

How then might we save Plantinga’s account of the IIHS through an internalist, evidentialist reading? Instead of seeing the Holy Spirit’s work as directly implanting theistic belief into a subject’s noetic structure we might see the Holy Spirit as causing the subject to undergo a particular kind of experience—the experience of making Christian truths seem evident. This may appear to be only a trivial issue of semantics, but it is much more. For evidential purposes there is all the difference in the world between the

IIHS causing the belief that p and causing p to seem true; for evidentialists this may mean the difference between justified and unjustified belief. Indeed, Plantinga himself is at times vague (perhaps intentionally so) as to how the Holy Spirit operates vis-à-vis the believer. Often he writes of the Holy Spirit causing or producing Christian beliefs; but occasionally his language leaves open the possibility that the Holy Spirit gently proposes

Christian propositions for belief—and this is obviously much more amenable to the move we are making here. Making matters even more complicated, Plantinga says at one point that the beliefs the Holy Spirit produces will seem true to the believer (Plantinga 2000:

284). But as we saw earlier, it is not clear whether this seeming prompts belief, whether this seeming just attends belief, or whether it seems true because the believer believes it.

Our evidentialist construal will see Christian belief as following naturally from the appropriate seeming. The experience posited here by an evidentialist interpretation of the IIHS is radically different from any old experience which constitutes the occasion for belief formation. The former contains an intrinsic connection between the way things

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seem and the truth of a relevant proposition. There is an intelligible connection in this

sort of experience between it seeming that p and the belief that p, between the content of

the seeming-experience and the content of the belief. In a like manner, because Plantinga

(2000: 183) posits that the belief outputs of the sensus divinitatis also have the character

of seeming true to the subject, a similar internalist interpretation is possible. The

experience of thankfulness for the spring morning can prompt the seeming that someone

(like God) exists who is responsible for the spring morning in all its beauty and the

corresponding theistic belief.

While our internalist model can remain neutral on how the Holy Spirit causes

such seemings, it might still be worth noting that this could occur in more than one way.

First, we might think of the Holy Spirit as affecting the subject’s background beliefs so

that when the subject is in a certain situation it will seem to her as though God exists or

that Christianity is true.26 This adjustment of prior probabilities could happen over time or just before the situation which evokes belief (e.g., just before one hears the gospel for the first time). Or perhaps the Holy Spirit could affect what you find salient in a book or conversation; he might cause you to recall and dwell upon a certain passage of Scripture or the challenging words of a friend such that it comes to seem to you that God exists.

There is no guarantee, after all, that when you read a passage from the Bible you would

‘get the same thing out of it’ as if you read it at another time. In these ways, the Holy

Spirit could cause you to develop a seeming you might not otherwise have developed.

These would be indirect means available to the Holy Spirit. But of course, second, it also

26 For more on the interaction of background beliefs and seemings as evidence see Gage (2014).

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might be the case that the Holy Spirit causes de novo seemings.27 Either way, we might

think of these seemings as a sort of previenient grace which leads to an act of faith rather

than the mere causing of belief/faith.28

A few advantages of this reconstrual are worth mentioning. First, an internalist

account of the IIHS has the advantage of working within the dominant epistemological

tradition. It fully recognizes the importance of the first-person perspective in an account

of knowledge, justification, and rationality. In this way it corrects the major defect we

saw in the courtroom conception of evidence. Second, this interpretation of the IIHS has

the advantage of being consonant with Scriptural descriptions of the activity of the Holy

Spirit. The dominant image in Scripture is of the Holy Spirit “testifying” to the believer

of Christian truths (e.g., 1 John 5:6-10) rather than causing or imposing belief. And what

is testimony or witness but an attempt to give evidence or reasons to think that a

proposition is true, an attempt to persuade or get another to see something in a different

light? Third, this interpretation of the activity of the IIHS tells a consistent tale about

justification. That is, it consistently maintains that evidence is necessary to justify belief

and that more evidence may be required as defeaters arise. Plantinga, on the other hand,

claims that on his model no evidence is necessary for warranted Christian belief. But

then he includes a no-defeater clause in his account of warrant. Because she possesses a

27 One might think that there is also a third option, however. George Mavrodes’s story “The Stranger” raises the possibility that God might give us something like pure intuition into the truth that God exists (Plantinga and Wolterstorff 1983: 98-100). Mavrodes’s story contains an Indian man who believes in the resurrection because it just seems to him that Jesus’ resurrection occurred—a belief which even surprises the man himself. But there is an ambiguity in the story. Does it the man truly believe the proposition, or does he merely find that he is inclined to believe it? It is difficult to see how one could have a full-fledged belief without it seeming true. So if he really does believe it, he has a seeming and this third way collapses back into the first option. But if he only has an inclination to believe, then he may not have a seeming at all. If not, then on our model he does not have evidence for the proposition in question. So our model favors the first two ways in which the Holy Spirit could create belief.

28 This act may also, of course, need special divine assistance.

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number of defeaters, the average Christian will end up needing some form of evidence in

order for her belief to be warranted.

It might be objected that even if we have been correct to argue that Plantinga’s

Extended A/C Model is flawed, and even if we have offered a workable reinterpretation along internalist, evidentialist lines, it still remains that Plantinga has argued that internalism derives any merit it has from a deontological view of justification, a view which is demonstrably false (Plantinga 1993a). “It is this notion of deontological justification,” he writes, “that is the source of internalism” (Plantinga 1993a: 15). I do not have the space to adequately argue the contrary here, but suffice it to say that several leading proponents of evidentialism reject the deontological account of justification to

which Plantinga thinks all proponents of internalist evidentialism are committed (e.g.,

Conee and Feldman 2004: 61-64). Plantinga also argues that evidence in the form of

seemings is insufficient for warrant—that property which epistemizes true belief.29 This evidence is not sufficient because even where one believes truly on the basis of evidence, proper function is required (Plantinga 1993b: 193). But of course in the wake of Gettier

(1963) evidentialists fully admit that evidence is not that which, by itself, epistemizes true belief. Some other condition, even an externalist condition, is necessary to obtain knowledge.30, 31 Plantinga’s official definition of warrant says that it may be a complex

property. BonJour points out that this assumes that that which moves true belief to

29 Despite at times claiming that evidence (or at least certain kinds of it) is not necessary for warrant (e.g., Plantinga 1993b: 188; Kvanvig 1996: 339)—his typical examples are of memorial and a priori beliefs—Plantinga (1993b: 193) concedes that if we think of evidence along the lines of seemings, then “the evidentialist is right: where there is warrant, there is evidence.”

30 It should be pointed out, however, that there are a few who do not think a fourth condition must be added to the justified, true belief account of knowledge (e.g., Foley 2012).

31 An alternative strategy is to abandon the attempt to find a theory of knowledge and see the development of a theory of justification as the chief task of epistemology (cf. Lehrer 1978).

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knowledge is either a single simple property or single complex property (Kvanvig 1996:

48-49). But why assume this at the outset? It may be that more than one property is

required.32 In the end, Plantinga reluctantly accepts this (Kvanvig 1996: 358). It is thus

no criticism of evidentialist justification that it fails (by itself) to move true belief to

knowledge.

One might also have a theological worry about our model: in making Christian

belief a product of one’s natural cognitive faculties, the internalist construal of the IIHS

makes Christian belief attainable by natural reason. If this is so, it is no longer a gift from

God, as Christian orthodoxy maintains. Along these lines, in his discussion of Locke and

Swinburne Plantinga insists that no assessment of evidence will ever get us to Christian

belief, for we are blinded affectively and cognitively by sin and need the Holy Spirit to

overcome our natural state. Besides, he continues, even an impartial assessment of the

evidence would not make the central claims of the gospel more plausible than not

(Plantinga 2000: 266-280).33 In response, one can easily maintain that if the Holy Spirit does not illuminate the mind of the believer by giving her a sufficiently strong seeming state then the believer would never have believed the things of the gospel. The gift is (at least in part) in the experience, the very seeming that the gospel is true.34 This is an

opening of the eyes of the blind, not merely a work of the believer, even if it utilizes the

believer’s natural faculties. Furthermore, what sort of evidence does Plantinga have in

32 In fairness to Plantinga, internalists often speak as if the fourth condition on knowledge is not important. But as Lehrer points out, this is not because Gettiered, justified true belief is almost knowledge but because Gettier cases are rather rare (Kvanvig 1996: 51-52). See similar comments by Swain and Feldman (Kvanvig 1996: 135-136, 199-209).

33 Swinburne replies in Swinburne (2001b).

34 I do not mean to suggest that that gift of faith is exhausted in the giving of seemings. It may be that we need a gift on the affective as well as the cognitive side in order to assent to the truth of the gospel.

108 mind when he claims that no assessment of evidence could justify Christian belief? He seems to have in mind arguments from natural theology. But that is not the evidence our reconstrual says the believer has for theism/Christianity. Rather, the evidence the believer has is the way things seem to her. It would, of course, take a further principle to show that the believer not only has evidence but evidence sufficient to justify her belief.

An assessment of such principles is the task of the next chapter.

A Second Desideratum

If the argument of the previous section is correct, then an internalist evidentialist approach to the sensus divinitatis and the IIHS would ground the rationality of Christian belief much more firmly than Plantinga’s externalist approach. What is important to see is that in so far as he began to treat experience as a candidate for evidence Plantinga offered a rather plausible view. But in so far as he failed to posit an intrinsic connection between an experience and the propositions that that experience makes evident, it was shown to be deeply problematic. And thus we arrive at our second desideratum for an adequate conception of evidence: Evidence may be subjective in that it consists in experiences or mental states which give subjects first-person reasons to believe; but it cannot be so subjective that there is no intrinsic, rational, and objective connection between evidence and the proposition evidentially supported. Without an objectivity requirement on experiential evidence nearly anything goes. While the positivists’ overly objective conception of evidence had trouble providing reasons for belief, it could still serve as a neutral arbiter in disputes. The overly subjective interpretation of Plantinga’s account of religious belief on the other hand reverses this. It has trouble playing the role of neutral arbiter, and even, in the end, playing the role of reasons-provider. If there is no

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intrinsic, rational constraint on the evidential support relation, a neutral third party cannot

assess whether subject S with phenomenal evidence e has better evidence for believing p

or not-p. If experience is to count as evidence, greater objectivity is clearly required.

In the following chapter we will heed this lesson and seek a workable principle

that tethers experiences or mental states to the beliefs they evidence. I will consider

several such principles and argue for the supremacy of one in particular. With this principle in hand we can see that evidence can indeed consist in experience if only it is tethered to a principle which provides objectivity in the evidential support relation.

Together with such a principle, the phenomenal conception of evidence would meet both of our major desiderata and hence would be a serious contender for a viable account of evidence.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Conservative Principles in Epistemology: How to Tether Experience and Epistemically Appropriate Belief

Introduction

In the previous chapter we saw that the phenomenal conception of evidence must

avoid the pitfall of implying that merely any experience can be evidence for any given

proposition. We have, then, the need for a basic principle that will link together the

contents of experience and the contents of beliefs in an appropriate manner—a principle

which fulfills our second desideratum for an adequate theory of evidence by providing

objectivity to the evidential support relation. As Chisholm has noted, while the logician

is tasked with formulating rules of induction and deduction, one task of the

epistemologist is to formulate rules of evidence to separate that which is rightly taken as

evidence from that which is improperly taken as evidence. Together with a plausible

principle to constrain the evidential relation, the phenomenal conception of evidence

would fulfill both of our desiderata (regarding objectivity and subjectivity) and hence

should be seen to be a viable theory of evidence once again.

The twentieth century has seen the development of a host of closely related

epistemic principles which may fit the bill. But as we will see, these principles have their

roots in even older philosophical traditions. Collectively these principles might fly under

the broad banner of ‘epistemic conservatism.’1 In this chapter we will collect the various

1 Some have used the term ‘epistemic conservatism’ for what many have more helpfully labeled ‘doxastic conservatism.’ Like Fumerton (2007), I use ‘epistemic conservatism’ as a broad label that includes principles of both doxastic conservatism and non-doxastic conservatism (more on this distinction below).

111 principles on offer and assess their strengths and weaknesses in order to find the most plausible version which can perform this constraining function.

Epistemic Conservatism Prior to the Twentieth Century

Later in this chapter we look closely at the many formulations of conservative epistemic principles offered in the last one hundred years (or so). It might be thought that this is because conservative epistemic intuitions are quite new—merely a product of contemporary analytic epistemology. This might in turn lead to skepticism about the validity of any conservative epistemic principle and its claim to capture something fundamental about the nature of evidence. But we restrict our consideration of principles in this way simply because only in the previous century did we see the development of explicit conservative principles. It should not be implied, however, that conservative epistemic intuitions (and implicit conservative principles) had not previously been operative in philosophy, law, and other domains dealing with evidence. In fact, I will briefly attempt to show that this is not the case; conservative epistemic intuitions can be seen even in the ancient world.

Much of ancient epistemology, not unlike modern epistemology, was devoted to the refutation of various forms of skepticism. In this ancient conversation we see the intuitions behind modern formulations of epistemic conservatism already at work. One strand of ancient skepticism claimed that it is always more reasonable to withhold judgment where there is the possibility of error than it is to form judgments or beliefs.

Sextus Empiricus informs us that Agrippa’s skepticism was so great that that Agrippa

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decided “it is necessary to suspend judgment altogether with regard to everything that is

brought before us” (Sextus Empiricus 1933 [c. 200A.D.]: 177).2

As Chisholm—who has done as much work as anyone to connect contemporary evidentialist epistemology with that of the ancient world—points out, a major tactic of ancient skepticism, and specifically of Pyrrhonian skepticism, was to show that all propositions are counterbalanced (Chisholm 1977: 10).3 That is, there is neither a

presumption in favor of each proposition nor in favor of its negation. If this is correct,

then indeed the reasonable response will be to withhold judgment on these propositions.

What is important to see is that many of the foes of ancient skepticism explicitly denied

that propositions are counterbalanced. After all, our experiences speak in favor of some

propositions and not others. In this way, ancient responses to skepticism provide

evidence of conservative epistemic intuitions at work. Consider Epictetus’s response to

Agrippa-style skepticism:

Can I argue with him any longer? What fire or sword, I say, am I to bring to bear on him, to prove that his mind is deadened? He has sensation and pretends that he has not; he is worse than the dead. One man does not see the battle; he is ill off. This other sees it but stirs not, nor advances; his state is still more wretched. His sense of shame and self-respect is cut out of him, and his reasoning faculty, though not cut away, is brutalized. Am I to call this “strength”? Heaven forbid…. (Epictetus 2004 [c. 108A.D.]: 13)

Epictetus equates the Pyrrhonian claim that all propositions are counterbalanced with

simply ignoring the rational role of experience as though one were dead or lacked all

sensation. For Epictetus, one’s faculty of reason is brutalized when one fails to take

2 For a deeper look at the motivation behind Agrippa’s skepticism, and particularly his five modes, see Sextus Empiricus (1933 [c. 200A.D.]: lx) and Vogt (2010: 4.3).

3 Because Chisholm (1977) is considered the standard, authoritative edition of his Theory of Knowledge, I quote it wherever possible. But Chisholm (1966) puts even greater emphasis on the history of epistemology.

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account of one’s experiences. The requirement of constant suspension of belief is

unreasonable, we can infer, in that it fails to take account of the positive epistemic

reasons for belief provided by experience—that there is some presumption in favor of beliefs in accord with the way things appear to the subject.

In a similar vein, consider the response of St. Augustine (1995 [386A.D.]) to the

Academic skeptics. Rather than arguing that our impressions of the world are infallible

or that all skeptical worries are unfounded, Augustine maintains that it is more

reasonable to trust one’s (defeasible) sense experience than to dismiss it outright

(Chisholm 1977: 7). Experience, then, is taken to be a generally reliable guide to correct

belief. The critics of ancient skepticism claim that unless we have explicit reason to

distrust a particular perceptual experience—unless we have explicit evidence against a

belief naturally formed in response to experience—we are reasonable in seeing the

perception as an indication of the truth (i.e., as evidence). These critics find a

presumption in favor of beliefs based on experience.

In particular, we find in Carneades something very close to the principle we are

seeking. Chisholm (1982: 14) notes that Carneades assigns “a positive epistemic status to

‘the uncontradicted.’” Elsewhere Chisholm formalizes what he takes to be Carneades’s

epistemic principle:

(Carneades’s Principle): Having a perception of something being an F tends to make acceptable the proposition that something is an F. (Chisholm 1977: 68)

This implies, of course, that one is within his epistemic rights to believe that something is

an F, even if that something’s being an F is not certain or even beyond any reasonable

doubt. Like many of its descendants, Carneades’ Principle may be too strong. While it

does seem to be the case that F is more reasonable to believe than its negation, it is not

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immediately obvious that one is reasonable in believing a proposition that seems only

very slightly stronger than its negation. Regardless, Carneades’s Principle is certainly in

the spirit of epistemic conservatism.

