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is true. We say ‘only if’ rather than ‘if and only if’, since the latter demands, absurdly, that we take an interest in everything. We shall see that this principle is far more controversial than it may appear; but let us disregard, for the moment, the question of whether it is actually true, and instead merely examine it as a proposition. It is certainly normative, and it is certainly about truth, but does it thereby expound a norm of truth? This does not follow, for although it is about truth, it is also about assertion, and it tells us something about how and when we should assert things. Once we understand it in this way, the fact that TN, our ‘truth norm’, cannot be derived from ES in no way shows the inadequacy of the latter, for ES was never supposed to tell us anything about assertion. Obviously, the concepts of truth and assertion are importantly linked,
10 Aiming at Truth
but this does not imply that we cannot grasp the former until we have grasped the latter. It might just as easily be the other way round. Horwich argues along similar lines, but he supposes that the primary reason that assertions have the normative features that they do derives from social and ethical considerations – the fact that we ought not to lie, for example.5 But such ethical issues will not arise unless assertion already has appropriately truth-directed features, and we shall see that much more needs to be said at an earlier point of the analysis. What are assertions? What is it to invest a speech-act with assertoric force? We should note, first, that not every indicative utterance qualifies as an assertion. An actor on stage may utter a declarative sentence, but he does not assert the proposition that it expresses. Why is this? A simple answer is that assertions express beliefs, and theatrical utterances do not. Beliefs are meant to be true, whereas plays are meant to be fiction. This fact is independent of, and prior to, the social and ethical considerations mentioned by Horwich; it ensures that the ethics of lying has no relevance to what actors might say when on stage, for example. However, as it stands, this answer does not get us very far, since it merely transfers the problem to one of belief. To say that beliefs are meant to be true, or that they aim at truth, is doubtlessly correct in some sense, but we still have to explain what it means. In fact, the two questions run together. Assertions are the linguistic expressions of beliefs, and the relevant norms governing them are essentially the same: we should believe that p only if
is true. However, it is often better to focus on the latter rather than the former, since it is easier to see what they might be contrasted with: we have a richer and more precise vocabulary here. I may believe that p, but I may also imagine that p, or consider (for the sake of argument) that p. More relevantly, many thinkers have argued that acceptance is something significantly different from belief itself, and with different normative constraints.6 For example, Michael Bratman writes, Belief has four characteristic features: (a) it is context-independent; (b) it aims at the truth of what is believed; (c) it is not normally in our direct voluntary control; and (d) it is subject to an ideal of agglomeration. In contrast, what one accepts/takes for granted (a) can reasonably vary across contexts; (b) can be influenced by practical considerations that are not themselves evidence for the truth of what is accepted; (c) can be subject to our direct voluntary control; and (d) is not subject to the same ideal of agglomeration across contexts. So acceptance in a context is not belief.7
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The distinction, which we shall examine more fully in Chapter 4, is important in the philosophy of science and, as we shall see, can motivate an important kind of general scepticism. However, before arguing for this, we need to see that this distinction has a direct impact on the nature of assertoric force. For suppose that I currently accept, but do not believe that p. Perhaps
is, or is the consequence of, some useful theory which works in some contexts, but not others. If I express my acceptance out loud (and why should I not do so?), it will sound like a normal assertion that p. Yet it is not subject to the constraint expressed in TN above. If we maintain that what are often thought of as beliefs are really acceptances, then this will place seriously in question the view that assertions aim at truth. A natural response is to deny that expressions of acceptances are genuine assertions. Like quotations and theatrical utterances, they should perhaps be re-classified as indicative speech-acts of a different kind, and this is a convention that we shall adopt (it may be no more than a convention since, as noted, we lack a precise classificatory vocabulary here). Nevertheless, regardless of whether we do this, what has emerged is that the concept of assertion is not innocent. It is not at all obvious what it is that we are doing to the proposition that p when we assert that p, just as it not obvious what it is to believe (as opposed merely to accept) that p; and this tends to confirm our thesis that much philosophical theorizing about the supposed normativeness of truth has been misdirected. It is the nature of assertoric force that needs our attention, not the nature of truth. Of course, we still have to explain what is meant by saying that assertions, or the beliefs that they express, aim at truth, and we still have to show that we can give a substantial account of this without importing a substantivist theory of truth. However, we still have a useful candidate in TN. It does seem to do the job. In particular, it adequately distinguishes real assertions from other indicative speech-acts, such as expressions of acceptance. Moreover, and crucially, it does not embody a substantivist theory of truth. The easiest way to see this is to note that TN can just as effectively be reformulated as: (TN ) We should assert that p only if p.8 Whatever slight difference in meaning there may be between TN and TN , whatever subtle extra ingredient there may be in ‘
is true’ that is not in ‘p’, it is evidently of little consequence here, for it remains the case that expressions of belief do, and expressions of acceptance do
12 Aiming at Truth
not, satisfy the latter. For this reason alone, it is easy to see that we are not required to adjudicate the deflationism/substantivism dispute in toto, for TN does not employ the concept of truth to begin with! It might be protested that we have undermined our own strategy, and have so distanced ourselves from the concept of truth that we can no longer hope to explicate what ‘aiming at truth’ amounts to, but this is to go too far. Even though TN does not explicitly use the notion of truth (and perhaps is therefore not, strictly speaking, about truth at all), it may still acceptably be formulated as ‘Assertions aim at truth’. It remains equivalent to TN, after all, and I challenge anyone to find a more economical form of words. It might also be protested that if this dispute is as irrelevant as it now seems, then there was never any need for us to consider the nature of truth in the first place; but this is not so. Our interests are largely epistemological, and it will prove to be important to show that nothing is to be gained by manipulating the notion of truth (as many do) when considering various anti-sceptical strategies. The full nature of truth may be irrelevant to our purposes, but it is relevant that we be able to show conclusively that this is so, and that all we need to know about truth is that it satisfies ES. This gives us a neat framework in which to pursue matters further. However, before doing so, we need to address a few preliminary objections. We shall discuss them only briefly at this stage: a fuller treatment will emerge in the context of our overall position. To begin with, it may be wondered if ES is really as insignificant as we have been assuming. For example, Crispin Wright has argued that deflationism is an unstable position.9 It claims that truth is not a genuine property and therefore can have no normative implications of any kind, and yet it also shows a tendency to ‘inflate under pressure’. In particular, ES alone (together with some elementary rules of inference accepted in both classical and intuitionist logic) is sufficient to prove: is true iff it is not the case that
is true This is far from trivial; for in a state of neutral information, the equivalence must fail from right to left if ‘true’ is read as ‘warrantedly assertible’. Thus, many anti-realist theories of truth are immediately excluded (we shall develop this point in §8.2). At any rate, it is hard to see how we can dispense with a norm of truth and make do simply with the norm of warranted assertibility. Wright himself prefers what he calls a ‘minimalist theory’ of truth. This regards truth as a quite genuine though ‘metaphysically lightweight’ property constituted by ES. We are
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happy to go along with this. However, it remains unclear that we have a problem with normativity. Warranted assertibility is self-evidently a normative constraint when applied to assertions (what else could we mean by ‘warranted’?), but it still seems as though it is only when propositions are subject to full assertoric force that this norm will be activated. Likewise, the truth norm. Thus it remains a mistake to suppose that ES itself somehow generates normativity all on its own (or is deficient if it fails to do so). Of course, it still needs to be explained how the truth and warranted assertibility norms relate to each other, and why they pull in the same direction even though one can be satisfied without the other. We shall return to this. For the moment, however, we note that it is still clear that it is the concepts of belief and assertion, rather than that of truth itself, that are doing the real work. However, some have doubted whether even belief and assertion have unqualified truth-norms. Jane Heal (1987), for example, has argued that it is just a mistake to suppose that truth is intrinsically valuable. This is not simply because it is wrong to suppose that truth itself has immanent attractive powers. More basically, it is also wrong to suppose that true beliefs and assertions are always better than false ones merely because they are true. Some truths are more important than others, and some are of no importance whatsoever. Likewise, Julian Dodd (1999) argues, against Wright, that since deflationist truth does not correspond to a single property, it follows that we have to look to the particular propositions said to be true to find out what is going on and whether anything important is at stake. For example, it certainly matters whether my belief that there is enough water to go round is actually true or not; however, this is not because truth per se matters, but because slaking thirst does. Truth in the abstract, he insists, has no value at all. Nevertheless, it is unclear how much these considerations really prove. Bernard Williams, for example, points out, against Heal, that one can value music ‘for its own sake’ without supposing that there is no music that one does not wish to hear. Likewise, to suppose that truth is valuable ‘in itself’ does not force us to suppose that all truths are valuable.10 There is more than one way of formulating the concept of intrinsic value, a point to which we shall return in §6.1. Moreover, we can understand someone who aims to believe only what is true, not only because of the individual importance of each belief, but also because valuing truth-in-general provides a useful regulative or second-order principle. For example, I may have a general policy of avoiding lying. This ensures that I do not have to take time to consider each possible lie on its own merits, even though the wrongness of lying as such ultimately depends on whatever it is that
14 Aiming at Truth
makes individual acts of lying wrong.11 Lying as such thus has a strong negative value for me, even though I can see that many individual lies are, or would be if uttered, totally harmless. In any case, we are primarily concerned with finding norms that differentiate belief from rival attitudes such as acceptance, and these sorts of problem apply to all these attitudes in much the same way. These points can also be used to address some of Michael P. Lynch’s objections to minimalism. Lynch protests that TN’ is not really equivalent to TN at all; specifically TN’, together with ES, is insufficient to yield TN in its full sense, since TN’ simply yields an indefinitely long string of apparently unconnected individual normative facts. Unless there is a single norm underlying them, this is inexplicable, and ES is unable to provide the connection. This becomes even more urgent if the normativity is understood to reflect an intrinsic, as opposed to a merely instrumental, value. The point is that these individual normative facts can only obtain because TN, considered as a general principle, is antecedently true.12 What is needed to ensure this is a conception of truth as a real, unitary property genuinely possessed by all and only true propositions: and this cannot be explained by the minimalist. Now, this objection might work when directed against a strictly minimalist position such as Horwich’s, but it is unclear that it would equally work against a less strict version such as Wright’s, where minimal truth is understood simply to be the weakest real, unitary property (in whatever sense is relevant here) that satisfies ES. The difference between TN and TN’ would become too small for much of a difficulty to emerge. Moreover, the issue of how individual normative facts relate to general principles, like the issue of how intrinsic values relate to instrumental ones, can be developed in several ways, as we shall later see. The question, ‘Why is truth valuable?’, can best be answered by showing how truth fits into a more general web of desirable goals – and, in fact, this is what Lynch himself actually does. That is to say, he shows, often very convincingly, that a great many other important things will typically go wrong if we fail to value truth. It is therefore far from clear that truth needs the kind of deeply intrinsic value that he attributes to it, even if this can seem, at first sight, a very natural view to take. Chapter 6 shows that positing values of this kind neither explains nor justifies our ordinary practices. Merely insisting that truth is valuable in itself, and by definition, does not adequately replace a detailed investigation into how we might actually be disadvantaged should our intellectual practices no longer aim to generate TN-satisfying beliefs – and we shall see that there are several
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ways in which that could happen, not all of which are self-evidently undesirable. More significantly still, we shall show that the value of truthdirectedness needs to be curtailed in a strong and highly revisionist way at the very outset if we are to avoid serious epistemological and metaphysical difficulties. Therefore, even if truth remains normative in some sense or other, it cannot be so in the most obvious sense, regardless of how it may appear. In any case, it is clear that truth is not an essentially normative concept in the way in which, for example, belief and assertion are. This is because, should anyone ask what is actually meant by belief (as opposed to mere acceptance), we can only answer by citing normative facts about it, such as TN. In that sense, the TN norm is constitutive of what it is to (really) believe something. By contrast, if anyone were to ask what is actually meant by truth, all we need to do is to point to ES (perhaps with a Wrightian modification). Principles that employ the concept of truth (such as TN – and its variants, which we shall discuss shortly) will now be fully understood. We simply do not need to cite normative facts at the definitional stage; and in this sense (perhaps not the only sense) normativity is just not constitutive of truth. The only remaining worry is that we might not have been able to effect the Wrightian modification unless we assumed that truth is essentially normative, but this is surely very implausible. This modification – at least, as we formulate it – talks about unitary properties, but says nothing about normativity. Moreover, imagine trying to define truth to someone wholly innocent of the concept, and who is quite indifferent to its supposed benefits. We may begin with a solidly Aristotelian definition: a proposition is true just in case the world is as it says it is. Should this be insufficient, we may enlarge on it by saying something along the lines of: ‘A given proposition is true just in case now just say that proposition’. This is grammatically odd, of course, but it can easily be clarified by giving examples. Unless our interlocutor is seriously dense, she will surely get the point fairly quickly. If she insists that it is the unitariness of the property which she cannot grasp, and that she still does not know what general concept or underlying rule is being gestured at, then we might ask her if she can give an example or two of propositions concerning which she is unsure what is meant by calling them true (or saying of them that they have the property of being true, if a difference is insisted upon). Her inability to do this surely demonstrates that the generality needed to form a unitary property is not a real problem for her. Of course, she may still not see the point in such a rule, and may not do
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so unless she attaches a normative value to the underlying concept. But this merely reveals an internal connection between having a point and having a normative value; it proves nothing about the nature of truth. Another concern is whether we have formulated the truth-norm correctly. An alternative version would be (TN ) We may believe/assert that p if and only if
is true.13 Unlike TN, this gives us sufficient as well as necessary conditions for belief/assertibility, but the original objection to the biconditional (namely that it requires us to take an interest in every proposition) is quashed by the fact that we concern ourselves only with when beliefs and assertions are permissible, not with when they are obligatory. It might be thought that this is a considerable advantage in both respects, for without sufficient conditions we are not told very much, and it is unclear why obligatoriness-conditions should ever have interested us in the first place. Nevertheless, some caution should be exercised. Sufficient conditions are potentially dangerous in so far as they neglect the fact that there are other norms which govern beliefs and assertions. In any case, we shall see that it is only necessary conditions that play any important role in our argument. Moreover, the obligatoriness operator in TN should be understood as applying to the whole conditional, not just its antecedent, and this, oddly enough, gives us something closer to permission-conditions.14 Others have formulated the norm in slightly different ways. For example, Ralph Wedgwood espouses the principle that ‘a belief is correct if and only if the proposition believed is true’. ‘Correct’, here, is not just a synonym for ‘true’. It is a predicate of mental states, not their contents, and ‘[t]o say that a mental state is “correct” is to say that in having that mental state, one has got things “right”; one’s mental state is “appropriate” ’.15 Here the biconditional is justifiable since the belief is already assumed to exist: nobody is forcing anyone to hold beliefs on each and every topic. And although ‘correct’ is best understood as ‘permissible’, if only because ‘incorrect’ is clearly understood to imply ‘forbidden’, it could also be understood in a stronger sense without any serious modifications, should this be required. This may seem like a sensible approach which avoids the above difficulties. However, it is much less innocent than it may appear. It treats beliefs as actual entities, states with a definite character, and Wedgwood goes on to examine at length the functional implications of truth-directedness considered as an intrinsic property of beliefs. We, by contrast, are satisfied with
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the verb rather than the noun, and in asking whether and when one should believe something, we are not automatically committed to any particular doctrine about the nature of beliefs. This is important for two reasons. First, as we shall see in Chapter 4, the current debates about why one cannot believe at will, how belief-aims relate to believer-aims, and whether beliefs have an intrinsic ‘direction of fit’ – debates generally regarded as central to this whole topic – all involve a number of highly questionable theses about the ontological status of beliefs. It is therefore unwise to make too many assumptions at the outset; and although TN allows that beliefs could be real entities in their own right, it does not force the issue. Secondly and more generally, states (considered as tokens, not types), like events, are metaphysically very troublesome entities if only because, despite considerable research on the matter, nobody has found useful and convincing identity criteria for them. We are sometimes disposed to think that the -ing of x at t is the same event as the -ing of x at t even though is not the same property as but merely included within it, for example if ‘’ is ‘walks’ and ‘’ is ‘walks slowly’. The walking-slowly is nothing over and above the walk itself, and not the fusion or mereological sum of the walk and the slowness (considered as an independent state). By contrast, the stabbing-fatally (i.e. the killing-with-a-knife, as opposed to the fatal stabbing) is the sum of the stabbing and the fatality (i.e. the death, an independent event), or at least arguably so (‘stabs fatally’ and ‘kills with a knife’ are more or less logically equivalent). Yet it is notoriously difficult to say exactly why we have a difference here, that is to say, why some adverbial modifiers import new events or states whereas others do not.16 Now, this has a special relevance to problems about belief since we are particularly interested in the question of whether believing can, and should, be replaced by weaker attitudes such as accepting. The property of believing that p strictly includes that of accepting that p (we shall argue), but is a person’s acceptance of p on a given occasion the same state as his belief that p, or a proper part of it? If the former, then how can the accept/believe distinction continue to be functionally effective? And if the latter, then exactly how does this part/whole relationship work, and what does the mereological complement (i.e. the belief minus the acceptance) look like? How do the intrinsic, functional qualities of these states interact with each other, and by what mechanism? These are highly intractable metaphysical questions, and the reader may (or may not) be pleased to learn that we shall not have to consider them any further! This is assured, however, only because we do not ‘ontologize’ beliefs and their
18 Aiming at Truth
rivals in any very serious way. It is the attitude of believing, not the state of belief, that will prove to be important. Another difficulty is that we have been considering belief and assertion together, but it is unclear that they relate to truth-aiming norms in quite the same way. If I assert what I take to be false, then I have certainly breached a norm which is, in some sense, constitutive of assertion, but such breaches are all too possible. The notion of assertion is not in any danger of collapse just because of them (unless, perhaps, they were to happen very frequently). By contrast, to believe what I take to be false is pathological in a much stronger sense. We might even say that it is impossible by definition for anyone to do such a thing (though the possibility of self-deception suggests that matters are not so simple). This is related to the fact that assertion is clearly voluntary in a way in which belief is not: deciding to say what is false is not to undermine the possibility of assertion in the way in which deciding to believe what is false undermines the possibility of belief. However, it is not clear that this points to a serious divergence. Assertion is the (voluntary) outer expression of an inner state, namely belief, and this ensures that assertions can be insincere in a way in which beliefs cannot be. Despite this, assertions and beliefs do run together, by and large, and our truth-norm TN does manage to articulate this fact quite satisfactorily, even though there are, of course, many other issues that need to be addressed. Focusing on belief rather than truth, and likewise force rather than sense, clearly has its advantages. Apart from the above, David Velleman points out that a proper understanding of the truth-directedness of belief can assist us not only with understanding the differences between theoretical and practical reasoning and the question of why beliefs cannot be voluntary, issues to which we shall return, but also with the ‘normativeness of content’, namely the phenomenon whereby entertaining a thought with a given content seems automatically to carry some intrinsic normative implications. Velleman’s account is that such normativeness is not to be found in the content at all, but in the particular attitude held towards it: It isn’t true that one ought to have the thought that snow is white only if snow is white; or, at least, it isn’t true on the most inclusive interpretation of the phrase ‘to have a thought’. If one can have a thought merely by entertaining it, without the belief, then having the thought that snow is white would be perfectly in order even if one were up to one’s neck in black snow. What one would be obliged to avoid, if snow weren’t white, is not the mere thought of snow’s
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being white but rather the belief with that content. And one would be obliged to avoid the belief because, given its nature as a belief, it would aim at being true but, given its content, would fall short of this aim on account of snow’s not being white. The belief would be wrong or incorrect in the sense that it would be a failure in relation to its own aim.17 This is surely right; and, as Velleman suggests, this completely dissolves the problem of why semantic content per se appears to have such normativeness. It is not content but attitude that is important. The upshot of these considerations is that belief and assertion are interesting and substantive philosophical concepts, whereas truth is not. This is not to deny that truth is important in so far as it is worth aiming at. It is just that, pace Lynch, its importance does not arise simply from its intrinsic nature, for that is too thin to generate a self-standing value. What does matter, rather, is that our inquiry into whether p or not-p should aim to end up with a genuine TN-satisfying belief on the matter, as opposed to something weaker; and the reasons for this are complex. Why, then, does it often seem as though truth has to motivate inquiry in a much stronger and more immediate sense? Indeed, regardless of the specific problem of normativity, why does it seem as though the concept of truth just has to be far more substantive than it really is? Much has been said on this, and we shall not attempt to deal with the question comprehensively. However, one reason rarely cited, but which our own approach manages to highlight very nicely, stems from the fact that it can be difficult to indicate the kind of force that a given speech-act is intended to have. Any given declarative sentence can be given full assertoric force or any number of alternative, lesser forces, and yet its meaning will remain unchanged. After all, force and sense are quite different. The sentence itself, therefore, cannot be used to indicate which force it has. To take an extreme example, suppose an actor on stage wishes to inform the audience that the theatre is on fire. Merely saying so will not do the trick, for the audience might assume that these lines are part of the script. The same applies to any other sentence he says (for example, ‘Look, this is for real, I am no longer acting!’ could, in theory, also be part of the script). In fact, there is nothing that the actor can say which will infallibly indicate the appropriate change of force. Other conventions, traditionally the proscenium, are required; and some playwrights deliberately subvert them, either by dispensing with an unambiguous stage area or by yet subtler means. Quotations can likewise be problematic, and we often resort to crooking our fingers
20 Aiming at Truth
in order to sound quotation marks. This crooking is linguistic in a broad sense, but necessarily non-verbal. As we have seen, no word can do the trick. Theatrical utterances and quotations are too different from assertions for this to be a problem worth worrying about, but with expressions of acceptance the matter is different. When engaged in a scientific discussion, it can be quite difficult to tell how a given utterance is to be understood. No doubt, we could introduce a non-verbal convention to indicate full-blown assertion analogous to the way in which fingercrooking indicates quotation – placing our fingers together in the shape of a Fregean assertion sign ‘–’, perhaps! – but this is inconvenient. What we actually do is use the word ‘true’ in a particular sort of way. Thus we may amplify an earlier statement by saying ‘That is actually true’, for example. We emphasize the word ‘true’ and this appears to add some important extra ingredient to what is said. Yet there is a paradox here, for it is unclear how there can be any such extra ingredient. If ‘p’ is a truth-apt sentence, then it will imply ‘
is true’, and quite regardless of the force with which it is invested. This is surely indisputable (doubts about bivalence aside). It may be protested that we are presupposing a deflationist account of truth; but that is not so. Deflationists claim that ES is all there is to truth, and we have not assumed that here. All we have assumed is that ES is merely correct, in particular, that there is a valid inference from right to left: and all parties to the dispute agree with that. The paradox is that it can still seem otherwise. For example, it is sometimes said that all that is meant by saying that beliefs aim at truth is that, when I believe that p then I must believe that < p > is true. This can indeed be made to sound right, even though it is clearly far too weak a criterion. After all, it is equally the case that if I imagine that p then I must imagine that < p > is true, but nobody supposes that imagination aims at truth in any interesting sense.18 Nevertheless, given the right setting, it can be made to sound as if merely imagining something to be true is weaker than actually imagining it to be true. However, there must obviously be a trick somewhere. A change of emphasis cannot strengthen semantic content, even if it can appear otherwise. So what is happening here? An answer has been suggested, namely that the word ‘true’ has, in addition to its normal meaning, a secondary, non-semantic function, namely to indicate assertoric force. Because this function is non-semantic – its utterance essentially plays the role of the ‘–’ assertion-gesture mentioned above – we should not try to accommodate it within any conceptual analysis of the term. It may seem
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bizarre that the word should have this feature, but it is not so strange really. Force has to be indicated somehow, and it is more convenient to do it verbally rather than through other means, such as gestures. And the word ‘true’ is supremely well suited for this task since it is so closely linked with assertoric force. Assertions aim at truth in a way that other utterances do not. This thesis thereby provides a neat explanation of a puzzling phenomenon: ‘< p > is true’ (said emphatically) seems to be stronger than ‘p’ when looked at from one perspective, and yet no stronger when viewed from another. Much theorizing about the concept of truth is designed to solve this problem. Our solution is that sense and force tend to be muddled, which is why the word ‘true’ appears to have schizoid features. Yet we have not really needed to move beyond a very minimalist picture of what truth itself actually is. All the interesting work needs to be done elsewhere.
