The Old Town House: lots of blue sky thinking went on here at the weekend
Few topics get as near the engine room of our practices as epistemic entitlement does.
The irony, though, is that entitlement itself (the epistemic state, whatever it is, that we’re supposed to enjoy when appropriately situated, not the notion we are arduously struggling to capture while in the philosophical closet) is an activity where we break no epistemic sweat (the heat from the engine room doesn’t quite reach us, although we brush along, unknowingly, really close to it). For entitlement, you see, is unearned warrant, epistemic theft, of sorts, without much toil but still with some (lots of, if you’re a positive kind of guy) honesty preserved; it gives us (or simply is) the right to take things on trust, to believe things without the need, or compulsion, to show others (and ourselves, when we succumb to our reflective moods) what directly supports the belief. And indeed, the whole point of entitlement is that no matter how hard we tried, we could not show a specific piece of evidence that would (or could) directly support our epistemic right to hold a certain belief (or, more trickily still: to take ourselves as being guided by a certain basic rule of inference). We’ll see (and qualify) in a moment what kind of doxastic states enjoy, allegedly, entitlement protection and how many varieties of entitlement there are (or seem to be). But a bit of reporting first; that’s, after all, what this post is all about: telling you, dear reader, what went on in the NIP-cave at the weekend.
Saturday morning session: Nikolaj takes us through the territory
Well, then, over the All Saints weekend we had our first ever event (this is a week of firsts at NIP, as the next post will also show) and appropriately enough we had both beatific visions of epistemic heaven and spooky intrusions in the shape of Truth Fairies and other quirky goddesses. NIP’s inaugural event was the Fifth AHRC-funded BK workshop and it took place in the rather wonderful Georgian-ly restrained surroundings of the recently restored Old Town House on the Aberdeen campus. The building has seen it all in its history—it has been, among other things, a court house, a police station and a masonic lodge—so a couple of days of intense forensic activity by a bunch of eager philosophers was nothing to bat an eyelid at (not that granite is prone to much eyelid-batting anyway, but never mind).
Nikolaj Pedersen taking us to the sources of entitlement
It was, by any measure, a highly successful workshop: work in varying degrees of progress was aired, friendly suggestions put forward, the odd devastating objection delivered and taken with perfectly good humour. All in that spirit of collegiality that is the hallmark of NIP’s ancestry as well as of its current and future activities. Nikolaj Pedersen opened proceedings with a very useful map of the territory. And given the contrasting uses of the term in the literature, one question comes pretty natural right from the start (and expert bootstrapper Colin Caret, on a welcome day visit from Arché, asked it): is entitlement a term of art, or are we indeed trying to capture (and make precise) a pre-existing folk notion? A bit of both, probably; but in any case, the (at times frustrating) divergence in use between, say, Burge, Wright and Peacocke may well indicate that they each are after a different quarry, so it’s no surprise at all if the notions on the table are divided by a common label. Perhaps we’d be better off jettisoning the term altogether, but usage is pretty much entrenched and there also seems to be some proprietary pride involved on part of the various practitioners. In other words, we’re stuck with the confusion and we’d better make some sense of it. Hence the usefulness of Nikolaj’s taxonomy (which, by the time the audience had finished tampering with it, gained some further refinements). Incidentally, Nikolaj didn’t actually say much about Peacocke; it was Field who completed the trio of notions up for comparison (and, inspired by this, the next few BK sessions will probably see us dip into Fieldean entitlement too: we can certainly do with a break from Burgean entitlement for a while).
Aaron Cotnoir, Colin Caret, Julien Murzi and Elia Zardini
One thing that emerged from the discussion is that when trying to pinpoint the differences between Burgean and Wrightean entitlement, appeals to externalist/internalist distinctions may not be wholly helpful. In fact, the two notions are not just distinct qua notions, but, more significantly, they’re at the service of radically separate purposes. For Burge, the point of introducing entitlement is to give epistemology as broad a base as possible. Burgean entitlement, that is, is (at least partly) of methodological interest and it is geared towards putting us in a position to give epistemic Brownie points to conceptually impoverished agents. More generally, it’s meant to allow us to give an account of why run-of-the-mill takings on trust (from testimony to perceptual inputs) even by agents of far-reaching conceptual powers are in good standing despite the unreflective stance normally adopted in such cases. Wright’s notion, by contrast, is not so much concerned with conceptual accessibility as with the availability (or rather penury) of evidence. It is aimed squarely at the question of what we should say when, in tracing the pedigree of certain cornerstone propositions (propositions whose lack of warrant would impair the execution of some privileged cognitive project), reasons give out and yet the having of warrant, for such propositions, is both rationally mandated and, seemingly, there for the taking. Whence the rational authority of these trustings in the absence of outright reasons in their favour, we want to ask. And how can we trace their rational provenance when the trail of reasons goes cold (or turn on itself)? The pressing problem is to give an answer to these kinds of questions without lapsing into explanatory quietism. More about this a little later (but notice, for the time being, that Wright’s main concern is with our claims to knowledge, whereas Burge’s is with knowledge-conducive states irrespective of an agent’s urge to establish the soundness of her epistemic credentials).