It is no accident that conservative epistemic intuitions can be seen in the context

of anti-skeptical polemics. Many contemporary conservative epistemic principles have also been proffered, at least in part, to fend off external-world skepticism (e.g., Pryor

2000, Huemer 2001). Hence it is worth noting that the example of Carneades gives some evidence that these conservative principles are not simply ad hoc principles designed to fend off skepticism. Carneades was, after all, a skeptic (albeit one who thought that we could at least derive probabilistic beliefs to guide our lives). Epistemic conservatism appears to have independent appeal.

Skipping ahead to the modern period (simply for the sake of time4), we can also see conservative epistemic intuitions (or latent principles) at work in the Scottish commonsense tradition—especially in the work of Thomas Reid. To see this, briefly consider the way in which Reid argues for God’s existence.5 David Hume worried that theistic philosophers often argue in a vicious circle: they use God to shore up the reliability of sense perception and then use their reliable senses to prove the existence of

God. Hume writes:

To have recourse to the veracity of the Supreme Being, in order to prove the veracity of our senses, is surely making a very unexpected circuit. …if the external world be once called in question, we shall be at a loss to find arguments,

4 One might also mention the use of rules of ‘presumption’ in ancient Hebrew and Roman law (as seen in the Talmud and Justinian’s Digest). Appearances which increased the probability of some state of affairs p were to be taken as making reasonable the belief that p until contrary evidence was uncovered. Appearances that p were taken as sufficient justification for the belief that p (see, for instance, Franklin 2001: 6). This tradition was continued on into medieval law as well (Franklin 2001: 17-18).

5 Here I draw on Gage (ms.).

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by which we may prove the existence of that Being or any of his attributes. (Hume 1999 [1748]: 202)

In this passage, Hume levels what I will call his Circularity Charge. He claims it is

circular to appeal to God to shore up sense perception, for reliable sense perception is a

necessary condition for a posteriori knowledge of God’s existence.6

Seeing how Reid avoids this charge reveals his conservative intuitions at work.

Reid does not in fact (à la Descartes) argue for God’s existence and then argue from God

to the reliability of sense perception. Rather, Reid first argues that by nature we are built

to trust our senses. They yield beliefs which seem true to us. Second, the purported

examples of faulty senses are not a good basis for distrusting our faculties (i.e., they do

not constitute defeaters). And third, given the first two steps it is perfectly reasonable to trust these reports about the world and infer further propositions—including the

proposition that God exists (Reid 2002 [1786]: 508-509).7 Behind this justification for the belief that our senses are generally reliable appears to be a version of epistemic conservatism. Though he does not develop any such principle with precision, at work is something close to what I call Reid’s Principle of Continued Belief (PCB):

(PCB): If we naturally believe a proposition to be true, then (i) it has some positive epistemic status, and (ii) we are epistemically justified in continuing to believe it if we have not been given sufficient reason to doubt it.8

6 Hume’s argument does not, of course, apply to a priori arguments for God’s existence (e.g., ontological arguments).

7 Marsden (1983: 227), Wolterstorff (1983a: 60-63), de Bary (2002: 71-72), and Tuggy (2004: 299-301) also affirm this general interpretation. They note that Reid is careful to argue for God’s existence from one of his first principles and not the other way around. For Reid God’s existence was not a first principle or basic belief.

8 Keith DeRose also thinks Reid offers a principle like PCB. He writes: “Reid seems to be making the plausible claim that since he came by his belief innocently and naturally, he is justified in holding to it; presumption is on his side. The belief is already there, and he is not responsible for it being there, so a reason must be given why he should give up his belief” (DeRose 1989: 327). Keith Lehrer (2011: 56, 63-64) and Nicholas Wolterstorff (1983b) take Reid to accept something like PCB as well. See the latter’s discussion of “adequate reason” and “formula (I)” (Wolterstorff 1983b: 162-164).

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In PCB I take Reid to assert that the mere natural seeming that p provides some, even if

minute, reason to believe that p. Sure, one can posit an Evil Demon or other skeptical scenario, but what evidence is there in its favor? Without counter-evidence, why

abandon belief in a proposition that naturally seems true? The seeming that our sense

perceptions are generally reliable is (at least some) evidence for the general reliability of

our sense perceptions. And, Reid would add, the fact that this seeming is shared by the

vast majority of other persons lends additional credence to this proposition (Reid 2002

[1786]: 466). Belief in the external world and an Evil Demon scenario are simply not

epistemic equals given PCB.

PCB has the obvious limitation that it is somewhat ambiguous what a “natural”

belief is. One supposes that it is a belief that most (adult) humans share, such as the

belief in material-world objects. Why, however, limit the scope to only “natural” beliefs?

After all, isn’t what is compelling about them not so much that they are widely held or

arise spontaneously but that they seem true to us? If this is so, then other beliefs which seem true should be accorded the same presumption. But what is important for our purposes is the conservative nature of Reid’s principle. The initial evidence for the reliability of sense perception, according to PCB, is enough to give theistic belief positive epistemic status and, in the absence of counter-evidence, enough to retain its positive epistemic status.

Doxastic Conservatism

Notice, however, that Reid’s principle PCB could actually be taken in a different way—one which will help us get a better grasp of the possible varieties of epistemic conservatism. It is unclear whether the “positive epistemic status” in PCB comes from

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the fact that the proposition seems true or rather from the mere fact that the proposition in question is believed. The latter view has often been called ‘doxastic conservatism’

(though it has also—unhelpfully in my view—been called ‘epistemic conservatism’).

Broadly speaking, doxastic conservatism is the view that “a proposition acquires a

favorable epistemic status for a person simply by being believed by him” (Foley 1983:

165). Or, formulated in terms of rationality, doxastic conservatism is the view that “mere

doxastic commitment can create some degree of purely epistemic rationality for some

beliefs” (Kvanvig 1989: 143). I am of the opinion that the reading of Reid as a doxastic

conservative is mistaken. Regardless, many contemporary thinkers advocate just this sort

of conservative epistemic principle, sometimes citing Reid as a forebearer.9 What is

important for our purposes, is to get a sense of the logical space of conservative

principles and to observe how these doxastic principles differ from their non-doxastic

cousins in which we are primarily interested. Exploring doxastic conservatism also

reveals key advantages of non-doxastic conservatism.

The first relevant reference to ‘conservativism’ in epistemology (that I can find) comes in the work of William James. James notes that when encountering new data we are all conservatives in the sense that we try to save as many of our previous views as possible (James 1954 [1907]: 148-150). William Lycan, one of the chief advocates of doxastic conservatism, specifically cites James on this point (Lycan 1988: 161). In

Lycan’s view, the coherentist tradition in epistemology and especially its explanationist strain “comes straight out of the pragmatist tradition, and the explanatory virtues on which our canons key are pragmatic virtues that make beliefs utile” (Lycan 1988: 134).

9 Lycan (1996: 6) and McGrath (2007: 16) make connections between Reid and doxastic conservatism. See also Goldstick (1971: 188) who links Sir William Hamilton, a prominent follower of Reid, to doxastic conservatism.

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But this tradition comes to Lycan primarily through Quine. Quine thought of

conservatism as “a favoring of the inherited or invented conceptual scheme of one’s own

previous work” (Quine 1960: 20; cf. Quine 1951: 43). In this way Quine appears to

advocate a presumption in favor of whatever beliefs one currently happens to have.

Quine and Ullian (1970; cf. Quine 1978) treat ‘conservatism’ as a theoretical virtue—a

virtue in which a new hypothesis/belief is deemed more plausible the less it conflicts with

prior beliefs.

Conservatism in this context is often treated as merely a pragmatic virtue.

Goldstick (1971: 189), however, argues that Quine treats conservatism as “being one of the prior standards for the assessment of any empirical evidence whatsoever— presumably including, surely, all empirical evidence as regards what is or is not useful.”

Perhaps because of this critique Goldstick explored—but critiqued—an a priori principle that he dubbed ‘methodological conservatism’:

(Methodological Conservatism): Even independently of…empirical grounds the bare fact that some proposition has been believed by us up to the present should be a consideration in its favor. (Goldstick 1971: 186)

Clarifying this principle, he notes that it “holds that a priori and in principle, it is possible

(at least sometimes) to make out a good prima facie case for a proposition by citing the fact that it is believed by us” (Goldstick 1971: 186). Further, the reason to believe generated by this principle is an epistemically justifying one, not just a pragmatic reason to believe (Goldstick 1971: 186).

Though disapproving of Goldstick’s particular arguments, Lawrence Sklar also rejects strong principles of doxastic conservatism like Methodological Conservatism

(Sklar 1975: 383-385). He opts instead for a tie-breaking principle in which it is rational

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to continue in your current belief upon encountering alternative hypotheses that equally

fit your evidence.

(Sklar’s Principle): If you believe some proposition, on the basis of whatever positive warrant may accrue to it from the evidence, a priori plausibility, and so forth, it is unreasonable to cease to believe the proposition to be true merely because of the existence of, or knowledge of the existence of, alternative incompatible hypotheses whose positive warrant is no greater than that of the proposition already believed. (Sklar 1975: 378)

In fact, not only are you justified in maintaining your current belief, but learning of the

existence of an alternative hypothesis that is “just as well warranted on the basis of all

possible (or current) evidence as the one we now believe,” and is equally as plausible as

our current hypothesis on a priori grounds, should not even lower your credence in your original hypothesis (Sklar 1975: 381).

By the 1980s, doxastic conservatism was perhaps at its zenith. But against this tide Richard Foley (1983, 1987) argued that views of epistemic rationality—such as

Lehrer (1974: ch. 8)—which maintain that what a subject S is rational in believing depends upon a holisitic understanding of S’s belief set inherently need to rely upon a principle of doxastic conservatism like that seen in Chisholm (1980). Such views necessarily give S’s current beliefs the presumption of truth. If they did not give S’s current beliefs such a presumption, then why fix what is rational for S to believe in terms of S’s total belief structure? Foley (1983: 170-171) argues that such a principle is in deep need of a truth-related or epistemic defense rather than a pragmatic one. Coherentist epistemologies that rely on doxastic conservatism do so because they presume that one’s current beliefs generate epistemic rather than practical reasons to believe some further proposition(s). If they did not presume this, then they would not be theories of epistemic

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rationality (properly speaking) at all. Foley’s worry is that the doxastic conservatism

required by these coherentist theories is false.

Foley was particularly concerned to respond to Roderick Chisholm’s claim that

“anything we find ourselves believing may be said to have some presumption in its

favor—provided it is not explicitly contradicted by the set of other things that we

believe” (Chisholm 1980: 551-552). In this claim Chisholm notes that he follows

Carneades in assigning a positive epistemic status to “the uncontradicted” (Chisholm

1980: 552). While Foley, Christensen, and others have taken Chisholm as a doxastic

conservative, Chisholm denied the charge (Chisholm 1989; Christensen 1994: 85). What

is unclear is why anything we find ourselves believing receives this presumption.

Chisholm might have maintained, for instance, that it is not the belief that p itself which

creates a prima facie epistemic reason to believe that p but rather the seeming that p. One

might maintain that when one believes that p then it necessarily seems to one that p; it is

just part of the nature of belief that the contents of the belief seem true. Seemings do not

entail beliefs, as we will see in the following section, but beliefs might entail seemings.

Some philosophers, it must be admitted, appear to deny that the belief that p entails the

seeming that p. Think of BonJour’s (1985: 41) Norman the Clairvoyant who finds himself with the belief that p and yet this belief (we are told) is not based on any other mental state (e.g., a seeming or another belief). Still, if Chisholm thinks that one could not have a belief without having the relevant seeming, then any belief one finds oneself with does have evidence supporting it, however slight and defeasible, in the form of a seeming state. If this understanding of Chisholm is correct, then the notion of

‘presumption’ with which Chisholm is greatly concerned is not primarily a presumption

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in favor of whatever beliefs we find ourselves with but rather a presumption in favor of

the way things seem to be.

Nonetheless, Foley’s worry may apply to coherentists and explanationsists10 in

the Quinean tradition like Gilbert Harman and William Lycan—perhaps the two foremost

advocates of doxastic conservatism. “The coherence theory supposes,” Harman

acknowledged, “one’s present beliefs are justified just as they are in the absence of

special reasons to change them” (Harman 1986: 32). “Inspired” by Sklar,11 Lycan (1985,

1988) and Harman (1973, 1986, 1999) both advocated doxastic conservatism as a theoretical virtue. Writes Lycan: “Other things being equal,” we ought to “prefer the theory that coheres best with what one already believes” (Lycan 1988: 162). As a specific instance of this canon of conservatism, Lycan offers the following principle:

(Lycan’s Principle of Credulity): Accept at the outset each of those things that seem to be true. That is, …each of the spontaneous beliefs I have mentioned is prima facie justified…. (Lycan 1988: 165-166)

While Lycan uses the word ‘seem,’ he intends to offer a Reidian “innocent until proven guilty” principle in which spontaneously formed beliefs are defeasibly justified merely by the having of the belief (Lycan 1996: 5-6). Note well, then, that Lycan thinks “the bare fact of one’s holding a belief renders that belief justified, to some degree; any belief at all is at least minimally warranted” (Lycan 1988: 162; cf. Lycan 1996: 7).12

10 For an early and classic treatment of explanationism, see Harman (1965).

11 See Lycan (1996: 21).

12 More recently, however, Lycan has presented a version of non-doxastic conservatism (Lycan 2013).

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As others have acknowledged, Harman’s exact position is difficult to pin down

(Christensen 1994:86-87; Littlejohn 2011: 35). But Harman certainly holds the

following:

(Principle of Conservatism): One is justified in continuing fully to accept something in the absence of a special reason not to. (Harman 1986: 46)

One might think that Harman only offers a pragmatic rule for retaining beliefs. But

Harman’s full position is much stronger. Like Lycan, he thinks that “a belief can acquire

justification simply by being believed” (Harman 1986: 34). After all, according to

Harman, we often forget the original justifications for many of our beliefs, and yet surely

it is rational to keep believing them (cf. Harman 1999: 23-27).

Jonathan Kvanvig (1989) offers an interesting twist on doxastic conservatism.

Kvanvig agrees with Foley that conservatism underwrites a great many methodologies in

epistemology and further agrees that the usual formulations of doxastic conservatism are

problematic. However, he argues for the following principle:

(Higher-Order Conservatism): Necessarily, if S believes that p, believes that there is something that shows that S’s belief that p is true, and believes nothing else that he takes to show that it is not the case that there is something that shows that S’s belief that p is true, then S’s belief that p has some presumption in its favor for S. (Kvanvig 1989: 160)

Notice that this principle includes a requirement that S have a belief about another belief.

In this way it is a higher-order rather than object-level principle (cf. Adler 1996). Notice too that this principle does not (problematically) imply that all of S’s beliefs are presumptively rational merely because of S’s doxastic commitments—only the subset about which S has this higher-order belief. In this way Kvanvig hopes to avoid some of the unsavory implications plaguing other principles of doxastic conservatism—especially the implication that beliefs automatically epistemically justify themselves.

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Even while the discussion of conservative principles today has largely shifted to discussion of non-doxastic conservatism, David Owens (2000), Kevin McCain (2008),13

Ted Poston (2012), and Matthew McGrath (2007, 2013a) have taken up the mantle of doxastic conservatism more recently with slight revisions of the basic theme. But I think that by now we have seen the central idea. Space does not permit a full critique of the various principles of doxastic conservatism. But I am of the opinion that they are mistaken—even despite the many epistemological puzzles and problems that might be solved if doxastic conservatism were true (see McCain 2008). David Christensen puts it well: “In certain conditions, the fact that one believes a proposition can help provide evidence that the proposition is true. But the bare fact that one happens to believe a proposition does not…justify one at all in maintaining that belief” (Christensen 1994:

69). That is to say, the higher-order approach like that of Kvanvig seen above might be acceptable. The fact that one has a belief about their belief—e.g., that it is well-founded or that in general one’s beliefs have a track-record of success even when one cannot recall the original justification—might provide evidence or justification for the first-order belief. But the arguments in favor of taking the sheer first-order belief itself as an epistemic reason in favor of that belief appear wanting (see Foley 1983, 1987;

Christensen 1994; Vahid 2004). Sheer belief that p yields no more than a pragmatic reason to continue believing that p.