1.2 An argument against truth-aiming The question still remains, however, whether assertions really do aim at truth in the sense expounded in TN and TN’. And even if the answer is ‘yes’, we still need to ask whether we really should invest our ordinary utterances with full-blooded assertoric force, so understood. It may seem clear that both answers should be affirmative, but this is not obviously so. As mentioned, it is epistemological considerations that cause the problem. Traditional sceptical arguments are powerful and, if sound, imply that truth is cognitively inaccessible. Aiming at truth thereby becomes impossible, not merely in the modest sense that we can only approach the whole truth asymptotically, but rather in the more worrying sense that we cannot even tell if we are moving in the right direction: the aiming itself, and not just the arriving, is undermined.19 Moreover, there is a certain kind of sceptical argument which is highly plausible, and which seriously challenges many of our intuitions about what it is to aim at truth. We shall develop this argument more carefully in the next chapter. However, it is sufficient for present purposes to observe simply what would happen if we did accept it. We may begin with van Fraassen’s ‘constructive empiricist’ view that scientific theories are not proper objects of belief. By this it is not meant that theoretical statements are not properly truth-apt, but rather that it is no concern of science whether they really are true or not. All that matters is whether theories are empirically adequate, that is to say consistent with all possible empirical data.20 His main argument for this
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(briefly outlined) stems from Quine’s thesis of the underdetermination of theories by data (UTD). Given any theory, we may find indefinitely many empirically equivalent alternatives which are logically incompatible with it. Since they are all internally consistent, neither reason nor experience can tell us which of these alternatives is actually correct, and this seems to lead to a general scepticism about theories. In practice, we do not worry about this, for we may rely on a variety of pragmatic criteria to make an intelligent decision about which alternative to ‘accept’ (van Fraassen’s term). In particular, we prize such qualities as simplicity, elegance and heuristic value, qualities which most alternatives do not have. The problem, however, is that these pragmatic criteria do not seem to have anything to do with truth. This does not mean that using these criteria is unwarranted. For example, it is clearly rational to prefer the simpler of two theories, other things being equal, if only because it is always rational to avoid unnecessary work. However, this is a maxim of practical reason, and tells us nothing about how things actually are. The general moral to be drawn, then, is that in science we should not be concerned about how things actually are. We should continue to look for good explanations of observable phenomena, of course, but should not suppose that good explanations per se lead to truth. Scientific theorizing forms only a small part of our assertoric, or putatively assertoric repertoire, and it may be thought that these debates are too remote from our ordinary affairs to be of great moment. However, the distinction between the theoretical and the non-theoretical is controversial, and it is arguable that UTD extends much further than the realm of ‘theories’ as ordinarily understood. Indeed, it may be that all our beliefs include an element of theory, in some sense or other. If so, what is now suggested is that all our beliefs, strictly speaking, are unwarranted, and should be replaced with weaker attitudes, such as acceptances; and likewise, that all our assertions should cease if they are understood to aim at truth in the sense expounded in TN and TN . They too should be replaced, and with same-sounding utterances invested with a weaker force. This sounds like a massively revisionist programme and highly counter-intuitive. Nevertheless, we shall see that it is less bizarre than it seems. However, before demonstrating this in detail, we must first answer a number of objections. For example, it might be protested that we have failed to appreciate the merits of alternative philosophies of science. If we reject the fundamental premise that pragmatic considerations, such as simplicity, are irrelevant to truth, and instead take the internal realist view that truth is actually constituted by what is most rational
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for us to believe (in ideal circumstances, of course), then we can avoid constructive empiricism (CE) and its sceptical implications.21 Instead, we reach the intuitively desirable conclusion that scientists do indeed aim at truth – and, by and large, succeed in their aim. However, there are two reasons for doubting whether this policy will work. First, if truth is to be epistemically constrained, and yet also satisfy ES, then the world must surely also be epistemically constrained. This mind-dependence leads to metaphysical difficulties, as we shall show in more detail in §8.2. Secondly, and more immediately, it seems in any case untrue that internal realism of the Ellis/Putnam variety really will save the doctrine that we should aim at truth in the above sense. Because each of the empirically equivalent alternative theories is internally consistent, each will have a model, what we may call an ‘empirically equivalent world’. Now, suppose that we are magically transported into such a world, for example, one where objects cease to exist when we do not observe them. Many of our most cherished beliefs will now have become undetectably false. Moreover, our inquiries will never lead us to see this, no matter how far they advance. If we had hitherto aimed at truth, now we are, alas, aiming at falsity; at least, that is so in the sense that not only are we systematically wrong, but we are not even moving closer ever to being right. But are we aiming wrongly? Would it better if our beliefs changed so that they become more nearly true? Indeed not, for it would not benefit us in the least. The theory we have chosen may be false, but of all its empirically equivalent alternatives, it is the one which is best suited to our psychological constitution. Even if an oracle were to tell us what the correct theory was, we would probably find it extremely difficult to take seriously, let alone believe – and we might easily go mad in the attempt! In these circumstances, we should surely not aim at truth in the sense of TN and TN’. It is better that what we think and say be false. In general, what really matters, it seems to follow, is not truth, but pragmatically conditioned empirical adequacy; and it is the latter not the former that we should aim at. It may be protested that we are not obliged to take these outlandish possibilities seriously. There are all sorts of sceptical scenarios that may be possible in principle, it may be said, but which nevertheless do not deserve our attention. Yet in a way, this is exactly the point. We should not alter our intellectual practices even if this magical transportation were to take place: it is not the sort of thing we should be concerned about, one way or the other. It may be protested further that if the possibility is not to be taken seriously, then we had no right to introduce it into the discussion in the first place. Indeed, we might well insist,
24 Aiming at Truth
with pragmatists such as Peirce, that if such possibilities play no part in our actual inquiries, then they should be ruled out altogether. But this is not true. The crucial point is that the principle TN is meant to be a conceptual truth, one which elucidates the concept of assertoric force. It must therefore be, if true at all, necessarily true, true in all possible worlds – even outlandish ones. As long as the magical transportation is a logical possibility, which it certainly is, then this is enough to falsify the principle. Or if we continue to insist that it is true by definition of ‘assert’, then it follows that we must abandon making ‘assertions’, so understood, and instead give our speech-acts a weaker force. The fact that we could never be interested in such possibilities outside the philosophy seminar is irrelevant. There is, moreover, no assumption used in this argument that the revisionist about truth, such as the internal realist or the pragmatist, can usefully challenge. We have made no direct assumptions at all about the nature of truth itself (apart from ES), and essentially the same argument will go through if we replace ‘
is true’ by ‘p’ throughout. Of course, we have assumed UTD, and it may be protested that internal realists need not do this. Some, such as Ellis, do, however. Moreover, all we really needed at this point in the argument is the bare premise that extreme sceptical scenarios are at least logically possible – nothing more than this. Clearly, then, UTD aside, we cannot hope to rescue matters by manipulating the concept of truth in an internalist direction, or in any other direction. As predicted, the nature of truth itself has again proved to be a red herring. Another objection is to insist that it is not wrong to make full-blown truth-aiming assertions in the magical situation after all, and that we have simply confused different norms of assertion. Huw Price (2003), for example, insists that assertion is subject to (at least) three different norms: sincerity, evidential warrant and truth. These may be summarized as follows: (SN) We should assert that p only if we believe that p; (WN) We should assert that p only if we have adequate evidence that p; (TN) We should assert that p only if
is true. Now, what happens after the magical transportation is that W-norms and T-norms, as we shall call them, yield conflicting imperatives; and this, of course, is unfortunate for the people so transported. Yet is this itself an objection to T-norms? It may be insisted that the whole
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situation itself is unfortunate; so it is hardly surprising that our norms of assertion should exhibit this conflict. It is perhaps even desirable that they should do so, for what else could explain why the situation is unfortunate, which it intuitively is, except a conflict of this kind? At any rate, there is surely no need to pretend that our assertions, or what pass for assertions, should not be subject to T-norms, but only W-norms. Price emphasizes this point against Rorty who rejects the distinction between justification and truth on pragmatist grounds, an idea which we shall develop further in §6.1. Price insists, by contrast, that obedience to (what we call) T-norms, and the demand that others also do so, makes a great deal of practical difference, a kind of difference which universal adherence to W-norms will not make. To see this, note that a consequence of TN is what we shall call the ‘universality principle’ (UP): (UP) If anyone should assert that p, then so should everyone (more accurately, nobody should assert that not-p). This principle – which is of fundamental importance – follows because ‘A should assert that p’, ‘B should assert that not-p’, TN and ES together imply ‘p and not-p’. This demand for universal agreement (more accurately, universal non-disagreement) is evidently a strong practical constraint, and one which has nothing to do with epistemic warrant. Thus, if I assert that not-p, I shall declare that your assertion that p transgresses a T-norm; and I shall continue to do so even if I can see that it transgresses no W-norm (maybe the evidence available to you is different from what is available to me). I may be wrong, of course, and it may turn out that you, not I, are speaking the truth; but this does not undermine the fact that T-norms have an eminently practical function, and one which is quite different from that of W-norms. We agree that UP does not follow from WN. But should what we say satisfy UP at all? We could maintain, with Price against Rorty, that UP provides the friction that is indispensable for the wheels of ordinary conversation to run; and which we are surely entitled to use. However, the indispensability is not that obvious. In the magical situation discussed earlier, the demand that I continue to aim at truth even after transportation is just idle. T-norms routinely conflict with W-norms in that situation, and the W-norms should always win if sanity is to prevail. It is therefore unclear why an outsider should continue to demand that my speech-acts be subject to TN – even in principle. It is admittedly a far-fetched situation, and one whose relevance is therefore
26 Aiming at Truth
dubious. It also needs to be formulated from an external standpoint, which rules out an ordinary two-way conversation between observer and observed. Nevertheless, it leads on to a considerably more powerful line of argument.
1.3 A revised argument Why do we choose a given theory over its empirically equivalent alternatives? We have mentioned such pragmatic criteria as simplicity and heuristic value. Yet UP, like TN, is meant to be a conceptual constraint, and therefore should apply to all logically possible creatures; and we might reasonably wonder whether every possible cognitive being employs such pragmatic criteria in the same way. Maybe ‘grueusers’ have different views from ours about which theory is the simpler. Perhaps Martians have different brain structures which ensure that they are attracted to very different theories from ours, despite exposure to the same stimuli. What Quine calls ‘man’s net contribution’ (i.e. theory minus data) is very large, and if we prefer one sort of contribution over another this is due to contingent features about us. A powerful argument for scepticism is clearly looming here, but we can also see that it is perverse that we should have to worry too much about it, if only because contingent features of some kind are inevitable, and it seems quite pointless (if not impossible) to alter the particular features we have. To demand a justification for our way of choosing between theories is, perhaps, in the limit, to demand a justification for being human (as opposed to a Martian, or God, or nothing at all), which is perverse, if not thoroughly ridiculous. This cognitive contingency is an inevitable feature of any kind of empirical cognition. It ensures that we do not have an Olympian or ‘God’s eye’ view of reality, but we should never have supposed that we did. For all normal purposes, we have all the justification we need. What is a problem, however, is that UP does not easily square with this cognitive contingency. As it stands, the principle demands nondisagreement from all possible beings, including Martians, grue-users, et al. We may make this clear by re-naming the principle UUP, for ‘unrestricted universality principle’, and contrasting it with RUP, or ‘restricted universality principle’: (UUP) If anyone should assert that p, then so should everyone (more accurately, nobody should assert that not-p). By ‘everyone’
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we include all logically possible intelligent beings (including Martians, grue-users, and so on). (RUP) As UUP, except ‘everyone’ applies only to creatures cognitively similar to ourselves.
The UUP follows directly from TN and ES, yet we surely have no right to make any such sweeping demands. Our perspective is human, not divine. Moreover, to invest what we say with such a universalist force is exactly what is going to bring into play the above sceptical argument that we should not have to worry about. For by what right may we declare that Martians ought not to say what they say? Of course, we can (and must) declare that what they say is false, but that itself is not to make any demands on them unless we assume that their speech-acts satisfy a principle like UUP. We surely have no right to make these demands, for neither experience nor reason – our only two sources of evidence – can tell us which of the two belief-systems is really superior (and appeal to pragmatic considerations is quite useless, since they do not favour one party over the other). It follows, therefore, that we have no right to extend the universality principle to all cognitively possible creatures. Once again, we must conclude that we should abandon the use of full-blooded TN-satisfying assertions. Instead, we should satisfy ourselves with mere quasi-assertions which satisfy a weakened principle like RUP, but not UUP. This Martian scenario is far more effective than the original sceptical scenario. The latter merely shows that we cannot know that we are aiming at truth in a strong external sense. It does not undermine the more modest thesis, that we should follow the practice of criticizing people whom we believe to violate TN – that is to say, of criticizing people who say that p, when we believe that not-p: and it could be argued that it is only this latter thesis, which Price emphasizes, that we need ever be concerned with. After all, it makes a real practical difference whether we adopt it or not, but no difference to us at all whether the original sceptical scenario is true or not. However – and this is the point – the Martian scenario undermines even this weaker Pricean thesis, for it forbids us to criticize Martians in the same way that we criticize humans. Revision is thus required even from within an internal perspective, and our actual practices themselves need to change. Moreover, this scenario deserves far more serious attention than a sceptical scenario based on outlandish possibilities. True, it is also a sceptical scenario of sorts, but it is of a very peculiar kind; for unlike most such scenarios, it does
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not involve something going wrong – a bizarre intervention, an unexplained breach of normal functioning, or whatever. On the contrary, the cognitive divergence that concerns us here is one which is expected to occur even if everything were to go right – indeed, even if all parties were to reach optimal cognitive performance! We are not concerned with mysterious and unverifiable possibilities, nor with situations where, with Wittgenstein,22 we might reasonably protest that we simply lack any grounds for doubt, but merely a quite plausible view about cognitive contingency, one which is eminently well grounded. And although it may be protested that there is nothing in our ordinary inquiries themselves which suggests that we should systematically doubt our beliefs, let alone abandon all of them, it must be remembered that we are not suggesting that there is anything at all wrong with our inquiries themselves – at least, as far as their contents are concerned. All that is being demanded is that the resulting beliefs and assertions be redescribed in a subtle way. And it must be remembered that all we really needed to assume here is that the Martians are logically possible. But does the Martian scenario really undermine the legitimacy of truth-aiming attitudes to this extent? The suspicion may be that we are still confusing alethic and evidential norms. It may be conceded, for the sake of argument, that there are serious epistemological problems here, and that different creatures are ideally warranted in believing incompatible things – with no hope of eventual convergence. To that extent, we cannot criticize the Martians from an evidential point of view for saying what is (according to us) false. However, it may be insisted, this does not prevent us from also claiming, with Price, that there is another kind of norm that the Martians are infringing, namely TN, and this ensures that we can continue to criticize what they think and say from an alethic point of view. To deny this is simply to ignore the fact that truth is quite different from warranted assertibility, and corresponds to different normative constraints – constraints which sometimes clash. It may be concluded that we still have no grounds to reject the use of speech-acts which satisfy TN or UUP. The objection is unfounded, however. What we have argued for throughout is that the strength of our commitments has a twodimensional structure. One dimension is the familiar one of propositional content. Thus a commitment to < p > is at least as strong as a commitment to , if
entails . However, the type of attitude held towards a given content also admits of a dimension of strength: attitude1 that p is at least as strong as attitude2 that p if the norms governing attitude1 include those of attitude2 . These dimensions cannot
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be reduced to one, just as force cannot be reduced to sense.23 Now the sceptical arguments under consideration apparently show that our commitments are typically stronger than is warranted, so something needs to be weakened, and we have argued that it is better to weaken the attitude rather than the content. Specifically, we have argued for the replacement of belief with an attitude (yet to be fully specified) which does not include TN amongst its norms. These arguments may be disputed, of course; but it is wrong to suppose automatically that, since TN is alethic and our sceptical worry is evidential, we cannot adjust the former to accommodate the latter without muddling different kinds of normative constraint. Even though TN itself has nothing to do with epistemology, it does not follow that it makes no epistemological difference whether our attitudes answer to it or not. On the contrary, it clearly does. The simple fact is that if we weaken our commitments, whether by attitude- or by content-reduction, then we shall require less warrant to retain them. For example, we require less warrant to accept a theory, in van Fraassen’s sense, than to believe it, since less warrant is needed to believe that T is empirically adequate than is needed to believe that T is true; and this point can certainly be used to address theoretical scepticism. We may wonder whether acceptance, so understood, really is sufficient for scientific purposes; but the bare fact that the problem is epistemological, and yet the difference between belief and acceptance primarily concerns truth, is neither here nor there. It certainly does not prove that van Fraassen is guilty of any elementary confusion. Moreover, the central argument relied on by both van Fraassen and ourselves remains sceptically powerful: our choice of theories hinges largely on pragmatic considerations that are unconnected with truth. Attitudereduction can resolve this problem, and it is unclear what else can. We might still wonder, however, whether this is a problem that even ought to be resolved. Thomas Nagel (1986), for example, agrees that there may be many different perspectives on the world, but insists that there is still a ‘view from nowhere’, an ultimately objective point of view. Perhaps we shall never fully attain it, but this should not stop us from trying. In any case, the correct response to the Martian scenario, surely, should be a deep humility. Lacking any neutral method of adjudicating disagreements, we should instead say that we simply do not as yet know which of us is actually right. Maybe we never will. There certainly does seem to be something a bit odd with the idea that our perspective is just the ‘right’ one, and theirs the ‘wrong’ one; so why should we want say it at all – even with reduced assertoric force?
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Moreover, there is certainly room for humility here. A 5-year-old child cannot understand the perspective of a human adult, and in that sense, the adult is cognitively alien to the child. Yet we are surely not forced to deny that the adult perspective is genuinely better, and not merely different. Why, then, could there not be superior beings who relate to us as we relate to the child? The answer, of course, is that there could be. The problem, however, is that there could be many such beings, all of whom disagree irreversibly with each other. Super-adulthood will not lead to a reduction of cognitive contingency. On the contrary, the more developed the brain, the more contingencies there will be; and there is no reason to think that this process must lead to convergence. Moreover – and crucially – our position, unlike Nagel’s, is that alien opinion might diverge from ours even about primary qualities, so we cannot even look to physics to provide a common intellectual framework. The humility needed to accommodate all these possibilities would therefore be utterly stifling, for both super-adults as well as ourselves. Even if we accept this, however, it might now seem that, should we descend from Mount Olympus, the very problem that concerned us in the first place will then evaporate. For does not the thesis that human and Martian viewpoints are equally valid, in some sense or other, already assume a neutral vantage point? It may indeed be unacceptably partisan to suppose that our outlook is just ‘right’ and theirs is just ‘wrong’, and that it is we, and not they, who are the Chosen People – if we were to suppose that this is the view from upon high. However, if we cheerfully acknowledge our bias, and make no attempt to make divine judgements, then, it may be felt, such partisanship is entirely in order. Indeed, our solution to scepticism essentially relies on our being partisan in something like this sense. So did we ever need to worry about the Martians to begin with?24 A negative answer would, of course, be extremely embarrassing for us! However, the problem is still here. The point is that it is from our own partisan perspective that we can see that other perspectives have as much claim to legitimacy as our own. The symmetry between the Martians and ourselves that is worrying us does not derive from the attempted adoption of a view from nowhere, but from the type of explanation of our (and their) beliefs that we shall need to give if we are to accommodate underdetermination. As we shall see in §3.4, we must cite non-epistemic facts about ourselves to explain why we are disposed to react in one way rather another when confronted with a given body of data. And not even a partisan explanation can be given as to why a brain structured like this should be more in tune with the world outside than a brain structured like that, if ‘this’ and
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‘that’ each stand for descriptions that are both non-epistemic and nonindexical. Empirical cognition of any kind inevitably has this feature. The problem has therefore not evaporated; and we do not have to ‘get out of our own skins’ in order to see that it needs to be solved. We might still feel that such reduction is not really forced on us, and that we can live perfectly well with our original attitudes. After all, we do live with them! But imagine that things were the other way round, and that we had always had reduced attitudes. Then suppose that someone were to suggest one day that we should augment them (perhaps with a view to simplifying the rules of inter-species conversation). Such augmentation will clearly lead to an increase in our commitments and, although the new conversational rules are much simpler, actual conversations with Martians about most matters of fact will now become seriously disputatious – interminably so. The original, commonsensical view, that what the Martians (actual or possible) might think should make next to no difference to the content of our own opinions, will have to be abandoned; and the irresolubility of Martian–human disagreements (which are ‘blameless on both sides’, to use Hume’s phrase) will become a noticeable embarrassment. It will not be the kind of embarrassment which we have to notice all the time, of course, but we can still see why conservatives have a good case for resisting such reforms. After all, when looking at a proposal for revision, we naturally concentrate only on those things that will actually change, even if they are of only marginal interest; and (philosophical thinking aside) the rules of interspecies conversation are the only things that would really change under this proposal. Attitude-augmentation would plainly make our commitments much stronger than can be justified, and has few countervailing positive virtues; it would therefore be wrong.
1.4 Intensional and extensional senses of ‘aiming’ Nevertheless, the suggestion that we should abandon ordinary beliefs and assertions, that is to say, cognitive attitudes and speech-acts which satisfy TN and hence UUP, may seem outrageous, and it might be thought that it can be blocked by denying the intelligibility of our story about Martians. There are, of course, many issues that need to be discussed more fully before we can establish that such creatures really are possible; still more, that it could ever be possible for us to recognize them as such. We shall return to these questions in Chapter 3. However, what we shall do here is show that the notion of ‘aiming at truth’ can be
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given a different, and even weaker, reading that provides an alternative approach. The key is to recognize that the notion of ‘aiming at’ something has both intensional and extensional senses. When we talk of aiming a gun, we usually (though not always) mean it extensionally; but when we talk of aims and objectives, we usually (though not always) mean it intensionally. Sometimes it is unclear what is meant. If, like J.L. Austin, I point my gun at your donkey thinking that it is mine, do I aim at your donkey or mine? Yours, I think, even though my aim was to shoot my donkey. But was I aiming to shoot my donkey, as opposed to yours? In a sense no, and in a sense yes. The difference might be expressed, perhaps confusingly, by saying that, although I was aiming to shoot my donkey, it was your donkey that I was aiming to shoot. Less confusingly (perhaps): I was aiming to make true . Nevertheless, concerning your donkey: I was aiming to shoot it. The first sense of ‘aiming’ is intensional, the second extensional. Now, what do we mean when we talk of aiming at truth? Can Martians and humans both be aiming at truth if they are aiming in different directions? In an extensional sense they cannot, of course, for the truth cannot lie somewhere along both directions. Yet it may still be possible for both of them to be doing so in some intensional or perspectival sense. It may seem as though TN says nothing more than that we should all adopt the maxim, ‘Assert only what is true’. However, this is to ignore the subtle difference between the intensional ‘We should aim for believing only what is true’ and the extensional ‘Only if something is true should we aim to believe it’. More formally, we have the distinction between: (ITN) We should aim that (we assert that p only if
is true) and (ETN) (We should aim that we assert that p) only if
is true. The ETN reads the aim extensionally: the object of the aim, namely the truth of < p >, is referred to outside the intensional context yielded by ‘We should aim that ’. However, ITN, the intensional reading, is significantly weaker. Crucially, it does not imply the UUP. This is because we can extend ITN to Martians without demanding their agreement with us. The sentence ‘We assert only the truth’ is one that everyone, including Martians, should want to be realized (and we, likewise, may
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want them to want it). However, this does not mean, concerning the truth, that everyone, including Martians, want to assert only it, which is to read the aim extensionally.25 Some additional clarification is needed. First, it may be wondered whether ITN and ETN do no more than just unpack possible interpretations of TN. After all, the latter is simply about what we should assert or believe, whereas the former is about what we should aim to assert or believe. This introduces an additional layer of modality whose significance needs to be explained. There are some delicate issues here to which we shall return, but at this stage it may be noted that if we treat the norms of belief as inhering primarily in the believer, then the additional layer does not amount to much. From the internal perspective of the believer, there is little difference between asking what one should do and asking what one should aim to do. Secondly, it may be protested that the extensional sense of ‘aiming’ cannot be made relevant here. When we introduced our first sceptical scenario in §1.2 (where we are transported unknowingly into an ‘empirically equivalent world’), we claimed that we could no longer be said to be aiming at truth because not only would we be systematically wrong in our beliefs, but we would not even be moving closer to being right. That is to say, we would be aiming extensionally in the wrong direction. Yet this can seem an odd conception of what it is to aim at truth. In so far as we are still trying to get things right (albeit with a total lack of success), it may be insisted that we clearly are ‘aiming at truth’ in the only sense that anyone could ever be likely to mean. The idea that truth is some sort of hidden target, one that we are expected to ‘aim’ at in a way that can only be judged to be successful or not from an external standpoint, is surely a confused idea that is bound to lead to an artificial sort of scepticism. Moreover, the whole point of recasting our truth-aiming criterion in terms of conversational rules and universality principles was precisely to get away from that way of looking at things. However, this does not do justice to the intensional/extensional distinction. Even when we work entirely from within our own perspective, and judge our own and other people’s beliefs by appealing to Pricean conversational rules rather than transcendental belief–world connections, we are still strongly tempted to suppose that our universality principle should be unrestricted in the sense of UUP. The idea that we could attribute to Martians genuine beliefs, and yet not care at all should they be (according to us) false – that is contrary to what we believe to be true – is a very counterintuitive idea, and will require elaborate defence. Yet if we only expect Martian beliefs to aim at truth
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in the intensional sense, then we lose the most obvious reason for demanding unrestrictedness – for remember how it looks to someone, from within her own perspective, to ‘aim at truth’. In practice, it means that if she discovers evidence that
is false, then she refrains from saying that p; and there is no reason why we should not expect all parties to do this. Divergence arises not because the Martians are not even trying to get things right, but because Martians have irreconcilably different views from us about what constitutes evidence for a given proposition. For example, they might regard the fact that all emeralds have been observed to be grue as very good evidence that all emeralds will continue to be grue, whereas we will certainly not. This ensures that they and we can continue to diverge – and know this – without denying that everyone is ‘aiming at truth’ in this sense. Consequently, we lose any grounds for supposing that Martian beliefs are ‘incorrect’ or ‘inappropriate’, even though we are sure that they are false. From their perspective, everything is just fine; and we, from our own perspective, can see this. At any rate, we can see that there is nothing wrong with their intensional aims. Yet despite this, intuitively everything is not fine, of course. There must surely be some residual mistake somewhere about Martian truth-aiming, we may instinctively feel, and the most obvious problem is that although Martian beliefs intensionally aim at truth, they do not approach it. We can say that their beliefs ‘aim in the wrong direction’ without having to transcend our own perspective (quite the opposite!), and the sense of ‘aim’ in question is clearly extensional. It is therefore just a confusion to suppose that the distinction between the extensional and the intensional corresponds to that between absolute and local perspectives. One no more has to ascend to a God’s eye view of the world to talk of extensional aiming at truth than one has to do so in order to talk of extensional aiming at donkeys. We should also remember that it is not only beliefs that are expected to be truth-directed, but also the intellectual practices that generate them. If our cognitive methodologies – our research programmes and so forth – fail to lead to increasing verisimilitude, then we naturally feel that they must be seriously defective.26 Moreover, it should make no difference whether we are talking about humans, Martians or anyone else. If asked why, we may well reply, with Michael Lynch and others, that this is because truth itself is a fundamental norm. It is also clear that if the beliefs generated by two such methodologies A and B were to diverge – not just every now and then, but massively and even when taken to their respective ideal limits – then A and B cannot both lead to increasing verisimilitude, and therefore cannot both be said to be
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‘truth-directed’ – in an extensional, and yet quite ordinary sense. So if we were to relax the constraint that they ought to be so directed, as we claim we should, then we are evidently saying something very radical. In particular, we are denying that truth per se has the kind of intrinsic normative pull usually attributed to it. This failure of extensional truth-aiming may even lead some to doubt whether these Martian states can properly be described as beliefs at all. For beliefs are essentially representational, and have a ‘world-to-mind direction of fit’. If we regard beliefs as real states with intrinsic functional qualities, then this objection starts to look very powerful indeed; and this is one reason why we should be cautious about assuming at the outset that beliefs should be understood in this way. We shall examine these issues in more detail in Chapter 4. For the moment, however, it should be noted that if this objection were valid, and we were to deny Martians real beliefs, then it would follow that we too would lack real beliefs if we were to find ourselves in the ‘empirically equivalent world’ of §1.2 (to avoid an irrelevant line of objection, let us imagine that we were born in that world, or even that we evolved in it). This sounds rather severe since not only would they feel just like real beliefs, but they would clearly be of more functional value to us in that world, given our psychological constitution, than states produced by methodologies that really did drive us towards the truth. It might be thought that it is not so much the extensional/intensional distinction that should concern us here as the difference between merely aiming at a goal and actually achieving it. What is odd about the Martians is that, although they aim at the right target, namely truth, they never hit it. This is tragic, and yet we apparently want them to be like this. Does this not point to an incoherence in our own outlook? However, this is not obviously so. I can coherently want my cats to aim to catch butterflies (since it is amusing to watch), and yet also want them not to succeed. Likewise, it is sometimes said that it is better to travel than to arrive, even though it may be impossible to travel in the relevant way without having a particular destination as one’s aim. Perhaps these are not very good analogies. Yet we can certainly see why pragmatically conditioned empirical adequacy is something that we should all both aim at and hope to arrive at; and it may well be the case, and almost certainly is, that we can only achieve this ambition if we make truth our intensional aim. We shall also develop a non-factive conception of knowledge in Chapter 5, and this will also prove to be something that can actually be achieved by all parties. Of course, there
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still remains a considerable tension in our attitude towards cognitively divergent creatures; but this is to be expected. We can therefore see that the retreat from ETN to ITN really does involve quite a serious degree of revisionism. It may thus be feared that this revised principle is too weak to do justice to our ordinary concerns. However, intensional assertion, as we may call it, is still stronger than mere expression of acceptance of the Cohen/Bratman kind, for the latter need not aim at truth in any sense. This ensures that we can continue to distance ourselves from the extreme versions of pragmatism which we shall develop in Chapter 6, where we lose all interest in truth. It also yields a norm stronger than the purely evidential norm WN, since the latter does not even imply the localized RUP. In fact, it will turn out to be exactly as strong as we want it to be. In practice, a systematic replacement of extensional beliefs and assertions by their intensional versions should enable us to carry on more or less as before. Of course, it means that our conversations with Martians and grue-users will now have unexpected rules; but since we seldom converse with them, this is not much of an imposition! Our policy may be philosophically radical, but is perfectly liveable. No doubt, there remains something highly unintuitive about this proposal, but there are important advantages to be gained. Most importantly, we are now free from a very strong and damaging form of sceptical argument, even though we are required to yield some ground. The fact that our refashioned ‘beliefs’ and ‘assertions’ (for want of better names) are justifiable only through our own contingent natures, and have no global authority, is now no longer a problem. Having abandoned UUP, we no longer attempt to invest them with such authority, and in consequence may, at last, declare that we have abandoned the ‘God’s eye view’ or ‘Olympian standpoint’ that is so rightly disparaged but seldom explained. Indeed, another advantage of our view, which we shall develop in the final chapter, is that we can give a precise meaning to these phrases. According to us, to adopt the ‘Olympian standpoint’, ‘God’s eye view’, ‘view from nowhere’, ‘absolute conception of the world’, or any kind of supposedly neutral perspective, is precisely to invest what one thinks and says with universal authority in the sense of UUP. To retreat to a more modest, human perspective is to replace them with attitudes and speech-acts which satisfy only a restricted version. It is not, as Putnam (for example) thinks, to conflate truth with ideally warranted assertibility or to retreat to an anti-realist semantics. On the contrary, it is both impossible and unnecessary to epistemicize truth, and it is not sense but force which needs reduction.
