A. Virtue Epistemology > Baehr's "Evidentialism, Vice, and Virtue" Available
A reminder that my reply is in the Janusblog library:
http://janusblog.squarespace.com/janusbloglibraryofpapersd/
DOUGHERTY, T. " BAEHR ON EVIDENCE AND VIRTUE".PDF (46K)
http://janusblog.squarespace.com/janusbloglibraryofpapersd/
DOUGHERTY, T. " BAEHR ON EVIDENCE AND VIRTUE".PDF (46K)
June 26, 2009 |
Trent Dougherty
Trent Dougherty
Trent, Congrats on your post at Baylor, and good luck there. I won't directly try to engage your reply to Jason, but had some comments of my own on overlapping issues. I think your work does exemplify a useful "rapproachment" of virtue responsibilism and evidentialism, as you articulate nicely th close relationship between the virtues and *personal justification* noting that personal justification is related closely with doxastic justification, and that it gets its value from exemplification of virtues.
All this is good, but is not the kind of stuf that CFE (Conee Feldman evidentialism well supports, and far from supporting a rapproachment, CFE strikes me as *undercutting* the epistemic centrality of issues of personal justification through the virtues, as I'll explain.
So say we start with doxastic, personal, and propositonal justification as three kinds we are interested in. In this case I'd say that each is an *independent* object of evaluation, and that all of the would-be reductions, whether internalist or externalist, fail. I haven't given arguments for that, but its just my view of things. But I would argue that the attempts by CFE to and by Kvanvig to "reduce them all to a basic notion of propositional justification," more specifically, fail. So here are two 'dogmas' of internalism:
1. Doxastic justification is just synchronic propositional justification plus "basing." (call this the 'well-foundedness forumula').
2. Diachronic rationality is just synchronic propositional justification plus responsibility in evidence-gathering). (call this the 'responsibility formula'.)
1. A nice criticism of 1, the well-foundedness formula is John Turri's new article, "Propositional and Doxastic Justification" (in PPR and at his homepage.) There like you he note Kvanvig as one source among many for this formula:
"Doxastic justification is what you get when you believe something for which you have propositional justification, and you base your belief on that which propostionally justified it" (KV) or again in Feldman, "S's belief that p at time t is [doxastically] justified (well-founded) iff (i) believing p is justified for S at t; (ii) S believes p on the basis of evidence that supports p." Or yet again, for Peter Klein, “Doxastic justification is parasitic on propositional justification. We have said that a belief that p is doxastically justified for S iff S is acting in an epistemically responsible way in believing that p” (Klein 2007, 25).
Turri calls the shared view here "Basis" and argues, I think persuasively, that basis fails. "Basis makes no mention of the way in which the subject performs or in forming or sustaining a belief. This is not a minor detail. Nor is it something we can set aside for present purposes, in the hope that the matter will resolve itself within a more comprehensive theory of propositional justification." Put in my own terms, any connection with the diachronic and personal justification is left out of the well-foundedness formula; its a formula acceptable only to a died in the wool internalist, since the only thing considered in basing is basing ON that which PROPOSITIONALLY justifies, not basing as externalists and responsibilists care about it. It seems then an overtly narrow defintiion of what doxastic justification is.
2. Against the responsibility formula, we might start with similar statements of it. Feldman, Conee, Swinburne and many others insist that “A belief will be what I shall call diachronically justified to the extent to which it is synchronically justified and its acquisition (or, in the case of a continuing belief, its maintenance) has been based on adequate investigation of its truth” (Swinburne 166-167).
In calling this a dogma of internalist evidentialism, I simply mean that its based upon a claim of the primacy of synchronic over diachronic rationality, and driven by doubtful reductionist ambitions; aside from those there seems to me little if anything to reccomend it. In CFE it functions to prioritize the synchronic, but why should we think that a belief can't be diachronically rational (responsibly investigated) without being synchronically rational? These ideas again seem independent, but CFE tries to make the diachronic secondary, epistemologically peripheral, and 'merely moral or pragmatic.' So for instance, "Whether I should be a better epistemic agent is always a practical question. The narrower question about what I should believe now, the question I want to focus on, is the central epistemological question" These "vaguely epistemological obligations" aren't relevant to "the central notion of epistemic obligation." This again seems like reductionist non-sense to me--I'm not saying there therory isn't self-consistent, but that there's no reason for anyone not sold on internalist evidentialism as an account of *epistemic* justification to accept either of the two 'formulas.'