Carrie Jenkins
After lunch, Carrie Jenkins took a break from her burgeoning career as Nottingham’s (or indeed Leibniz’s) response to Florence and the Machine to present a paper on The Truth Fairy (the artist formerly known as The Quirky Goddess). Her target was Wright’s notion of entitlement to cognitive project, one of the four sub-species of entitlement that Wright contemplates (yes, Virginia, four sub-species, you heard that right). This particular notion had already been subjected to sustained assault in Jenkins’ 2007 Synthese paper (and Duncan Pritchard had also expressed similar concerns in a 2005 paper). At the workshop, Carrie was back for more of the same. One problem Wright faces is the need to make clear why some acts of trusting are more rational than others. Some form of epistemic consequentialism might suggest itself as a way to regiment Wright’s suggestion that certain trustings are, in a given context and for a given project, the dominant strategy—on balance, better (or at least no worse) epistemic goods accrue to the agents who accept a certain cornerstone than to those who refrain from so doing. Jenkins’ Truth Fairy is meant as a challenge to this escape route, for we could imagine this kindly (or mischievous?) little fairy promising us all sorts of epistemic goodies as long as we accept some basic (and possibly pointless, or even false) proposition. The intuition here is supposed to be that acceptance, in the envisaged scenario, is no more than a practical expedient as opposed to a fully fledged rational act—there’s a fatal disconnection between the untold epistemic riches awaiting us and the puny intrinsic epistemic value of the acceptance act. It also amounts to (horribile dictu) an abdication of epistemic responsibility. And yet it is Wright’s intention that entitlement be a trusting under normative (not just pragmatic) constraints. The specific awkwardness here arises when we try to spell out the conditions that make some trustings more rational than others in the absence of a direct link to truth—the slide into mere practical rationality is but a small slippery step away, for it is not that the chosen trusting is the right thing to do because it itself is nearer the truth than its discarded competitors but rather because of the anticipated epistemic benefits that will flow from the act of acceptance.
Elia Zardini in full flight
Let’s step back a bit now and say something about the role played by entitlement within Wright’s wider concerns. Very roughly, Wright’s anti-sceptical strategy is to show that the classic project-disabling arguments deployed by the sceptic make an illicit move from the impeccably drawn conclusion that no evidence can be mustered for a certain class of beliefs (say, concerning the correct functioning of our cognitive system) to the further step (not entailed by the reasoning at that stage) that no warrant is available either, for the targeted class. Wright’s proposal is that you can have warrant even without evidence (a move missed by both parties to the dispute). The hard work starts when you have to show that the claim to warrant is a rationally supported one. And here the added difficulty is that for Wright entitlement, i.e. non-evidential warrant, (primarily) attaches not to beliefs (like in Burge’s framework) but rather to a broader doxastic notion, namely, acceptance, where only some aspects of the notion of belief are retained (mostly, those connected with commitment to action). And so, if the mark of rationality, adapting Hume’s dictum about wisdom, is that we proportion our belief to our evidence, Wright has his work cut out in making out a notion of rational epistemic value that supposedly applies to cases where we have neither belief nor evidence on hand.
Finn Spicer, Luca Moretti, Peter Graham
This is where Jenkins launches her attack: when it comes to acceptance of cornerstones, rationality had better not be a simple matter of the obtaining of best consequences, but rather of the consequences of the best rules. Wright’s response is that hinge propositions are essentially connected to the project as a whole and so truth-fairy cases do not really threaten genuine cornerstones, for the basic proposition in such cases enjoys, ex hypothesi, only incidental (if not flatly accidental) relations to the undertaking at stake. But we’re treading delicate ground here: for, given Wright’s own strictures, the pieces of quasi-belief state to which entitlements attach cannot be inflated to the rank of fully-blown reasons, and without doing that it seems difficult to endow them with enough of a rational connection to the project to make the Truth Fairy disappear in a puff of disappointed smoke. No doubt we’ll have to return to this point in some of our seminars ahead.
Duncan Pritchard
In a previous post, I announced there would be much gnashing of hinges at NIP in the session ahead, of both the metaphorical and the real variety. Duncan Pritchard, I’m told, is no slouch with a screwdriver, but on Saturday his contribution was limited to having a vigorous go at some familiar Wittgenstenian hinges (I’m pleased to report that the doors in the Old Town House all survived the weekend intact). The option explored by Pritchard in this regard was that some form of Wittgenstenian naturalism might be put at the service of quasi-epistemic entitlement, that is, the kind of entitlement under pressure from the misdoings of the Truth Fairies. Here’s a sketch of the idea: it is peculiar to entitlements that they be cases where warrant is had without the ability to recover the grounds that hold it in place. But perhaps the impossibility is only with respect to direct recovery; we may nevertheless have an indirect recovery route that can still make us fully rational (or as rational as we can get in the circumstances) in accepting hinges/cornerstones. Pritchard is still refining his neo-Wittgenstenian argument on the structure of (indirect) reasons. The difficulty will be, once again, how to navigate the fine line between cheerfully saying that while our epistemic situation unimprovably commits us to forced acceptance of cornerstones (these propositions are such that rational support for them is neither available nor mandated because the question of rationally doubting them cannot even arise) we’re still nevertheless enjoying indirect rational support for our stance and, on the other hand, and more sombrely, conceding defeat and admitting that the epistemic status of cornerstones show that in the most crucial areas of our belief system we face, as it were, an institutional lack of rational grounding. This is heady stuff and, as Duncan puts it, it is also vertigo-inducing; I for one am certainly looking forward to the final version of the paper.