Still, given the great variety among principles of doxastic conservatism, perhaps this basic worry is ill-founded. Some would claim that their brand of doxastic

13 McCain (2008) presents an especially helpful and interesting formulation of doxastic conservatism in that he explicitly lays out the conditions of defeat for his principle.

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conservatism does not make sheer belief an epistemic reason. To see this, consider three

basic varieties of doxastic conservatism distinguished by Vahid (2004: 102).

(1) Generation Conservatism: Holding a belief is sufficient for its justification.

Here Vahid intends to capture the basic idea behind doxastic conservatism. However,

given our discussion of Chisholm above, to be precise the principle should make clear

that it is the believing itself that justifies. I will construe it this way in what follows.

(2) Perseverance Conservatism: One should stop believing a proposition whenever one positively believes one’s reasons for believing that proposition are no good.

It is unclear to me why Perseverance Conservatism is formulated negatively, given that

its proponents typically formulate it positively. What the advocates of this view are

really after is this: any belief is justified until shown to be unjustified, and thus

persevering in any belief you find yourself with is epistemically rational. I will construe

it this way in what follows.

(3) Differential Conservatism: One is justified in holding to a hypothesis (belief) despite coming to know of evidentially equivalent alternatives.

It should be noted that according to advocates of Differential Conservatism the two

hypotheses are not just evidentially equivalent but also equivalent in terms of a priori and

all other epistemic considerations. I will construe it this way in what follows.

Vahid takes Chisholm to be representative of Generation Conservatism, Harman to be representative of Perseverance Conservatism, and Sklar to be representative of

Differential Conservatism. Advocates of the latter two principles sometimes acknowledge that Generation Conservatism is clearly mistaken but then proceed to say that they are only offering one of the latter two principles. However, as I will now argue, this strategy fails. As others have noticed, if these principles are truly to be of epistemic

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interest, then they are offered as epistemic rather than purely pragmatic principles. But if

this is so, then both Differential Conservatism and Perseverance Conservatism must rely

upon Generation Conservatism (i.e., garden variety doxastic conservatism).

Let us begin with Differential Conservatism. Say that a subject S believes A at t1.

But while relaxing on her back porch at t2, S suddenly realizes that hypothesis B, which is logically incompatible with A, fits her evidence just as well as A. A is no better than B, and B is no better than A, with regard to evidential fit, a priori considerations like simplicity, etc. Differential Conservatism claims that S is justified in believing A at t2,

and indefinitely so long as A and B remain epistemic equals. Assuming an internalist understanding of epistemic justification, as advocates of doxastic conservatism typically

14 do, how could A be epistemically justified for S at t2? This only seems possible if S

possesses epistemic reasons to believe A that S does not possess with respect to B. But by

hypothesis the only difference between A and B is that S believes A. Therefore, if

Differential Conservatism is tenable, then it must rely on a principle of Generation

Conservatism which claims that believing A itself creates an epistemic reason to believe

A. What S needs here for A to be justified for her is that her belief itself provides an

epistemic reason to believe.

Now consider Perseverance Conservatism. Sometimes advocates of this view

claim that they are not advancing a view about the justification of S’s belief A per se; they are merely claiming that S’s belief A justifies S in continuing to believe A. Kevin

14 Advocacy of doxastic conservatism has taken place among internalists for the obvious reason that only internalists need to come up with another source of epistemic reasons to believe in addition to one’s standard evidence, since externalists deny that these first-person reasons to believe are what confer knowledge-level warrant or justification in the first place. For instance, whereas doxastic conservatism has been proffered by internalists as a solution to the problem of memorial beliefs (which do not have an obvious source of evidence), an externalist would just say that memorial beliefs are warranted on externalist grounds (e.g., the proper functioning of one’s memorial faculties).

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McCain, for one, claims that “intuitively” belief does not count as evidence/reasons in

favor of that belief but does count as a reason not to abandon the belief (McCain 2008:

188). Matthew McGrath, for another, thinks that while the formation of belief requires

good evidence, the rational retention of belief (generally) does not (McGrath 2007: 22).

But, pace McCain and McGrath, surely if S is epistemically rational in continuing to believe A—which, let’s be clear, is nothing more than the believing of A at later time— then A is at least epistemically justified for S at that later time. If Perseverance

Conservatism is to be a substantive epistemic principle at all, as its chief advocates claim, then it must claim that any belief one finds oneself with is justified (and continues to be justified) until one possesses defeaters regardless of the past history of the belief. The whole point of doxastic conservatism in the first place is to help justify things like memorial beliefs for which we do not have (or so it is claimed) independent evidence. So if S spontaneously finds himself with belief A and no evidence against A, then

Perseverance Conservatism judges that belief justified—regardless of whether that belief was in fact formed based upon good evidence, regardless of whether A can now find independent evidence for that belief, etc. But how could A be justified for S, given that he has no independent evidence for it, unless the believing itself creates an epistemic reason to believe? Hence Perseverance Conservatism must also rely on Generation

Conservatism.

Even critics of doxastic conservatism have agreed that there is something legitimate about giving presumption or the benefit of the doubt to the first-person perspective that any given subject finds himself/herself with. Recall that in Chapter Two we described a seeming state as a conscious experience, with propositional content,

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distinct from belief and mere sensation, which has the ‘feel’ of revealing the way the

world is. Given the perceived failure of doxastic conservatism, one natural move is to

think that non-doxastic states like seemings are capable of non-inferentially grounding or

justifying beliefs rather than the beliefs themselves. It is to such non-doxastic principles that we now turn.

Non-Doxastic Conservatism

We have previously critiqued Plantinga (and those like him) who are too profligate in their treatment of experience as evidence. We turn now in this section to introduce and examine the various formulations of non-doxastic conservatism which might serve to constrain this evidential relationship. In the following section we will assess their strengths and weaknesses with the aim of finding the best formulation possible. Our goal will be to find a minimal, plausible principle that can tether experiences and beliefs such that not any experience counts as evidence for any proposition.

As early as 1886, Alexius Meinong wrote of a presumption in favor of the veracity of the contents of perceptual experience. If the world appears to have a certain sensible property P to subject S, and S forms the belief that the world contains property P on that basis, Meinong thinks that S’s perception gives “presumptive evidence” in favor of S’s belief (Haller and Kindinger 1977). As one Meinong scholar puts it, any

“experiential judgment…has presumptive evidence” (Kalsi 1987: 94). Recall that one great motivation for doxastic conservatism was its ability to account for the justification of memorial beliefs—beliefs that supposedly have no evidence in their favor. But for

Meinong, memorial seemings are “immediate presumptive evidence” for that which one

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appears to remember (Meinong 1973 [1886]). Important here is not just that perceptual

(and even memorial) beliefs have positive epistemic status but that they are seen as resting on the evidence of perceptual (and memorial) experience. Perceptual and memorial beliefs are not merely legitimate; we are not merely ‘entitled’ to these beliefs we find ourselves with or entitled to hold on to them until we possess a defeater. Rather, these beliefs are grounded in the evidence of perceptual and memorial experience.

In his 1932 book Perception, H. H. Price formulated this notion of a presumption

in favor of experiential/perceptual beliefs more precisely. Price advocated a sense-data

theory of perception. As we saw in Chapter Two, sense-data theorists hold that what we perceive in the act of perception are impressions, images, or sense-data rather than the objects themselves. From these sense impressions we are able to infer the existence of objects in the material world. In other words, sense-data theorists hold that sense impressions are evidence for material world objects. Price writes:

We want to be able to say: the fact that a material thing is perceptually present to the mind is prima facie evidence of the thing’s existence and of its really having that sort of surface which it ostensibly has; or, again, that there is some presumption in favour of this, not merely in the sense that we do as a matter of fact presume it (which we of course do) but in the sense that we are entitled to do so. (Price 1950: 185, italics original)

Here Price ties together the notions of presumption and evidence. Price was heavily influenced by Thomas Reid. However, he clearly worried that Reid established how our minds naturally work but only devoted minimal attention to establishing that we are rational to believe their outputs (Price 1950: 203). It is one thing to say that our minds work a certain way and that we must rely on their outputs. It is another to say that in perceptual experience we receive evidence which makes our mental outputs rational to

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believe. Price took up this task, formulating what he called the Principle of

Confirmability.

(Principle of Confirmability): the existence of a particular visual or tactual sense- datum is prima facie evidence (1) for the existence of a material thing such that this sense-datum belongs to it, (2) for the possession by this thing of a front surface of a certain general sort. (Price 1950: 185)

Hence perceptual experiences as of object X with property P are evidence for the actual

existence of X with P. Though not self-evident, Price thinks this principle is an a priori

truth, not the sort of thing we could glean from empirical generalization (Price 1950: 186-

189). Price puts his principle in the simplest terms possible: “if any visual or tactual

sense-datum exists, then its existence is evidence that a material thing also exists” (Price

1950: 186). Even if we are deceived by an evil demon, he suggests, the “extremely

strong evidence” we receive in perceptual experience creates “rational belief” in the

material world that is further confirmed with every perceptual act (Price 1950: 198).

In any discussion of non-doxastic conservatism, the work of Roderick Chisholm

looms large. His influence in this regard is difficult to overstate (cf. Kornblith 2003).

Influenced as he was by Meinong and Price, Chisholm also advocated a principle by

which perceptual experience is rightly taken as evidence supporting attendant beliefs

about the world. Unlike Price, however, Chisholm carefully remains non-committal on

sense-datum theory. After all, there may be no such things as sense-data; there may only

be subjects in various mental states (Chisholm 1957: 115-125). He thus takes care to describe the appearances of the world neutrally in adverbial language (e.g., one is said to be appeared to treely rather than to perceive a tree-like sense-datum).

According to Chisholm, we are aware of the way the world appears to us via our

immediate, first-person experience. Like Price, Chisholm takes these appearances as his

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starting point. In non-technical language, Chisholm thinks that in a perceptual experience

in which we take the world to be a certain way (he calls these “takings”), we thereby have evidence that the world is the way in which it seems (Chisholm 1957: 85). If a woman walking down the street takes a certain car to be red, even though it is in fact black, she still has evidence that the car is red—even though she is mistaken. Even if she is systematically deluded, or has damaged her sense organs, these takings or seemings are still evidence—unless of course she is aware that she is subject to delusions or that her sense organs are damaged (Chisholm 1957: 87). Contrary to contemporary worries about cognitive penetration (e.g. Markie 2013; McGrath 2013), Chisholm thinks it matters not to their status as evidence that seemings “are notoriously affected by our emotions, attitudes, and wishes” (Chisholm 1957: 87). They give us reasons for belief, period.

More technically, Chisholm puts his key principle, Principle C, as follows:

(Principle C): For any subject S, if S believes, without ground for doubt, that he is perceiving something to be F, then it is evident for S that he perceives something to be F. (Chisholm 1977: 78)

F stands for any predicable, sensible characteristic. The subject here, Chisholm thinks, is not only rational in taking himself to be appeared to in a certain way. Rather, this rule of evidence functions much like Price’s Principle of Confirmability in that the subject is also said to be rational in believing the world to be as it appears, barring specific grounds to doubt the veridical nature of the appearances. (Chisholm thus adds a defeater clause which will be seen in many of the later principles of epistemic conservatism.) The subject is rational, after all, because the appearances are good evidence—they make it

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evident to the subject that he perceives something to be F.15 Principle C is

(unfortunately) formulated in terms of what S believes about his own perception, but in context it is clear that Chisholm has his lesser standard of “takings” in mind. “We are saying,” Chisholm explains, “that taking something to be red, or blue, or green, or yellow, tends to make evident there being something that is red, or blue, or green, or yellow” (Chisholm 1977: 78). It is the perceptual taking/seeming that confers evidence on one’s perceptual belief rather than a reflective, higher-order belief about one’s perception.16

In his 1979 book The Existence of God, Richard Swinburne argues that one good reason for belief in God, one good source of evidence, comes from religious experience

(Swinburne 2004: 293-327).17 Religious experiences—experiences that from the subject’s point of view seem to her to be experiences as of God (his existence, his presence, his comfort, etc.)—provide evidence for God in much the same way that others have claimed that seemings about the material world are evidence for a mind-independent material world, according to Swinburne. Sometimes it will seem to one that God exists after seeing a beautiful sunset or after viewing a starry sky on a clear evening. Yet some religious experiences may involve no bodily sensations at all (Swinburne 2004: 300-301).

For instance, one might feel that God is telling her to sell everything she owns and give it

15 Chisholm develops a technical understanding of what it is for a proposition to be evident in this way: “h is evident for S =Df (i) h is beyond a reasonable doubt for S and (ii) for every i, if accepting i is more reasonable for S than accepting h, then i is certain for S” (Chisholm 1977: 12).

16 For a careful analysis of Chisholm’s view of the justification of perceptual beliefs, see Alston (1997).

17 Swinburne’s argument for the existence of God based upon religious experience is similar in many respects to C. D. Broad’s (1953: 190-201). Broad also thinks that religious experience—or at least mystical experience—is, in the absence of compelling counter-evidence, evidence for God’s existence. However, he does not develop a principle of non-doxastic conservatism, even if he implicitly relies on one.

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to the poor. There are no bodily sensations, yet she has had an experience in which it

seemed to her that God requires something of her (which, if veridical, entails that God

exists).

This latter sort of religious experience appears to have led Swinburne to a version

of epistemic conservatism which is perfectly general—i.e., it is not formulated in terms of

sense experience, as was, for instance, Price’s principle but applies to seeming to see,

seeming to remember, etc.18 Swinburne’s Principle of Credulity (not to be confused with

Lycan’s principle of the same name) is not precisely formulated, but here is my

reconstruction:

(Principle of Credulity2004): In the absence of special considerations, if it (epistemically) seems (in contingent respects) to S that p, then S has good grounds for believing (i.e., S has evidence) that probably p in proportion to the strength of the seeming.19

Several things should be noted. First, “special considerations” arise when the subject has positive reasons for thinking that the seemings may be false. For instance, someone who has just taken hallucinatory drugs has good reason to doubt his perceptual seemings.20

Second, seemings are only evidence in contingent matters (Swinburne 2001a: 146-147).

Third, Swinburne thinks S’s reasons to believe are proportionate to the liveliness (to

18 Swinburne does, however, give a version of the principle explicitly for perceptual experience: “…it is a principle of rationality that (in the absence of special considerations), if it seems (epistemically) to a subject that x is present (and has some characteristic), then probably x is present (and has that characteristic); what one seems to perceive is probably so” (Swinburne 2004: 303).

19 I base this formulation upon two different versions of the principle Swinburne offers in Swinburne (2004: 303) and yet another version from Swinburne (2001a: 141) with greater emphasis on proportionality: “every proposition that a subject believes or is inclined to believe has (in so far as it is basic) in his noetic structure a probability corresponding to the strength of the belief or semi-belief or inclination to believe.” In his less technical book Is There a God? Swinburne describes the Principle of Credulity in deontological terms: “we ought to believe that things are as they seem to be (in the epistemic sense) unless and until we have evidence that we are mistaken” (Swinburne 1996: 132).

20 Swinburne (2004: 310-315) lists four kinds of special considerations which might defeat perceptual claims.

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borrow Hume’s phrase) of the experience: “The more forceful the experience, the

stronger the memory, the more probable it is that what we seem to perceive or remember

is true—other things being equal” (Swinburne 2004: 303). He thus concludes that

religious experiences in which one seems to perceive an object—whether God, Poseidon,

or whomever—should be taken as good grounds for belief in their ostensive object in the

absence of defeaters (Swinburne 2004: 304).

While it is Swinburne’s 2004 version of the Principle of Credulity which has been

more influential, he recently described the Principle somewhat differently:

(Principle of Credulity2013): any basic belief (that is, the content of that basic belief, the proposition believed) is probably true (that is, it is more probable than not that the belief is true) on the believer’s evidence that he believes it—in the absence of evidence in the form of other basic beliefs of that believer which makes it probable that he is mistaken. (Swinburne 2013: 42)

Swinburne formulates this principle in terms of basic beliefs. As Swinburne writes, “My basic beliefs are rock bottom…. Put in propositional form, one’s evidence is a conjunction of propositions reporting, not the things that the subject believes, but that he believes them” (Swinburne 2001a: 137, emphasis added). He also clarifies that the

“special considerations” or defeaters must also consist in S’s other basic beliefs. But it is crucial here to recall that Swinburne thinks of seemings as a species of belief. Hence he continues, “Put in another way the principle claims that what seems to us to be so probably is so, that our apparent experiences are probably real experiences” (Swinburne

2013: 42). Notably, Swinburne believes that his principle is “a fundamental a priori epistemic principle,” rather than a contingent feature of human reason (Swinburne 2013:

42). One might worry, however, that as currently formulated the principle is false.