So is short conclusion, rapproachment between virtues responsibilism and *some* form of evidentialism might be a good thing, but I think it would need to be a new form of evidentialism, and in particular one that consciously makes a decisive break from two formulas, formulas that I at any rate see as dogmas in epistemology driven only by the reductionist ambitions of internalist-Chishomian tradition that Conee and Feldman still want to defend.
All this is good, but is not the kind of stuf that CFE (Conee Feldman evidentialism well supports, and far from supporting a rapproachment, CFE strikes me as *undercutting* the epistemic centrality of issues of personal justification through the virtues, as I'll explain.
So say we start with doxastic, personal, and propositonal justification as three kinds we are interested in. In this case I'd say that each is an *independent* object of evaluation, and that all of the would-be reductions, whether internalist or externalist, fail. I haven't given arguments for that, but its just my view of things. But I would argue that the attempts by CFE to and by Kvanvig to "reduce them all to a basic notion of propositional justification," more specifically, fail. So here are two 'dogmas' of internalism:
1. Doxastic justification is just synchronic propositional justification plus "basing." (call this the 'well-foundedness forumula').
2. Diachronic rationality is just synchronic propositional justification plus responsibility in evidence-gathering). (call this the 'responsibility formula'.)
1. A nice criticism of 1, the well-foundedness formula is John Turri's new article, "Propositional and Doxastic Justification" (in PPR and at his homepage.) There like you he note Kvanvig as one source among many for this formula:
"Doxastic justification is what you get when you believe something for which you have propositional justification, and you base your belief on that which propostionally justified it" (KV) or again in Feldman, "S's belief that p at time t is [doxastically] justified (well-founded) iff (i) believing p is justified for S at t; (ii) S believes p on the basis of evidence that supports p." Or yet again, for Peter Klein, “Doxastic justification is parasitic on propositional justification. We have said that a belief that p is doxastically justified for S iff S is acting in an epistemically responsible way in believing that p” (Klein 2007, 25).
Turri calls the shared view here "Basis" and argues, I think persuasively, that basis fails. "Basis makes no mention of the way in which the subject performs or in forming or sustaining a belief. This is not a minor detail. Nor is it something we can set aside for present purposes, in the hope that the matter will resolve itself within a more comprehensive theory of propositional justification." Put in my own terms, any connection with the diachronic and personal justification is left out of the well-foundedness formula; its a formula acceptable only to a died in the wool internalist, since the only thing considered in basing is basing ON that which PROPOSITIONALLY justifies, not basing as externalists and responsibilists care about it. It seems then an overtly narrow defintiion of what doxastic justification is.
2. Against the responsibility formula, we might start with similar statements of it. Feldman, Conee, Swinburne and many others insist that “A belief will be what I shall call diachronically justified to the extent to which it is synchronically justified and its acquisition (or, in the case of a continuing belief, its maintenance) has been based on adequate investigation of its truth” (Swinburne 166-167).
In calling this a dogma of internalist evidentialism, I simply mean that its based upon a claim of the primacy of synchronic over diachronic rationality, and driven by doubtful reductionist ambitions; aside from those there seems to me little if anything to reccomend it. In CFE it functions to prioritize the synchronic, but why should we think that a belief can't be diachronically rational (responsibly investigated) without being synchronically rational? These ideas again seem independent, but CFE tries to make the diachronic secondary, epistemologically peripheral, and 'merely moral or pragmatic.' So for instance, "Whether I should be a better epistemic agent is always a practical question. The narrower question about what I should believe now, the question I want to focus on, is the central epistemological question" These "vaguely epistemological obligations" aren't relevant to "the central notion of epistemic obligation." This again seems like reductionist non-sense to me--I'm not saying there therory isn't self-consistent, but that there's no reason for anyone not sold on internalist evidentialism as an account of *epistemic* justification to accept either of the two 'formulas.'
So is short conclusion, rapproachment between virtues responsibilism and *some* form of evidentialism might be a good thing, but I think it would need to be a new form of evidentialism, and in particular one that consciously makes a decisive break from two formulas, formulas that I at any rate see as dogmas in epistemology driven only by the reductionist ambitions of internalist-Chishomian tradition that Conee and Feldman still want to defend.
July 2, 2009 |
Guy Axtell
Guy Axtell
Abstract: Evidentialists maintain that epistemic justification is strictly a function of the evidence one has at the moment of belief. I argue here, on the
basis of two kinds of cases, that the possession of good evidence is an insufficient basis for justification. I go on to propose a modification of evidentialism according to which justification sometimes requires intellectually virtuous agency. The discussion thereby underscores an important point of contact between evidentialism and the more recent enterprise of virtue epistemology.