Mikkel Gerken
The first day of the workshop closed with dinner in downtown Aberdeen, and with all the Halloween costume extravagance the talk at the philosophers’ tables was not, for once, the most outrageous thing around. Disappointingly, I spotted no-one donning a Truth Fairy outfit. Or maybe I didnae look hard enough. Could do with a cornucopia of epistemic riches right now.
On Sunday morning, the debauchery of the night behind us, the skies darkened ominously (as they are wont to do in such circumstances) and after the glorious weather on the Saturday we were in for a sting in the meteorological tail, as we shall see. Mikkel Gerken took the entitlement debate back to the externalist/internalist divide. Broadly speaking, Gerken adopts the Burgean division whereby entitlement is externalist warrant and justification its internalist variant. The dividing factor is accessibility of reasons/evidence. The main focus of attention was the epistemology of testimony, something on which Burge has written ground-breaking (and slightly baffling) stuff. Mikkel’s aim was to convince us that epistemic pluralism (roughly, the view that more than one type of warrant can be had by a single piece of belief, either synchronically or diachronically) about testimony is the way to go (and if the approach can be sustained, it may generalise across the epistemic board), for it can take us away from some of the false dichotomies and clashes of intuitions about the classic twin-earth cases that are the bread and butter of the literature on externalism.
Peter Graham
Peter Graham’s was the last paper in the workshop and it took us back to a form of broadly Burgean entitlement. For Burge, reliability is the key notion. Entitlement is a property that attaches to the outcomes of certain belief-forming mechanisms in a cognitive system that is functioning normally and is itself the product of a social-evolutionary history of the right sort. So, within this framework, we have entitlement because we are reliable in the appropriate way (the system developed its perceptual types in normal conditions and the belief-forming methods to whose outputs entitlements accrue are functioning normally, i.e., in line with their functional evolutionary design).
A couple of things to note, doing a bit of violence to the subtlety of both positions: for Burge, we are entitled because we function properly; for Wright, if we didn’t help ourselves to entitlements, we could not function properly (this is not quite right, but it’ll do for the purpose). As we saw, the difficulty for Wright is to say why entitlements are rational (and not merely practical), if their only role is to allow the implementation of some crucially important cognitive project. For Burgean entitlement theorists, like Peter, the problem is that too much explanatory burden is assigned to evolutionary design. Incidentally, Hartry Field is the one who can smile and relax here, for in his account the sui generis status of entitlements is straightforwardly explained because they are non-factual: the lack of sweat for the agent here is explicated on a completely different basis than on the other two accounts. Field is therefore not under any pressure to defend claims of epistemic rationality, whereas both Burge and Wright have to show that the source of the entitlement (some kind of evolutionary story for Burge and some kind of dominant strategy argument for Wright) plays an essential part in securing that status. The problem for Burge, then, as Dylan Dodd vividly showed, is that if we remove the evolutionary story (just imagine some startling scientific discovery that showed the world only came into existence relatively recently with all the species already in their wondrously appointed place), we do not feel that this suffices to remove the entitlement (would we start doubting the reliability of testimony and of our perceptual apparatus on being apprised of Darwin’s delusion?), whereas in Wright’s case if we keep the dominant strategy move in place but alter the intrinsic epistemic value of the warrant for the cornerstone, we do feel that there’s no question of the move being rational after all.
The High Street and the Market Cross, Old Aberdeen
Not another philosophical aporia, I hear you groan. Well, yes and no, because while entitlement remains as tough a customer as they come, there was also genuine progress during the workshop and much to take home and ruminate on in the BK-weeks ahead. The workshop closed, then, with a round table where lots of research questions for future work within the project and elsewhere were mooted. All in all, it could hardly have been a better start to NIP’s progress as a major research centre (there are a few more pictures in the photo gallery for this event, by the way). Meanwhile, the skies had further darkened outside, relieving themselves of a month’s supply of watery stuff in a mere 20 hours or so. Flooding blocked the railway line, forcing some of our intrepid participants to become acquainted with the interior of Montrose station to a greater degree than they had ever wished for. But not even the rage of the deluge (where is the Weather Fairy when you need her?) could dampen the enthusiasm for NIP’s nascent activities. The future, if not Sunday’s skies, is bright indeed.
Walter Pedriali