Surely it is not a necessary, a priori truth that what seems true is likely to be true; just

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think of demon worlds. What is far more likely is that it is a necessary truth that if p

seems true to S, then S has a reason to believe p. But Swinburne only means to claim that

if it seems to S that p, then (in the absence of defeaters from S’s other basic beliefs), there is an objective epistemic probability for S that p is more likely to be true than not

(Swinburne 2013: 41).

Before looking at perhaps the two most discussed formulations of non-doxastic conservatism (those of Pryor and Huemer), let me here briefly mention three other formulations. Like others, Robert Audi has been concerned to show that beliefs we naturally and spontaneously form based upon our impressions of the world are prima facie justified. He advocates the following principle:

(Audi’s Conservatism): If S has a spontaneous perceptual experience in which S has the impression that x is F (an x-is-F-ish impression), and on this basis attentively believes that x is F, then this belief is prima facie justified. (Audi 1987: 9)

In a similar vein, but stressing the defeasibility of perceptual belief, John Pollock and

Joseph Cruz offer the following principle:

(P & C Conservatism): Having a percept at time t with the content P is a defeasible reason for the cognizer to believe P at t. (Pollock and Cruz 1999: 201)

William Alston uses a similar principle to ground belief in the external world. While he is also focused upon the justification of perceptual beliefs, his wording yields a principle with broader application:

(Theory of Appearing): Whatever appears to one as so-and-so is thereby likely, in the absence of sufficient indications to the contrary, to be so-and-so. (Alston 1999: 198)

In context, it is clear that Alston intends a theory of prima facie justification. That is, he does not intend to pronounce on the objective statistical likelihood of the occurrence of

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“so-and-so” but rather on the justification one has for believing that things are so-and-so.

As Alston writes, “beliefs so formed are prima facie justified just because they register

what is presented” in perceptual experience. “This not only supports the claim that

beliefs about the external world can be justified by sense experience but also throws light

on how this is brought off” (Alston 1999: 198).

In his influential article “The Skeptic and the Dogmatist,” James Pryor defends a

non-doxastic principle of epistemic conservatism he calls Dogmatism.21 To develop a

Moorean reply to external-world skepticism, Pryor develops a principle of perceptual

justification: “when it perceptually seems to you as if p is the case, you have a kind of

justification for believing p” (Pryor 2000: 519). This principle allows him to view many

ordinary beliefs as foundationally justified (i.e., not justified by other beliefs but by

experience).22 While Pryor is primarily concerned with perceptual belief, at one point he offers a broader principle of non-doxastic epistemic conservatism:

(Dogmatism): Whenever you have an experience as of p, you thereby have immediate prima facie justification for believing p. (Pryor 2000: 536)

Unfortunately, when Pryor describes the official version of his view he reverts back to thinking primarily about perceptual justification (Pryor 2000: 539). While not committed to the existence of sense-data, Pryor thinks the propositions represented in experience are not at the object-level (the proposition that “there is a policeman ahead…[is] not

21 Pryor’s article has elicited a number of powerful responses. See, for instance, White (2006) and Wright (2007). For recent counter-replies, see Pryor (2013) and Moretti (forthcoming).

22 Jessica Brown (2013) notes that while Pryor only defines dogmatism as the view that perceptual experience gives one immediate justification to believe the content of the experience, many have associated the view with the more particular thesis that not only does the experience justify but it is the phenomenal character within the experience which provides immediate justification. But Tucker (2013b) notes that Pryor is non-committal about what precisely does the justificatory work—i.e., whether it is the seeming itself or even some sort of reliability in the perceptual experience. Pryor (2013), however, provides more clarity on this score.

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perceptually basic”) but are—or so I understand him—propositions like ‘there is a red

surface’ (Pryor 2000: 539).

Without a doubt, Michael Humer’s Phenomenal Conservatism is currently the most widely discussed principle of non-doxastic conservatism. Unlike Pryor, Huemer takes seemings in a very broad sense. They may be either object-level seemings or more simple seemings. They may be perceptual seemings, or they may be non-perceptual seemings (Huemer 2001: 99). Recall that Huemer takes a seeming to be “a kind of propositional attitude, different from belief, of which sensory experience, apparent memory, intuition, and apparent introspective awareness are species” (Huemer 2007: 30).

Like Pryor, he is interested in articulating a principle of non-inferential, foundational justification:

(Phenomenal Conservatism2001): If it seems to S as if p, then S thereby has at least prima facie justification for believing that p. (Huemer 2001: 99)23

This prima facie language is meant to convey that S’s belief that p is properly

foundational and has “at least” defeasible justification, and perhaps even indefeasible

justification (Huemer 2001: 100-101).24 After much discussion of this principle in the

literature, Huemer added a defeater clause and dropped the prima facie language:

(Phenomenal Conservatism2007): If it seems to S that p, then, in the absence of defeaters, S thereby has at least some degree of justification for believing that p. (Huemer 2007: 30; cf. Huemer 2006: 148, 157)

23 It is important to distinguish Huemer’s understanding of seemings/appearances from the sui generis relationship of direct acquaintance posited by Russell (1998 [1912]) and Fumerton (1995). On the direct acquaintance view one is non-inferentially justified in believing propositions about one’s own mental states because of this relationship of acquaintance with one’s own mental states. But on the seemings view, one is justified not by any factive relationship but by the phenomenal qualities of appearances. On the seemings view, if per impossibile one were directly acquainted with p but it did not appear to one that p, then one would not be justified in believing that p (Huemer 2007: 45).

24 See Pollock (1986: 175-179) and Audi (1993:307-310) on prima facie justification.

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Additionally, with this modified version, Huemer now treats “Phenomenal Conservatism

as governing justification in general, rather than only non-inferential justification”

(Huemer 2007: 30). If seemings are evidence, then the defeater clause itself will only be

fulfilled when something seems to be the case which contradicts or decreases the

probability of the original seeming (Huemer 2001: 100). Finally, Huemer defends the

strong claims that Phenomenal Conservatism is a necessary truth, is self-evident, and is self-defeating to deny (Huemer 2001: 103-107). How else are we to form judgments,

Huemer asks, other than by basing them upon the way things seem to us?25

Finally, Earl Conee suggests a principle of epistemic conservatism similar to, but perhaps more cautious than, Huemer’s formulation. Conee advocates an evidentialist account of reasons whereby a person’s evidence consists of her epistemic reasons in favor of a proposition. But according to Conee, one’s reasons go well beyond her beliefs, extending to all “the indications that the person has concerning the truth-value of the proposition” (Conee and Feldman 2004: 15). Reasons or evidence, then, is a broader category which potentially includes the way things seem to the subject. As Conee puts it, it may be that “someone’s evidence about a proposition includes all that seems to the person to bear on the truth of the proposition” (Conee and Feldman 2004: 15). Conee calls his view Seeming Evidentialism. He does not construct the principle explicitly, but perhaps we might formulate it as follows:

(Seeming Evidentialism): If it seems to S that p is true, one thereby has evidence (i.e., an epistemic reason to believe) that p.

25 For an exchange on this self-defeat argument for Phenomenal Conservatism, see Huemer (2001: 103-107), DePoe (2011), and Huemer (2011a). See also DePaul (2009), Littlejohn (2011), Hasan (2013), Skene (2013), section seven of Conee (2013), and Mizrahi (2014).

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The truth indicators (or evidence) in question can consist of “conscious qualities,

memories, and conceptual connections” (Conee and Feldman 2004: 15). They are things

of which S would be aware but are not necessarily beliefs S holds.

Seeming Evidentialism is meant to differ from Huemer’s Phenomenal

Conservatism2001 in two key ways (Conee and Feldman 2004: 15n8). First, Seeming

Evidentialism does not imply that one has justification for believing that p in the absence of defeaters. Rather, the seeming that p may be very weak; if so, S may not have full-

blown justification for believing that p but only one, weak reason in favor of believing it.

For this reason Conee much prefers the language of evidence and epistemic reasons to

that of justification (more on this below). Second, unlike Phenomenal Conservatism2001,

Seeming Evidentialism does not speak of it seeming “as if p”—a clause which, when

given the natural subjunctive interpretation, leads to difficulties. It should be noted,

however, that Conee (2013) (i) argues that it there is reason to think that it is the sensuous

character of perceptual experience rather than the seeming truth of a relevant proposition

which confers justification, and (ii) remains officially neutral about the status of seemings

as distinctive mental states.

Examining Non-Doxastic Conservatism: Toward a Refined Prinicple

Let us now turn to an examination of these various principles. Both Meinong’s

phrase “presumptive evidence” and Price’s phrase “prima facie evidence” have the

unfortunate defect of implying that the seeming or appearance that p may well not be

evidence that p if counter-evidence turns up at a later date. That is, the language of

Meinong and Price—as well, perhaps, as the defeater clauses of Chisholm, Swinburne,

and Huemer—may give the impression that if one possesses a defeater for p, then the

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seeming that p was never evidence that p at all. But this is a bad result both intuitively

and theoretically. If Sally has never seen a large body of water before, and it seems to her that the oar in water is bent, intuitively this seeming is evidence that the oar is indeed bent; it makes her belief that the oar is bent highly reasonable. Theoretically, if the

evidential connection claimed in principles of non-doxastic conservatism is to be

defended as a priori, then the evidential relation must be an objective one between

seeming states and propositions of the same propositional content regardless of what

defeaters a subject gains at a later time. The language of ‘defeat’ itself is problematic.

Sally’s original evidence is not defeated by learning about refraction. That seeming itself

is objectively a positive piece of evidence in favor of thinking the oar is bent. For this

reason, the principle of evidence we seek should avoid this sort of language and merely

speak of evidence or reasons for belief.

The formulations of epistemic conservatism given by Price and Pryor possess yet

another limitation. Price’s principle is so specific as to commit him to the reality of

sense-data. Sense-data theory is highly questionable (Austin 1962; Adler 1985; Huemer

2001). Regardless, the formulations of Price and Pryor are simply too specific, being, as

they are, merely about perception.26 It is true that the principles of epistemic conservatism which have gained the widest acceptance have specifically been about perceptual seemings (Pryor 2000; Audi 1993: 366; Chisholm 1989: 65; Chudnoff 2011;

Pollock and Cruz 1999: 201; Pollock and Oved 2005). But surely we want a perfectly general principle of evidence, not merely a special rule which allows us to infer the existence of the external world. Such a specific principle, unless it rests on a more

26 Pryor’s more recent article (Pryor 2013) seeks to rehabilitate ‘dogmatism’ not as a theory of justified perception but as the minimal claim that justification can be both immediate and defeasible. Nearly everyone, however, has taken dogmatism as a thesis about perception given Pryor (2000).

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general principle, is likely to appear ad hoc—only developed to assuage skeptical

worries.

Next, recall Chisholm’s principle:

(Principle C): For any subject S, if S believes, without ground for doubt, that he is perceiving something to be F, then it is evident for S that he perceives something to be F. (Chisholm 1977: 78)

First, as we noted earlier, Chisholm’s principle (as worded) regards self-reflective beliefs about one’s own perceptual experience. Yet in normal cases of perception a subject may have no beliefs about her seemings whatsoever. Second, as Swinburne (2004: 307-308) points out, in Chisholm’s elaboration of his principle only sensible qualities

(characteristics and relations) are taken to be the objects of evidence-providing seemings.

On this view, if it seems to you that something is a ship you do not necessarily have evidence that it is a ship. The seemings which count are about sensible qualities, not seemings or impressions of the world as described in language about objects (Chisholm

1957).27 While some like Laurence BonJour (BonJour and Sosa 2003: 87-88) agree with

Chisholm and argue against object-level seemings as being foundational or basic in favor of these more fundamental perceptions, this strikes me as a defect. For instance, consider the phenomenon known as ‘amodal completion’ whereby objects are often visually perceived as wholes rather than parts, even though not all the parts are visible from the subject’s perspective (Stokes 2013: 651-652). Notice that if we plug the seeming ‘there are splices of a cat behind a picket fence’ into a principle of non-doxastic conservatism it will not non-inferentially justify the conclusion ‘there is a cat.’ At any rate, we do not

27 To make matters worse, Chisholm indicates at one point that only what Reid calls the objects of original perception (primary qualities like motion, extension, hardness) are the proper objects of seemings of the evidential sort (Chisholm 1957: 83). N.B., regarding motion, Reid only claims that relative rather than absolute motion is originally perceived; and regarding extension, Reid only claims that two dimensions rather than three are originally perceived (Reid 2002 [1786]: 245-246).

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have such bizarre micro-level seemings (even if we have the relevant micro-level

sensations).

Recall next Swinburne’s principle:

One advantage over previous principles is that Swinburne specifies the kind of seemings which count as evidential. Chisholm (1957: 44-47) distinguished between epistemic and comparative uses of words like ‘seems,’ ‘looks,’ and ‘appears.’ In the comparative sense,

I might say that the stick in the pond looks/appears/seems bent and only mean that it looks the way things typically look when they are bent. But this is not the relevant, epistemic sense of seemings—the sense in which we take the world really to be the way it appears.

Note two more things about Swinburne’s principle. First, although Swinburne does not intend this reading, as worded the “special considerations” can be wholly

external to the subject. So the defeater clause should be specified so as to refer to the

subject’s other seemings or counter-evidence. Second, I see no need, as Swinburne does

(2001a: 146-147) to restrict evidential seemings to contingent matters. It strikes me as

perfectly reasonable to cite as one’s evidence for believing some necessary truth of, say,

mathematics the fact that one has an extremely strong seeming that it is the case. Upon

reflection, one could easily have the seeming that a mathematical proposition seems

necessary. One can even have an epistemic reason to believe a necessarily false intuited

proposition, such as the naïve comprehension axiom. Intuited seemings may well form a

distinctive class of seemings (viz., intellectual seemings), but they are relevantly similar

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to other epistemic seemings in their phenomenological character (cf. Bealer 1996,

Chudnoff 2011). Furthermore, taking seemings as evidence across the board gives non-

doxastic conservatism an attractive theoretical unity. Hence it is to be preferred if at all

tenable.

As noted above, Pryor’s formulation of epistemic conservatism contains a

problematic prima facie locution. In addition to the previous issue, a few other problems arise. Recall Pryor’s formulation:

(Dogmatism): Whenever you have an experience as of p, you thereby have immediate prima facie justification for believing p. (Pryor 2000: 536)

First, the ‘seeming’ language is more accurate than Pryor’s broader language of

‘experience,’ as we saw in Chapter Two. Second, it is unclear that anything is added by

claiming that experience gives “immediate” justification to beliefs. While Pryor (2000:

532) is attempting to say that the experience gives basic or foundational justification—

not resting on evidence or justification one has for believing other propositions—many

readers will read “immediate” in its temporal sense. Indeed, Pryor has to spend several

pages saying what is not meant by ‘immediacy’ (Pryor 2000: 532-536). Third,

Swinburne and Chisholm’s warnings against the comparative use of seemings applies

equally well to Pryor’s “as of p” language and is best avoided. Lastly, Pryor thinks that

seemings cannot constitute evidence because they cannot function as premises in

arguments (Pryor 2000: 519). Perhaps for this reason his principle has experience confer

justification rather than evidence. Why evidence must function as a premise in an

argument, however, is less than clear. This is certainly not a conceptual truth about

evidence.

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Both Pryor’s Dogmatism and Huemer’s Phenomenal Conservatism contain

perhaps the most problematic feature of many accounts of epistemic conservatism.

Unlike the formulations of Pollock and Cruz (1999) and Conee (Conee and Feldman

2004), they both introduce the more complicated notion justification instead of sticking to the more basic notions of evidence and epistemic reasons. For this reason these

principles have not hit rock bottom. Further, the justification language can be

misleading. Pryor, for instance, recognizes that the justification he thinks a belief derives

from experience, even once one has considered potential defeaters, need not be

knowledge-level justification (Pryor 2000: 534-535, 544n24). But of course many

readers will read “justification” in both Dogmatism and Phenomenal Conservatism2001 as

knowledge-level justification. So why not avoid these understandable misreadings by focusing on reasons for belief or evidence rather than justification?