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Our account replaces a worthy but vague sentiment (of course we should not pretend to be God!) with a specific thesis that is no less admirable for being controversial. Much more needs to be done, of course, to prove that this picture is correct – and we can now begin to see that it is a very big picture indeed, one which links together a whole realm of issues – and we shall attempt to fill some of the gaps in the rest of the book. Our concern in this chapter, however, is primarily the philosophy of language, and we have achieved our goal. This goal was not to solve all the problems involved in explaining what it is to aim at truth, but rather to locate them – in particular, to show that they are not to be found within the nature of truth itself, but rather within the concepts of belief and assertion. Truth is connected to normative and epistemological claims only indirectly, and is in itself an insubstantial concept. Aiming at truth, however, is a rich and controversial notion that links together many important issues.
2 Scepticism – and How Not to Avoid It
Our overall thesis hinges on a number of interconnected claims about the nature and the limits of empirical cognition. We claim that we cannot be justified in believing anything empirical if belief is understood to aim at truth in a strong extensional sense; but claim also that the situation can be rectified if the concept of belief is modified in a certain way. However, before examining the ways in which our ordinary concepts can be modified, we first need to show more carefully that there really is a sceptical case to answer.
2.1 Types of scepticism Before looking closely at particular sceptical arguments, it is helpful to look at scepticism in general. A familiar distinction is between ‘epistemic scepticism’ or scepticism about knowledge and ‘justificatory scepticism’ or scepticism about belief.1 This corresponds more or less to the distinction between Cartesian and Pyrrhonist versions. The former challenges our claims to know, for example, that there is an external world, on the grounds that we cannot be certain of it. Our standards of justification are not strong enough because we cannot conclusively rule out alternative scenarios, for example that I am always deceived by a malignant demon. The latter is more serious. It claims that not only do I not know for sure that there is an external world (for example), but that I have no right even to believe that there is one. There is surely a difference. We might concede to the Cartesian that knowledge is impossible because our evidence is never absolutely conclusive, but nevertheless insist that we have some degree of justification. In particular, it may be insisted that we have some justification in our belief that there is an external world: there is more reason to believe it than not. A Cartesian sceptic 38
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may be a menace if he sits on a jury in a criminal trial, where the prosecution has to prove its case beyond all reasonable doubt; but he can behave perfectly well in a civil case, where a verdict depends only on a balance of probabilities. By contrast, a Pyrrhonist juror will be a menace wherever he goes. We shall have more to say about the concept of knowledge later. However, our concern is primarily with the stronger, justificatory variety of scepticism. We shall argue that we have no right to believe or to assert, where belief and assertion are construed as satisfying the UUP. This is evidently a kind of scepticism that is stronger than Descartes’. In fact, it is even stronger than the original Pyrrhonist version, since the latter applies only to things as they are, as opposed to how they appear.2 For example, our claim is that not only may we not believe that honey is sweet, but we may not believe that it appears sweet either.3 This is because there is no reason why a Martian should agree. For not only will it not necessarily appear sweet to him (of course), but it may not appear to him that it appears sweet to me. We shall reject the distinction between theoretical and observational facts, which ensures that the Martians and we may have no common ground at all, no pure appearances that are beyond doubt. Of course, honey will still appear sweet to me. It is just that I have no right either to believe or to assert that last sentence. It is a moot point whether the ancient sceptics would agree with this last claim. R.J. Hankinson claims that The Sceptic ‘says nothing’ only in a special sense. He says nothing about the reality of things, but he may perfectly well make avowals, or apangeliai.4 He immediately cites the following passage from Sextus Empiricus: [W]henever I say ‘to every argument, an equal argument is opposed’, what I say in effect is ‘to every argument investigated by me which establishes something dogmatically there appears to me to be opposed another argument that establishes something dogmatically, equal to the first in credibility and the lack of it’, so that the utterance of the slogan is not itself dogmatic, but is rather an avowal of a human affection, which is something which is apparent to the one who is affected.5 This suggests that what is proposed is a replacement of one kind of judgement by another, which is, of course, our own view. What is not
40 Aiming at Truth
suggested, however, is that the sceptic may continue to make apangeliai about the reality of things, confident that since they are only apangeliai (and not full-blooded truth-directed assertions) they are immune from the justificatory difficulties that led us to scepticism. It is unclear that an apangelia (variously translated as ‘avowal’, ‘report’, ‘recitation’) is the sort of thing that can be applied to anything other than a pathos (affection, something that happens to one): and a feeling that honey is sweet in itself (and not merely apparently sweet) presumably will not count as a pathos. So, although there is room for debate as to how the Pyrrhonists understood the appearance/reality distinction, it seems that there are fundamental differences between their view and ours. We certainly do not share their view that the purpose of the sceptical elimination of belief is to achieve a state of tranquillity. Our view, rather, is that we should replace belief by a weaker sort of attitude in order that we may see correctly the relationship that we have with the world that we investigate. In short, we aim at truth. This relates to another important difference. A non-sceptic will claim that, in many situations, we should believe that p, given such-and-such evidence and given that we are interested in the question. The interest clause is important. It may be that my perceptual evidence licenses the belief that there are exactly 100 books in my bookcase. This does not oblige me to hold that belief on pain of scepticism, however, if I am simply not interested in how many there are, and consequently feel no need to pay attention to the evidence. Nevertheless, if I still refuse to hold the belief even if I do acquire an interest, then I am now being sceptical in the sense that concerns us, and it is this scepticism that conflicts with our ordinary justificatory norms. The important point is that the latter are more than just a set of permissions. They also claim that it is irrational to fail to believe certain things in certain circumstances: that is to say, that I am actually obliged to believe it in such circumstances. A sceptic, of course, denies these obligations. Nevertheless, the sentence (0)
We are obliged to believe that p
has three negatable forms of increasing strength: (1) (2) (3)
We are not obliged to believe that p We are obliged not to believe that p We are obliged to believe that not-p.
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What we may call a weak sceptic merely accepts (1), whereas a strong sceptic accepts (2) as well. The third form is so strong that it does not express scepticism at all, of course, as Philonous reminded Hylas. However, weak scepticism does not seem to go far enough: it does not forbid belief, but merely refuses to demand it. It is consistent with a kind of cognitive anarchism where one moves arbitrarily from one dogma to another according to whimsy. Such a policy does not look like scepticism, as ordinarily understood, yet it is (1), not (2), that is the negation of (0). So any argument for strong scepticism, or indeed any interesting type of scepticism, will require more than just a proof that (0) is false. What is required is that we show that belief that p is not merely not licensed by our justificatory norms but actually transgresses them, which will only be the case if these norms are very robust. It now seems, though, that strong scepticism is unstable, for where could such robust norms come from, and why should they apply to us? The elimination of belief is evidently a psychologically very demanding task: how can the sceptic be so sure, we may ask slyly, that we are really required to do this? The Pyrrhonists’ answer appears to be that we are not required to suspend judgement: there are no cognitive norms. In that sense, they are weak sceptics. It is just that when one follows a particular sceptical line of thought, one simply will, as a matter of fact, end up suspending judgement (and thereby achieve tranquillity).6 The sceptical method makes use of argument in showing that to each argument there is equal counter-balancing argument; but despite this, the method is essentially therapeutic rather than argumentative as such.7 It is not about what we should or should not think. Our scepticism, however, is about that, and its conclusion is that we should not believe or assert anything: so the question of where these norms come from, and why we should suppose that we are bound by them, is very real. Where, then, do they come from? We shall see that there is no particular problem as far as we are concerned, since our scepticism is only skin deep. Indeed, it may seem, and with some considerable justification, that our theory is more of a rebuttal of scepticism than an affirmation. Our quarrel is only with a certain way of construing belief and assertion; and our view is that once these concepts have been reconstructed, we may carry on more or less as before; and that the cognitive norms that apply to these revised concepts do so for essentially the reasons that they were originally thought to apply to the unreconstructed versions. The norms that forbid certain cognitive attitudes thus derive from those that demand certain other cognitive attitudes. Our scepticism is, to that extent, parasitic on an underlying non-scepticism. Of course, this needs
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to be shown in detail. At this stage, however, it is sufficient to note that there is no immediate theoretical objection to the idea that our cognitive norms should actually forbid all belief and assertion.
2.2 The problem of induction It was Hume, of course, and not the ancient sceptics who first drew the problem of induction to our attention. The Pyrrhonists had several types of argument designed to undermine belief, but it did not occur to them to worry specifically about whether the future would resemble the past, or whether and how we may extrapolate from a given set of data. Not that the arguments that they did employ are irrelevant to us. On the contrary, our problem about Martians and grue-users owes a good deal to the ‘ten modes of scepticism’, in particular to the first and the sixth modes, and it was arguably they who first grasped the importance of underdetermination. Nevertheless, it makes sense to start with induction as Hume understood the problem, as it can be shown that it underlies most other sceptical worries. What, then, is the problem? In essence, it is that we cannot justify, without circularity, the belief that unobserved cases will resemble observed ones. Experience will not teach us this, since we do not experience the unobserved; nor will reason, for there is no logical contradiction in supposing that there is no such resemblance. Appeals to universal scientific laws, or the regularity of nature, do not solve the problem, for without induction we have no grounds for believing that what we are appealing to are really there. That induction is enormously successful as a method is also inconclusive: we know that it always has worked well, but that does not prove, without begging the question, that it will continue to do so. Is there some other source of knowledge, some ingenious synthetic a priori principle that will save the day? Even Kant shied away from the problem of induction, and there does not seem to be much hope of providing any such principle.8 The problem extends more widely than knowledge about the future. Rather, it concerns any proposition that lies outside the content of our immediate experience, for we cannot rely on any scientific or commonsensical picture of the world without assuming that the world is regular. We can argue at length about what our ‘immediate experience’ contains, of course, but a theory that limits our cognitive horizon to what is so given, however it is construed, is bound to be unsatisfactory. Our supposition that physical objects continue to exist when unobserved would be undermined, for example.
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Hume’s own answer to this problem is complex and subtle. He insists that the supposition, that the future resembles the past, is not founded on arguments of any kind, but is deriv’d entirely from habit, by which we are determin’d to expect for the future the same train of objects to which we have been accustom’d. This habit or determination to transfer the past to the future is full and perfect; and consequently the first impulse of the imagination in this species of reasoning is endow’d with the same qualities.9 The imagination plays a central role in human nature, according to Hume, as does habit. Reason, by contrast, is embarrassingly impotent, being not only a ‘slave to the passions’, but also quite powerless to underpin our most central beliefs about ourselves and the world. This sounds alarming, but Hume’s thesis is that reason is not only powerless to justify our beliefs but also powerless to eliminate them. This ensures that it is notoriously difficult to decide whether Hume is really a sceptic. In so far as he denies that our beliefs can be given a rational foundation, he evidently is one. However, unlike the Pyrrhonists, he firmly rejects the suggestion that we should therefore abandon them. Whereas the former thought that suspension of judgement would inevitably follow from sceptical argument, Hume insists that our minds are just impervious to such influences, except perhaps for very short periods of time. We are simply not as rational, that is to say, susceptible to argument, as even the Pyrrhonists will allow, and scepticism is therefore not a live option.10 Are Hume’s strictures on the limits of reason really acceptable, however? Many have denied that our inductive practices are irrational. Indeed, it is often insisted that they are rational par excellence, and that anyone who denies this simply fails to understand what rationality is. For example, A.J. Ayer writes, Thus it appears that there is no possible way of solving the problem of induction, as it is ordinarily conceived. And this means that it is a fictitious problem, since all genuine problems are at least theoretically capable of being solved . Of course, the fact that a certain form of procedure has always been successful in practice affords no logical guarantee that it will continue to do so. But then it is a mistake to demand a guarantee where it is logically impossible to obtain one. This does not mean that it is irrational to expect future experience
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to conform to the past. For when we come to define ‘rationality’ we shall find that for us ‘being rational’ entails being guided in a particular fashion by past experience.11 and P.F. Strawson, likewise: [T]he rationality of induction, unlike its ‘successfulness’, is not a fact about the constitution of the world. It is a matter of what we mean by the word ‘rational’, in its application to any procedure for forming opinions about what lies outside our observations or that of available witnesses.12 Also: To call a particular belief reasonable or unreasonable is to apply inductive standards, just as to call a particular argument valid or invalid is to apply deductive standards.13 It is not that it is impossible for induction to break down, if by ‘impossible’ we mean ‘logically impossible’. To demand otherwise is akin to demanding that induction not really be induction, but rather deduction in disguise. It is just that induction has its own standards, and it is unreasonable to demand that they be given any kind of independent justification. After all, nobody would demand an independent justification of deduction, or complain that deductive reasoning is viciously circular because we cannot give one. Why should induction be different? This response may be acceptable up to a point. After all, the meanings of words are not sacred, and if we wish to define ‘rational’ in a certain way, then so be it. Likewise, if we wish to invent a new form of reasoning with its own distinctive norms, then nothing can stop us. However, not all that much will be achieved. The risk of sudden chaos has not been neutralized, and Strawson points out that: The chaotic universe just envisaged is not one in which induction would cease to be rational; it is simply one in which it would be impossible to form rational expectations to the effect that specific things would happen. It might be said that in such a universe it would at least be rational to refrain from forming specific expectations, to expect nothing but irregularities. Just so. But this is itself
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a higher-order induction: where irregularity is the rule, expect further irregularities.14 Is this good enough? As Robert Stern (2000, pp. 38–9), who also cites these passages from Strawson, points out, the problem is one of reliability. He goes on to cite the following passage from BonJour: Strawson’s response to the problem of induction does not speak to the central issue raised by Humean scepticism: the issue of whether the conclusions of inductive arguments are likely to be true when the corresponding premises are true. It amounts to saying merely that if we reason in this way, we can correctly call ourselves ‘reasonable’ and our evidence ‘strong’, according to our accepted community standards. But to the underlying issue of whether following these standards is a good way to find the truth, [Strawson’s] response appears to have nothing to say.15 Deduction does not exhibit this kind of problem. We know that deductive argument is reliable in the sense of being truth-conducive, because that is what deductive validity means: an argument is valid if, whenever the premises are true, the conclusion is also true. Induction is not similarly truth-conducive. Of course, we do not expect induction to be infallible; we only demand that the conclusion of an inductively strong argument be probably true given that the premises are true, but that is also to demand a lot. This fact may be obscured by the difficulty of explaining what is meant by ‘probably’. Subjective theories define probability simply in terms of what it is rational to believe; in which case it will indeed follow that inductive reasoning is probably truth-conducive if we define rationality in Strawson’s way. It is, admittedly, very difficult to define probability in a more objective fashion for the concept is highly intractable, but this should not afford us much comfort. We can see all too clearly that we have not really made any progress.16 Is this as far as we can go? Must we simply conclude that induction is induction, and there’s an end on it? In fact, we can do considerably better. The ‘pragmatic justification of induction’ does not give us everything we might want, but it avoids the circularity objection and does not demand of us simply that we accept our generally accepted canons of rationality because that is what they are. The gist of it is extremely simple: if we use induction, then there is a possibility that our inquiries will be successful; but if we do not do so, then
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there is no possibility of such success. It therefore follows that we should use induction. It may be presented schematically as follows:
We use induction We do not use induction
Induction works
Induction does not work
Success Failure
Failure Failure
The two rows represent the two possible strategies available to us; the two columns represent the two possible ways the world might turn out (continued regularity versus chaos). Evidently, if we use induction and the world cooperates, then we shall be successful in our investigations. Our predictions will be accurate. However, if induction breaks down though we expected it to work, then our predictions will go wrong. Conversely, if we abandon our inductive method and predict irregularity, and yet the world continues to behave regularity, our predictions will also go wrong. The fourth box is the decisive one: if induction breaks down then we shall still fail to get anywhere – even if we fail to use induction. Demonstrating this conclusively, however, is not easy, and there is some debate on exactly how the argument should go. The main point is simple, though: there is no alternative strategy available to us. For imagine a counter-inductive strategy S. Perhaps we try it out once and find, to our surprise, that it works. It predicts the right result where orthodox induction predicted the wrong one. What should we conclude? If we suppose that this is a one-off result, a miracle or some such thing, and that we should continue to make predictions in the normal way, then we have not really abandoned induction. This is because there are only two possibilities here: if there were some principled reason for supposing that S was going to work on that occasion, but no other, then it must be because of some conventional methodology, so we have certainly not abandoned induction; and if we suppose that S worked on that one occasion for no principled reason, then we clearly have no strategy at all, inductive or counter-inductive. Finally, and crucially, if we suppose that our strange success is not just an anomaly and that S is to be preferred from now on, this still does not argue against induction, because we are tacitly assuming a higher-order induction: S has worked well, therefore it is rational to suppose that it will continue to work. We might object further that we need not use any single alternative strategy S, but a sequence of them, S1 S2 S3 and so on. But either
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this sequence is generated randomly, in which case there is really no alternative strategy at all; or else there is some meta-principle which generates it, and our argument applies as much to as to our original S. We just have an even higher-order induction. Supposing that is also a variable that yields a similar response at a yet higher level, and so on. The game is therefore up for the counter-inductivist. However exotic S may be, a world in which S regularly works is most certainly not one in which induction has broken down; and a strategy where we expect S to work regularly is certainly not a counter-inductive strategy. The success we meet with in this strange situation still corresponds to the first box, not the fourth. We can pick at the details here, but this does not alter the very welcome fact that, for the first time, the sceptic really has been stopped dead in his tracks. We can now see for sure that it is rational, and in a very down-to-earth and non-question-begging sense, that we should use induction. Hume’s thesis that induction is not founded on reason now looks decidedly premature. The above argument, after all, is wholly deductive, not inductive. There is no circularity. We are not demanding that people follow convention simply because it is convention. What we have is a cause for considerable celebration, being surely a rare example of what Kripke (1982) calls a ‘straight solution’ to a sceptical problem, that is to say a solution that actually refutes the sceptic instead of merely showing how we can live with him. Indeed, we shall later see that, although it does not prove everything that it might, it nevertheless provides the foundation for an effective overall anti-sceptical strategy. Nevertheless, there are clearly some things that it does not prove. It does not prove, alas, that induction actually will not break down, or equivalently, that an inductive strategy actually will be successful. At best, it proves only that we should believe that it will not break down, and that we should believe that such a strategy will be successful. There is evidently a difference, since ‘We should believe that p’ does not entail ‘p’, even though Moore’s paradox of infallibility may deceive us into thinking otherwise. Nevertheless, it may seem that this does not matter very much. For if I am rationally required to believe that induction will work, then what I am rationally required to believe is: induction will work. And what more could I want? Of course, from an external standpoint, I can still see that a mismatch between my expectations and the actual course of events remains a possibility. Yet since I do not in fact occupy that standpoint, this is surely neither here nor there. Many suppose that this does indeed give us all that is required.17 However, this is not quite so. The critical move is not from ‘We must
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believe that induction will work’ to ‘Induction will work’, but from ‘We must adopt an inductivist strategy’ to ‘We must believe that induction will work’. Belief aims at truth in a way that adoption of a methodological strategy does not, and this ensures that there are still some problems about reliability and truth-conduciveness left unresolved by the pragmatic solution. Of course, we can and must accept that induction is reliable; but as we have already argued, and shall develop in more detail in Chapter 4, acceptance is not the same as belief. This point can be made clearer by considering the ‘new riddle of induction’. Goodman’s famous paper points out that, even if we agree that it is unwarranted to reject induction as such, a further problem remains, namely that of distinguishing arguments which are inductively strong from those of a similar form which are not.18 For example, the argument ‘All emeralds have so far been observed to be F; therefore all emeralds are F’ is (we naturally assume) strong if, for ‘F’, we substitute ‘green’; but is certainly not so if we instead substitute the artificial predicate ‘grue’, where ‘x is grue’ is defined to mean ‘Either t is before midnight tonight and x is green, or else t is during or after midnight tonight and x is blue’. For this revised argument predicts that emeralds will turn blue at midnight. Of course, we may say, there is no reason for supposing that emeralds will continue to be grue after midnight, even though they always have been grue up until now. The trouble, though, is that we have, apparently, no better reason for supposing that they will continue to be green. So why should we prefer green to grue? The gross artificiality of the latter is obviously relevant, but we need to be careful here. As Goodman points out, if we start with grue and its dual bleen, we may define green and blue from them in an analogous way: x will be green (blue) at t iff either t is before midnight tonight and x is grue (bleen), or else t is at or after midnight and x is bleen (grue). This symmetry blocks the most obvious way of distinguishing the good or ‘projectible’ predicates from the others. True, as Blackburn points out, there remains a difference unaccounted for, namely that we can tell whether x is green or blue just by looking at it, and without also needing to know what time it is; not so with whether x is grue or bleen.19 There are many other considerations that can be brought to bear as well.20 The problem remains, however, that even if we can explain conclusively why it is unreasonable for us to use concepts like grue (which, of course, it is), there may still be alien creatures for whom such concepts are psychologically more appropriate. Such creatures see similarities differently from the way in which we do, so grue and bleen are natural for them and green and blue are not. For this
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reason, they organize and ‘synthesize’ data quite differently from us, and therefore are disposed to make quite different predictions. Likewise, they will have very different views about which of two theories is the simpler, which shows conclusively that simplicity per se is not truth-conducive, and should instead be classified as a pragmatic virtue.21 Of course, we have yet to prove that such creatures really are possible, but suppose, for the sake of argument, that they are. The pragmatic justification demonstrates that it is rational for such creatures to adopt an inductivist strategy, and for exactly the same reason as before: such creatures have no alternative. The trouble, however, is that their inductivist strategy is incompatible with ours since they project different properties. A critical step in our argument now follows. The above point is not wholly a fact about alien rationality. It is also something that we ourselves can see. It has, after all, just been explained by us and to us. Therefore we can see that, according to our own criteria of rationality, these creatures ought to make grue-type inductions. Against this, we might still insist that, since these poor creatures are out of tune with reality, they nevertheless still ought to adopt our sort of strategy since, after all, we know that ours is the right one. But this is precisely what we do not know. Our justification of induction is not reliabilist, but pragmatic in character, so we lack any grounds for even recommending, let alone insisting on, our strategy to creatures for whom it is not thus pragmatically appropriate. Cognitive maxims should not be universalized unrestrictedly. This is not in any way to weaken our own adherence to our strategy, for it was only designed for people who project as we do. What we simply have is a kind of methodological relativism. We ought to make one sort of prediction, and the grue-users ought to make another sort. In particular, we would be irrational if we made grue-type predictions, and the grue-users would be irrational – by our own standards as well as theirs – if they made green-type predictions. There is nothing logically odd about this, nor is it even all that surprising. The consequences of this point are nevertheless impressive. For what we have shown is that to demand that our own inductivist strategy be universally adopted does not merely overreach our justificatory norms. It actually transgresses them. We ought not to demand the universal acceptance of, for example, the proposition, ‘Emeralds will continue to be green after midnight’. We therefore ought not to believe that proposition, if belief is understood to satisfy the UUP. The same is true of any proposition which relies on induction for its justification – in other words, (virtually) every proposition. Ergo, we ought not to believe anything.
