Download Big Epistemology Handout, part 2

Intro to Non-Evidentialism
In the debate about what sorts of things justify beliefs, there developed two ideological
camps. Traditionally, they described themselves as “internalists” and “externalists”,
respectively. Feldman uses the terms “evidentialist” and “non-evidentialist” to describe the
same divide, and others sometimes substitute “accessibilist” for “internalist”.
It’s usually hard to draw much information from mere labels, but these are descriptive
enough to be worth a second look. As you know from your earlier reading, internalists come
with a variety of views, but one thing they agree on is that if you have any justification at all
for your belief, that justification is somehow internal to you, that it manifests itself in the
form of evidence that you have access to. Hence the names.
The intuition that drives internalism is that to understand what is a justified belief, we
have to look at what we do when we give justifications for beliefs. I said that the first pass for
giving content for ‘justified’ is “having pretty good reasons”. Internalists argue amongst
themselves about what sort of reasons are good enough, but they accept that justification
requires some adequate reasons, and there is no such thing as a good reason for your
believing that p unless you are aware of that reason. That might seem obvious. If we want to
spell out why this is so, we might say that you can’t use reasons to justify anything unless
you are aware of them.
Internalists tend to view your belief as justified iff, on the basis of the evidence
available to you, you are entitled to that belief. Another way to put it: Would it be rational
for someone in your position to believe that? Do you have a right to draw that conclusion (or
are you judging too quickly, or maybe ignoring evidence you have to the contrary)? Are your
reasons adequate to support your belief? Clearly, what entitles you to believe p, or makes
your belief a rational one, or gives you evidence that p is stuff “in your head”, stuff like other
beliefs, perceptual states, memory states, etc. Of course, all that supporting stuff has to itself
be epistemically unproblematic. For example, if your memory contains no trace of you
singing karaoke last night, but you were also drinking heavily, your memory might not
constitute adequate evidence. The requirement that we must have good reasons to trust our
reasons quickly draws us into the problem of the criterion, but internalists find it unavoidable
(“a grim feature the human cognitive condition”) and do their best to solve the problem.
(Foundationalists, coherentists and other sects of internalism group themselves according to
their proposals on how they think the problem of the criterion is best solved, as we saw on
the previous handout. Some throw up their hands and declare themselves skeptics.)
Non-evidentialism (finally!)
Then there is a different approach to rendering what justification is about. Feldman’s chapter
on non-evidentialist theories of justification discusses four externalist attempts to explicate
‘justification’. Here I will focus on one variant of reliabilism.
The big innovation in externalism was most clearly put in the publications of William
Alston, and it is not described well is Feldman’s chapter. (Feldman is famously an internalist
holdout.) Alston’s first lesson is that being justified and being able to show you’re justified
are different requirements that internalists don’t adequately distinguish. If you think nonhuman mammals believe stuff then certainly some of their beliefs are justified, but you don’t
expect them to be able to articulate their reasons, or even reflect on them.
Suppose I believe that Alaska is larger than Texas. Like internalists, Alston thinks
that this belief is only justified if my grounds for holding it are adequate. Suppose my
grounds are the following: I read this in an almanac. Is this an adequate ground? The
Alstonian reliabilist answers: “That depends on whether almanac-reading is a reliable beliefforming mechanism.” Suppose it is, by which I mean, suppose that most almanacs I have
access to have correct information, and that I tend to store that information fairly accurately.
Then, my beliefs based on almanac reading are for the most part true. And that fact is what
makes me justified in believing that Alaska is larger than Texas.
An internalist would think this analysis is too quick. Don’t I need reasons to think that
my almanac-generated beliefs are reliable? The reliabilist thinks not. Just the fact that they
are reliable gives me the justification. What the internalist insists I show is that I’m justified
in thinking I’m justified, and if I can’t do that, I’m not justified at all. The second lesson we
learn from Alston is that we can be justified without being justified that we’re justified.
Likewise, we can know without knowing we know. He says that knowing requires having a
true belief appropriately based on a reliable ground. If color perception is reliable, then true
beliefs based on color perception are justified. If color perception is unreliable (if the colors
of objects keep changing and maybe the color of lighting changes with them, so that our
beliefs based on color perception are often false), then my belief that my coffee cup is green
is not justified.
This is a novel way of sidestepping the problem of the criterion. Reliabilists don’t
think it’s necessary for me to be able to produce justifications for my thinking I’m justified.
At some level, my justification is grounded in my reliability. If my memory of recent events
is reliable, then my beliefs based on such memory are justified.
You might object: “So is the reliabilist saying that if you’re lucky enough to have a
reliable belief-forming process, you’re justified, but in the absence of that luck, you’re not?”
The response is: The whole point of reliability is that it isn’t luck. When you use reliable
processes, you aren’t getting lucky; you are correctly interfacing with the world. That’s what
grounds your justification.
What makes externalists earn their names is that the source of justification for your
beliefs are facts about you (reliability, truth-tracking, proper functioning), not mental states
in you. Here are some objections they raise to this move:
1. You’ve given up trying to defeat the skeptic.
2. Your criteria of justification are totally unusable in making decisions about what to
believe.
3. You’re divorcing the idea of justification from the idea of rationality. Surely, a brain
in a vat with exactly your experiences is equally rational as you are if they draw the
same conclusions you draw. But because your belief-forming mechanisms are reliable
envatted brain’s aren’t, you’re justified and the brain in a vat isn’t.
4. Related to 3: You can fulfill all your epistemic obligations in forming beliefs
(collecting lots evidence, not judging too quickly, considering alternatives, etc.) and
still fail to be justified (just because you live in a world where you’re belief-forming
processes are unreliable). That’s silly.
5. You can be justified without having any evidence you’re justified. That seems too
easy.
We’ll talk about these objections in class.