Dropping the language of justification also has the advantage of simplifying the

conceptual space. There would be no need to distinguish, as Tucker (2013b: 11) does,

between phenomenal conservatism and “phenomenal semi-conservatism,” where the

latter holds that, “necessarily, if it seems to S that P, then, in the absence of defeaters, S is

thereby rationally committed to believing P.”28 This position is motivated by the fact that one could have, say, two memorial seemings that appear alike to the subject, but one of which has a bad (i.e., irrational) causal history. While “phenomenal conservatism allow[s] seemings to justify their contents no matter how they are caused,” semi- conservatives will worry that the latter belief is not justified (Tucker 2013b: 12). Yet this proliferation of positions is unnecessary. All sides should agree that the seeming

28 Tucker formulates rational commitment as: “S is rationally committed to taking some attitude A toward P just in case, if one takes an attitude toward P, it is irrational not to take A toward P” (Tucker 2013b: 10; cf. Pryor 2004).

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constitutes a reason to believe from the subject’s perspective, even if it does not

automatically create a justified belief. A better formulation of non-doxastic

conservatism, one which avoids commitment to justification language, would avoid this

proliferation of positions and unify supporters of epistemic conservatism under a larger

tent. For instance, as Tucker (2013b) notes, Markie (2013), McGrath (2013), and

Brogaard (2013) may endorse the weaker form of epistemic conservatism but not one

which commits to seemings necessarily providing justification.

Lastly, Recall Huemer’s mature formulation:

(Phenomenal Conservatism2007): If it seems to S that p, then, in the absence of defeaters, S thereby has at least some degree of justification for believing that p. (Huemer 2007: 30)

Like Pryor, Huemer (2007: 30n1) agrees that seemings do not necessarily create knowledge-level justification. He further complicates the introduction of the concept of justification by (rightly, in my view) noting that justification comes in degrees. Yet it would seem that even beliefs with a justification of .03 have “at least some degree of justification.” Huemer surely would agree that even weak seemings not only give some justification, but some positive justification—say .51, or enough to make the veridicality of the appearance at least slightly more plausible than its negation, other things being equal. What Huemer is presumably trying to say is that seemings (in the absence of defeaters) give positive epistemic status but not necessarily knowledge-level justification

to their attendant beliefs. So, if Huemer insists on incorporating justification into his

account of epistemic conservatism, it would more accurate to speak of positive epistemic

status in the absence of defeaters rather than only “some degree of justification.” But

145 better altogether, I say, to follow the lead of Pollock and Cruz (1999) and Conee (Conee and Feldman 2004) and stick to the language of ‘reasons for belief.’

There is a recent formulation of non-doxastic epistemic conservatism, however, which avoids nearly all of these concerns. Trent Dougherty has recently advanced the following principle of epistemic conservatism which is similar to Conee’s Seeming

Evidentialism:

(Reasons Commonsensism): If it seems to S that p, then S thereby has a pro tanto reason for believing p. (Dougherty 2011: 333)

Before proceeding to highlight the advantages of Reasons Commonsensism, let me say a few words of explanation. First, the seemings here should of course be taken in the epistemic sense of Chisholm (1957) and Swinburne (2004). Second, having a “reason for believing p” should not necessarily be taken to imply having an all-things-considered reason to believe that p but only as having at least a weak reason to believe. One might have conflicting seemings, for instance. Third, the seemingly unimportant “thereby” in

Reasons Commonsensism is much more helpful than a mere if-then locution. The latter is simply not strong enough to capture the ‘because-of’ relation the consequent bears to the antecedent. This clears up some possible confusion over earlier formulations (cf.

Chudnoff 2014; Ghijsen 2014).

A fourth feature requires a little more explanation. While the “pro tanto” locution is more common in moral theory, it is very helpful in this context. Shelly Kagan, for instance, writes of reasons for promoting the good. In complete concord with what we said above regarding the nature of defeat, Kagan thinks these reasons for promoting the good never disappear—they are merely overridden by stronger reasons. He calls these

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defeasible but never disappearing reasons pro tanto reasons. Kagan clearly distinguishes such reasons from prima facie reasons:

A pro tanto reason has genuine weight, but nonetheless may be outweighed by other considerations. Thus, calling a reason a pro tanto reason is to be distinguished from calling it a prima facie reason, which I take to involve an epistemological qualification: a prima facie reason appears to be a reason, but may actually not be a reason at all, or may not have weight in all cases it appears to. In contrast, a pro tanto reason is a genuine reason—with actual weight—but it may not be a decisive one in various cases. (Kagan 1989: 17)

Using this pro tanto verbiage serves to highlight the fact that evidence is an objective relation holding between seeming states and propositions. S’s seeming that p—call it e1—objectively lends evidential support to the proposition that p, even if S has a conflicting seeming or S no longer has e1 at a later time.

Given our criticism of other non-doxastic principles it should be obvious that

Reasons Commonsensism avoids a number of those other principles’ chief defects. So let me just note the biggest advantage of Reasons Commonsensism: It removes the justification language that we saw to be problematic and focuses on first-person reasons for belief. And while the principle is neutral with regard to what constitutes evidence, if evidence consists of epistemic reasons for belief, then Reasons Commonsensism states a sufficient condition for evidence (cf. Dougherty ms.). This is important in that it bypasses complicated debates about what else is needed besides evidence to have justification or knowledge. These are important questions, but we should not let them obscure the fact that seemings lend reasons to believe regardless of whether they secure knowledge or justification in a given case.29

29 There is, of course, a natural bridge principle from reasons to justification. The combined weight of reasons yields the total evidential force or probability. Justification is simply when the strength of S’s belief that p accords with the weight of S’s reasons for p. Thanks to Trent Dougherty for discussion on this matter.

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Much of the recent discussion of principles of non-doxastic conservatism like

Phenomenal Conservatism surrounds cases of so-called ‘cognitive penetration’ (Markie

2005, 2006, 2013; Lyons 2011; McGrath 2013; Siegel 2012, 2013). These thinkers worry that seemings do not (or do not necessarily) justify because they can be penetrated by non-rational or even irrational factors like wishful desires, emotions, prejudice, etc.

Now in my view these cases do not pose a problem for principles like Phenomenal

Conservatism that concern justification. I see nothing wrong with cognitively penetrated seemings synchronically justifying beliefs in the absence of possessed defeaters. As

Fumerton (2013: 739) remarks, “If such people have every (epistemic) reason to believe that the conditions under which their experience occurs are ‘normal’ and if they have no reason to believe that there [sic] experiences are problematic, then I don’t see why the resulting beliefs aren’t epistemically rational.”30 Regardless, notice that by formulating the principle in terms of reasons for belief Reasons Commonsensism has the advantage of being intuitively more plausible—even, perhaps, to those who dissent from stronger conservative principles because of cognitive penetration. Intuitions as to whether S’s belief that p is justified or prima facie justified given her seeming that p can vary widely; but that S has a reason to believe p appears much more obvious. Reasons

Commonsensism is simply weaker and more general than the other principles considered above.

Now, one might object that Reasons Commonsensism is at a disadvantage vis-à- vis other conservative principles which answer (or at least potentially answer) the

30 Tucker (2010: 539-540) also helpfully notes that while cognitively penetrated seemings might yield prima facie justification, the advocate of seemings might still argue that this justification would not be sufficient for knowledge, even in the absence of defeaters, simply because knowledge requires the right sort of causal connection (i.e., the experience needs to be caused in an appropriate manner).

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question, ‘Is this belief justified?’ Reasons Commonsensism does not even address this

important question.31 But, by way of reply, it must be said that justification is a difficult issue which gives occasion to more varied and disparate intuitions. Surely we are better off beginning from more solid and intuitive ground regarding evidential principles and then building up to a theory of justification with plausible bridge principles. Moreover, in some cases we really are not interested in doxastic justification so much as in assessing the weight of our evidence for a proposition (i.e., the sum of our reasons) and which doxastic attitude toward it would be fitting and proportionate given that evidence.

Tying Together Experience and Belief

Having considered the landscape of conservative principles in epistemology and assessed the strengths and weaknesses of various non-doxastic principles, we are now in a position to consider whether our favored principle, Reasons Commonsensism, is up to the task of tying together experience and belief in an appropriate evidential relationship.

Recall what we have seen so far. We saw briefly in the first chapter that the late-logical positivists’ Courtroom Conception of evidence was mistaken. This notion is too objective to perform the epistemological tasks that evidence must perform. This immediately raised the question of whether we should retrieve the logical positivists’ initial view that evidence consists in experience. Then we saw in the second chapter that experience is a highly plausible candidate for evidence in that it is capable of playing all four of the roles that evidence typically plays. However, we saw in Chapter Three that treating experience as evidence can be problematic; we do not want to end up suggesting that an experience with propositional content p can evidence any other proposition.

31 Thanks to Trent Dougherty for raising and discussing this objection.

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Hence we set out in search of a fundamental principle of evidence which might tie

experiences together with appropriate beliefs.

Unfortunately, as it stands, Reasons Commonsensism (RC) is not up to this task.

It is simply not as strong as we need in light of our worries about Plantinga’s religious

epistemology. According to RC a subject’s seeming that p will always give the subject a

reason to believe that p. But RC does not claim that a seeming that p cannot give an epistemic reason to believe q, r, or s, where q, r, and s are propositions with radically different content than p. For that task, we would need to utilize a conservative principle with a biconditional. Such a principle would not only claim that seemings are sufficient for generating an epistemic reason but also necessary. Some defenders of non-doxastic conservatism have begun to defend this stronger principle. For instance, even though he typically defends the weaker form of phenomenal conservatism, Huemer (2013c: 746-

747) seems to endorse the stronger principle (at least for non-inferential justification) in that he thinks that the “sole ultimate source of justification is experience—in particular, a type of experience that I call an ‘appearance.’” Similarly, Trent Dougherty suggests the following biconditional, even for inferential reasons/justification:

(Reasons Commonsensismiff): S has a pro tanto purely epistemic reason to believe that p iff (and because) it appears to S that p.” (Dougherty 2014: 102)32

With this principle (call it RCiff) we are arriving in truly contentious territory. Even

Dougherty only tentatively endorses this principle and has not given it any substantive defense.

So let us consider some potential problems for RCiff and suggest a few replies.

Perhaps the most obvious difficulty for this biconditional is the worry that seemings are

32 During editing this principle’s “iff” was accidentally replaced with “if” (Dougherty, personal correspondence). I have simply presented the principle as it was supposed to appear.

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not what create an epistemic reason to believe in the case of inferences. Inferences are based upon a subject’s other beliefs rather than her seemings. In reply, we should begin by noting that it would be sufficient to reply to Plantinga to defend a biconditional which was limited to non-inferential justification/reasons to believe. After all, our worry with

Plantinga was that if we take his view of experience to be evidence then an experience could potentially give a subject a non-inferential epistemic reason to believe any other proposition.

Still, two things might be said on in defense of RCiff by way of reply to the charge

that it cannot handle inferential reasons. First, inferences appear to be reducible to

seemings. In that inferences share the same phenomenal character as what we have

called intellectual/rational/intuitive seemings—given their sense of “intuitive

plausibility” (Audi 2013: 184) and the apparent grasping of a necessary evidential

relation—inferences appear to be a sub-species of intuitive seemings. As Audi writes,

“Isn’t it our basic rational capacity (embodying the ‘faculty’ of intuition) in virtue of

which we see the validity of anything having the form of ‘If q then p, and q is true, then p

is also true’” (Audi 2013: 198)? Inferences occur when either one proposition appears to

follow from another proposition(s) or when one proposition seems true because of

another proposition(s).33 We should then distinguish seemings with two different kinds of content. In one kind, an inference appears to be the seeming that this proposition

33 Here I am describing deductive inferences. But there are of course also inductive inferences in which e increases the probability that p. Both can easily be seen as seemings.

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follows from these other propositions. In the other kind of inference, the subject appears to have a seeming that this proposition is true because of these other propositions.34

It is important to distinguish the propositional content of these two kinds of inferences for the following reason. One might worry that S’s belief that q which is based on a good inference from p may not seem true to S even though S believes q; rather, S believes that q merely because p seems true and seems to entail q. This is the best objection which we have heard to the biconditional version of non-doxastic conservatism.35 But in this case it looks like S does not actually believe q (i.e., the

content of the inferred proposition), otherwise we have an absurd situation in which S

believes that the content of q is true and yet that very same content does not seem true to

S. If q really does not seem true to S, then it would appear that S only believes a

proposition like ‘I ought to believe that q since it follows from true proposition p’ rather

than the content of q itself. This often happens in the case of religious commitments, for

example. One can come to see that theism is implied or strongly indicated by one’s other

beliefs without the automatic formation of theistic belief. If those advancing this

objection to RCiff are correct, reductio ad absurdum would seem impossible: when presented with a reductio in which we see the evidential connection between our true belief p and the absurd consequence q, we would simply believe q! If I am correct that

34 It has come to my attention that Huemer (forthcoming) has also begun to argue that inference constitutes a kind of intellectual seeming. Crucially, however, he takes an inferential seeming/appearance to represent some thing to be true given, or in light of, some other presumed truth.” Thus he does not make the distinction above in which an inferential seeming might merely represent that p follows from e, not that p is true.

35 It has been pressed in conversation by, among others, Maria Lasonen-Aarnio. It is clear that many defenders of non-doxastic conservatism also endorse this sort of objection to a biconditional like RCiff.

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inferences are seemings, then, given RCiff, inferences yield reasons to believe in the same

fashion as other kinds of seemings.36

Second, earlier in this chapter we saw that doxastic conservatism is widely acknowledged as a non-starter because of the fact that nothing about a belief seems to epistemically justify itself. For this reason it made more sense to think of a non-doxastic state as justifying belief. But notice that the rejection of doxastic conservatism might lead us to question whether, pace widespread philosophical opinion, beliefs are justifiers at all rather than at best transmitters or indicators of the justification created by the

relevant seemings. Both Huemer (2013c: 746-747) and (Skene 2013) have argued along

these lines (cf. Conee and Feldman 2011: 296). Because beliefs always include a

seeming with the same propositional content it would be very natural for philosophers to

confuse the belief as the justifying agent since seemings have only received due

philosophical attention more recently. Some might worry that this reductive analysis of

inferential justification comes at too great a cost; long-standing philosophical tradition

has it that there must be a fundamental difference between inferential and non-inferential

justification. But we might see the cost as offset by the great unity of the seemings-only

approach in which there is one kind of evidence or justifier rather than two distinct kinds

with their own justificatory principles.

With this major objection out of the way we can now see that the stronger

principle, RCiff, is up to the task of constraining the phenomenal conception of evidence.

It contains just the right combination of objectivity and subjectivity. The late-logical

positivists erred precisely because their Courtroom Conception of evidence does not

36 Perhaps the biggest reason why even some prominent defenders of seemings want to distinguish inferences from seemings is that they think of inferences as something we do while seemings are just something that happen to us. Dougherty (forthcoming) persuasively argues that this is a mistake.

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allow for evidence to consist in first-person mental states. It was difficult, then, to see

how their late conception of evidence could justify particular people in believing

particular propositions. But RCiff takes evidence to consist in first-person seeming states.

This is precisely the sort of thing which can ground the rationality of a given proposition

for a particular person. On the other hand, even though Alvin Plantinga’s religious

epistemology could be construed as taking experience as evidence, this view was seen to

be too subjective. It suggests that it is possible for any experience to evidence any

proposition. But what RCiff does is to take an experience with a given propositional

content and link it in an objective evidential relationship with an appropriate candidate

for belief and only that candidate for belief. Importantly, the propositional content of the

belief evidenced by the experience shares the exact same content with the experience. In

this way it gives us a non-arbitrary, objective link between evidential states and the

beliefs they evidence. Though I do not have space to explore them here, this tight

connection between the contents of experience and belief has a number of other

advantages. It both avoids epistemological puzzles like the Sellarsian Dilemma and

makes RCiff a plausible candidate for an a priori principle (cf. Swinburne 2013;

Wedgwood 2013). If RCiff is such a fundamental principle of evidence, one that is

subjective in being person-relative and yet objective in the evidential support relation,

then we can take the wheat from both the late-logical positivist and Plantingian views of

evidence but leave the chaff. Our conclusion, then, is that the phenomenal conception is plausible—but only when taken in conjunction with a principle of non-doxastic conservatism like RCiff.

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While non-doxastic conservative principles have often been proffered for their

ability to ward off external-world skepticism (Pryor 2000; Huemer 2001), we can now

see a deeper motivation for principles of non-doxastic conservatism. If we are to take

experience as evidence at all—as epistemologists of various stripes in fact do, and as I

have argued is most plausible (see also Dougherty and Rysiew 2013)—then we need

precisely this sort of principle to perform its function of constraining which experiential

inputs can evidence specific belief outputs. Seeing this situation, the question arises as to

whether non-doxastic principles like RCiff can withstand the criticism they have received.