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This argument – which is absolutely central to our overall thesis – hinges on the plausible view that every creature’s cognitive methodology should include adherence to local inductive norms. However, matters are complicated by the fact that another universal norm, surely, is that every creature’s cognitive outcome should be empirically adequate: and here we have a problem, for green-like and grue-like predictions cannot both be empirically adequate. If we accept our own green-like predictions to be rational, then we must regard grue-like predictions to lead to empirically inadequate results, and this ensures that we cannot after all regard the grue-user’s alternative predictions to be locally rational. We might be able to relativize rationality norms, but we cannot relativize empirical adequacy: if a theory is empirically inadequate for us, then it is empirically inadequate for every creature. This apparently implies that our attitude towards the grue-user’s methodology is incoherent – or, at the very least, embodies serious internal tensions. There are two possible responses to this. One is to conclude that there is something fundamentally wrong with the very idea of a grueuser; the other is to conclude that induction about the unobserved is incurably irrational. The first response is intuitively the more attractive, but we should exercise caution here. To adopt the second response is really no more than to accept fully the Humean picture which we have already adopted. We already know and have conceded that there are grave difficulties involved in justifying our inductive practices, though this need not lead to any practical problems. Moreover, all we have really shown is that either the grue-users or ourselves will be sadly disappointed at some time in the future, which is not the same as supposing that grue-using is itself an incoherent idea. Odd creatures have managed to survive for many years before unexpected events ensured their demise, and we do not yet have an argument to show that there could not be creatures here and now who are cognitively disposed to make (to us) eccentric inductions about a time yet to be experienced. In any case, our primary interest is with the picture of the world that we have here and now, and problems about empirical adequacy do not arise in this way. Our real concern is underdetermination, and it is to this that we now turn.
2.3 The underdetermination of theories by data The thesis of the underdetermination of theories by data (UTD) has been much discussed in the literature of the philosophy of science. Although, as we noted, it can be traced back to the ancient sceptics, it is
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associated primarily with Quine and Duhem.22 It is usually understood to be the claim that, given any theory T , and any body of evidence E which supports T , we can always find another theory T that is equally well supported by E. If E is all the evidence that could possibly be obtained, then T and T are said to be empirically equivalent. The sceptical problem is now obvious: if T and T are empirically equivalent then there can be no good reason for preferring one over the other, since neither reason nor experience – our only two sources of knowledge – can distinguish between them. Reason will not distinguish them, since they are both internally consistent; experience will not distinguish them, since they are both empirically adequate. We therefore can have no reason to believe any theory to be true. Indeed, we can have no reason to believe any singular non-observational consequence of any theory to be true if we can find an empirically equivalent alternative which has the opposite consequence. This idea forms the backbone of van Fraassen’s constructive empiricist thesis that the aim of science is not truth but empirical adequacy.23 This idea can be questioned in a number of ways, however: 1. Just because T and T are both consistent with E, does it follow that they are equally supported by E? 2. Will T and T be sufficiently different for the problem to be worth worrying about? 3. Can we in any case be sure that T will always have empirically equivalent alternatives if it is sufficiently all-embracing? Realists frequently answer (1) in the negative by appealing to induction.24 To say that one thing is supported by another is to say more than that the first implies the second. Of course, it is notoriously difficult to define the notion of inductive support or confirmation, but anyone who accepts induction at all must accept that there is such a thing. Moreover, it must also be accepted that confirmation is different from reverse entailment, otherwise we shall be landed with Hempel’s and Goodman’s paradoxes. Thus ‘This raven is black’ may provide some confirmation of ‘All ravens are black’, but ‘This non-black thing is a nonraven’ typically provides no confirmation at all of ‘All non-black things are non-ravens’, even though the examples are syntactically similar. After all, the non-black thing in question might be a red ballpoint pen, and the fact that it is not a raven in no way confirms the generalization ‘All non-black things are non-ravens’ (which, of course, is logically equivalent to the original generalization ‘All ravens are black’). Thus, it may
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be argued that although T and T are both equally consistent with all the evidence available (or, indeed, all the evidence there could possibly be), this does not mean that there are not good empirical reasons for preferring one over the other. There is more to empirical reasoning than mere deduction. This is an effective criticism of many would-be sceptical uses of UTD. Reasoning from evidence to theory – variously known as ‘theoretical induction’, ‘abduction’ or ‘inference to the best explanation’ – is very closely linked to ordinary enumerative inductive inference, so it seems perverse to accept the latter but reject the former. However, this objection is powerless against the kind of critique that we are offering, since our scepticism is about all kinds of inductive inference. In fact, this theoretical induction yields a more difficult challenge than does ordinary induction, since we lose the incoherence problem mentioned earlier. Note that UTD is really a combination of two underdetermination theses: (a) The underdetermination of theories by the observable (b) The underdetermination of the observable by the observed.25 Thesis (b) is the classic problem of induction, and, as we noted above, it requires us to adopt a mixed attitude towards grue-using practices. On the one hand, we are required to support such practices on the grounds that they are as rational for grue-users as our own green-using practices are for ourselves. Yet on the other hand, we are also required to abhor such practices since we must suppose that grue-users will make predictions that will lead to disaster by their own standards as well as ours, since all parties want their theories to be empirically adequate and empirical adequacy cannot be relativized. However, (a) has no such problems. If grue-users adopt a theory that is empirically equivalent to ours, and is consistent with all possible evidence, then they will never find themselves going observably wrong. Our attitude towards their theorizing should therefore be one of uncompromising approval. The second line of objection to UTD is that empirically equivalent theories are too similar for there to be much of a problem anyway. The strongest version of this idea comes, of course, from logical positivism. The verification principle states that the meaning of a sentence is its empirical content. It immediately follows that if two sentences have the same empirical content, then they have the same semantic content, that is to say, are synonymous. Thus empirically equivalent theories can be no more than notational variants of each other, and choice between
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them can be grounded in nothing more than convention (in so far as there is any choice to be made at all). Most people repudiate the verification principle nowadays (at least, they think they do), and it may seem that this is no more than a historical curiosity. However, it is notable that actual examples of pairs of empirically equivalent theories do tend to look unimpressively similar. van Fraassen gives the example of two versions of Newtonian mechanics: in one, the centre of gravity of the universe is at absolute rest; in the other, it moves at a constant non-zero velocity. Even if we reject verificationism, we must concede that the difference, although meaningful, is small. Much the same is true of Reichenbach’s geometrodynamics example where we may choose between a non-Euclidean geometry or a universal force. The point is that nobody need suppose that it really matters all that much if we latch on to the wrong theory. The Quine–Duhem thesis is frequently used here to show that nontrivial empirical equivalents always exist, and this leads us to our third line of objection. This thesis says that no statement can be empirically tested in isolation. Any theory has the empirical consequences it does only when taken in conjunction with many auxiliary hypotheses. The upshot is that any empirical proposition, however bizarre, can be saved from falsification if one is prepared to make enough compensating adjustments elsewhere in the system. Such a proposition would therefore form a part of an alternative theory which is not only empirically equivalent to the standard theory, but also impressively different from it. This remains the case even if each theory is expanded to become a ‘total theory’, one which accommodates everything.26 Some care is needed here, however. It is not only verificationists who could challenge the assumption that the meanings of theoretical terms will remain unchanged if such sweeping adjustments are made, and there is good reason to be uneasy here. To take a trivial example, consider the sentence ‘Cats bark and dogs mew’. Ostensibly any theory that includes this must be radically different from our own. However, suppose that falsification is deferred indefinitely by constructing a suitably paranoid fantasy about how cats habitually disguise themselves as dogs, and vice versa. We might be impressed by this. But it would surely be more reasonable to conclude that we have not a radically new theory, but exactly the original theory, though one where the meanings of ‘cat’ and ‘dog’ have been reversed. This new theory may include the sentence ‘Cats bark and dogs mew’, but it does not imply that cats bark and dogs mew, since the quoted sentence is no longer in standard English. Less trivial examples are also open to a similar risk.
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For Quine himself, this problem does not arise in quite this way because he denies that individual sentences have determinate meanings in any case. Nevertheless, it is important that we be able to get around this objection if our thesis is to remain interesting. Undoubtedly, it is difficult to provide convincing examples of empirically equivalent total theories of the world which are not either trivial variations of the original or else hopelessly contrived. We must remember, however, that we do not intend such alternative theories to be ones that we ourselves should ever wish to consider adopting. We are not recommending a kind of scepticism that places our own theory choice in serious jeopardy; and, like the scientific realists, we should be delighted if it were to turn out that there is only one possible total theory that is seriously available to us. Rather, we wish to show that there are alternatives which creatures quite unlike ourselves might wish to adopt. This is a quite different sort of task, and much harder to make convincing, since, as we shall show in the next chapter, it is difficult to describe a truly alien intelligence in any detail. Nevertheless, the distinction between theory and observation is highly controversial. Indeed, a very natural criticism of van Fraassen’s CE is that any distinction of this kind is likely to be not merely obscure, but wholly untenable. It is undoubtedly difficult to draw a sharp distinction here. For example, does observation under an electron microscope count as pure observation? Since all that one actually sees is a rather strangelooking image on a computer monitor, and since a massive amount of physical theory needs to be involved in its interpretation, we might say not. But what about observation with an ordinary optical microscope? With spectacles? Is the sentence ‘The moon has a cold interior’ theoretical or observational? Theory is certainly involved in its knowledge, but should we say that the moon is a theoretical entity or that heat is a theoretical property? There is no doubt more than one issue involved here, but the difficulties are plain enough. Still, it may be protested that a fuzzy borderline area does not itself invalidate a distinction; and we could treat the terms ‘theoretical’ and ‘observational’ as scaling adjectives, and speak of one thing as being more (or less) theoretical than another thing. After all, it would be clearly absurd to suppose that ‘yellow’ and ‘electron’, for example, are equally theoretical in character.27 UTD could then be reformulated as the underdetermination of the more theoretical by the less theoretical. However, the point can be pressed further. Following Kant, it may be insisted that all observation is theory-laden. Merely to see a tree as a tree, for example, involves the view that it is a physical object
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which exists even when unperceived, has certain basic causal powers, and so on. The classical empiricist idea that all experience is grounded in a pure, unadulterated ‘Given’ – ideas, impressions, sense data or whatever – is now deservedly unfashionable, and we might agree with Kant that ‘intuitions without concepts are blind’.28 However, it is unclear that it helps us with the sceptical problem. Might it not mean simply that underdetermination now applies to the whole of cognition? That is to say, rejection of the theory/observation distinction might show that the Martians and we can be expected to disagree not only on a theoretical subset of our beliefs, whilst agreeing on a purely observational core, but about everything empirical. Underdetermination, and the scepticism that it apparently implies, will go all the way down. This is not unduly obvious, however. On the one hand, it does seem that the thesis that all observation is theory-laden is merely what we end up with when the borderline between the theoretical and the observational is pushed further and further towards the observational end. If so, then the locus of underdetermination, we might conclude, will likewise be pushed further and further inwards until it eventually comes to embrace everything. On the other hand, however, it may be protested that without a viable distinction between theory and observation to begin with, we can never formulate UTD in the first place. Far from capturing the whole terrain of empirical cognition, the sceptic will instead merely undercut his own position. Putnam, for example, in the Dewey Lectures, celebrates Austin’s rejection of the representative theory of perception and the idea of an interface between mind and world; and this forms an important part of his rejection of Metaphysical Realism with its conception of truth as epistemically wholly unconstrained, an idea which we have been assuming.29 Underdetermination seems to require a core of fixed, theoretically neutral data – that is the same data for each of the various competing theories under consideration. Lose the theoretical neutrality, and we apparently lose the whole underdetermination thesis as well, and with it our main argument for scepticism. This is a difficult issue, but the theory/data distinction can be understood in more than one way. Thus Quine himself writes:
[W]e can investigate the world, and man as a part of it, and thus find out what cues he could have of what goes on around him. Subtracting his cues from his world view, we get man’s net contribution as the
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difference. This difference marks the extent of man’s sovereignty – the domain within which he can revise his theory while saving the data.30 Quine talks here of ‘cues’, and elsewhere talks of ‘input’ or ‘stimuli’, but these are typically understood in purely physical terms. He certainly rejects the idea of ‘sense data’ as traditionally understood, that is to say, a mental interface from which alone more substantial empirical claims must be inferred. Rather, he talks in this context of ‘surface neurons’ or ‘surface irritations’. This might seem paradoxical, for we cannot characterize such entities except in neurophysiological, and therefore highly theoretical terms. Likewise, the word ‘theory’ is given an unconventional meaning in the quoted passage, namely ‘world view’. Yet once one has grasped the terminology, the point remains clear enough. Moreover, it is obvious that what Quine calls ‘man’s net contribution’ is going to extend very widely indeed. At any rate, the point is surely not undermined by the (highly plausible) thesis that all our beliefs, including beliefs about the immediately phenomenological, require some form of ‘theoretical’ processing. What is crucial here is that there is a fundamental difference between input and evidence, a difference that is easily overlooked when we talk of data, a seriously ambiguous term. We originally defined UTD in terms of evidence, and this is still fairly standard. However, evidence is not neurophysiological in character, but is rather something that the subject can grasp explicitly and use as premises in inferences. It does not even have to be epistemologically more basic than the theory it supports, for it might consist of a set of initial hypotheses which are later confirmed if the theory built on them is highly successful. After all, empirical justification is typically holistic in character, and the holism may well penetrate throughout the whole system, even down to the most basic level. Data in the sense of input, by contrast, should be understood in a very different way, as the above quote shows. Quine later confirmed this point: If there was still an unintended overtone of sensory quality in my reference to surface irritation [in Quine 1953], it was effectively banished by the time I wrote Word and Object; for there I wrote explicitly of the triggering of sensory receptors. Nobody could suppose that I supposed that people are on the whole thinking or talking about the triggering of their nerve endings; few people, statistically speaking, know about their nerve endings.31
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Nevertheless, it is all too clear that UTD can be understood in more than one way, and that this is not always fully appreciated. It is, however, with the more authentically Quinean sense, where ‘data’ is to be understood as meaning input rather than evidence, that the underdetermination thesis is of most immediate importance to us. How does UTD, so construed, lead us to an all-embracing scepticism? The most basic fact at work here is that any theory of the world must extend way beyond any input available to any organism because of the very nature of empirical cognition. There is a considerable loss of information when a three-dimensional reality is encoded within a twodimensional retinal image, for example. Quine makes it plain that this is how he understands the underdetermination thesis.32 It is still only very poorly understood how the brain manages to construct a threedimensional model of reality on the basis of this exiguous information. Yet even if we did understand it, we might reasonably wonder how the brain ‘knows’ how to construct the right model, that is to say, the one that matches the original reality. More generally, any internally connected inhabitant of an n-dimensional reality will have, at most, an (n − 1)-dimensional boundary, and the state of that boundary will not determine the state of the overall reality. This is just geometry. Moreover, since the inhabitant has nothing to go on except the state of his boundary when it comes to working out what goes on outside himself (given a few reasonable assumptions about causal contiguity, and ignoring, for the moment, the question of internalist versus externalist theories of mental content), this instantly leads to a problem of massive underdetermination. This elementary idea makes no use of the notion of evidence, or indeed any specific account of how knowledge is gained from perception. Nor, indeed, does it concern itself with whether there are any basic evidential propositions (or occasion sentences, or Protokolsätze or whatever else they might be called). The point is that we are not required, at this stage, to decide. Yet this elementary idea is quite powerful enough to give us what we need: we shall call it geometrical underdetermination. However, we need to look carefully at how this works. The main point is simple enough. Given any input, for example, the input that I have been given throughout my entire life, we can construct not only the standard model of reality, but also innumerable alternatives: possible worlds which are seriously different from the original but which produce the same boundary states. Although it might never be reasonable for me to suppose that any of these non-standard possibilities are actual, the possibility remains that an alien creature with the same boundary
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states might think differently, and with as good a justification as my own. However, leaving the aliens on one side for the moment, it may still be protested that we have not demonstrated conclusively that these non-standard models are genuinely incompatible with the original. For example, Quine himself is wholly dismissive of the idea of empirically equivalent, but logically incompatible, theories. The most obvious examples arise when two terms are systematically interchanged. We considered this point earlier when we considered the sentence ‘Cats bark and dogs mew’; Quine prefers an example where the words ‘molecule’ and ‘electron’ are interchanged, and his solution is, indeed, that we merely have notational variation, which ensures that both theories can be true at once. But what of other examples?
Suppose, however, two empirically equivalent theory formulations that we see no way of reconciling by such a reinterpretation of terms. We probably would not know that they are empirically equivalent, for the usual way of finding them so would be by hitting upon such a reinterpretation. Still, let us suppose that the two formulations are in fact empirically equivalent even though not known to be; and let us suppose further that all of the implied observation categoricals are in fact true, although, again, not known to be. Nothing more, surely, can be required for the truth of either theory formulation. Are they both true? I say yes. But, again, they may be logically incompatible, despite their empirical equivalence. This raises the specter of cultural relativism: each is evidently true only from its own point of view. However, the specter is easily laid, by a move just as trivial as our recent switch of ‘molecule’ and ‘electron’. Being incompatible, the two theory formulations that we are imagining must evaluate some sentence oppositely. Since they are nevertheless empirically equivalent, that sentence must contain terms that are short on observational criteria. But then we can just as well pick out one of those terms and treat it as if it were two independent words, one in the one theory formulation and another in the other. We can mark this by changing the spelling of the word in one of the two theory-formulations. Pressing this trivial expedient, we can resolve all conflict between the two theory formulations. Both can be admitted thenceforward as true descriptions of one and the same world in different terms. The threat of relativism of truth is averted.33
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There are several points that arise here. First, and most immediately, it is far from clear that we are allowed to reinterpret terms just because it is convenient to do so. Words do not mean whatever we choose them to mean, a fact that Quine cannot always see, given his general hostility to word-meaning.34 Pragmatic considerations are certainly allowed when it comes to interpretation, of course, but there are other constraints as well; and to suppose that empirically equivalent total theories must automatically have the same total semantic content is to assume a kind of global verificationism that is not much more plausible than the original local variety. Quine is right, of course, that we do not ordinarily suppose two theories to be empirically equivalent unless we can effect some kind of reinterpretation of theoretical terms, but our geometrical point does not require us to deal with ordinary possibilities. Moreover, we know that our bizarre theory-formulations mean exactly what they appear to mean because we have ourselves constructed them. This relates to a second point. Some, notably Quine himself, reject the possibility of alien beliefsystems on the grounds that any interpretation of alien language must satisfy the ‘principle of charity’, that is the principle that most of what is said and thought (by anyone) must be true. We shall see, in the next chapter, that this principle is, in fact, highly implausible; but at the moment it should be noted that, even if it were correct, it would not prove the point. The principle of charity is intended primarily to apply to ‘radical translation’, that is translation between two groups between whom there has been no previous cultural contact. Yet this is clearly not what is happening here, for it is we ourselves who are constructing the geometrical alternatives, and we can be reasonably confident that our words mean exactly what they look as though they mean. True, decipherment of our neighbours’ speech also requires interpretation, and translation is not logically required to be homophonic, even where object- and meta-language are essentially the same. Nevertheless, we surely cannot interpret non-homophonically our very own utterances from one moment to the next without real absurdity. Our confidence here should not be shaken by the fact that the alternative realities we describe are wholly incompatible with the world as we ourselves take it to be. For example, we may construct a reality where physical objects cease to exist when unobserved. True, to describe the full story (including the laws that these ‘objects’ need to satisfy) would take considerable effort and ingenuity, but it can surely be done. Now, of course, we might be able to reinterpret such a tale in such a way as to make it compatible with the standard story (by giving the phrase ‘physical object’ some entirely new meaning, for example). But (a) there is no particular reason
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to think that this can actually be done, except, perhaps, in some unreasonably artificial way; and (b), even if it could be done, it remains wholly implausible to suppose that this is what we, working within our own well-understood language, really meant all along. The notion of meaning just cannot be manipulated in this manner. And why should we want to do this anyway? The path of wisdom, surely, is to concede that there are indeed many total theories empirically equivalent to our own which are genuinely incompatible with it (i.e. they really cannot all be true): for example, the standard brain-in-a-vat view and the thesis that physical objects go out of existence when no one is observing them. The point, though, is that such theories, despite possessing the virtues of empirical adequacy and internal consistency, have deep pragmatic flaws concerning lack of simplicity, general psychological repulsiveness and so forth – and this gives us ample reason to pay absolutely no attention to them (outside certain specialized philosophical contexts, that is). What more do we really need? Still, the notion of geometrical underdetermination needs careful handling. Of course, it may be said, we can describe any number of possible worlds, and be confident that they are genuinely different from our own, for to deny this is tantamount to supposing that we can only grasp one possible world, namely the actual one. However, it would be a mistake to suppose that we can just mentally ‘cut a hole’ in some bizarrely specified world, insert our normal selves into the gap, and suppose that we now have an alternative world of the relevant kind; for the assumption that we really have been so inserted is not innocent. Thought-experiments can deceive us here, and Bernard Williams, for example, warns that the difference between imagining a situation and imagining ourselves within that situation is elusive.35 It may be thought that since we are only required to imagine a combination of physical entities we are unlikely to be deceived here, but even physical combinations embody subtle constraints. For example, John Foster argues that spatial location itself requires a kind of causal positioning. Specifically, he argues that it is conceptually impossible for the contents of two regions of space to be exchanged systematically (so that when an object approaches the one region, it instead suddenly appears in the other, and so on).36 We are not required to posit anything quite as odd as that, but without some degree of continuity and causal coherence at and around the boundary between our bodies and the remainder of this non-standard reality, the hypothesis that we could be a part of such a reality becomes, at best, hopelessly contrived, and, at worst, incoherent. However, there is surely no geometrical impossibility with the
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sort of scenario that we are trying to construct here, even if we insist on heavy constraints of continuity and differentiability of input. In any case, since our powers of discrimination are only finite, we can relax the geometrical constraints so as to include a small margin of error. If we then construct our non-standard reality by varying the original reality only very gradually as we move outwards from the body’s surface, we can end up with spectacular differences. We must allow some peculiar features to the construction, of course, particularly concerning the laws of nature, but given that the results are meant to seem natural only to grue-users and their ilk, this is not itself much of an objection. Evidently, the idea will lose credibility if such constructions are (to us) grossly artificial. Yet, as we have seen, the artificiality can be kept under a good deal of control. Our thought-experiments are certainly more satisfactory than the exceedingly familiar malin génie or brain-in-a-vat scenarios, where it defies all our powers of imagination to suppose that there could be real creatures who genuinely believe that they yield scientifically more useful theories than the standard variety.37 Theories that posit merely systematic geometrical distortion of physical input, by contrast, are not contrived in anything like the same sort of way. Indeed, they are only natural developments of hypotheses that have in any event been discussed in serious scientific contexts, as we have already noted. It might still be complained that these fantasy scenarios should not be allowed to dominate the proceedings. Such lurid possibilities play no role in our actual inquiries, after all; and even if we are later able to explain why we can discount them, it may be suspected that they should never have been permitted to enter the discussion in the first place. Moreover, the idea that we cannot ‘rule out’ these alternatives, which we occasionally rely on, is tendentious, since to say that we cannot ‘rule out’ X is rather too close to just saying that we do not know that X does not obtain.38 An anti-sceptic such as G.E. Moore might insist that the burden of proof here should fall entirely on the revisionist, and that we should not even consider these alternative scenarios unless we already have reasons for doubting our ordinary beliefs, that is to say, reasons which emerge from our ordinary inquiries themselves. However, it is not clear that this strategy will work against our kind of scepticism. Ours, after all, derives from certain facts about human cognition, facts which our own inquiries reveal. True, such inquiries are of a specialized character, yet the desire to find out how human cognition works does not mark an unacceptable departure from the ordinary. It is difficult to see why we should have to draw a distinction between ‘ordinary’ inquiries and philosophical investigations about their status, especially
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if we are professional philosophers. Moreover, if we have an argument, as we do, that shows that even if cognition works optimally we have no right to believe anything, then this argument cannot just be ignored on the grounds that we never have to pay attention to it unless we are doing philosophy. It may nevertheless be wondered if geometrical underdetermination really gives us the kind of epistemological framework that we need. In construing data as input rather than as evidence, is there not a risk that we shall lose the empiricist insight that all evidence is ultimately empirical – if only because we have ceased to talk about evidence altogether (and any contrast that it might have with theory)? Indeed, might we not lose sight of empiricism as a distinctive thesis altogether, and with it the Humean framework that we have been largely assuming? Davidson, for example, writes: This dualism of scheme and content, of organizing system and something waiting to be organized, cannot be made intelligible and defensible. It is itself a dogma of empiricism, a third dogma. The third, and perhaps the last, for if we give it up it is not clear that there is anything distinctive left to call empiricism.39 An immediate objection to this is that neurophysiological input is not the same as evidence (or pre-schematized content).40 Nevertheless, the notions are importantly related. We cannot identify any specific piece of evidence with any specific input, to be sure, but we might well say that the former is supervenient on the latter, in the sense that if two people have had exactly the same input throughout their lives, then they will necessarily have been given exactly the same overall evidence. This claim does manage to formulate the insight that all evidence comes ultimately from the senses, and that there are no ‘noetic rays’, or whatever, that enable the mind to access directly any part of the world that does not in some way affect it; and, moreover, without demanding a foundationalist theory of justification, or talk about the ‘Given’ or anything like that. Although we have still not explained fully what is meant by ‘evidence’, we have suggested a fairly plausible analysis of the fundamental empiricist thesis that all evidence is empirical in character; and we still retain the basic point upon which our scepticism depends: namely, that our evidence, so characterized, will inevitably fall some way short of what is needed to give an unqualified justification of our beliefs.
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2.4 Externalist criticisms Nevertheless, this picture is open to another important line of objection, for we need to consider not only these geometrico-physical constraints, but also some more recently identified semantic constraints if we are to be satisfied that we have accurately described a situation where we ourselves would actually be a part of a specified non-standard reality. In particular, it may be protested that we have been treating mental content – for example, evidential content – in a traditional, Cartesian, internalist manner, and have neglected the (extensive) literature that argues that externalist alternatives can be developed, which effectively undermine any simple distinction between what is ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ a person’s mind.41 Internalists suppose that the mind is wholly within the head in the sense that if two individuals undergo qualitatively identical internal states (so that they are indistinguishable from within), then they must undergo exactly similar mental states, that is states with exactly the same mental content. Yet Putnam famously considers the idea of Twin-Earth which is just like Earth, except that its oceans and rivers contain not H2 O, but a superficially indistinguishable, yet chemically quite different substance, XYZ. Twin-Earth’s inhabitants use the term ‘water’ to denote this stuff in a way that makes their linguistic behaviour indistinguishable from our own. Putnam insists, against Locke, for example, that it is real essence, not nominal essence, that determines the meanings of natural kind terms. ‘Water’ means ‘Any substance with the same (possibly unknown) internal constitution as this (ostensively identified) stuff’, and since Earthling A and Twin-Earthling B will point to chemically different items here – different external items – it follows that they must attach different meanings to the word. The sentence ‘Water quenches thirst’, for example, will thus have different meanings for them, thereby ensuring that the beliefs that A and B each express by this sentence have different contents. Yet their internal states are indistinguishable. As Putnam puts it, ‘[M]eanings just ain’t in the head!’42 We might add that beliefs are not there either. Such externalist approaches provide a radical challenge to the notion of an ‘interface’ between an individual and her environment, since not only the theory/observation distinction but also the more basic idea of geometrical underdetermination is brought into question. Externalism undermines any attempts to locate the boundary of an individual, that is to say, the surface which divides the inside from the outside, and this might be thought to present a problem. We cannot have surface irritations without a surface.
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Further reflection shows, however, that the immediate problem is not that serious. Surface irritations are physical in character, and externalism does not undermine physical boundaries, only supposed mental ones. True, we now have grounds for rejecting the principle, mentioned earlier, that same overall surface irritations imply same overall empirical evidence, since evidential content – which is mental content – may turn out to include external items as constituents in some strong sense, items which could vary independently of the surface irritations, a point to which we shall return. Yet even if we go along with this, it surely does not undermine the possibility of cognitive divergence. As long as it is possible for the world beyond my physical boundary to be very different from the way it is, even though the boundary state itself remains the same, I lack the means to rule out that alternative possibility. Should I be magically transported into a world where the possibility actually obtains, then the difference will be unknowable. True, the evidence available to me might change when so transported, if evidence is understood in an externalist sense, but that will not help because I shall not be able to tell that this has happened. It is likewise true that I have to be more careful about how I describe even my own mental states, for the sentence ‘I am now thinking about water’, for example, carries direct implications about my environment which may no longer be true (at least, according to some versions of externalism). Yet this surely only makes matters worse as far as any attempt to refute scepticism is concerned! Because externalists subvert the traditional interface between mind and world, it may seem that they automatically undermine any sceptical arguments which arise when knowledge is seen as involving some controversial sort of inference from what goes on in the former to what goes on in the latter. But this is a mistake. It may be that if I were to inhabit an alternative reality, then my beliefs would automatically be different, albeit undetectably so, because their contents include their referents as actual constituents. However, it does not follow that they will automatically be sufficiently different so as to be true. For example, if the alternative reality is one where objects do bizarre things when I do not observe them, then this fact will be cognitively inaccessible to me regardless of how much we try to externalize content. My belief that unobserved trees behave normally, for example, will not be made to match this new reality merely by introducing an undetected semantic shift in the word ‘tree’, since not all behavioural facts about trees (or their variants) follow simply from the meanings of the words in question. This remains true regardless of how much they are allowed to shift their meanings from one sceptical scenario to the next.
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This point needs to be developed in more detail. Suppose that amongst the many things that I believe about a given tree are the following: 1. is solid; 2. has been in the garden continuously for 15 years; 3. shed none of its leaves last night. Suppose further that my counterfactual self is in a counterpart reality with an exactly similar boundary, but where physical objects go out of existence when not perceived. Now, we might be able to accommodate (1) on the grounds that the word ‘solid’ will have a different meaning in our alternative reality. We may mark the difference by using the word ‘solid*’ instead, where solidity* relates to solidity rather as XYZ relates to water. The difference is relatively unimportant here, since the chief indicator of solidity concerns what happens when two solid objects meet; by contrast, the impermanence aspect is less significant, and perhaps forms no part of the meaning of the term at all. We can therefore say that (a) * (i.e. our counterpart tree) will be solid* in the nonstandard reality, and (b) my original belief that is solid and my parallel belief that * is solid* are psychologically indistinguishable. The sceptic has therefore been stalled, for the moment at least, since my counterpart belief has ‘reached out’ into the world sufficiently far to ensure that it remains true, even though it appears to be no different from the original belief, and even though the world beyond my boundary is significantly different and in exactly the sort of way that was supposed to generate scepticism. This may sound like the beginnings of a useful anti-sceptical strategy. The problem, though, is that it is highly implausible to suppose that this trick can be continued indefinitely. We just might be able to handle example (2) above by modifying the notion of continuity, perhaps in the way suggested by Hume when he discussed continued existence, though a serious strain is already apparent. Yet what about (3)? What sort of parallel concept can we associate with that of shedding that allows that a tree (or a tree*) can shed* leaves at a time when it does not exist at all? Perhaps we could find one if we tried really hard. But now consider other worlds where the tree does exist, but where leaves are shed only for new leaves to sprout in their place 5 minutes later. The old leaves then vanish 10 minutes after hitting the ground. The upshot is that * ends up looking much as it did the last time I looked at it, thus prompting me to say that it never shed* any leaves during the night, a claim whose unstarred version is certainly false. Now, we can perhaps
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construct a parallel concept of shedding* that guarantees that * never shed* any leaves during the time under consideration, though since this concept is required to hold good not only for this particular situation, but also for all the indefinitely many other possible situations that could be imagined here, it will have to be considerably more contrived even than grue. Given our penchant for outrageous possibilities, of course, it might be retorted that we are in no position to complain about this sort of thing! But it must be remembered that it is not enough that the proposition that * shed* no leaves be true in such a world; it must also be the case that my counterpart’s belief that * shed* no leaves be psychologically indistinguishable from my belief that shed no leaves, and this surely cannot be so by any stretch of the imagination. To see this, we need only ask my counterpart what he himself understands the word ‘shedding*’ to mean. Specifically, we should ask him whether a tree would be said to shed* leaves if it drops them – only for them later to vanish, but not before exactly similar leaves grow swiftly on the tree. If my counterpart is psychologically the same as me, then he must surely answer ‘Yes’, and for the same reason that I would if asked the unstarred version of the question. We might go further and ask him whether the same would be true if this were to happen when the tree was unobserved. Again, he would surely also have to answer affirmatively. But how can anyone now seriously suppose that he really means by ‘shed*’ the bizarre interpretation that we have just foisted on to him? We could only get away with this by a massive reinterpretation of just about everything else that he says in response to our questions about what he thinks he means. Again, a strict principle of charity might be invoked here to argue that truth must be maximized at all costs, that semantic truths form only a small subset of all truths, and that semantic beliefs should therefore be sacrificed for the greater good; but is it really charitable to insist that my unfortunate counterpart is so utterly deluded about himself that he never means what he thinks he means? An alternative strategy is to retreat to an anti-realist semantics. Thus, a phenomenalist might insist that all anyone in either world can mean by the sentence ‘ shed no leaves last night’ is that all actual and possible observations confirm this sentence. The trouble here, however, is that counterfactual observations precisely do not confirm the sentence in the non-standard world. Perhaps counterfactuals, relying, as they apparently do, on questions about comparative similarity of possible worlds, are too elusive to be able to provide a conclusive objection here (especially since aliens differ from us so much about what is similar to what), but the problem remains that we, from the outside, can see
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that my counterpart’s utterance of the sentence ‘ shed no leaves last night’ cannot possibly express a true proposition unless the words are given radically different meanings from standard English. Of course, if we can help ourselves to a conception of truth that is itself epistemically constrained in such a way as to render all such world-evidence divergences impossible in principle, then the problem will evaporate. However, as we have already noted in Chapter 1, and will develop further in the final chapter, such conceptions are deeply implausible. The problem, essentially, is that our bizarre constructions are all too obviously genuine logical possibilities. However, the externalist anti-sceptic might be able to turn this point to his advantage. If it is so absurd to suppose that meanings should vary so drastically and undetectably, then does this not show the unintelligibility of the sceptical scenario? Even if a bizarre reality can be understood as an abstract possibility, any attempt to locate ourselves within any such reality will, according to the externalist, require that we fail to mean whatever it is we think we mean. This is what we ourselves will be required to suppose. Indeed, in extreme cases, we may have to say of ourselves that we do not mean anything at all. This is clearly a selfdefeating claim. Nevertheless, it may be insisted, it is not externalism but scepticism that has been defeated. This argument is reminiscent of Putnam’s celebrated attempt to refute the claim that I am a brain in a vat.43 The point is that since a brain in a vat does not learn the meanings of words like ‘brain’ by reference to real brains, he (it?) cannot mean that he is a brain in a vat when considering the sentence ‘I am a brain in a vat’. The English sentence ‘I am a brain in a vat’, as opposed to its samesounding counterpart in Brain-in-a-vat-ese, can only be understood by creatures of whom it is not true. More generally, our descriptions of seriously eccentric worlds can only be understood by people who do not inhabit them. This is a neat argument but, as has often been pointed out, it applies at best only to cases where the subject learnt his language within the odd situation. If we were to learn English in a world where most of what we think and say is true, and are then transported elsewhere, then our meanings will come with us and will be largely unaffected by the new environment. Of course, we are still required to assume that the world was originally the way we roughly took it to be, and this rules out many kinds of extreme sceptical scenario, but it is clear that this is nowhere near enough. The point about water and XYZ types of example is that there is not really all that much semantic difference involved. This is why we are in
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a position to allow that the mental content of the Twin-Earthian belief is different from that of the original terrestrial one, even though their psychological character is the same; for even if we agree that content and character should not automatically be tied together, we cannot plausibly allow them to diverge too much. Moreover, what underlies their separability is the fact that we are dealing with terms for natural kinds, and not all terms are like that. This ensures that externalist strategies will not do what is needed here. Let us grant that total evidence is supervenient not merely on total boundary states, as we originally suggested, but rather on total boundary states plus whatever goes on in the subject’s mind. Given that evidence inevitably requires interpretation, and hence mentality, this is reasonable enough. Let us also grant that the subject’s mind extends way beyond what is merely inside the boundary. The fact remains, however, that it is still possible to vary reality to an enormous extent without changing the evidence even as the term is now understood. The mind may ‘reach out’ into the world, but it grasps no more than a tiny subset of all the facts about it. My evidence may supervene on my mental content (including boundary states), but the world itself certainly does not, and no matter how much content we allow, and how much it is externalized. It follows, therefore, that there is still a huge gap between evidence and reality, and that the sceptic has not yet been answered.
2.5 Transcendental arguments There is, however, another kind of anti-sceptical strategy that needs to be investigated before the arguments of the previous sections may be regarded as conclusive. We have assumed that all our evidence is ultimately empirical in character, and have thus neglected the Kantian thesis that there is an important a priori component in human knowledge, a component which, moreover, plays a decisively anti-sceptical role. Kant attempted to show this primarily by means of transcendental arguments, and arguments of this kind have been much considered and debated ever since. A transcendental argument is typically of the form: We have experience We cannot have experience unless p ————————————————— p.
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The second premise is required to be a priori: we are not concerned here with empirical conditions (that oxygen be present, for example), but only with the a priori conditions for any experience to be possible. We often qualify this by restricting the first premise to experience of a specific type, for example, spatio-temporal experience, or experience that can be characterized using language. The first premise is supposed to be so basic that not even a philosophical sceptic can seriously deny it, so when both premises are taken together we end up with an a priori justification of
– which is supposed to be some interesting proposition that the sceptic doubts. Nobody denies that arguments of this form are valid, since they are clearly just instances of modus ponens. The debate, rather, is about how much such arguments can really be expected to show. Evidently, it is the second premise that does the work, and so the question is whether there really are many interesting a priori statements of that form. Kant himself has several reasons for thinking that there are. His view is that human experience does not emerge purely from sensory input, as the classical empiricists supposed, but rather from a complex interaction between two quite different cognitive faculties: sensibility, which is purely receptive; and the understanding, which is active. Unless and until the primitive data or ‘intuitions’ are organized and ‘synthesized’ by concepts, self-conscious experience is not possible. The most important such concepts are the categories, or pure concepts of the understanding. These originate from the Table of Judgements, which in turn has its origin in pure logic, and so it is concluded that these categories are both necessary and universal. This is significant for us, for although we agree that ‘intuitions without concepts are blind’ and that all observation is theory-laden to some extent, we have supposed that Martians and grueusers might conceptualize experience in a way very different from us. Kant does not allow for this, though he does draw a distinction between pure and schematized categories. The latter include the more interesting concepts of substance and causality, and differ from the former in that they concern not just experience as such but, more specifically, spatiotemporal experience. Kant does not attempt to show that all ‘outer experience’ (i.e. experience of something other than oneself) must be spatio-temporal in character for all possible creatures, but is content to observe that it is so with us. This leaves open the possibility of some sort of cognitive divergence, but Kant does not explore the possibility, and, indeed, seems temperamentally opposed to the idea.44 Other thinkers, such as Thomas Kuhn in his later writings, have explored the idea of multiple category-systems, but it arguably does not much make any
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difference here. Even if we insist that Kantian categories, pure or schematized, have an absolutely universal application, it is unclear that this will get us very far. The requirement that all experience should be of causally ordered substances is a fairly minimal constraint, and is surely not sufficient to exclude all the non-standard theories suggested by UTD as we have construed it. Our principles of theory-construction, whatever they are, must include far more than Kant’s short list of categories, and so we cannot look to Kant to supply us with a transcendental deduction of their legitimacy. Even if both the Martians and ourselves must have experience that is ordered by the same Kantian categories, that still leaves plenty of room for divergence and the sceptical problems that go with it. In any event, we still need to show that Kant’s arguments are valid for human beings, and this has certainly been disputed. We note first that Stroud and others have argued that transcendental arguments of a Kantian kind can never satisfactorily prove anything about the world itself, but, at best, only conclusions about our beliefs and our concepts; and this criticism has been widely accepted.45 Arguably, Kant himself never supposed otherwise, since he insists that his conclusions apply only to things as they appear to us, and that we can have no knowledge of things as they are in themselves.46 We shall examine transcendental idealism (TI) in more detail in §8.2. But regardless of how Kant himself is best interpreted, we need to ask whether these weakened transcendental arguments are valid in their own terms; and, if valid, whether they answer the sceptic satisfactorily from our own point of view. It certainly seems as if weakening is necessary. In order to refute any claim that the world must be of a certain kind (for example, contain independently existing, causally ordered substances) for experience to be possible, it is sufficient to construct a possible situation where someone has the appropriate kind of experience and yet the outside world is quite unlike what is experienced. Notwithstanding externalists’ valiant attempts to make the content of experience ‘reach out’ into the world itself, this has virtually no chance of success. It is just too easy to construct unbeatable sceptical scenarios where one is subject to massive undetectable illusion. However, it is much more promising to argue that it is (a priori) impossible to have experience of type X unless one has beliefs of type Y, for one’s experiences and one’s beliefs are far more intimately connected. Massive systematic error is not excluded by this type of argument, but it may well be that this does not matter too much. After all, as we noted in §2.2, if it can be shown that I cannot have experience of the kind that I have unless I believe that there is
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an external realm, for example, then what I must believe is: there is an external realm. I therefore cannot deny such a realm without a pragmatic contradiction. Such belief-directed transcendental arguments therefore appear to achieve everything for which we could reasonably ask. Of course, we still need to show that such arguments actually work in particular cases. However, even if we succeed, or apparently succeed, there remains another big query, and that concerns, once again, the notion of belief. Any argument of this kind needs to be careful that it does not merely show that experience requires that one accept or adopt some weak cognitive attitude towards the desired conclusion. For example, the pragmatic solution to the problem of induction, itself a kind of transcendental argument, does not appear to license anything stronger than pragmatic acceptance, as we saw in §2.2. It is notable that most advocates of these arguments seem entirely unaware of this risk. Stern (2000), for example, provides one of the best and most carefully argued defences of certain uses of transcendental arguments, and he agrees that they are of no use against epistemic scepticism and what he calls ‘reliabilist justificatory scepticism’, that is to say, scepticism based on a reliabilist model of justification. Both knowledge and reliabilist justification are too intimately connected to the notion of truth for weakened transcendental arguments to work. He assumes, however, that the notion of belief is quite innocent of any such alethic requirements. The trouble, though, is that the very concept of belief itself is intimately connected to truth, albeit not as intimately as the concept of knowledge (as traditionally understood). Although beliefs can be false, they aim at truth. There is still room for debate as to exactly what this means, of course; but we must still wonder how, even from within my own perspective, I can suppose myself justified in believing that p, if the justification is completely indifferent to whether the object of my belief is actually true. Of course, it may be that we can find a further argument that shows that it is full-blown belief, and not merely acceptance, that is required here, but it is conspicuous that such arguments are seldom provided or even sought. We shall return to this in §5.3. However, it could be argued that our experience simply would not have the phenomenological character that it has unless we have certain beliefs about it – specifically beliefs – and that any attempt to replace these beliefs with weaker attitudes would significantly change the very appearances of things. Stern, for example, interprets certain passages in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in a way that suggests this. In general, it does seem plausible to suppose that the externality of objects, the reality of causal relations and the sheer impossibility of a comprehensive
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breakdown of normal expectations are just directly, manifestly given to us in the sense that the experience itself just forces the relevant beliefs upon us. Thinkers as diverse as Hume and Wittgenstein have also insisted on this.47 It may seem that we have here a decisive transcendental argument, or at least a transcendental argument of a decisive kind. But do we? A revisionist might just insist that our current experience is diseased and its phenomenology unwarranted. This may sound absurd: surely our experience just is what it is, and we conceded that not even the most extreme philosophical sceptic can challenge its mere existence! But if we agree that the very character of our experience itself is coloured by our attitudes towards it, and if we have reason to think that those attitudes are wrong and should be replaced, then we should likewise think – strange though it may sound – that our experience itself is wrong and should be replaced. That is to say, we should conclude that we should try as best as we can to alter the very phenomenology of our experience by altering our thoughts about it. Indeed, this is precisely what we do claim! The idea may be radical and unusual, but it is not at all clear what transcendental argumentation can do against it – unless it has already been shown that there is no satisfactory cognitive alternative to full-blown belief. Without such an argument, certain kinds of willed phenomenological change may well turn out to be genuinely possible – even mandatory. So where does this leave us? Our task in this chapter was to show that there really is a sceptical case to answer, and that some well-known arguments against scepticism fail. Up to a point, we have succeeded. In particular, it has been shown that UTD does indeed provide a serious threat to our ordinary assumptions, and we have come some way to showing that alternative views about the nature of the world could exist, albeit not ones that we ourselves could seriously entertain. Yet until we are sure that there really are alternatives to belief, these arguments are incomplete. Should such an appropriate alternative be found, the effects will be both positive and negative. It will be positive in so far as it will be shown that we can continue our intellectual activities in an adjusted way that is free from further sceptical attack. Yet, oddly enough, it will also be negative, and for precisely the same reason! Most people reject the Pyrrhonist doctrine that we should abandon all belief simply because it seems so utterly perverse and unliveable. If a view can be shown to have Pyrrhonist implications, that is generally regarded as an effective reductio ad absurdum.48 The fact that the doctrine that all beliefs are unjustifiable has not actually been proved false is then conveniently (though understandably) overlooked. However, if it can be shown that
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there really are serious alternatives, then the issue is forced open again. Such alternatives may seem highly unattractive to many people, but if they are nevertheless liveable then they can no longer be ignored just because we should prefer not to live them. This itself will ensure that those many philosophers who have supposed that scepticism is not a real issue will have to think again.
3 Cognitive Contingency
So far, we have established that it might turn out that the world is very different from the way we take it to be, and this is enough to yield a kind of scepticism. However, it does not take us very far. We need also to show that there could be an alternative belief-system that fits the data as well as our own, for the legitimacy of our actual system will not be threatened very seriously if it turns out to lack any competitors. The latter thesis does not immediately follow from the former, for a consistent set of sentences need not automatically represent a coherent set of beliefs (as upholders of the coherence theory of truth often point out in answer to a standard objection). This remains so even if the set is empirically adequate, for there is more to intellectual coherence than just freedom from contradiction. Moreover, it is surely absurd to suppose that any of us could actually believe any of the radical alternatives suggested in the previous chapter, since they require massive adjustment at all levels. However, the possibility remains that a creature with a different cognitive constitution could find such an alternative system more congenial than the standard version. We have already said a certain amount about such alien creatures, whom we have referred to variously as ‘Martians’ or ‘grue-users’, but we need to show in more detail that such creatures are genuinely possible.