I have briefly addressed the first and most obvious criticism to RCiff regarding inferential

justification. But this is insufficient. In the following chapter we examine whether RCiff

can withstand the most developed objection leveled against non-doxastic conservative epistemic principles.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Phenomenal Conservatism and the Subject’s Perspective Objection

Introduction

In the previous chapters we saw that while experience is generally a good candidate for evidence, without a principle constraining which experiences justify which propositions the phenomenal conception is untenable. In Chapter Four we examined the history of conservative principles in epistemology which might do the job. We saw that the best principle on offer is a version of Dougherty’s Reasons Commonsensism.

Without doubt, however, the conservative principle which has drawn the most attention in recent times is Michael Huemer’s Phenomenal Conservatism (PC). As such, it has been the target of several objections—objections which also apply to Reasons

Commonsensism and other non-doxastic conservative principles. Let me briefly mention three. Some worry that PC must be false because it implies that even crazy seemings or appearances can justify (Markie 2005: 357; Littlejohn 2011; Tooley 2013). Other philosophers fear that without a meta-justification for thinking that one’s seemings are reliable—i.e., a justification for one’s justification—PC must be mistaken (BonJour

2004: 357-360; Steup 2013). And still others have worried that because one’s seemings can be cognitively penetrated by wishful thinking and irrational beliefs and desires, seemings surely cannot justify (Markie 2005, 2006, 2013; Lyons 2011; McGrath 2013;

Siegel 2012, 2013).

In my view however, each of these challenges has been met with plausible replies by advocates of Phenomenal Conservatism (see especially Huemer 2013b). There is

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however one very serious challenge to PC (and other non-doxastic conservative

principles) that has not been met. In this chapter I will consider what I take to be the

most important recent objection to internalism generally—and conservative principles

like PC more specifically: Bergmann’s Dilemma for Internalism. Because PC is the

primary focus of criticism, for the sake of simplicity and clarity it is PC that I defend in

what follows. However, it should be kept in mind that my defense of PC will apply

mutatis mutandis to other conservative epistemic principles like my preferred version of

Reasons Commonsensism. In fact, Bergmann’s target is a biconditional version of PC

similar in nature to the stronger principle—Reasons Commonsensismiff—that we advocated in the previous chapter (cf. Bergmann 2013a: 154-155).

Bergmann’s Dilemma for Internalism

As I have said, while we have seen that conservative principles are well motivated, we have not explored the serious challenges to them. The most serious challenge, perhaps, comes from Michael Bergmann who has urged a dilemma against all internalist theories of epistemic justification (Bergmann 2006) and against Phenomenal

Conservatism in particular (Bergmann 2013a). In essence, Bergmann has argued that all internalist theories of justification either end in regress and skepticism or else are unmotivated. Michael Huemer has not directly responded to Bergmann’s challenge.1 So

I will attempt to respond on his behalf. First, I set the broader context by explicating the nature of Bergmann’s dilemma for internalism. Second, I explain Bergmann’s specific application of his dilemma for internalism to Phenomenal Conservatism. Third, I suggest what I deem to be plausible replies to Bergmann’s arguments against both weak and

1 When the opportunity arose Huemer had very little to say. See Huemer (2013a: 336-337).

157 strong versions of PC. In short, I will argue that PC—and, by extension, other conservative epistemic principles—can withstand Bergmann’s dilemma. I close with a reflection on the nature of Bergmann’s dilemma and its prospects for success even if my counter-arguments are unsuccessful.

It must be said up front that defining internalism and externalism has led to no small controversy in recent epistemology. But as Bergmann (2006: 55-57) understands internalism, it is a position requiring an awareness condition on justification. As he puts it, internalism is the thesis that, “in order for a person’s belief to be epistemically justified, it is not enough that it has certain virtues (such as being in accord with the evidence or being caused by the fact that makes it true); in addition, that person must be in some sense aware of those virtues” (Bergmann 2006: 3). This awareness, however, need not be actual. Potential awareness—awareness that one is able to gain by armchair reflection alone—is also acceptable on many internalist accounts. Thus what most kinds of internalism seem to have in common, thinks Bergmann, is that a subject must be at least potentially aware of something contributing to her justification in order for her belief to be justified (Bergmann 2006: 9). Specifically, Bergmann conceives of this necessary condition of awareness in the following way:

The Awareness Requirement: S’s belief is justified only if (i) there is something, X, that contributes to the justification of B—e.g. evidence for B or a truth indicator for B or the satisfaction of some necessary condition of B’s justification—and (ii) S is aware (or potentially aware) of X. (Bergmann 2006: 9)

Some prominent internalists would likely dispute the idea that an awareness requirement is an essential feature of internalism (e.g., Conee and Feldman 2004: 53-82).2 Still,

2 In fact, it should constantly be kept in mind that several prominent internalists clearly reject access requirements. See, for example, Fumerton (1995: 81) and other direct acquaintance theorists. For different but relevant understandings of internalism, see Fumerton (1995: 60-66) and Huemer (2011a: 11).

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Bergmann’s understanding of internalism does capture the heart of what many prominent

internalists like BonJour (BonJour and Sosa 2003: 24) see as distinctive about internalism.

At this point, Bergmann offers a dilemma for internalism—one which clearly parallels the Sellarsian dilemma for foundationalism (Sellars 1963; 1975; cf. BonJour

1978; 1985). Internalism comes in two main varieties: strong and weak, depending on the strength of awareness that the internalist requires for justified belief. Regardless of which kind of awareness the internalist adopts, Bergmann argues, problems arise.

Simply put, strong internalism leads to a vicious regress because of a meta-level awareness requirement; and weak internalism cannot meet its own criteria of success and hence is unmotivated. He formalizes his argument against internalism as follows

(Bergmann 2006: 13-14):

(I) An essential feature of internalism is that it makes a subject’s actual or potential awareness of some justification-contributor a necessary condition for the justification of any belief held by that subject.

(II) The awareness required by internalism is either strong awareness or weak awareness.

(III) If the awareness required by internalism is strong awareness, then internalism has vicious regress problems leading to radical skepticism.

(IV) If the awareness required by internalism is weak awareness, then internalism is vulnerable to the SPO [the Subject’s Perspective Objection], in which case internalism loses its main motivation for imposing the awareness requirement.

(V) If internalism either leads to radical skepticism or loses its main motivation for imposing the awareness requirement (i.e. avoiding the SPO), then we should not endorse internalism.

(VI) Therefore, we should not endorse internalism.

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In defense of premise (V), Bergmann argues that other attempts to motivate internalism

fail—a claim we will return to at the end of this chapter.3 But if that is the case, the key

premises needing defense are those constituting the heart of the dilemma, namely

premises (III) and (IV).

Let us begin with the strong awareness requirement and Bergmann’s defense of

premise (III). As Steup helpfully clarifies, according to Bergmann’s notion of strong

internalism, a subject

S is justified in believing p if and only if (i) S has an undefeated reason r for believing p; (ii) S is justified in believing that r is a reason for believing p. (Steup 2013: 138)

Condition (ii) is the key here. This condition requires a level-ascent which creates a

4 vicious regress. That is to say, if S must not only have a reason r1 for her belief that p

but must also have a reason r2 for believing that reason r1 is a reason to believe that p,

then in turn one must also have a reason r3 for believing that r2 is a reason for believing that r1 is a reason for believing that p, and so on ad infinitum. In sum, this kind of strong

internalism typically holds that one must have a justified meta-belief about her reasons for believing that p. Once this meta-requirement is in place, the need for a meta-meta- belief and a meta-meta-meta-belief arises. Unless one opts for infinitism about beliefs, this requirement seems untenable (Bergmann 2006: 14-16). One might try to escape this conclusion by claiming that the doxastic awareness only need be potential. That is, one might claim that S need only be potentially able to believe that the justifier justifies in

3 Chapter four of Bergmann (2006) argues against a positive, deontological motivation for internalism, while chapters seven and eight consider criticisms of externalism other than the SPO which might be considered as negative motivations for internalism.

4 Both Bergmann (2006) and Steup (2013) advance arguments that the regress is vicious. I will not reduplicate their efforts here.

160 order for S’s belief to be justified. But Bergmann argues that this view ends in vicious regress as well, since it requires the potential for an infinite number of beliefs of ever- increasing complexity (Bergmann 2006: 16-19).5

While this doxastic version of strong awareness is clearly the most popular option, Bergmann does consider a non-doxastic version of strong awareness (Bergmann

2006: 17-19). This option can be difficult to understand, but the central idea is that S conceives of the justifier as a justifier but has no beliefs about the justifier being justified.

Bergmann argues that this version of strong awareness could also come in actual and potential varieties depending on whether S justifiably but non-doxastically conceives that the justifier justifies or whether S only has the ability to so conceive (i.e., has potential non-doxastic awareness of the justifier as a justifier). Bergmann thinks both routes, like the doxastic version of strong awareness, end in vicious regress. Actual non-doxastic strong awareness will require the application of an infinite number of concepts, while potential non-doxastic strong awareness will require the potential for the application of an infinite number of concepts.

Weak internalism, on the other hand, avoids the regress problem only to create another, according to Bergmann. This problem constitutes the second horn of

Bergmann’s dilemma for internalism. Rather than require a meta-belief about one’s reason to believe that p, weak internalism only requires an awareness of the reason for believing that p. This awareness can take many forms, but the hallmark of weak awareness is that it does not require conceiving of the justifier as a justifier. For this very

5 Crisp (2010) argues that the meta-beliefs do not actually increase in complexity. For this reason, he concludes that Bergmann has given no reason to think the regress induced is actually vicious. Hence Bergmann’s premise III above is unmotivated. One need only have the potential to believe one of these meta-beliefs to be justified; and this, he claims, is fully possible. For a critical reply to Crisp, see DePoe (2012: 414-416).

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reason, however, in defense of premise IV Bergmann maintains that weak internalism is

too weak to motivate internalism. It falls prey to a common objection internalists

themselves often make against externalism.

Bergmann (2006: 11-12) asks us to reconsider BonJour’s famous argument

against reliabilist versions of externalism from Norman the clairvoyant. BonJour writes:

Norman, under certain conditions which usually obtain, is a completely reliable clairvoyant with respect to certain kinds of subject matter. He possesses no evidence or reasons of any kind for or against the general possibility of such a cognitive power or for or against the thesis that he possesses it. One day Norman comes to believe that the President is in New York City, though he has no evidence either for or against this belief. In fact, the belief is true and results from his clairvoyant power under circumstances in which it is completely reliable. (BonJour 1985: 41)

The lesson of course is supposed to be that, contra reliabilism, Norman clearly lacks

justification for his reliable clairvoyant beliefs. Making this point explicit, BonJour tells

us that the problem is that, from Norman’s own perspective, the fact that Norman’s belief

is true is “an accident.” Sure, an external observer might see that Norman’s belief is not

an accident but is the result of a reliable cognitive faculty. Yet, BonJour wonders, “how is this supposed to justify Norman’s belief?” After all, from Norman’s own subjective perspective, the belief surely is accidentally true; and “the rationality or justifiability of

Norman’s belief should be judged from Norman’s own perspective rather than from one which is unavailable to him” (BonJour 1985: 43-44).6

In BonJour’s argument, Bergmann sees the following internalist objection to

externalism:

The Subject’s Perspective Objection: If the subject holding a belief isn’t aware of what that belief has going for it, then she isn’t aware of how its status is any

6 For a similar argument, see BonJour in BonJour and Sosa (2003: 27-32). And as Bergmann notes, this sort of awareness requirement is seen in several other internalists. For instance, see Lehrer (1990: 162) and Moser (1985: 129).

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different from a stray hunch or an arbitrary conviction. From that we may conclude that from her perspective it is an accident that her belief is true. And that implies that it isn’t a justified belief. (Bergmann 2006: 12)

The problem, according to Bergmann, is that weak internalism cannot itself satisfy the wide-spread conviction of internalists that is behind the SPO; weak internalism is thus subject to the SPO. Norman’s belief is defective in that it is in some sense “accidental.”7

But without a meta-requirement like that found in strong internalism (which requires that the subject be aware of her reason for believing that p qua reason), Bergmann argues that many ordinary beliefs will be accidental when considered from a subjective perspective.

If this is correct, having an undefeated reason for believing that p is insufficient for doxastic justification.

To better see the problem for weak internalism consider the form of what Steup dubs Bergmann Cases (i.e., cases where weak internalism does not meet the SPO).

(i) S has a true belief that p.

(ii) S has a reason r for p.

(iii) S does not have any form of justified meta-belief with the content that r is a source of justification for his belief that p.

(iv) Because of (iii), the truth of S’s belief must, from within S’s perspective, be considered accidental.

(v) Because of (iv), S’s belief fails to be justified by the very standards internalists themselves endorse. (Steup 2013: 140)

Here S has a reason r1 for believing that p but not a reason r2 for believing r1 to justify his belief that p. The idea is that by meeting (i)-(iii) S is justified according to weak internalism but in reality S is surely unjustified according to a common criterion (viz., the

7 Bergmann (2006) did not attempt to carefully define what is meant by “accidental,” but as we will see below Bergmann (2013a) considers several possible meanings.

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SPO) which internalists typically urge against externalists. If such cases are possible,

weak internalism cannot meet internalism’s own standard for success.

PC to the Rescue?

It has seemed to some advocates of Phenomenal Conservatism that PC—a

conservative epistemic principle similar to the principle of Reasons Commonsensism that

we defended in the last chapter—can escape Bergmann’s dilemma. After all, PC does

not require any sort of meta-belief for justification. According to Huemer’s current

formulation, it only states the following:

(Phenomenal Conservatism): If it seems to S that p, then, in the absence of defeaters, S thereby has at least some degree of justification for believing that p. (Huemer 2007: 30)8

Recall that a seeming is an experience of a special sort—one that has propositional content and a distinctive phenomenal character which has “the feel of truth” (Tolhurst

1998: 298; cf. Huemer 2001: 77-79). One might easily think that PC escapes the horns of

Bergmann’s dilemma: it gives an internalist notion of justification which neither leads to regress (through requiring a meta-belief) nor seems accidental from the subject’s point of view, rooted as it is in the way the world seems to the subject.

Bergmann, however, argues that PC also falls prey to his dilemma. It is this contention that I wish to dispute in the remainder of this chapter. But first we must see why Bergmann thinks PC cannot avoid his dilemma for internalism. Bergmann begins by pressing on Huemer’s definition of PC. He argues that if Huemer intends PC to be an internalist notion of justification (i.e., one which excludes externalism), then he must really have in mind the view—similar to Dougherty’s Reasons Commonsensismiff—that

8 In Chapter Four I referred to this as “Phenomenal Conservatism2007.”

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S’s belief that p is doxastically9 justified if and only if the belief is based on S’s seeming

that p (Bergmann 2013a: 154-155). This seems fair enough since at times Huemer (e.g.,

Huemer 2001: 109) suggests that PC is the only viable principle of non-inferential

justification. Just think of Huemer’s self-defeat argument (Huemer 2001: 107-108;

Huemer 2007: 39-41; DePoe 2011; Huemer 2011a; Huemer 2011b; Hasan 2013). He

argues that ultimately only seemings can justify. Huemer (2006: 148) also endorses the

“appearance account” of internalism which maintains that “all of the conditions that

confer justification supervene on how things seem to the subject.” Hence it seems likely

that he would endorse the stronger, internalist ‘if and only if’ principle.

Given this specifically internalist notion of PC, Bergmann distinguishes two

possible formulations of internalist phenomenal conservatism (IPC) depending on the sort

of awareness requirement they place on PC. IPC might claim that S must conceive of S’s

seeming as in some way relevant to the truth or justification of the belief (strong version),

or it might not (weak version). Hence he distinguishes these two possible versions of IPC

with the ultimate aim of showing that they fall victim to the two horns of his more

general dilemma for internalism. The strong version is as follows:

(IPCS): S’s belief that p is prima facie justified only if (1) it seems to S that p, (2) S is aware of this seeming (i.e., it is a conscious seeming10), and (3) S conceives

9 Bergmann switches to doxastic justification here instead of propositional because externalists tend to take doxastic justification as basic and define propositional justification in terms of it. In my view this constitutes a serious mistake. See Kvanvig (2007b). Indeed, by defining propositional justification counterfactually, Bergmann (2006: 4) has proposed an account of propositional justification that Kvanvig has argued for years is simply untenable. But we will let this pass in what follows.

10 On Bergmann’s inclusion of the word ‘conscious’ here, see Bergmann (2013a: 160-162). By a conscious seeming he just means a seeming that is within your first-person perspective. You need not be aware that you are having a seeming to have a conscious seeming; you need only be aware of the content of the seeming from the inside, so to speak (Bergmann 2013a: 161). In what follows I just assume that all seemings are conscious and so simply tend to leave that specification implicit, since I am unsure what an unconscious seeming might amount to.

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of this seeming that p as being in some way relevant to the truth or justification of the belief that p. (Bergmann 2013a: 164)

The weak version, however, requires no such conceiving of the seeming as relevant to the

truth or justification of the belief.

(IPCW): S’s belief that p is prima facie justified only if (1) it seems to S that p and (2) S is aware of this seeming (i.e., it is a conscious seeming); it is not necessary that (3) S conceives of this seeming that p as being in some way relevant to the truth or justification of the belief that p. (Bergmann 2013a: 163)

Here we have PC-instantiations of Bergman’s original targets, strong and weak

internalism. With these two versions of internalist PC clarified, Bergmann argues that

PC is bound to fall prey to his general dilemma against internalism. In what follows I

consider and evaluate his arguments that both IPCS and IPCW cannot meet the challenge of Bergmann’s dilemma.

PC and Bergmann’s Dilemma, Part I: ICPS

Put most simply, the problem facing advocates of the strong version—i.e., those

who advocate clause (3) of IPCS—is this: They must either think that (a) the subject’s

conceiving must itself be justified, or they must think that (b) this conceiving need not be

justified (Bergmann 2013a: 164). Let us consider option (a) first. Bergmann’s concern

here is that if only seemings can justify, then in order for a given belief to be doxastically

justified it must be the case that (i) S has a seeming that p, (ii) S believes that p on the

basis of the seeming, (iii) S conceives of the seeming that p as relevant to the justification

of S’s belief that p, and (iv) S is justified in step (iii)—that is, S is justified in conceiving of the seeming that p as relevant to the belief that p. In order for step (iii) to be justified,

Bergmann says, one must apply a concept like “being relevant” to the seeming. But if that concept application is itself to be justified, then it too needs a seeming. An infinite

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regress is created because, on this view, if a seeming is to be useful in justifying a belief,

then it needs a concept application; and each concept application needs a seeming to

justify it (Bergmann 2013a: 164-166). So seeming S1 needs concept application A1. But

then concept application A1 needs another seeming S2. But then one needs concept application A2 in order to be justified in connecting S2 to A1, etc., etc. While I will not do so in this paper, it is worth noting that some have challenged the notion that the regress this creates is vicious (Rogers and Matheson 2011; Crisp 2010; Fales 2014).11

More interesting for my purposes is interpretation (b) of the strong version of IPC.

Recall that this version agrees that the subject must somehow conceive of her seeming that p as relevant to the justification or truth of her belief that p; but, crucially, this conceiving itself need not be justified. Bergmann (2013a: 164) thinks that it is simply implausible to think that a conception which is not itself justified is somehow a necessary condition for doxastic justification. After all, he wonders, what could this conceiving possibly contribute to a belief’s justification if it is not itself justified? Bergmann (2013a:

166) motivates this concern with the following thought. Say that some subject S satisfies clauses (1) and (2) of IPCS. That is, suppose S has a conscious seeming that p.

Bergmann notes that S could then meet clause (3) of IPCS simply by incorrectly or even irrationally conceiving of the seeming that p as relevant to the justification of her belief.

If (1) and (2) are not sufficient for doxastic justification, what could an irrational concept application add such that the belief is then doxastically justified?

In my view, the advocate of IPCS should not be troubled by this objection. The advocate of IPCS thinks that S needs to conceive of S’s seeming that p as in some way

11 Bergmann (2006: 38-43) replies to Fales’s (1996) argument that the regress here is not vicious. Fales (2014) extends this debate.

167 relevant to S’s belief that p. But what should it matter if the concept application turns out to be mistaken—even badly so? The advocate of IPCS, after all, is only concerned with prima facie justification. If a concept application is necessary at all, then as long as the subject is unaware that her concept application is mistaken, the necessary condition would seem to have been met. The subject has—for all she knows—a good reason to base her belief that p on her seeming that p. The question is not whether S’s concept application is justified. The question is whether, given that S thinks her concept application is justified (or at least has no reason to doubt that it is), S is prima facie justified in believing that p. I see no reason to doubt that this is so.

Consider an analogous objection to PC: the case of cognitive penetration by non- justifiers.12 Consider Markie’s (2005: 356-358) gold-digger case, or as Tucker (2013b:

15) dubs it, the case of Wishful Willy. It seems to the prospector Willy that a yellow object he has just unearthed is gold. But there is a problem: it seems to Willy that this object is gold only because he deeply desires the object to be gold. That is, this is a case of a seeming which is unconsciously influenced (or penetrated) by wishful thinking. Just like Bergmann worries that a subject could unconsciously apply a wildly inaccurate concept application to her seeming, others have worried that Willy could unconsciously influence his seemings in wildly inaccurate ways.

But what is the right thing to say in the case of Wishful Willy? As Tucker (2010) argues, while Wishful Willy is surely defective or perhaps even blameworthy in some sense, this is fully compatible with it being reasonable for Willy to believe that the object is gold given his seeming and his lack of a possessed defeater. In the same way, the

12 These cases are common in the PC literature. Huemer (2013a: 343) puts these objections under the banner of the “Tainted Source Objection” to PC.

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subject who unknowingly applies a mistaken or even a wildly inaccurate concept

application has done something incorrect and perhaps worthy of blame. But this in no

way entails that the concept application has not added anything to her justification. It

makes p the reasonable thing to believe from her perspective, regardless of whether her perspective is defective in some way. If condition (3) of IPCS is necessary at all, the fact that S has inaccurately (but unknowingly) applied a concept would not seem to affect S’s prima facie justification.13

Bergmann, then, asks the wrong question. The question is not what a wildly

inaccurate concept application adds to one’s justification. The question, rather, is what a

concept application which appears correct from the subject’s perspective adds to one’s

justification. Perhaps Bergmann’s leading intuition here is that if x fails to add anything

to the truth connection—i.e., if x fails to make it more likely that the target proposition is

true—then it would be absurd to think that it is a necessary condition on internalist

doxastic justification. If so, Bergmann is right that this mistaken concept application

does not add anything to the truth connection. But this mistaken concept application

surely does add the right sort of mental connection between the evidence (seeming) and

conclusion such that the conclusion is, from the subject’s perspective, the reasonable

thing to believe (cf. Tucker 2012). If this is correct, Bergmann has given no good reason

for the advocate of IPCS to think that a requirement like (3) is unnecessary.

13 Externalists often construe internalist justification as deontological justification. Perhaps when they sense that a subject is blameworthy in some way they then think the subject must be doxastically unjustified, on an internalist understanding of justification. But for those of us who do not identify internalism and deontological justification, there is little reason to think such a defective or blameworthy subject cannot be justified.

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PC and Bergmann’s Dilemma, Part II: IPCW

But even if the foregoing reply to Bergmann regarding IPCS is sound,

Bergmann’s dilemma might still have great force. After all, as Bergmann (2013a: 167)

himself notes—and I concur—most advocates of PC are unlikely to be dismayed by his

argument against IPCS since “they have never been particularly enamored with higher- level requirements such as clause (3)” of IPCS. For this reason he focuses most of his attention on IPCW. Just as with other versions of weak internalism, Bergmann argues that

IPCW, given its weak awareness requirement, will fall victim to the Subject’s Perspective

Objection (SPO). If this is correct, Bergmann continues, the motivation for internalist PC will be undermined, as the SPO was the main motivation for internalism in the first place.

Therefore IPCW should not be endorsed.

Let us examine this argument in more detail. The SPO is meant to be an

objection to externalism, and hence a (negative) motivation for internalism. It is meant to

show that even if a belief has something going for it—say, it is reliably formed, or

produced by properly functioning faculties—this is still not enough for the belief to be

justified. Something more than externalist virtue is needed for epistemic justification.

Bergmann (2013a: 168) describes the heart of the SPO as follows:

(SPO) If the believing subject isn’t aware of what her belief has going for it, then from her perspective, it is an accident that the belief is true, in which case the belief isn’t justified. (Bergmann 2013a: 168; cf. BonJour 1985: 42-44 and Bergmann 2006: 11-12)

But what exactly does it mean for a belief to be an accident from the subject’s

perspective? In his earlier work, Bergmann (2006) did not attempt an analysis. But more

recently Bergmann (2013a: 168-170) considers several possibilities. He settles on the

following notion:

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(Accident I) It’s false that it’s an accident from S’s perspective that her belief B is true iff: S is aware of X and S believes that X indicates B’s truth (or at least conceives of X as being relevant to B’s truth or justification). (Bergmann 2013a: 168)

Bergmann thinks this interpretation of what it means to be an accident from the subject’s

perspective is best in that if you satisfy Accident I then the target belief is clearly not an

accident from the subject’s perspective, while on other accounts this is not the case

(Bergmann 2013a: 169). For this reason the SPO is best interpreted with Accident I’s

understanding of accidentality in mind. The problem with BonJour’s Norman, in this

view, is that Norman is either not aware of something X which indicates the truth of his

belief and/or Norman does not believe that X is (or at least conceive of X as) relevant to

the truth of his belief.

We will return to this issue shortly. But with this view of the SPO in mind we can

now see why Bergmann thinks IPCW cannot escape his dilemma for internalism: IPCW is

simply unable to avoid the SPO. As a result, it is unmotivated and hence should not be

believed. To see this, recall that according to IPCW all that doxastic justification for the belief that p requires is that S has a conscious seeming that p. It is not required that S

conceive of this seeming that p as relevant to the truth or justification of S’s belief that p.

Bergmann rightly notes that the question before us is this: can S have a conscious seeming that p while at the same time the truth of p is an accident from S’s perspective

(Bergmann 2013a: 170)?

Bergmann thinks the answer is surely ‘yes.’ He imagines situations in which S

has an objectively good reason to believe that p, and does indeed believe that p, but S

does not recognize the good reason to believe that p as a good reason to believe that p.

For instance, Bergmann (2013a: 170) says, one might have pains that are indicative of a

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heart attack; believe that one is having a heart attack; and yet believe that one is having a

heart attack for silly reasons (e.g., one has just heard a song with a lyric about heart

attacks). So what is the problem here? Well, the truth of the belief that p seems

accidental from S’s perspective (i.e., given the reasons for which S actually believes that

p).

Now, let’s return to the question of whether S can have a conscious seeming that p

while at the same time the truth of p is an accident from S’s perspective. Bergmann says

that this is surely possible. Just imagine that Sam, because of some severe cognitive

malfunction, cannot see the connections in modus ponens. In such a case, Sam might

believe that p, believe that p entails q, and believe that q without basing the belief that q

on the relevant propositions and modus ponens. In the same way, Bergman thinks, if

one’s “cognitive malfunction is serious enough,”

it is possible to hold the belief that p for a silly reason and at the same time to be aware of the seeming that p, all the while (because of severe malfunction) not recognizing any connection between the seeming that p and the truth of the belief that p. (Bergmann 2013a: 171-172)

But if this is possible, then “the believer will have a conscious seeming that p and yet it

will be an accident from that person’s perspective that her belief that p is true”

(Bergmann 2013a: 172). If Bergmann is right, it is possible to have a conscious seeming

that p and, at the same time, for one’s belief that p to be only accidentally true from one’s

own perspective. If this is possible, then IPCW is too weak to avoid the SPO. As the whole point of internalism in Bergmann’s view was to posit the need for an awareness requirement on justification and hence avoid the SPO, the fact that IPCW cannot itself avoid the SPO is a major problem. If the point of rejecting externalist theories of justification was because externally justified beliefs could still be accidental from the

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subject’s perspective, then the advocate of IPCW has just as good of a reason to reject

IPCW as to reject externalism. IPCW is simply unmotivated.

In reply, however, Bergmann’s critique of IPCW depends crucially on the way he has formulated IPCS and IPCW. Recall that PC is actually a principle of propositional

justification. In order to show that PC falls prey to his dilemma for internalism,

Bergmann had to transform PC into a principle of doxastic justification. That is fair

enough. But note that for most internalists—Huemer (2011a: 1) included—doxastic

justification is simply a function of propositional justification plus proper basing (i.e., the

belief that p must actually be based upon one’s propositional justification).14 But when

Bergmann translates PC into its supposedly doxastic versions in IPCW and IPCS, he fails

to include a basing clause. It is possible that Bergmann took clause (3) of IPCS to be sufficient for basing, but it is not: Conceiving of a seeming that p as being relevant to the truth or justification of the belief that p is not sufficient for basing the belief that p on the seeming that p. One could surely conceive of a seeming that p as relevant but fail to have it enter into the evidence they actually use to support their belief that p. Just think of

Lehrer’s (1971) Gypsy-Lawyer case. A lawyer reads tarot cards to determine whether his client is guilty. The cards ‘say’ that he is guilty, so he goes out and finds evidence sufficient to conclude guilt. But the lawyer only collects evidence because his job requires it; he does not actually care about the evidence or epistemic reasons. He would believe with the cards and no evidence, and he would disbelieve with the evidence and no cards. Even though the lawyer is aware of the evidence and conceives of it as relevant to the proposition ‘my client is guilty,’ it seems clear that the lawyer is epistemically

14 Some coherentists about justification, of course, will think that proper basing is not necessary to doxastic justification.

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defective precisely because he does not base his belief in his client’s guilt on the actual

evidence. So clause (3) of IPCS is insufficient for basing. But even if it were sufficient,

IPCW would still fail to contain a basing requirement. The point is this: because neither

IPCS nor IPCW includes a basing clause, IPCS an IPCW do not accurately reflect an

internalist PC view of doxastic justification.

So let’s include a basing clause in IPCW, get a more accurate view of the weak version of internalist PC, and re-evaluate.

(IPCW2): S’s belief that p is prima facie justified only if (1) it seems to S that p and (2) S is aware of this seeming (i.e., it is a conscious seeming); it is not necessary that (3) S conceives of this seeming that p as being in some way relevant to the truth or justification of the belief that p; and (4) S must base the belief that p upon S’s seeming that p.

With this addition, it is clear that Bergmann’s hypothetical, severely malfunctioning subject who has the seeming that p but fails to base his belief that p on his seeming that p has some degree of propositional justification according to PC but is doxastically unjustified according to IPCW2. And this seems as it should be. If a subject has an

epistemic reason to believe that p (viz., it seems to the subject that p), then p has some

justification for that subject. But the subject’s belief that p might still be unjustified,

depending on the subject’s reason(s) for believing that p. To Bergmann’s larger point, he

is surely right that it is possible for S to have a seeming that p and at the same time for S’s

belief that p to be accidentally true. But this is only because S’s belief that p could be based upon bad evidence.

A quick aside: One might worry that by imposing a basing requirement IPCW2

can no longer do the work required of it. That is to say, because many accounts of the

basing relation are doxastic and require that the subject believe that her evidence supports

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her conclusion (Audi 1993: 233-273; Fumerton 2004: 165; Leite 2008), one might worry

that IPCW2 cannot function as a solution to Bergmann’s dilemma. After all, if IPCW2

contains a higher-level doxastic requirement, then it seems that it just becomes a strong version of internalist PC and hence may fall victim to the first horn of Bergmann’s dilemma. But by way of reply, note that the basing relation need not be doxastic. I do not have space to defend the view here, but I suggest that the basing requirement not be

construed doxastically but in terms of a weaker requirement like S takes evidence E to

support the proposition p (cf. Tucker 2012). ‘Taking,’ is meant to encompass even non-

doxastic states like seemings (and perhaps direct acquaintance, if it is construed as a non-

doxastic state).

Now let’s return to the main line of argument. Say that S has a conscious seeming

that p and believes that p on the basis of this seeming that p; that is, let’s say that S meets

the conditions laid out in IPCW2. If p turns out to be true, is it only accidentally true from

S’s perspective? This will depend on how we construe ‘accidentally true.’ Recall that

Bergmann understands this notion as follows:

Now if this is the only viable understanding of what it means for a proposition not to be

accidentally true from a subject’s perspective, then IPCW and IPCW2 are doomed to

failure from the start. After all, weak internalist PC just denies that S must have a belief

that her seeming is (or conceive of her seeming as) relevant to the truth of her belief. As

Bergmann (2013a: 169) notes, Accident I has the virtue that if you have satisfied it, then

your belief is clearly not going to be accidentally true. But surely this is not the only

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viable understanding of what it means for a belief to fail to be accidentally true from a

subject’s perspective. We need a conception that captures Bergmann’s original intuition

that an accidental belief is one that is no better than “a stray hunch or an arbitrary

conviction” (Bergmann 2006: 12). Rogers and Matheson (2011: 62) capture something

of the common sense notion of what it means for a belief not to be accidentally true when

they write: “Given that the proposition seems true to him, it is not surprising or

accidental, from his perspective, that it is true.” The notion of ‘not being surprising’ is a good start. But we might ask why the truth that p would be unsurprising to the subject?