3.1 How to be an alien Cognitive relativism is a doctrine that has been much discussed.1 It is motivated primarily by the fact that opinions are highly diverse, and that it can be difficult to find a non-question-begging way of adjudicating disputes between positions that are very far apart. For example, Thomas Kuhn (1970) argues that the difference between, say, Aristotelian and 74
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Newtonian physics is far greater than is often supposed, so much so that they are incommensurable in the sense that one cannot translate the terms of the one into the other. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis argues more generally that language-structure conditions our perception of reality in a very strong way, and that Hopi Indians, for example, have a radically different conception of time to ours.2 A more pressing dispute is between orthodox evolutionary biologists and creationists that is hard to adjudicate since there is so little common ground between the antagonists. All these exotic parties mentioned are in some sense alien to us, or at least alien to contemporary Western scientific opinion. Do they qualify as examples of the type of aliens that we should be concerned with? The answer is ‘no’, and the reason is simple. They are nowhere near alien enough (though the creationists present more than one problem, as we shall see). The trouble with the first example is that Aristotelian physics is not empirically adequate. Anyone who thinks otherwise need only drop a rock whilst standing on the moon and see whether it tries to get to the centre of the Earth. If it could be shown that it could have been developed from within its own framework so as to overcome this and all other empirical objections, and yet still end up quite different from current theory, then Aristotelianism might qualify as an alien beliefsystem in our sense. But there is no reason to suppose that it can, and Kuhn does not argue otherwise. More generally, we are concerned only with belief-systems which are divergent in the sense that they will never converge (that is to say, become consistent) with ours, no matter how each is amended and improved from within. Disagreement that is due simply to internal error on one side or the other is of no relevance whatever. This may seem obvious, but it is important to note that the kind of cognitive relativism that we are advocating does admit that there is such a thing as error. The main reason why relativism is abominated by most philosophers is because it is supposed that it forbids criticism of alternative positions. There is indeed an influential, though naïve, sort of relativism which does do this, and which philosophers are right to excoriate, but our version is not committed to anything like this. We shall return to this point in §7.1. So Aristotelians are not different enough to count as aliens in our sense. The same, surely, applies to mediæval Japanese, Hopi Indians and members of other exotic human cultures. True, their belief-systems may remain very different from ours even if taken to their respective ideal limits, if only because they may have very different concepts and interests. Yet there is no good reason to suppose that they will remain ultimately incompatible with ours, and so they do not present us
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with a significant sceptical challenge. Non-human animals tend to be unsatisfactory candidates, since the only kind we have met are insufficiently intelligent. Bats, for example, undoubtedly have a very different cognitive system from humans, but their beliefs are surely too rudimentary to be of much help here. Evidently, we need to consider hypothetical creatures, but here we reach another difficulty. Can we be sure that we are dealing with genuine possibilities, since this is an area where imaginability does not automatically coincide with logical possibility? The only way to tell is to describe such creatures in considerable depth and detail. Yet the literature of science fiction, although extensive, is not as helpful as we might hope; and again, it is for the same reason as above. The creatures imagined either have no fathomable beliefs at all or else are just too close to being like ourselves. For example, one of the possibilities suggested by the underdetermination of theories by data (UTD) is that physical objects pop in and out of existence depending on whether we are observing them. I know of no creature in the SF literature that has beliefs of that kind, nor can I easily imagine what a story about such creatures would be like. What makes matters even more difficult is that, although our aliens are required to be massively different from us in some respects, they are also required to be amazingly similar to us in others. The contents of their beliefs must genuinely contradict ours if they are to be of any relevant interest, and this automatically introduces some heavy constraints, especially concerning inter-translatability. More basically still, we need to assume that their intelligence and behaviour can be described in the familiar vocabulary of beliefs and desires. We need to assume, further, that they do mind making mistakes and that they aim at truth in at least some sense or other. It is unclear what could underlie this assumption. In supposing that our aliens have alternative scientific theories about how the world works, for example, we are making them sound rather like Western intellectuals. To see the oddity here, recall that one possible candidate for an alien belief-system that we mentioned earlier was creationism. Yet it is unclear if we have a genuine alternative scientific theory here at all. What we appear to have, rather, is the kind of semi-paranoid system suggested by the Duhem–Quine thesis (see §2.3), where one chooses some unlikely proposition, in this case, that the world was created exactly as stated in the book of Genesis, and ensures that falsification is deferred by an endless sequence of ad hoc auxiliary hypotheses. Normal scientific criteria are abandoned altogether. The difficulties of taking the biblical stories literally are so well known, and the resistance to argument exhibited by the more extreme
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kinds of religious fundamentalist is so severe, that it is tempting to conclude that we are dealing with a quite different conception of ‘belief’ altogether, one which aims at a kind of certainty rather than truth, perhaps. The difficulties of delineating our aliens can now be seen to be acute. It seems that even the most far-fetched creatures of science fiction are too similar to us to count, whereas the extreme creationists that many of us have actually met are nowhere near similar enough! The temptation, therefore, is to conclude that our ‘aliens’ are a philosophical myth, and that we cannot make any sense of the notion of divergent belief-systems after all. However, this is too swift. We are not required to describe these aliens in any significant detail, nor need we be able to imagine them very distinctly. All that is required is that we show that they are logically possible; and, although it is true that something may be imaginable without being logically possible, the converse is also true. We are famously unable to imagine what it is like to be a bat, but we may recognize that bat-consciousness is logically possible – indeed, actual. Animal biology is extraordinarily various, even when we restrict our attention to known terrestrial species. The variety expands dramatically when we consider what biologists call ‘animal space’, that is to say, the space of all types of animals that could possibly have evolved on Earth given the ordinary laws of nature.3 It is in this context that we may speculate about how the dinosaurs might have evolved had they not met an untimely end – and, indeed, the various possible directions in which Homo sapiens might develop. If we weaken the initial conditions for development, and consider more generally what evolution on any planet whatever would require, then the diversity of possible intelligent life becomes vastly greater again. The idea that it is a biological necessity that intelligence can only evolve in a human direction is very unlikely given what we currently know about biological diversity. The idea that it is a logical necessity as well, as the UUP requires us to suppose, is surely nothing less than utterly absurd. Rather, the space of logically possible intelligences can be expected to be huge, even if we are quite unable at present to describe the alternatives. The point is that our central thesis is actually very weak. We merely claim that human rationality is only one of many logically possible alternatives. This is what we mean by ‘cognitive contingency’. To deny this is to demand that it be logically necessary that there can be no creature whatsoever who is psychologically disposed to latch on to any logically possible, alternative, empirically adequate theory of the world. This contrary position is manifestly very strong and therefore very hard
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to prove (though, as we shall see, some have tried to prove it). It is also intuitively very implausible, as we have just shown, which means that the burden of proof should not lie wholly on our side. Nevertheless, it is not enough for us to sit back and demand that our opponents prove their case. If our position is to have any real credibility, we need to show how we might, under certain circumstances, be in a position to recognize an alien intelligence if we were confronted with one; and this is rather harder to establish.
3.2 Alternative classifications We have already said a little about ‘grue’ and ‘grue-users’, but we need to examine more carefully the extent to which these ‘bent predicates’, or anything like them, could genuinely be used by an alien intelligence. The question of whether our methods of classification reflect objective divisions in nature, as opposed to psychological preferences of some kind, is very old. Plato’s theory of forms is an example of the view that grouping individual Fs under a single heading should reflect some kind of objective resemblance. There is a form of Man, a form of the Good and perhaps also a form of the Green, but certainly not a form of the Grue, for example. Aristotle’s doctrine of substance and essence is also realist in this sense, though in a heavily qualified way. Mediæval disputes about realism, conceptualism and nominalism continued the debate. The modern scientific outlook seemed initially hostile to this kind of realism, and Locke’s swingeing attack on earlier doctrines of essences and substantial forms proved to be enormously influential. However, more recently, Aristotelian essences and the concept of a natural kind have been rehabilitated, though it is highly debatable to what extent the new kinds of realism resemble the old. Colour predicates have little scientific importance, and few imagine that sameness of colour is a likely guide to sameness of natural kind (whatever that may turn out to mean), which is why Goodman’s example of ‘grue’ is not altogether satisfactory. However, the classification of living organisms into species and genera is a more interesting issue, and it underlines some actual scientific controversies. For example, Locke writes, This, then, in short, is the case: nature makes many particular things, which do agree one with another in many sensible qualities, and probably too in their internal frame and constitution; but it is not this real essence that distinguishes them into species; it is men who, taking
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occasion from the qualities they find united in them, and wherein they observe often several individuals to agree, range them into sorts, in order to their naming, for the convenience of comprehensive signs; under which individuals, according their conformity to this or that abstract idea, come to be ranked as under ensigns: so that this is of the blue, that the red regiment, this is a man, that a drill; and in this, I think, consists the whole business of genus and species.4 Thus it is primarily human psychology that is responsible for the way in which we carve up the world. If this is right, then it would be entirely reasonable for the aliens to carve it differently: the world itself would not protest. But can we accept very exotic taxonomies as equally valid? Foucault famously invites us to consider a passage in Borges, [which] quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopædia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.5 Such a taxonomy is certainly one that we find psychologically bizarre, but is that the worst that can be said of it? If so, then that still leaves open the possibility that an alien psychology (more Martian than Chinese) might find it more intuitive than the standard Linnæan model. However, it may be protested that the incongruity of the divisions is deeper than that. For example, dogs of all types form a natural kind; this is because all dogs are essentially dogs. Stray dogs, however, are not essentially stray dogs, nor do animals belonging to the Emperor essentially belong to the Emperor. The Aristotelian distinction between essence and accident invoked here reflects nature itself, not our psychology, and this ensures that this alternative classification is not just unintuitive or inconvenient, but objectively wrong. It does not correctly map the order of things themselves.
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This is right as far as it goes. However, the distinction between essence and accident does not reach as far as some suppose. To say that dogs are essentially dogs is to say that they could not be otherwise. They could not become non-dogs and still exist. By contrast, a stray dog may become tamed, but would not thereby cease to exist: being tamed may be humiliating, but it is not lethal. What is relevant here are criteria of identity through time. Some kinds of changes are qualitative changes, or alterations, where the object persists through the change; and other kinds are substantial changes, where the object comes into being or ceases to exist. We naturally want to ask: could these identity criteria be different? Might we locate the distinction between qualitative and substantial changes elsewhere? However, the first thing to note is that we do not have the same question here. It might be that we could carve up nature very differently, and ensure that our newly articulated substances have unfamiliar spatiotemporal boundaries. Nevertheless, even if we could do this, what we would end up with are different substances, not different identity criteria for our original substances. We might arrange it so that we have a new type of substance, which we may call a Q-straydog, such that: (a) wherever we have a stray dog we have a Q-straydog; (b) wherever we have the same stray dog we have the same Q-straydog; but (c) Q-straydogs necessarily cease to exist upon domestication. Thus, Q-straydogs are essentially stray, and therefore do form a natural kind according to our earlier definition. But a Q-straydog is never a stray dog, nor vice versa, even if the dog in question is always a stray. This is because they have different modal properties. What we have, rather, are two substances occupying the same places at the same times, one normal and the other not. After all, an Aristotelian substance is a compound of matter and form, and it is the form which yields the essence. What we therefore have with the stray dog and the Q-straydog are two substances which result from compounding the same matter with two different forms, one ordinary and the other eccentric. These eccentric forms are indeed eccentric, but they are also harmless. They do not undermine or, indeed, have any significant influence at all on ordinary forms and ordinary substances. The essential qualities of dogs, stray or otherwise, will not be affected in any way by the compresence of Q-straydogs, nor vice versa. The eccentric creatures may not be located in any animal space known to biologists; but nothing much needs to be done to put them there. As Wiggins once remarked, ‘Lebensraum is an ecological problem which ontology cannot aggravate’.6 We therefore cannot argue from the fixity and the objectivity of essences to the impossibility of carving up reality in more than one way.
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True, a given set of substances can be classified according to essence in only one way, but that does not prove that reality can be articulated into just one set of substances.7 In that sense, Borges’s Chinese encyclopædia is indeed objectively illegitimate given its familiar domain, but this does not prove very much. Something not unlike it might well become appropriate given an ontology that includes, inter alia, Q-straydogs instead of stray dogs, Q-animals-belonging-to-the-Emperor instead of animals belonging to the Emperor and so on. Of course, this position would be undermined if it could be shown that Q-straydogs and their ilk are themselves illegitimate entities, and we must agree that it is not just an arbitrary convention that gives us our current ontology. The reason that we treat some kinds of change as qualitative and others as substantial is closely integrated with our more general scientific theories about how the world works. However, empirically equivalent theories may yield rather different results, so we still lack a reason for supposing that alien scientists have to carve up reality in the same way that we do. It is certainly hard to see why they should actually be forbidden to do so if an alternative carving yields results that they find more consonant with their own scientific practices. It is all very well to insist that everyone must carve nature ‘at the joints’, but the aliens and we are as likely to have divergent views about where the joints themselves really are as we are about anything else. The upshot of this is that the notion of a ‘natural kind’ is not at all straightforward. We can make sense of it easily enough once we have already articulated reality into an ontology, for the distinction between essence and accident, construed in terms of persistence-conditions, gives us all that we need. However, we still do not have grounds for supposing that there is only one ‘natural’ way of constructing the ontology in the first place – unless, of course, ‘natural’ just means ‘intuitive’, in which case we are back to psychology again. Given the importance of natural kinds in distinguishing projectible from non-projectible predicates in inductive reasoning, we can see how cognitive divergence might be a genuine possibility. However, there is a problem here. It is important that our aliens have theories that genuinely contradict ours. If they are merely incommensurable, or if the aliens and we merely ‘pass one another by’, then we lack an argument for scepticism, for there is no reason why all these theories should not be true at once. Yet if it turns out that the aliens and we lack a common ontology, then the prospects for contradiction are automatically diminished. After all, if we never talk about the same things, then we shall never say anything different about them. Now, this is not a serious
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problem with the alternative substances that we have considered. All substances, both familiar and eccentric, supervene on the distribution of matter in space and time, and this provides important constraints. If my optimal theory says that stray dogs must go north and yours says that Q-straydogs must go south, then we cannot avoid inconsistency by merely saying that we are talking about different things. Stray dogs and Q-straydogs are different, but they are not detachable. The trouble, however, is that theories that agree on the distribution of matter in space and time are not interestingly different, and it is surely false that all empirically adequate theories agree in this way. An alien theory which claims that objects go out of existence when not perceived, for example, will certainly not agree on this. But what are the objects that are being talked about in such an alien theory? Unless they relate to the objects in our own ontology in some useful way, then the theory will drop out of the picture altogether as far as we are concerned. Appearances notwithstanding, it will not contradict our own view of the world at all. It may be that we can find an appropriate way of relating the two ontologies in this particular case, but the general problem remains. What is common to all parties are the empirical data, but this leads us back to the problem of how to characterize raw data. If they are understood as surface irritations in Quine’s sense, then they are irrelevant to our current problem. Such physiological input is processed, not classified. If they are construed as sense data in a more traditional empiricist sense (‘pictures in the head’), then they already involve a good deal of conceptualization, in which case they will not be the same for all parties. Something like the Kantian notion of an ‘intuition’ is required, but this notion is notoriously hard to make sense of. Intuitions, on this model, are ‘synthesized’ through the application of concepts, and what emerge are the familiar objects of perception. Grue-users, perhaps, would synthesize the ‘manifold’ differently, and would thereby construct different objects. Yet these basic intuitions are entities of which we have no direct awareness, since their conceptualization is a precondition of any kind of empirical cognition; and this ensures that ‘conceptualization’, in the sense of ‘classification’, is impossible here. There are no graspable common entities, either mental or physical, that we would classify as green and blue and the aliens would re-classify as grue and bleen. However, this is too hasty. We noted earlier that colour predicates are not scientifically fundamental, and therefore may not provide the right kind of example when considering natural kinds, and so forth. However, the compensating virtue of primitive phenomenological notions is that
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they can be applied in a very general sort of way. It is not just physical objects, but also hallucinations, after-images, and much else besides that may be described as ‘green’. The result is that if we have someone who classifies colours as ‘grue’ and ‘bleen’, and so forth, then we can expect her to end up with beliefs that are seriously different from our own. We do not have to specify exactly what it is that she will classify as grue or bleen. It is enough that she will classify whatever comes her way in that manner, and will consequently make inductive inferences incompatible with ours. It may be feared that even this scenario stretches our credulity too far. ‘Grue’, it may be protested, remains too absurdly artificial to be psychologically available to any sort of creature. After all, we require such a creature, when confronted with a uniformly green surface before midnight, to have a visual experience phenomenologically similar to ours; for if she does not see green, then she does not see grue either, given that the essence of greenness is its phenomenology, and given also the inter-definability of the green/blue and grue/bleen pairs. Nevertheless, if she is a grue-user, then she must see this surface as grue, not as green, which requires that grue surfaces before midnight look more similar to grue surfaces than to bleen ones after midnight: in which case how can her experience be phenomenologically the same as ours (or even remotely similar)? Whatever else she may be, she is not a grue-user. But this problem is less serious than it seems. We may concede that the notion of ‘grue’ may need adjustment, yet this should be possible. To see how we might proceed, it is better to consider a simplified model. Suppose that our aliens have only monochrome visual perception. Suppose further that visual perception is their only sensory mode. They are thus sensitive to light and dark, but we need not suppose their experiences to be phenomenologically exactly the same as our experiences of black, white and grey. To make them something like grue-users, what we require is that they do not group light and dark things in the same way that we do. We may agree that grouping the light things before midnight with the dark things afterwards is intolerably weird, but there are other, more credible possibilities which concern how a given item compares to other items in its (perceived) spatiotemporal vicinity. Notice, first, that our own methods are not as straightforward as some suppose. The correlation between high/low intensity radiation and the perception of light/dark is not exact. Our eyes always flicker very slightly when we view something, and this ensures that the retinal image is always changing slightly. This is what perception of constancy
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requires. If the retinal image is ‘stabilized’, which can be achieved in the laboratory by means of an eye-tracker, then visual sensation ceases. So even if the intensity of radiation is very high, the perception is of dark, not light. More generally, movement is often more noticeable than stillness, especially in our peripheral vision. How we perceive something at a given point in our visual field depends to a surprising extent on what is going on elsewhere. The colour perceived at a point, for example, is as much due to contrastive effects as it is to the dominant wavelength of the reflected light. These phenomena are all due to subtle physiological processes, and it is surely possible that they might work very differently with alien creatures. The idea that there might be alternative methods of classifying light and dark need not stretch our credulity since, as we have just seen, our actual methods are far less straightforward than they might appear. Constancy of perception does not correlate simply with constancy of stimulation, and sameness and difference of phenomenological features are the product of many contingent factors. We therefore can start to make some sense of the notion of aliens with ‘bent’ colourpredicates. We still have to show that such aliens are likely to have belief-systems which are divergent with ours, and, again, it may be wondered how we could prove incompatibility (as opposed to mere difference). Even if the aliens interpret their perceptions as perceptions of independently existing objects of some kind, it is unclear how to relate such objects with the physical objects with which we are concerned. However, even if such relationships are obscure, we can still have good reasons for supposing incompatibility. In order for our respective belief-systems to be compatible, it is not enough that there be compatibility at the level of what we actually perceive. There must also be compatibility at the level of possible perceptions. Yet the only way in which we can reach conclusions about what we would perceive if such-and-such were the case – and most claims about external reality will involve this – is by inductive inference from actual perception. But our aliens cannot be expected to make inferences in ways compatible with ours, since they have different conceptions of sameness and difference, and at the most basic level. Whatever it is that our aliens believe, it will stretch beyond the immediate contents of their experience. If their inductive reasoning is incompatible with ours – and we introduced bent colour predicates into the discussion precisely in order to guarantee this – then it is fair to conclude that their beliefs about the world beyond their immediate experience will be incompatible with ours. We can say this even though we may be unsure exactly what their beliefs are about, and
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regardless of precisely how we wish to construe the notion of ‘immediate experience’. They would therefore qualify as genuine aliens, in our technical sense. Many will remain unconvinced by this. It is not that exotic creatures are impossible as such, nor even that we cannot imagine or describe them in any detail. We need not dispute that a different cognitive structure is possible at the purely sensory level, and biology already provides us with many actual examples. Our normal assumption, however, is that sensory differences are always compensated for so as to ensure that the resulting world-picture, although different from ours, does not seriously contradict it. For a serious contradiction, a different intellectual structure would also be required, and this cannot be established unless we probe rather more deeply into the question of how to characterize alien concepts.
3.3 Alternative conceptual schemes Some, notably Davidson, have argued that our alien scenario is not merely unlikely, but a priori impossible.8 We cannot attribute intelligence at all, it is claimed, unless we assume that the beliefs attributed are mostly true. This is a constraint on any kind of intelligible interpretation, sometimes called ‘the transcendental argument to end all transcendental arguments’.9 If sound, it would evidently rule out cognitive contingency in our sense. The argument is elusive, and has been much discussed. A more immediate target, however, is the idea of an alternative conceptual scheme. Davidson disparages standard examples such as the thought of the Hopi Indians or earlier scientific ‘paradigms’ (in Kuhn’s sense) by arguing that we can, in fact, make a good deal of sense of these alternative ways of thinking using our own conceptual apparatus. Since concepts have no reality apart from the languages in which they can be expressed, the question of whether there could be a genuinely alternative conceptual scheme reduces to that of whether there could be a language that cannot, even in principle, be translated into ours. Davidson’s argument that there cannot be runs along the following lines. We cannot make sense of the claim that (1) Certain alien noises constitute a language, unless we suppose that (2) These alien noises can express beliefs.
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However, we cannot suppose this unless (3) We can recognize the relevant beliefs as beliefs, and we cannot do this unless (4) We can understand the content of these beliefs, which requires that (5) We are able to translate this alien language into ours. It follows that these aliens do not have an alternative conceptual scheme after all. Indeed, the very idea of a conceptual scheme has been shown to be hollow, and Davidson goes on to argue that the distinction between scheme and content which underpins this idea is also essentially meaningless. There are various ways of criticizing this argument. One objection is that we cannot conclude that untranslatable languages are impossible just because nothing counts as evidence for them, unless we assume a rather strong version of the verification principle. The move from (2) to (3) is especially suspect in this respect. This is a good point, but it does not take us very far. Unless we know how to attribute the status of language to a given set of sounds, then our concept of language is not going to do very much work for us; and Davidson’s target is not just untranslatable language as an abstract possibility (though it certainly includes that), but also, and more significantly from our point of view, whether we ourselves could ever have any use for the notion. If our aliens remain no more than an essentially unverifiable possibility, then we shall have achieved considerably less than we intended. Another objection, which Davidson himself considers, is in the move from (4) to (5). It is not obvious that interpretation always requires translation into a home language, though he does have a very familiar argument that connects the concept of meaning with the ability to construct T-sentences in a home language. It may be insisted, against this, that we could instead just ‘go native’, in Kuhn’s phrase, and learn the new language directly. However, even if this objection were right, it is unclear how much it can really establish, for if we are able to speak both languages, then they cannot be that far removed from each other, even if we cannot translate between them. It should be remembered that our own language, English, is full of internal variety. We cannot
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translate between, say, the language of international finance and the language of atomic physics, but this does not mean that they represent different conceptual schemes in any very radical sense. At best, it just means that our conceptual scheme (if we may speak of such a thing) is not a simple monolith. If an unworldly atomic physicist were to come to learn the vocabulary of international finance, having previously been wholly uninterested in economics in any shape or form, then she will indeed have to ‘go native’ and learn a new vocabulary that cannot be translated into her original idiolect; but the fact that she can do this merely shows that atomic physicists and international financiers should not regard each other as ‘aliens’ in our sense. The differences are nowhere near wide enough. The same point applies to the speakers of different natural languages, as opposed to different sub-languages. The borderlines between languages are not absolute, and most successful languages consist largely of borrowings from other languages. We could argue at length about how to individuate languages, of course, but little would be gained by doing so. If we are to talk of an alien conceptual scheme in any relevant sense, then the language in question must apparently be so wildly different from our own that we could never come to understand it at all: in which case, Davidson’s argument still holds. A rather different worry, however, is whether we should have ever wanted there to be alternative conceptual schemes in the first place. Our primary concern, after all, is to show that there can be alternative beliefsystems, and it is unclear why the latter should require the former. Indeed, it might be thought that they exclude each other, for unless the alternative belief-system can be expressed in our own language, then it will not genuinely contradict our own system. Logical relations, it may be insisted, presuppose a common language, for unless there is a single question to which the aliens and we give incompatible answers, we will not genuinely disagree. Instead, we merely ‘pass one another by’. Without inter-translatability, there can be no such single question, from which it follows that alien beliefs (supposing, for the moment, that there are such things) and our own beliefs could all be true at once. If this is so, they do not form an alien belief-system in our sense after all. It may nevertheless be protested that we were not wrong to focus on alternative conceptual schemes as we did, because it was always absurd to suppose that creatures could be found whose language resembles ours sufficiently that we can translate between them, and yet are so utterly alien in other respects that their belief-system diverges with ours in the strong sense of ‘divergence’ that we are concerned with. How could this similarity of language and conceptual apparatus be explained,
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given the massive differences elsewhere? But if this objection is right, then the possibility of an alien belief-system now seems to be ruled out altogether very swiftly – and regardless of the considerations that Davidson adduces! We cannot have such a system in our own conceptual scheme, and we cannot have it in a different one either. However, this is rather too dismissive, and there are a number of gaps in these arguments. First, it should be noted that a different conceptual scheme is not the same as an incommensurable one. Grue and bleen, for example, are different from any native concepts that we have; and therefore any conceptual scheme that includes them would have to be different, in a sense, from our own. Nevertheless, they are still commensurable with our concepts, since there are precise inter-translatability relations. Likewise, although Inuit may have several words for snow that have no single-word translations in English, this does not mean that translation is impossible. (Anglophone skiers and avalanche scientists, in fact, have considerably more words and phrases for snow in their vocabulary than can be found in Inuit.) An alien culture can be expected to have different interests from ours, and hence many different concepts from ours. But this does not mean that we cannot translate their terms into ours; only that precise translations might need to be rather elaborate. Secondly, it is not clear that logical relations always require that the relevant concepts even be commensurable. We may agree with Kuhn, for the sake of argument, that we cannot accurately translate the language of Newtonian physics into Aristotelian terms, nor vice versa, even in a long-winded way. Nevertheless, as we have already noted, the theories can still yield conflicting predictions, and this conflict cannot realistically be resolved by adjusting the auxiliary hypotheses. It is enough that there be rough translations, and we can certainly produce these in this context. More generally, it should be remembered that translation is never an all-or-nothing matter. Translations can be very good, mediocre, or highly misleading; but hardly ever perfect. Yet even where the best possible translation is highly misleading, conflict can arise. Indeed, even where translation is wholly inappropriate, we can still have conflict. As we observed, our own conceptual scheme is not a simple monolith, and we cannot translate between the sub-languages of international finance and atomic physics. It does not follow that any theory about the distribution of money in the world is consistent with any theory about the distribution of matter in the world. Even without translatability, there are still relations of supervenience which provide appropriate constraints. True, it may be impossible to find examples of individual
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sentences taken from each sub-language that are pairwise inconsistent, but we do not need to do this. All that is required is that two systems of belief taken as a whole contradict each other. We do not need to be able to say precisely where the contradiction occurs. This point underlies a third argument. Beliefs are not the only propositional attitudes: we not only believe that p, we also desire that p and bring it about that p. Now, if the untranslatability of an alien language into our own proved that the aliens and we cannot have conflicting beliefs, then it should equally prove that we cannot have conflicting desires or wish to perform incompatible actions. More accurately, given any proposition that we wish to make true – that the aliens are exterminated, for example – then there would have to be a way of doing so that is compatible with everything that the aliens wish to be true. Lacking any real basis for disagreement, we can only ‘pass one another by’, as they say. But this, of course, is preposterous. A total lack of mutual understanding is no guarantee of harmonious co-existence! Rather, all it means, once again, is that when there is disagreement we cannot say exactly where. The same point applies to beliefs. A fourth and more abstract argument for the possibility of logical conflict between alien vocabularies relies on a David Lewis-style conception of propositions, namely as sets of possible worlds. There are infinitely many possible worlds, and therefore a non-denumerable infinity of sets of possible worlds, a non-denumerable subset of which is (a) disjoint from the set of possible worlds in which the earth is round (say) and (b) cannot be delineated by a finite English sentence. Any one of these sets corresponds to a proposition which logically excludes the proposition that the earth is round, and yet which cannot be formulated in English. Here we have logical conflict without even rough inter-translatability. Of course, we need to rely here on a number of Platonist assumptions about set theory, and it may also be wondered whether Lewis’s conception of a proposition is close enough to the more orthodox conception, namely as the content of a declarative sentence, to be the kind of thing that even an alien could entertain.10 A related worry is how we could ever have reason to suppose that an alien (whom we may find wholly incomprehensible) had managed to latch on to one of these propositions. Of course, we could always retreat once again into an anti-verificationist sulk, as we may call it, and insist that lack of all possible evidence for a hypothesis does not prove its impossibility, even though it is increasingly clear that this tactic will not get us very far in the long run. However, this set-theoretic argument is interesting in another way in that it helps to bring into focus a more general line of objection to our project.