Well, presumably this is because the subject has a positive reason to believe that p and no

defeaters, no outweighing evidence. I suggest, then, that we capture this notion as

follows:

(Accident II) It’s false that it’s an accident from S’s perspective that her belief that p is true iff: S has an epistemic reason for her belief that p and has no believed defeaters for p.

The truth of the belief that p is not surprising to S because she has good reason to believe

that p (viz., p seems true) and no outweighing reasons against p. Surely then the truth of

p is neither surprising nor accidental from S’s perspective.

To see that Accident II is indeed a good account, let us return to the Norman case

which spawned this discussion of accidentally true beliefs to see if Accident II yields the

right verdict in that case.

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BonJour’s critique of externalism, recall, is that Norman’s belief is surely unjustified

since he has no reason from his own perspective to believe that the President is in New

York, even though Norman has a reliable clairvoyance mechanism. According to

Accident II, Norman’s belief will indeed be accidentally true from his own perspective,

given that BonJour has stipulated that Norman has no epistemic reason or evidence on

which he bases his belief. So Accident II appears to jive with BonJour’s internalist

intuition about accidentally true beliefs.15

It is perhaps worth noting, however, that the Norman case is problematic.

BonJour is welcome to stipulate the case as he sees fit. But it is not at all clear that one

can believe that p without it seeming that p is true. In fact, it seems to me to be

psychologically implausible that one can believe p without it seeming that p is true. And this does not appear to be an intuition only an internalist might have; Plantinga, for instance, has claimed that part of what it is for S to believe that p is for p to seem true to S

(Plantinga 2000: 284).16 If this is correct, then on the PC view of evidence Norman does

have evidence (or an epistemic reason) for his belief that the President is in New York—

not his belief itself but the fact that it seems true to him that the President is in New York.

Construed this way, Norman’s belief would not appear to be an accident. And this too

jives perfectly with our account in that Norman would then meet Accident II’s

15 Accident II also jives with the intuition expressed by Peter Markie (2009: 365-366) that S’s belief that p is an accident if S cannot potentially identify a belief or experience as the basis for S’s belief that p.

16 Bergmann does not go so far as to claim that all beliefs are accompanied by seemings. But he does say: “It is not implausible to think that whenever I have a justified non-inferential belief that p, it is caused by a seeming that p” (Bergmann 2013b: 163). Given that most externalists seem to think Norman the reliable clairvoyant (with clairvoyant faculties) is non-inferentially justified, then perhaps Bergmann’s statement here should be extended to imply that it is plausible to think that Norman’s belief that the President is in New York City must have been caused by it seeming to him that the President is in New York City.

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conditions. The advocate of PC might add, however, that while Norman has an epistemic

reason to believe that the President is in New York he also likely possesses a believed

defeater to the effect that he has no special faculty by which he could know that the

President is in New York. Norman would then have a defeated reason for his belief.17 In

this case Accident II is not met, but the proponent of PC need not claim that Norman’s

belief is justified.

The larger point is this: If Accident II is a good account of what it means for a

belief to fail to be accidentally true, then there seems no reason why IPCW2 must fall prey

to the SPO. If a subject meets the conditions of IPCW2, then the subject has also fulfilled

the conditions for Accident II and hence her belief will not be accidentally true. For if

one has a conscious seeming that p and bases her belief that p on that seeming (per

IPCW2), then one has an epistemic reason to believe that p upon which the belief is based

(and, we are presuming, no defeaters). Hence fulfilling IPCW2’s conditions will fulfill

Accident II’s conditions. Consequently, IPCW2 does not fall prey to the SPO.

Recall that the SPO is as follows:

Huemer (2013a: 337) dismisses Bergmann’s challenge from the SPO, for he thinks that

the SPO is simply false if it is interpreted in a positive manner. For Huemer, the

believing subject need not be aware of anything positive that the believed proposition has

going for it in order to be justified; the subject must only be unaware of any defeaters.

For him, the SPO is only true if it is posed as a negative requirement. But I have argued

17 Recall that I do not really think that epistemic reasons get defeated but rather outweighed. This is one reason I preferred Reasons Commonsensism to Phenomenal Conservatism.

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that the defender of PC need not deny the SPO. I have taken the SPO’s claim that a subject must be “aware of what her belief has going for it” in a straight-forward manner as requiring that a subject must have positive epistemic reason(s) to believe the target proposition. Seemings appear to provide epistemic reasons, and Bergmann has not argued the contrary.18 Given this, internalist PC escapes the SPO horn of Bergmann’s dilemma.19

A Final Worry: The Sociological Nature of Bergmann’s Dilemma

I have attempted to show that Bergmann’s dilemma is unsuccessful against PC.

In particular, I have argued that PC can avoid the SPO horn of his dilemma. But even if my argument here was unsuccessful, it is worth noting that the SPO horn of Bergmann’s dilemma is sociological in nature: Ultimately, it is about what motivates the internalist.

It claims that because the only viable motivation for internalist PC is the SPO, and internalist PC itself falls prey to the SPO, the motivation for internalist PC is lost.

But, while Bergmann has admittedly argued at some length that the SPO is the only good motivation for internalism (and hence the only good motivation for internalist

PC), it is not at all clear that the SPO is the only viable motivation for internalism. Peter

Markie (2009), for instance, has argued that while some of Bergmann’s (2006) criticisms of leading motivations for internalism are successful, he still leaves some versions of internalism well motivated. And I concur. There are many internalists who have sought

18 In fact, as Rogers and Matheson (2011: 61) have pointed out, Bergmann (2006: 176) appears to accept the view that if a proposition p seems true then one thereby has a good reason to believe that p.

19 It is also a consequence of my conclusion that Matthias Steup’s (2013; cf. Steup 2004) recent revision of PC that he dubs “internalist reliabilism”—a revision which includes as a necessary condition on justification that one possess a memorial belief to the effect that one’s seemings have a track record of reliability—is unnecessary. PC can fend off Bergmann’s dilemma without Steup’s additional necessary condition.

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to motivate internalism without invoking the SPO (or without emphasizing the

consequences of rejecting an awareness requirement on justification). Michael Huemer

himself, to take but one example, seeks to motivate internalism with his self-defeat

argument (most recently: Huemer 2011a). He thinks that all of our beliefs are based

upon appearances. If, then, the basis for a belief must itself be (propositionally) justified

in order for the belief to be (doxastically) justified, it follows that if appearances are not

an adequate source of justification, then all our beliefs are unjustified. So either

appearances justify, or skepticism follows. The point is that those of us who think that

many of our beliefs are justified seem to be presupposing that appearances can justify.

But it is a short step, of course, from acknowledging that appearances justify to being an

internalist. The point here is not that this argument is correct. The point is, rather, that

Huemer—the most prominent advocate of non-doxastic conservatism—possesses a

motivation for internalism that is quite independent of the SPO.

Other advocates of principles like PC also seem to have independent motivations

for internalism. Trent Dougherty (of Reasons Commonsensism fame), for instance,

argues quite generally for an experience-first epistemology (in which experience

constitutes epistemic evidence) which appears to ground his internalism (Dougherty and

Rysiew 2013). Now, it would be manifestly unfair to criticize Bergmann for having

failed to refute every possible motivation for internalism other than the SPO. But still,

the claim on which the second horn of the dilemma rests is that the SPO is the main

motivation for internalism (see premise IV of Bergmann’s dilemma, above).

Consequently, if Huemer, Dougherty, and other advocates of principles of non-doxastic conservatism have plausible motivations for their internalism beside the SPO, then

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Bergmann’s dilemma is bound to fail—even if I have been incorrect in arguing that PC

(and, mutatis mantandis, other conservative epistemic principles) can meet the challenge of the SPO.

Conclusion

I have argued that PC (and, by extension, other conservative epistemic principles like Reasons Commonsensism) can answer what is perhaps the most serious and developed criticism on offer from its detractors—one which has received little attention from PC’s advocates. Earlier (in Chapter Two) we argued that the phenomenal conception of evidence was a viable candidate in that (unlike other major views on offer) it allows evidence to play all of the various roles that it plays in our epistemic lives.

However, we also argued (in Chapter Three) that the fate of the phenomenal conception of evidence appears to stand or fall with a tenable principle of non-doxastic conservatism.

We then saw (in Chapter Four) that something like the stronger, biconditional version of

Reasons Commonsensism can serve precisely this function of constraining the evidential role of experience. While there are certainly other criticisms of non-doxastic conservative principles like RCiff, given that such a principle is capable of withstanding what is perhaps the most serious and developed criticism that has been thrown its way— viz., Bergmann’s dilemma—we should now have increased confidence not only in the viability of RCiff but in the viability of the phenomenal conception of evidence.

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CHAPTER SIX

Conclusion: A Defensible Phenomenal Conception of Evidence

Our concern throughout this dissertation has been to find a defensible version of

the phenomenal conception of evidence. In Chapter One we began by tracing the

development of the concept of evidence held by perhaps the most influential

philosophical group of the early twentieth century, the logical positivists. There we saw

that growing concerns about the phenomenal conception’s ability to ground the

objectivity of science and its compatibility with “the scientific conception of the world”

(i.e., naturalism) led Carnap and the positivists away from that conception and toward the

objectual or courtroom conception. Problems emerging from the courtroom

conception—namely, that on the courtroom conception we lack evidence for all sorts of things we normally take ourselves to know—led to our first desideratum for an adequate conception of evidence: Evidence, whatever it is, must not be so objective that it cannot do the epistemic (i.e., reasons-providing) work required of it. Evidence must not only be able to function as an arbiter in public disputes, but it must also be the sort of thing that gives an individual reasons for belief regarding many common items of knowledge (or justified belief).

Importantly, the failure of the courtroom conception gave us motivation to explore more deeply the charges leveled against the phenomenal conception by the positivists and contemporary critics. Hence in Chapter Two we argued that the phenomenal conception can indeed play all four of the roles that evidence typically plays.

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There we began by clarifying the seeming state version of the phenomenal conception that we defended throughout the rest of the dissertation. As even Kelly admits, the phenomenal conception easily handles the role of justifier and that which rational thinkers respect. Regarding these roles we also saw that the phenomenal conception has several advantages over its major rivals, including the courtroom and Williamsonian conceptions of evidence. But most consequentially we saw that the phenomenal conception can play the third role of a guide to the truth (even though phenomenal evidence is, admittedly, non-factive) and the fourth role of neutral arbiter. Regarding the former, we argued, among other things, that the phenomenal conception does not sever the truth connection. Regarding the latter, we argued that the phenomenal conception can not only play the role of neutral arbiter but can even solve difficult philosophical problems related to the objectivity of evidence, peer disagreement, and the need for evidence to be publicly available. We closed that chapter by considering why the seeming state version of the phenomenal conception of evidence is able to play all four of the roles identified by Kelly: namely, on this view evidence has propositional content but is also a species of evidential internalism. In other words, it combines objective and subjective features which allow it to play both objective and subjective roles of evidence.

On the one hand it is person-relative and subjective (or internalist) in order to adequately justify individual beliefs for particular subjects. On the other hand, it has propositional content that can easily exist in objective evidential relationships.

Given the fact that older critics like the positivists and more recent critics like

Kelly reject the phenomenal conception on the basis of its supposed inability to play the latter two roles of evidence, if we have been right in arguing that (i) other prominent

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theories of evidence like the objectual and Williamsonian conceptions are unable to play

all four roles, and (ii) the phenomenal conception can play all four roles, then we have

good reason to reverse the momentum away from the phenomenal conception and see if a

workable phenomenal conception of evidence can be found. We began this task in the

next chapter.

In Chapter Three our approach was to assess one particular application of the phenomenal conception in order to gain a general insight into the nature of evidence.

Alvin Plantinga’s religious epistemology illustrated well that fact that if the phenomenal conception is to be viable it needs a further constraint. We began by arguing that

Plantinga’s work on evidence contains a serious oversight. Particularly, we argued that

while evidence must be subjective, on Plantinga’s model experiential evidence is too

subjective; any proposition, it seems, could be evidenced by any experience. We then

attempted to reformulate his model, accentuating some things Plantinga says about the

evidential value of experience. We did not stop there, however. We gained a general

insight from Plantinga’s misstep, a second desideratum for an adequate conception of

evidence: Evidence must not be so subjective as to be unable to fulfill the role of neutral

arbiter in disputes. We found that if the phenomenal conception of evidence is to be

tenable today, it needs to be offered in conjunction with an epistemic principle which

tethers together experiences with the propositions they evidence in a manner appropriate

to the propositional content of both the experience and the associated belief. With such

an addition, the phenomenal conception of evidence might find a Goldilocks zone in

which evidence is both objective and subjective—but no overly so.

184

For this reason, in Chapter Four we examined a great number of conservative

epistemic principles in order to find the best principle for the job. Conservative epistemic

principles like Michael Huemer’s Phenomenal Conservatism are often thought to be

recently invented principles merely used to advance yet another novel epistemology.

Hence we began by looking at epistemic conservatism prior to the twentieth century and

argued that more recent conservative principles have their roots in intuitions that are as

old as skeptical arguments themselves. By the time we reached Reid and the modern

period, two very different kinds of conservative principles become clear—kinds of

principles that are often run together in current epistemic discourse. Principles of

doxastic conservatism claim that a believed proposition has positive epistemic status for

the believer in virtue of its being believed. Principles of non-doxastic conservatism, by

contrast, claim (roughly) that experiences (seemings or appearances) provide their

relevant beliefs with prima facie justification. Having detailed the various formulations of non-doxastic conservatism offered by Chisholm, Swinburne, Huemer, and others, I argue for the superiority of Dougherty’s Reasons Commonsensism. Furthermore, I advanced novel arguments defending the stronger, bi-conditional version of this principle. This was crucial to our project of rehabilitating the phenomenal conception, for only the stronger principle (which claims not only that seemings provide epistemic reasons for belief but that only seemings provide epistemic reasons for belief) can truly constrain the phenomenal conception of evidence. This principle, we concluded, is capable of keeping the phenomenal conception from being, as in the case of Plantinga’s epistemology, too subjective.

185

If offered in conjunction with RCiff, the phenomenal conception of evidence

would meet our second desideratum and appear viable once again. However, principles

like Phenomenal Conservatism and Reasons Commonsensism (even in their bi-

conditional version) have faced serious challenges. Plausible replies have been given to

many of these challenges in the literature, and we began the job of addressing some of the

remaining criticisms in Chapter Four. In Chapter Five, however, we faced head-on the

most serious recent challenge in the literature: Michael Bergmann’s dilemma for

internalism. Having carefully set out Bergmann’s dilemma in great detail, we argued that

the strong version of internalist Phenomenal Conservatism (IPCS) survives Bergmann’s

first horn. Contra Bergmann, even a wildly inaccurate concept application which appears

correct from the subject’s perspective can indeed add something to epistemic

justification. Second, we argued that because (i) Bergmann failed to include a basing

clause in the weak version of internalist Phenomenal Conservatism (IPCW), and (ii)

Bergmann’s account of what it means for a belief to fail to be an accident from the subject’s perspective is not the only acceptable account, there is no reason why my more- appropriately formulated IPCW2 must fall prey to the Subject’s Perspective Objection

(SPO). Hence the advocate of IPCW2 has nothing to fear from the second horn of

Bergmann’s dilemma either. We concluded that the bi-conditional version of Michael

Huemer’s Phenomenal Conservatism, and by extension the bi-conditional version of

Dougherty’s Reasons Commonsensism, can survive Bergmann’s dilemma.

More to the point, because RCiff can survive this most serious of challenges, RCiff

is plausibly available to help chasten the phenomenal conception of evidence. In

conjunction with RCiff, the phenomenal conception meets both of our major desiderata:

186

Our version of the phenomenal conception is subjective in that it advances the kind of evidence (viz., seeming states) which can provide us with first-person reasons to believe, but—because RCiff specifically tethers experiential inputs with appropriate doxastic outputs in an evidential relationship—it is also objective in that not any experience can be said to evidence any belief. Hence, with all due respect to Kelly, Williamson, the logical positivists, and others, I conclude that the version of the phenomenal conception of evidence advanced here is currently a viable and attractive conception of evidence.

187

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