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Human language is not static, and our concepts evolve as a result of a number of different kinds of pressure. In what way does the additional vocabulary relate to what is already there? In some cases, it simply stands for notions that were already expressible, but only lengthily. More often, however, as Rorty, for example, emphasizes, the new terms stand for ideas that are significantly different from what has been hitherto expressible.11 The Newtonian concept of mass, for example, cannot be accurately translated into the vocabulary available to Aristotle. Outside the natural sciences, the scope for radical development is even more evident. A metaphorical extension of the meaning of a word does not just replace one meaning with another previously available. On the contrary, it expands the previous limits of what can be meant – in a very real and slightly uncanny way. What is potentially misleading about the above set-theoretic argument, it may be felt, is not that it admits of too many weird possibilities, but that it does not admit enough – or not enough of the right sort. It reflects what Rorty, following Heidegger, calls the ‘mathematical attitude’.12 The set of all possible worlds that we have considered is supposed to be a fixed universal entity, the same for all cultures and vocabularies. Yet in so far as we are talking about the contents of beliefs, we cannot distance ourselves from cultures and vocabularies in this way. Likewise, we cannot locate our vocabulary within a fixed space of all possible vocabularies, nor can we represent a change of vocabulary as a shift within this pre-existing fixed space. Anyone who doubts this need only remember that every human language evolved continuously from nothing, so it just cannot be true that every later distinction is expressible in every earlier version of the language. This remains true even if we were to help ourselves to settheoretic constructions similar to the above. For example, consider a Stone Age language ancestral to our own that can generate infinitely many sentences (it does not need to be all that sophisticated to do this much). This will yield infinitely many consistent and complete sets of sentences, each of which represents a possible world (as seen from this Stone Age perspective). From these, we may produce a nondenumerable infinity of Lewis-style propositions, most of which are way beyond anything that its speakers (or any other finite beings) can grasp. However, is it remotely plausible to suppose that all later thoughts (the ideas of Newton and Shakespeare, for example) can be found somewhere amongst them? To suppose that this must be so, no matter how primitive the original language, is to reveal the absurdity of the ‘mathematical attitude’. The relationship of new concepts to old has to be far more subtle than this.
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This relates to a more general worry about our depiction of alien intelligence. In order to be relevant, such aliens have to be very exotic, and this certainly makes description difficult. Some descriptions stretch one’s credulity, such as that of a ‘grue-user’. Yet what is really objectionable here is not the unfamiliarity, but rather the incongruous mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar, or the way in which familiar ingredients are mixed in unfamiliar ways. To be credible, aliens need to be unfamiliar through and through, otherwise they run the risk of becoming not so much exotic as grotesque. The inhabitants of Star Trek run this risk (and those of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy embrace it enthusiastically!). If we can be sure of anything, it is that extra-terrestrial life will not include anything much like any of them. Notwithstanding the legends of centaurs, hippogriffs and so forth, we do not expect a newly discovered animal to consist of part of one familiar animal conjoined to part of another.13 Likewise, we should not expect an alien concept to consist of two or more (or even infinitely many) familiar concepts combined in some arbitrary fashion. Nevertheless, these objections do not reach as far as it might seem. We have already conceded that alien language may not be capable of exact translation, and we may agree that unfamiliar combinations of familiar ingredients are more often than not merely grotesque. Yet, as we have already observed, all translations are approximate to some degree, and the possibility remains that a grotesque combination gives a better approximation than anything else. Where this happens, we should just recognize that this is the best we can do, and do not have to conclude that the aliens really are grotesque in the way that our inadequate attempts to translate might suggest if taken at face value. Bearing all this in mind, then, the best translation available to us on certain occasions may well attribute to some form of creature beliefs that are seriously incompatible (and not merely incommensurable) with our own. There do not appear to be any essential difficulties in the notion of an alternative conceptual scheme that automatically rule this possibility out, and it would be hard to set a priori limits to how good an approximation translation can get. The question remains, of course, whether we could ever have a good reason to attribute such a scheme to anyone, and this leads on to slightly different problems.
3.4 Radical interpretation The interpretation of the mental life of creatures with whom we have never before been in any cultural contact is known as ‘radical
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interpretation’, and much has been written on the constraints attached to it.14 Issues of translation are clearly going to be of considerable relevance here. Quine, for example, insists that translation of the host language into our own in such circumstances (‘radical translation’) is inevitably indeterminate, in the sense that two groups of anthropologists might propose two wildly incompatible translation manuals, each of which is consistent with all the possible linguistic evidence.15 He concludes that there is just no fact of the matter concerning which is right, and that individual words and sentences lack a determinate meaning. Few have followed Quine here, but the question of how to find the best translation, if there is one, has been much debated. The chief constraint on translation, according to Quine, is the ‘principle of charity’, which requires that most of the utterances made by native speakers be deemed true. The problem on which Quine focuses is that we still have considerable indeterminacy even with this constraint in place. Given this, it may therefore seem perverse to abandon the principle of charity, since that could only expand even further the number of possible translations. Yet if we do accept this principle, then our story about aliens will evidently collapse back into unverifiability (at best), since we could never identify aliens as aliens if we interpret their utterances ‘charitably’, in this sense. Quine’s holism about language leads him to reject the very notion of a belief, since beliefs are required to have propositional content in a way that requires individual sentences to have determinate meanings. However, we need not adopt such a sceptical view about meaning in order to agree with the main argument. Davidson, for example, originally agreed with Quine that the interpretation of any language, and likewise the interpretation of any person’s set of beliefs, requires us to suppose that most sentences uttered and most beliefs are true.16 Yet the argument for the principle of charity that we have given is rather weak, and it is not clear how to strengthen it. True, in normal situations, we do not expect radical disagreement; and if the inhabitants of some remote region were apparently to say to us something seriously odd, our first instinct would be to question the translation – and no matter how remote the region. However, we are not concerned with normal situations here, and first instincts are not infallible. There are many stronger and more useful constraints on interpretation that sometimes conflict with the principle of charity. It is certainly not difficult to imagine situations where it would be unreasonable to attribute true beliefs. For example, Papineau considers the example of people unfamiliar with cinema who chance upon some papier-mâché trees on a film
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set.17 In such a situation, it would be reasonable to translate a word they use as ‘tree’ and thereby attribute false beliefs to them. It is not the only interpretation available to us, of course. We could instead translate their word as ‘papier-mâché tree’ in order to preserve the truth of their beliefs, but nothing forces us to do this. Nor would it be a sensible move, since it fails to take into account their ignorance of cinema. Admittedly, this concerns only a very localized divergence of belief, and it could be insisted that Papineau’s interpretation is the least disruptive, all things considered. It would require considerable ingenuity to account for a knowledge of cinema where the people concerned had never been exposed to it without massive adjustment elsewhere in the system, so it could be argued that this decision is still consistent with the policy of maximizing overall agreement between interpreter and interpretee. The fact remains, however, that this was not the reason that we supposed there to be divergence here, and there are more immediate constraints on intelligibility that surely deserve attention in their own right. This suggests an alternative ‘humanitarian strategy’. As Papineau puts it: Where our original strategy urged charity, advising us to interpret so as to make as much as possible of what the aliens say come out true, this new strategy requires only humanity. We can interpret the aliens so as to make their judgements false, as long as we represent them as having the kind of beliefs that we would expect humans in those circumstances to have.18 So far, so good. However, suppose that the aliens in question are not human, but have a very different cognitive constitution altogether. Might it not be most reasonable to abandon this principle of humanity in favour of what we might call a ‘principle of alienity’? And might not the best interpretation of alien language require not just the occasional local divergence, but massive disagreement across the board? After all, it would certainly be unreasonable to insist on a principle of charity if such a principle is not always appropriate even when dealing with human beings.19 And if we are not dealing with human beings, there is surely no good reason why we should be constrained by a principle of humanity either. The crux of the matter is whether we can really make sense of such a possibility. Specifically, we need to show that it could be reasonable for us to suppose that such creatures might possess such beliefs. In fact, an extension of our earlier argument does just this. Why, amongst all the empirically equivalent (total) theories of the world, do we latch on to the one that we do? One rather brusque answer
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is that the alternative theories are all patently impossible, and we do not need any particular explanation of why we do not believe the impossible. But this will not do. Even according to our own parochial standards, the alternatives are patently not impossible, since neither experience nor logic excludes them. And if, despite that, it is still impossible for us to accept any of them, then this surely makes an explanation even more necessary. We have agreed that it is ultimately pragmatic criteria, such as simplicity, that underlie our theoretical choices, but this does not explain why some theories look simpler to us than others. Now, we might insist that this is just a brute psychological fact about us; and it is true that we currently have no clear idea of what causes it to be so. Nevertheless, it would be a highly defeatist view to suppose that no explanation of it could ever be given. We currently know little about how our minds work, but it is surely more reasonable than not to suppose that, one day, we shall be able to provide some sort of explanation here. What shape would such an explanation most likely have? First, it should be noted that it really does need to be an explanation, not a justification. As we have already pointed out, it is easy enough to give a pragmatic justification for preferring a believable theory over an unbelievable one, and impossible to give a more orthodox truth-directed one; but that is not what we are after here. We want to know what causes us to process data in one way rather than another. Ultimately, this will lead us to neurophysiology and the fact that our brains are structured in one way rather than another. Now that we are within the realms of natural science, we can expect explanations to exhibit a familiar pattern. In particular, we can expect explanations to be intimately connected to laws, which in turn are intimately connected to counterfactuals. Specifically, if we explain our preference for theory T by reference to the fact that we have brain structure B, then, if the explanation is any good, it will yield counterfactual consequences of the form: if we had had instead brain structure B we would instead have preferred theory T . Without this, there would be no law-like connection between brain structure and theory choice, and hence no explanation. The clincher is this. Suppose creatures suddenly emerge from a spacecraft and are discovered to have brain structure B . Surely it would now be reasonable – according to our own canons of rationality – to attribute to these creatures belief in theory T rather than T . Such an attribution becomes entirely reasonable, because we can explain why they are more likely to have these beliefs: this is how best to maximize intelligibility. By contrast, it would be entirely unreasonable for us to suppose that most of their beliefs are true (i.e. what we, from our own viewpoint, call true),
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since that would make them utterly mysterious. It would be equally unreasonable for us to suppose that the creatures had no beliefs, even if they are so alien that they do not present any obvious signs of intelligence to us at all (a rather more likely scenario). If this picture is correct, then it follows that we really can show that our sort of alien is possible. Furthermore, we can explain how to identify an alien as such should we be confronted with one. As we said, this is the crucial argument, and we need to look carefully at the details. First, we need to be sure that the counterfactuals yielded will not simply be of the form ‘If we had had instead brain structure B we would not have grasped any theory at all’. We are concerned essentially with differential explanations here, with why we prefer T as opposed to T (or T or T and so on), but it may be wondered why we should expect to obtain the sort of explanation we are looking for in each case. After all, it would be unreasonable to suppose that for every alternative theory we can find a congenial brain structure; and if an appropriate differential explanation can fail in one case, then perhaps it can fail in all of them. Given our current ignorance, we cannot rule this possibility out, but the important point is that we are not forced to accept it either. It must be remembered that our cognitive contingency thesis is very weak, for it claims no more than that it is logically possible that there are alien belief-systems; and our argument is surely adequate to this rather minimal task. Indeed, we appear to have established something far stronger than is strictly needed. It may still be wondered if it is even logically possible that beliefs and their generation should be subject to this kind of explanation. Davidson, for example, has famously argued for ‘the principle of the anomalousness of the mental’, that is to say, the thesis that there are no strict psychophysical laws.
My general strategy for trying to show that there are no strict psychophysical laws depends, first, on emphasizing the holistic character of the cognitive field. Any effort at increasing the accuracy and power of a theory of behaviour forces us to bring more and more of the whole system of agent’s beliefs and motives directly into account. But in inferring this system from the evidence, we necessarily impose conditions of coherence, rationality, and consistency. These conditions have no echo in physical theory, which is why we can look for no more than rough correlations between psychological and physical phenomena.20
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If we cannot find lawlike correlations between mind and brain, then this will seriously damage our whole project, for we can hardly hope to understand a truly alien intellectual structure without considerable assistance. An indirect approach, one which goes beyond pure psychology, is needed, and an understanding of the correlated alien brain structure provides the most obvious way forwards. There are many issues here beyond the scope of this book, of course, but it is sufficient to show that Davidson’s influential arguments are unlikely to affect our own view. First, we do not require rigid, deterministic laws between brain structure and theory choice in order to obtain the relevant sort of counterfactual consequences; it is enough to have weaker, more probabilistic laws of the kind which are not at all out of place in the human sciences. If we can infer from our psychophysical laws that it is more likely than not that our aliens have a belief-system divergent from ours, then that is quite sufficient for our purposes. Secondly, it is not clear that Davidson’s arguments apply to the kind of correlations that we are trying to establish. We are not trying to explain why we have made a rationally (or irrationally) motivated choice between two positions, but rather why some options are psychologically available to us and others are not. This is not something that we choose, or can provide reasons for (in the relevant sense), and it is unobvious why there should be any problematic holistic constraints at work here that would rule out the kind of lawlike explanation that we want. This is, admittedly, a grey area. Many features of human cognition can be given a physiological explanation of a kind that will certainly sustain counterfactuals, for example the perception of certain basic similarities and differences that we noted in §3.2. Other similarity judgements surely cannot be given such an account, such as my tendency to see communists as more similar to fascists than to democrats. It is unclear, however, where one area ends and another begins, especially when we remember that we have only scratched the surface of what can be known about human physiology. Yet this itself tends to undermine Davidson’s position, since his argument requires there to be a sharper distinction between lawlike and non-lawlike models of explanation than is really credible. At any rate, it surely remains highly implausible to suppose that neurophysiology will never turn out to have any explanatory role to play in our predilection for one theory over another, which is all that is needed here. A completed science, on our view, will do more than just give a complete account of how the world is – what we shall call a ‘basic theory of the world’ (BTW). It will also link that account with the contingencies
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of our own natures in the manner indicated above, so as to give us what we may call an ‘amplified theory of the world’ (ATW) – that is to say, a theory of the world that includes a theory of why it should be our theory of the world. Our ATW predicts that different creatures should prefer BTWs to our own – and, indeed, different ATWs. This has an air of paradox, for an ATW talks about all viewpoints, and therefore looks as though it ought to transcend them all. A familiar argument against cognitive relativism that goes back to the Theætetus makes use of this idea. But the paradox is illusory, and an important virtue of our kind of cognitive relativism is precisely that it enables us to avoid this kind of objection. Attitude-reduction works as effectively on statements about ATWs as on anything else.21 Having said that, some of the consequences are undoubtedly odd. If the aliens and we can be expected to disagree profoundly about the way the world is, then we can be expected to disagree about the aliens themselves: in particular, about what they ought to think. But what can I mean if I declare that an alien ought to think such-and-such, and then add, in the very same breath, that they rationally ought to disagree with what I have just said? This double claim is apparently self-stultifying, and yet if my ATW demands the former, and (according to that same ATW) the aliens’ ATW demands the latter, then I must be committed to both parts of it. Indeed, there is a risk of a hierarchy of opposing claims, for my ATW, my ATW’s account of the aliens’ ATW, my ATW’s account of the aliens’ account of their ATW, and so on ad infinitum might, in theory, yield claims that are all different. We might insist that the constraints within our own theory will prevent that from happening, but that does not explain why we should be allowed to have any agreement at any level between the aliens and ourselves, given that we disagree so wildly about everything else. Interpretations are as much underdetermined by data as anything else. A more careful examination will reveal, however, that these oddities can be contained. Consider, once again, translation. Ostensibly, it is absurd, in the same way as above, for me to declare that an alien word W means such-and-such, and then add, in the very same breath, that the alien rationally ought to attach a different meaning to it. Nevertheless, if our theory says that we cannot possibly grasp the exact meaning of W, and also gives us a best approximation, then it is not at all odd to claim that the alien should not accept our translation. It may well be that our approximation is as unintelligible to the alien as his version is to us. If this sounds unlikely, consider a real life example. A developmental psychologist might study concept-acquisition in young children, and
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this will certainly demand an analysis of a child’s utterances in various circumstances. As likely as not, the psychologist’s interpretation of these utterances, and the ways in which they deviate subtly from what they might appear to us to mean, will be formulated in a professional vocabulary that is not understood by most adults, and quite obviously not by the child herself. Does this automatically invalidate the interpretation? At one level, yes; but at another, clearly not. What is important to remember in such cases is that an interpretation is something that an interpreter confers upon the interpretee. It does not have to be shared between them. Thus any constraints that we place upon the interpretation of aliens need reflect only facts about ourselves and what we find intelligible, and not inexplicable similarities between the aliens and ourselves. This relates to the point we discussed at the end of the last section about grotesque combinations of the familiar and the unfamiliar. It is easy to lose sight of these facts because normal communication assumes a common language. Yet communication, even when two-way, does not automatically imply a communion of minds, as the above example shows. True, to recognize any kind of state as mental is to demand that one re-enact it in one’s own mind, and not regard it in a purely external sort of way as if it were something on a Petri dish. This does not alter the fact, however, that re-enactment is permitted to alter the original to a considerable extent.22 Our capacity for empathy is highly elastic. Of course, an ability to communicate effectively with the kind of extreme aliens that we have been postulating is something that we can scarcely imagine at all at present. But this in itself proves nothing about what is genuinely possible; for if we can be sure of anything at all, it is that the arrival of intelligent alien creatures into our world would greatly expand the limits of what we can imagine! Our thesis may be strange, but the evidence still points in its favour.
3.5 Further objections Despite these arguments, many will remain uneasy. Our defence of the possibility of alien intelligence hinges very much on problems about concepts and classifications, areas where there is indeed room for unfamiliarity; but it may be felt that the real problem lies at a much more elementary level. Our knowledge of the external world comes primarily from direct perception, and it is, perhaps, a mistake to suppose that this is something that requires any significant intellectual capacities at all. We have been largely assuming, with Kant and many others, that it is the understanding that provides the additional element that
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transforms raw sensation into full-blown perceptual experience, but this can be challenged.23 Most obviously, the Kantian thesis that perception without concepts is blind fails to account for the fact that animals such as dogs and cats, for example, have excellent perceptual faculties despite having no concepts at all (a fortiori, no conceptual scheme). When the cat runs off, it is because it has seen the dog running towards it. This is obvious. Of course, we do not have to suppose that it sees the dog as a dog (as opposed to an animal of a roughly similar appearance). Nevertheless, it has more than just a set of visual sensations. It genuinely sees the dog – and knows where it is. More generally, it has a pretty good idea of the distribution of matter in its immediate environment, a fact that is not sustained by any conceptualization whatsoever. It therefore follows – and this is the point – that this fact equally cannot be overturned by an alternative conceptualization. Yet we want it to be possible for an intelligent alien to have a radically different view about the distribution of matter in space and time, and it now seems that this is an idea that does not really make much sense after all. We can envisage all manner of fascinating divergences at a higher intellectual level, of course; but when it comes down to the most basic facts about our physical environment, we are forced into the limits set by what is directly and immediately perceived – and these limits are considerably more restrictive. Is this a decisive objection? It is true that we should be wary of supposing that alternative conceptualizations will have a significant impact at the fundamental perceptual level that we are interested in. However, radical perceptual divergence still remains a possibility. The ‘geometrical underdetermination’ that we considered in the last chapter applies as much to dogs, cats and other non-conceptualizers as it does to human beings. Specifically, it remains quite possible to arrange for a cat’s sensory boundary to be stimulated in exactly the same way as it would be if a dog were running towards it, even though nothing of the kind is actually happening. Even if the cat’s mental content is wholly nonconceptual, and therefore cannot, strictly speaking, be ‘false’, it will still be ‘wrong’ in the very real sense of being hallucinatory: the intentional objects of its perception simply do not exist.24 The gap between sensory input and full-fledged perception still remains considerable, even if the processing that enables the latter to arise out of the former should not be described as ‘conceptualization’. However we describe it, it is of massive importance, and the question of why it produces the full-fledged perceptions that it does, even though the sensory input is consistent with many alternatives, remains. If the answer, once again, is that there are
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lawlike connections between brain structure and methods of sensory processing (and it is difficult to see what other answer there could be), then, as before, we shall, once these connections have been identified, be in a good position to claim that certain types of alien creature have not only radically different higher beliefs from ours, but also quite incompatible basic perceptions of the external world. Moreover, this need not be solely because they are making grue-type inductions, for this presupposes comparatively advanced intellectual activity. Rather, the processing is, for the most part, automatic, unconscious and better characterized in purely physiological terms. It nevertheless is quite sufficient to produce the kind of underdetermination problem that generates cognitive contingency in our sense. It may be objected further that, even if we accept the possibility of alternative perceptual processing of this kind, there is another kind of very basic difficulty which rules out the possibility of a radically alternative mentality. Specifically, we need to answer the fundamental objection, which we associate primarily with Wittgenstein, that languages are essentially public, and that the correct application of words of all kinds rests ultimately on general agreement.25 This point applies, indeed, to any kind of rule-governed activity. This line of argument has often been used to argue that radical scepticism is incoherent, and that our concepts will just disintegrate if we try to formulate alternative belief-systems of the kind that we are considering (or take ourselves to be considering). The literature on this topic is huge, of course, and we shall not attempt a full analysis here. However, some points are immediately relevant. Most importantly, it must be emphasized, once again, that Wittgenstein’s target is primarily groundless doubt and an associated type of scepticism which is essentially unmotivated. As we have already noted, however, our sort of scepticism is of a very different kind from the standard brain-in-a-vat variety. Indeed, it is arguably not a kind of scepticism at all, for not only do our own beliefs remain more or less as before, we are prepared to tell aliens exactly what they ought to believe as well, even if that turns out to be something quite different. This is very far from suspending judgement, which is what the true sceptic does. We reduce the attitude of full belief, of course, and across the board, but we do not do this because the justification of our original attitude fails to meet some artificially high standard. On the contrary, we have argued that it is because we would fail to keep faith with our own scientific practices if we did anything else. It may still be feared that our concepts will not survive the kind of extreme variant application to aliens, however well motivated such a
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practice can be made to look. However, this is to disregard the fact that we have no intention of trying to interpret aliens until our own internal linguistic practices have become very stable and well understood. Let it be granted that no one could learn the meaning of a word if there were no agreed method of application; but once the word’s meaning has been well and truly learnt, there is no obviously compelling reason why its usage could not be extended in a very odd new way in very odd new circumstances. The interpretation of aliens is a very specialized sort of activity, and it is just far-fetched to suppose that our grasp of ordinary domestic linguistic affairs is automatically going to be threatened just because such interpretation requires us to say some unusual things far from home. Even if we agree with virtually everything that Wittgenstein says about how we learn our first language, this leaves us with plenty of room for manœuvre where it is needed. We may protest that it is still hard to envisage what our revised linguistic practices are going to be like. Given the sheer alienness of our aliens, this is unsurprising. Nevertheless, we can give an illustration of the kind of thing that might be involved if we restrict ourselves, in the first instance, to disagreement about secondary qualities, a far more modest kind of cognitive divergence. The possibility or otherwise of inverted colour-spectra (or inverted qualia) is not entirely representative of our problem, since there seems to be little or no functional difference involved (which is, of course, why qualia are usually thought to be philosophically significant). However, there are aspects of the debate which impact directly on our problems about interpretation. It is, of course, quite natural to wonder whether you might see green where I see red, and vice versa.26 However, some, following Wittgenstein, have declared that the thought is not just unwarranted but actually meaningless.27 ‘Meaning is use’, it is insisted, so if you use the word ‘red’ as everyone else does, then it instantly follows that you mean exactly the same as everyone else. The suggestion that you may actually see green qualia (and therefore speak a variant form of English) must therefore be meaningless, however much it may seem otherwise. Now, if the hypothesis of inverted qualia were nothing more than idle speculation, we might agree that it amounts to nothing. After all, if it deserved to be taken as seriously as the more orthodox view (that we all see things in much the same way), then why not go further and suppose an unlimited divergence of qualia across the board? And if we allowed that, then how could colour words ever be learnt? The sheer impossibility here suggests that colour sensations cannot be private in the way that talk about qualia suggests. At least, we might concede
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this much – if only for the sake of argument. Yet suppose that we discover a method of ‘re-wiring’ the connections between the eye and the visual cortex in such a way that a person, so manipulated, comes to see colours reversed. We know that this is what results from such manipulation because the subjects tell us so.28 And suppose we then discover that the inhabitants of a Twin-Earth, call it TE1 , who appear to speak normal English, all have altered brains of this type. Would it not now be a reasonable scientific hypothesis to suppose that they have inverted qualia and speak a variant form of English? We might insist instead that such a difference in brain structure cannot be given this level of importance. But now imagine another Twin-Earth (call it TE2 where not only do its inhabitants have hereditarily altered brains, they also use English non-standardly (i.e. they typically utter sentences like ‘Blood is green’ and ‘Grass is red’). Suppose that A is an inhabitant of TE2 and that B is one of the terrestrial human beings whose brains were recently altered (assume that there are many of them). Let us now consider what ‘red’ means when A says ‘Grass looks red to me’. Hypothesis H1 is that ‘red’ here means green, and it is supported by the fact that A’s usage will come to resemble our own as soon as the usages of ‘red’ and ‘green’ are interchanged: their language thus relates to ours as, for example, British English relates to American English with respect to the words ‘endive’ and ‘chicory’. By contrast, hypothesis H2 says that ‘red’ here means red; and it is supported by the fact that A’s usage is identical with B’s, and B does speak ordinary English even if her usage has recently become eccentric (when she says, in obvious bewilderment, that grass now looks red to her, that is exactly what she means). Now, the crucial point is that the thesis that meaning is use fails to adjudicate between these two hypotheses. Since A’s usage differs from our own, that suggests we should adopt H1 ; but since A’s usage is the same as B’s, that suggests that we should adopt H2 . However, the difference in brain structure tips the balance towards H2 , for A and B are alike not only in respect of usage but also cerebrally. No other pair of individuals in this story are similar in both respects. We should therefore conclude that alternative brain-structure leads to inverted qualia, not just in B’s case, but also in A’s. It is also natural to conclude further that the inhabitants of TE1 , our original Twin-Earth, also have inverted qualia. They thus do not speak standard English, just as we originally suggested, even though their usage is identical to ours. At the very least, we should allow that such suggestions are not only meaningful but also quite reasonable, even if defeasible by further empirical information. Moreover, such possibilities give rise to a real sceptical problem about
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colours, one that can be resolved in a very nice and plausible way by our sort of attitude-reduction.29 In general, we can see how a discovery of certain correlations between cognitive phenomena and brain-structure might license hypotheses that demand radical differences in aliens’ beliefs and perceptions, hypotheses that Wittgensteinian considerations about meaning and use fail to undermine. Nobody can seriously maintain that if we go along with hypotheses like the above, then our colour concepts will be in imminent danger of collapse, even if meaning and usage have diverged. The point is that the divergence is at the periphery, and far from the familiar central area within which our colour vocabulary was first learnt and where normal rules still apply. The ‘private language argument’ is totally irrelevant here, of course, for none of the languages under consideration is private. True, visual sensations are allowed a measure of privacy (as common sense demands), but the neurophysiological considerations that prompt us to suppose that you may see things quite differently from me are ‘private’ only in the irrelevant sense of being concealed within the skull. The scientific reasoning involved is public in every sense that matters. Can we extend this idea to cases of disagreement about primary qualities? It may be feared that we shall rapidly reach the limits of intelligibility if we attempt to do so. Nothing fundamentally odd happens to one’s experience when colour qualia are altered, but perceptions of where things are cannot be manipulated so readily. True, distorting spectacles can alter spatial appearances, but they do not alter spatial beliefs, except, perhaps, momentarily: indeed, even the appearances often return to normal fairly swiftly. Yet this does not alter the fact that we can construct alternative possible realities, where divergence is at the basic level of spatio-temporal distribution of matter, and where the laws of nature are different; and yet which yield indistinguishable sensory boundaries. Of course, we are nowhere near constructing such scenarios in any detail, but it would be perverse to suppose it to be impossible in principle. Geometrical underdetermination is a real phenomenon, as we have already argued at length. But, it may be protested, it is not the mere description of an alternative hypothesis that is the problem, but rather the idea that there could be a belief in any such hypothesis. If we cannot envisage ourselves holding any such belief, then what could justify our supposing that we have a genuine belief (or even potential belief) here at all? Yet it is difficult to see why we should have a fundamental problem here. Of course, we cannot imagine ourselves adopting an alien belief-system, just as we
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cannot imagine what it is like to be an alien (if we could, then it would not be an alien in any useful sense). However, it is hard to see why that should be significant unless we have already assumed that cognitive contingency is impossible, and, as we have already noted, the prima facie evidence is against this.30 Nevertheless, we may still want some more detailed assurances that we can have any real use for this notion. With this in mind, let us look more closely at how our interpretation of aliens is supposed to work. Thus suppose we come across some very strange creatures whom we suspect just might be intelligent. With this in mind, we attempt to translate what just might be their language. Naturally, we shall start with the hypothesis that most of what they ‘say’ is true, for it is reasonable to start with what is most familiar to us. This is the acceptable face of the ‘principle of charity’. But now suppose that, despite our best efforts, we are unable to find any translation that meets these constraints. It is at this point that Quine and the Davidson of ‘Radical Interpretation’ give up and conclude that these creatures cannot be intelligent after all, and that their murmurings, however complex, have no more semantic content than the rustling of the leaves or the howling of the wind. Our claim, however, is that we can go much further. We can examine, not just their output, but also their internal physiology. We have also, we may suppose, constructed a variety of alternative empirically equivalent theories of the world T T , and so on, and also have a theory that nomologically associates them with alternative brain structures B , B , and so on in the manner indicated earlier. This is what our ‘amplified theory of the world’ yields. We also notice that our creatures have B . So far, so good. We can now consider seriously the possibility that these creatures might have genuine beliefs after all, but that they conform to T rather than our own theory T . Now, is there something about the notion of a belief (as opposed to a mere description) that blocks the last stage of this strategy? If so, what could it be? It may be protested that the real mistake happened at an earlier stage of the argument, namely in the suggestion that we could find laws that explained why we ourselves adopt one theory rather than another; for what we are required to explain is why we do not believe any of the alternatives, and we have yet to explain what we really mean by that. However, as long as we are concerned with what we ourselves may or may not believe, there is surely not a fundamental problem. We often consider weird and wonderful hypotheses, and ask ourselves why we should not believe them to be true. It is just implausible to suppose that the concept of belief is in danger of collapse because we consider such
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things. Of course, if someone claimed to believe that his pencil is really a lawnmower, and attempted to avoid refutation by insisting that the paper on which he is writing is actually a lawn, and so on, then we shall wonder if he can possibly mean what he says, or if it even makes sense to suppose that he could actually believe what he says (he can easily imagine it, of course). Nevertheless, this is not because language per se forces us in that direction. It is just that pretence (or else a verbal error of some sort) overwhelmingly provides the most likely explanation of what is happening in most cases of this type. However, if this person were subject to severe perceptual distortion of an appropriate kind, one where pencils tend to present the same sensory stimuli as lawnmowers, then we might well take his belief-claims more seriously. And we need have no reason to suppose that the notion of belief has thereby been put under unreasonable strain, even if the content of what he believes becomes increasingly unfamiliar. We should also remember that the laws that we hope to discover will connect brain-structure with more than just belief-choice. They will connect with all the other factors that are involved in the generation of beliefs from sensory input. At present, we know little of what they are – indeed, for the most part, we do not even have names for the types of thing that will turn out to be involved, for our understanding of our own cognitive processes is currently only minimal. We may therefore expect that these laws, when they are eventually discovered, will provide a much more powerful tool for understanding cognitive divergence than we can now imagine. The notion of a radically alien belief may seem too fragile to survive; but if it is supported by a wealth of other cognitive concepts yet to be discovered, then we can be less and less sure of this. There are, of course, degrees of alienness, and it is perhaps helpful to grade them. Let us define a Type 1 alien as a creature of a cultural background very unlike our own whose concepts and interests may thus be rather different from ours, but whose basic beliefs about his environment are broadly the same. Communication with such an alien is quite difficult, but it can be managed after sufficient study. There is no fundamental disagreement about the ordinary world, though scientific theories may look rather different. We can list several real-life examples here (Aztecs, mediæval Japanese and so on). A Type 2 alien is not only culturally different, but also biologically significantly different. His sensory modes may not include anything like our five senses, but he does gain information from his environment in a recognizable way. Communication may be very difficult, but is possible after a fashion. Although there may be considerable disagreement in
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outlook, there is no fundamental divergence of belief of the type we have been considering. Most of the aliens in the science fiction literature are of this type. A Type 3 alien presents no immediate signs of intelligence at all, though there is certainly complexity of both behaviour and internal structure. Interpretation, however, does eventually become possible, but only if we attribute divergent beliefs in the manner we have been discussing. We have currently no idea of what two-way communication with them would be like. Science fiction, as far as I am aware, ignores this possibility. A Type 4 alien is like Type 3, except that we cannot interpret them even in our extended manner. The supposition that they are intelligent life-forms at all thus remains pure unverifiable speculation, though their strange complexity means that only verificationists are sufficiently confident to say that they are definitely mindless. It is, after all, unreasonable to suppose that the universe itself is limited by what Homo sapiens can make sense of, so we should perhaps allow such aliens to be possible, even if there is not much more that we can say about them (though science fiction often speculates about such creatures). Our own peculiar category, Type 3, reflects the fact that the limits of what we can agree with fall strictly inside those of what we can understand. The region between these limits is, in some ways, even stranger than the realm beyond understanding (after all, if we can show that something really is incomprehensible, then our intellects will be taxed no further on the subject). Yet it is precisely this intermediate area that underlies cognitive contingency, and it makes unfamiliar but very important demands on us. Until we come to terms with it, we shall not really understand what we are and what we are not, for a full understanding of specifically human intelligence requires a contrast. For example, P.F. Strawson has argued that individual persons cannot properly identify themselves until they can distinguish themselves from other persons;31 and historians typically argue that we cannot understand our own times until we can compare and contrast them with other, earlier times. In an analogous way, it can be argued that we cannot really understand our own human intelligence until we can fit it into a wider space of possible intelligences. We do not yet know quite how to do it, but a fundamentally important long-term research programme is precisely to achieve this: the ‘ecological model’ of knowledge that we shall develop shortly hinges on just this idea. Indeed, it should be of ultimate importance to us that such a goal eventually be achieved.
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It may still be protested that these arguments, for the most part, can amount to little more than whistling in the dark. It is true that many of our claims are highly speculative, and many of our analogies are often strained, but this is to be expected. The subject matter demands it. However, most of the speculation is, in fact, highly reasonable; in particular, the idea that science is moving towards what we call an amplified theory of the world, a theory that will enable us to describe alternative intellectual structures and to identify their possessors. This just involves a very natural, albeit highly advanced, extension of existing scientific research. And as long as we are interested in ourselves and why we think as we do, the point of such research remains quite plain. These ideas may be futuristic, but they are not at all far-fetched. Finally, it is worth repeating once again that our central task in this chapter is minimal, namely to show that alternative belief-systems are logically possible. We have successfully demonstrated that familiar arguments for their impossibility fail. We have, in addition, taken all steps reasonably available to us to show that such a possibility is more than just an unverifiable speculation, and that the attribution of such alternative beliefs to creatures of an identifiable kind just might, in some circumstances, be justified. This is all that we can be expected to do; and we have done it.
4 Belief and Acceptance
Having established that there really is a sceptical case to be answered, we must now show that our theory manages to answer it. Specifically, we must establish that if we weaken our concept of belief in the manner recommended in Chapter 1, then our ordinary standards of justification become valid. To do this, we need, first, to demonstrate more carefully that the concept of belief really is capable of such modification, that it is not a simple case of full-belief-or-nothing; and this means looking in more detail at rival notions such as acceptance.
4.1 Acceptance as a distinct attitude Is there a valid difference between believing something and accepting it? Many, perhaps most, philosophers have supposed that, if there is any difference at all, it cannot be very significant – perhaps just a matter of degree or something similar. The two certainly sound much the same. I recall a conversation some years ago between my uncle and a man who, like him, had served in the Far East during the war. After hearing one wartime tale too many, my uncle returned the memorable comment: ‘I accept your story, of course – but I don’t believe a word of it!’ His interlocutor was the host of the evening, and my uncle’s comment managed to avoid all offence, but it struck me forcibly then and for some time afterwards that here was something not quite right – although I could see perfectly well what my uncle was getting at. Yet a number of philosophers have argued that there is in fact a very important distinction here, one which goes beyond etiquette, degree or mere emphasis. 108
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Michael Bratman, it will be recalled from §1.1, sets out four ways in which he claims belief and acceptance differ, which we may summarize in the following table: Beliefs
Acceptances
1 Are context-independent 2 Aim at truth
May vary between contexts Can be influenced by practical considerations unconnected with truth Are typically voluntary Cannot always be agglomerated across contexts
3 Are typically involuntary 4 Can always be agglomerated across contexts
Criteria (1) and (4) are broadly similar, since contexts tend to be individuated largely according to whether agglomeration is possible. However, (2) and (3) seem wholly dissimilar, both from each other and from (1). Criterion (2) implies (1) in so far as truth itself is contextindependent: any variation would imply that we do not have the same proposition in each context. The converse, however, is not clear, in the sense that it is not obvious that if I accept p in every context then my acceptance must, for that reason, aim at truth. Likewise, it is far from clear why an attitude must be truth-aiming just because it is involuntary, though the converse may seem more plausible. We shall develop these points shortly. Yet, given the independence of these criteria, we naturally wonder why they should come together in this way. Our suspicion may well be that, in fact, they do not, or do not have to. Instead of two candidates, belief and acceptance, we might have a whole range of possible attitudes here. This, indeed, is what we shall argue for. Let us be clearer about our strategy here. We wish to devise a weakened notion of belief, one which does not aim at truth in the full-blown, ‘extensional’ sense, but which is stronger than mere acceptance inasmuch as it is context-independent, typically involuntary, has a weak, ‘intensional’ truth-aiming aspect, and satisfies a restricted universality principle. To achieve this, we must first show that acceptance in our sense really is a full-fledged cognitive attitude in its own right, and genuinely different from belief. Acceptance, so understood, will thus be our starting point, our original minimal attitude. We must then show that we can strengthen it, step by step, without its collapsing into full belief. Context-dependence does seem to show conclusively that there are occasions where full belief is inappropriate. It is a commonplace of
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science that many theories, principles or equations work well with some kinds of problem, but give quite the wrong results with others. This can come as a surprise to those with an idealized view of science, one which supposes it to deal only with eternal and universal truths; but the reality is considerably messier. Even our most basic theories suffer from some degree of contextualism. For example, quantum mechanics (QM) and the general theory of relativity (GTR) notoriously do not mix well. Even the special theory of relativity (STR) sits uneasily with QM, since the latter demands that electrons jump instantaneously from one orbit to another (a ‘quantum leap’), which apparently contradicts the STR principle that nothing moves faster than light. More recent advances have largely removed the latter problem, but this does not alter the fact that for a long time the contradiction was unresolved. During that period, physicists would accept QM but not STR when working with some kinds of problem, and would accept STR but not QM when working with other kinds.1 Their minds, however, did not collapse under the strain of a contradiction. But did they believe their theories? If they believed both of them, even in different contexts, then they were clearly asking for trouble (unless the contextualization modified the contents of the beliefs themselves, thus removing the contradiction – but this is implausible). Of course, we can and do often believe contradictory things, but not when we also believe that they are contradictory (except in pathological cases). As noted, we can always modify content if needed, though not always in an uncontrived and non-ad hoc way. However, a natural way to resolve the matter is to conclude that the scientists accept the different theories in different contexts, and insist that acceptance in a context is indeed different from belief. So, although it may well be that whenever I accept that p in context C, then I shall believe that
is acceptablein-context-C (and conversely), we need not insist that the former is reducible to the latter. Such a demand would be perverse, even if one chooses a different word for ‘acceptable’. Rather, we should treat acceptance as a cognitive state in its own right, and reject the idea that it has to be ‘belief or nothing’. So far, so good. Trouble arises, however, if we accept a theory T in all contexts, not just some. van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism, which is closely related to our own view, says that to accept a theory T one need only believe it to be empirically adequate. One does not have to believe it to be true as long as it ‘saves the phenomena’. Where empirical adequacy is restricted to a particular context, this makes sense. If I accept T within context C, what I require is that T give the right (observable)
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results within context C; but since other contexts may give the wrong results, I do not suppose T to be actually true. But this is not what is meant by the term. Rather, van Fraassen defines ‘empirical adequacy’ to mean consistency with all (actual and counterfactual) observations.2 But if a theory is expected to work in all contexts, it becomes much harder to see why my attitude towards it should be anything less than full-blown belief. Horwich (1991), for example, protests that belief and acceptance are functionally identical in the sense that they play indistinguishable causal roles.3 Now, there is plainly a difference in the contextualized cases, and we might insist that universally quantifying across contexts cannot really make that much difference. On the other hand, it might be protested that, since we relied solely on context-variance to argue for the distinction in the first place, then such variance will be precisely what makes all the difference! But belief aims at truth, and it is not easy to see why non-contextual acceptance should have to do so if its contextual version does not. More specifically, suppose we invent a new attitude, acceptance*, defined as follows: (A*) S accepts* that p =df S accepts that p in all contexts. If acceptance* is the same as belief, then the truth-norm schema (TN)
We should that p only if
is true
must hold when we substitute ‘accept*’ for ‘ ’, but not when we substitute ‘accept’. Since the only difference between these attitudes comes from A*, there must somehow be an inference from A* to the substituted TN (perhaps with some innocuous background premises added). It is hard to see what could underlie such an inference, enthymematic or otherwise, since the premise and the conclusion look wholly unrelated. It may be complained that we have no business just defining into existence a whole new range of cognitive states, and that proof is needed that acceptances* genuinely exist. But is there a real issue here? It is the verb ‘accept*’ that does the work, not the noun ‘acceptance*’, and the same is true, for the most part, of ‘accept’, ‘believe’, ‘desire’, and all other attitudes. Nobody is suggesting that acceptances* have to be basic entities in any interesting ontological sense. As long as we have the verb, we can easily get the noun if we want it, and A* gives us the verb. And from it we may immediately conclude that accepting* something is different from, and stronger than, merely accepting it. We can define
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into existence many other such attitudes if we feel like it. Nothing much of interest will happen if we do so, however. In particular, we should not expect a truth-norm suddenly to emerge – for where would it come from, and why? True, there are some general difficulties here about attitudes versus states, as we noted in §1.1, and we shall return to this in the next section. Yet there is surely no immediate reason for supposing that we face a problem at this stage. Still, this may seem unduly swift. If there really are no functional differences between beliefs and acceptances*, so defined, and if contextdependence is the only reason we can give for supposing that original acceptance is different from belief, then the onus of proof is surely on us to show that accepting* and believing really are different attitudes with different norms. However, context-dependence does not really play that fundamental a role in explaining what is meant by acceptance. When we ask, ‘What are scientists doing when they accept T in context C?’, we answer by appealing to which equations they actually use, which assumptions they adopt, which measurements they choose to make, which alternatives they select, and so forth. These italicized terms, which are central to the notion of acceptance, may be explicated without mention of belief, if only because they have a much wider range of application (we may use, adopt, choose and select all sorts of things, not all of which have propositional content). More significantly still, however we describe the scientists’ attitude to T within C, we need not mention the fact (if it is a fact) that they do not accept T in all contexts. Indeed, we need not talk about what goes on outside C at all (and probably will not). The science that goes on within C alone should be more than able to hold our attention. It is therefore a mistake to suppose that acceptance can only be differentiated from belief in terms of context-dependence, even though it is most obviously context-dependence that proves that acceptance is not belief. It is just not that essential to the distinction. So we are not forced to suppose that the addition of the asterisked context-independence criterion will automatically collapse our revised acceptance back into full belief. In any event, we should be wary of supposing that there are no functional differences between these attitudes. We may not see them if we focus simply on their causes and effects, but functionalism of that kind was always an unreasonably crude way of characterizing mental items. We have no idea of how to analyse even the central notions of intentionality and semantic content within such a meagre framework. If, by contrast, we simply ask subjects about their states, and how they think
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that truth-aiming enters the matter, then they may tell us many relevant things. Horwich, however, is rather dismissive of this approach: The difference between belief and acceptance, it might be claimed, is that believers say, or at least think, ‘I believe this’, whereas mere accepters do not. However, facts of this sort hardly settle the matter. For it is perfectly plausible to maintain that such differences in behaviour are not the reflection of a difference between belief and acceptance but that they come, rather, from the difference between belief on the part of those who are not confused about their psychological states, and belief on the part of those who have been so muddled by philosophical double-talk that they are mistaken about the right way to describe their psychological state. In short, it is perfectly possible for someone to sincerely, yet mistakenly, deny her beliefs, that is, to believe without believing that she believes. So a difference between belief and acceptance is not implied merely by the possibility of conforming one’s metabeliefs to instrumentalist doctrine.4 Horwich is perfectly right, of course, that we can make mistakes about our own mental states, and we are all deceived by double-talk on occasions. However, our defence of the distinction rests on more than just introspection. The question of whether an attitude is deemed to satisfy a truth-norm makes a good deal of difference to ordinary conversation, as we noted in Chapter 1. Moreover, as we also noted there, subtler distinctions between intensional and extensional truth-aiming norms will reveal themselves in our attitudes towards aliens, and although we have only a very hazy idea of what that might mean in practice, it would be premature to suppose that these normative distinctions have no functional implications. It is just that we may need to consider rather exotic situations before we notice them. And crucially, we have argued that theoretical virtues such as simplicity have nothing to do with truth, and that underdetermination presents a major sceptical threat. It follows, if such arguments are sound, that we have no reason to believe a simpler theory over a more complex, empirically equivalent one, even though there are excellent pragmatic reasons for accepting it.5 Of course, in practice, we often will believe the simpler theory as well as accept it, but we still can see why we should not do so, and this is enough to give us a distinction, even if it cannot be directly characterized in straightforward functional (i.e. causal role) terms. Still, we are left with a puzzle as to why van Fraassen thinks that theories should aim even at empirical adequacy in the across-the-board
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sense. A full-blown constructive empiricist should be quite happy to keep things contextualized, as long as contextualized theories give the right results within their respective spheres, and as long as it remains the case that, for each context, we can find a theory that works within it. After all, the phenomena would still be saved, and this is all that is supposed to matter. What could motivate the desire for convergence across contexts, to find a single theory that works in all spheres, other than a desire for theoretical truth? Perhaps further pragmatic criteria could be brought to bear here, a point to which we shall return in Chapter 6 . Nevertheless, it is easy to suspect, with Horwich, that van Fraassen has not really managed to distinguish his views all that fundamentally from the scientific realist’s, even if there genuinely is a logical distinction between belief and non-contextual acceptance. This suspicion is increased by the fact that van Fraassen says virtually nothing about the concept of acceptance itself. We gather that once we have established that a theory T is empirically adequate, then we have fulfilled our epistemic duty as far as T ’s acceptance is concerned. Yet obviously acceptance of T requires more than the mere belief that T is empirically adequate, since we believe that there are many such empirically adequate theories, only one of which is actually selected. van Fraassen tells us that these additional criteria are pragmatic, not epistemic, but does not tell us much else; and this leaves him open to several objections. For example, L. Jonathan Cohen agrees that underdetermination ensures that we have no right to believe our theories, and also agrees that this does not automatically undermine their acceptability.6 Yet he insists against van Fraassen that belief in empirical adequacy is not required for acceptance: Indeed, we do not even have to treat empirical adequacy as a matter for belief and theoretical explanation as a matter for acceptance. So far from its being the case that good scientists typically seek empirically adequate knowledge of a kind that involves belief, they must be supposed rather always to seek knowledge of a kind that does not necessarily involve belief. Galileo would have remained a good scientist if he had merely accepted Copernicus’s astronomy, without also believing it. Scientific enquiry, whether in pursuit of empirical uniformities or probabilities or of theoretical explanations, is not to be regarded as a procedure that is consummated only when appropriate justifiable belief, with novel content, arise in or come over those engaged, who have presumably been waiting patiently meanwhile for this happen to them.7
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The point is that to believe that a theory is (merely) empirically adequate, as opposed to true, is already to make a huge commitment, given that such adequacy implies consistency with absolutely all actual and possible observations. Most of us would hesitate before making any such claim, but are we forbidden to ‘accept’ a theory until we do so? It is for reasons of this kind that Cohen marginalizes belief, and treats acceptance as a wholly independent cognitive attitude in its own right: [B]elief that p is a disposition, when one is attending to issues raised, or items referred to, by the proposition that p, normally to feel it true that p and false that not-p, whether or not one is willing to act, speak, or reason accordingly. But to accept the proposition that p is to have or adopt a policy of deeming, positing, or postulating that p – i.e. of including that proposition or rule among one’s premises for deciding what to do or think in a particular context, whether or not one feels it to be true that p. So belief that p can coexist in your mind with acceptance that p. But it is not conceptually tied to doing so.8 Cohen’s treatment of the distinction is much more carefully worked out than van Fraassen’s. However, there are some complications here – at least, from our point of view. First, it is hard to see how any statement could ever be ‘accepted’ in all contexts according to this definition, since we plainly do not use it as a premise in every argument. We might try to get around this by saying that our desired claim is at least consistent with what is accepted in irrelevant contexts, but this will not do either: for no matter how well entrenched a claim may be, one might always use its negation as a premise in some context or other – for example, in a proof by reductio ad absurdum. It apparently follows that we do not accept* any statement which is proved in this manner! Perhaps some sort of distinction between provisional and terminal acceptance could be invoked here, though it is not obvious how to make it precise.9 However, it may be that this does not matter all that much, for we do have an adequately intuitive idea of the sort of contexts we are interested in. Galileo famously tried to prove that objects of different masses must fall at the same rate by (among other things) a reductio ad absurdum argument, but no one would conclude, except as a joke, that he accepted that this law held only in some contexts, not all. It may be retorted that this is just because we know exactly how to identify contexts of the right sort, namely those where acceptance amounts to belief! However, this is not entirely plausible. We are shocked to learn that QM and GTR do not work in ‘all’ contexts, and we mean all contexts of the relevant kind.
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However, they are not automatically the contexts where acceptance would amount to belief, for the variation across these relevant contexts ensures that neither of these theories is believed in any context. van Fraassen gets round these points by insisting that a necessary condition for ‘acceptance’ of T , in the relevant sense, is the belief that T is empirically adequate, though we have already noted Cohen’s objections to this. We prefer not to put too much weight on this idea, since we wish to show that the original notion of belief is one that can be dispensed with across the board, and not just in theoretical contexts. However, Cohen also presents us with a more general difficulty since, according to him, acceptance is not a weaker version of belief, as we have assumed, and therefore cannot be made to approximate to it by adding further restrictions, whether concerning empirical adequacy or anything else. On the contrary, not only can one accept something without believing it, one can also believe it without accepting it. There are several kinds of example here. For instance, I may believe a favourite thesis T , but decide that it needs to be tested more rigorously. In conducting this testing, I shall need to accept various things at the outset, but obviously not T itself. A different kind of example is the case of the lawyer who is required, as a matter of professional duty, to accept that his client is not guilty, even though he believes no such thing. Here we have a case of acceptance without belief.10 However, it naturally follows that if he feels that his client is guilty (though cannot prove this decisively enough), he is required not to accept this if his client insists on pleading not guilty, and for the same reason as before; and this gives us a case of belief without acceptance. Indeed, we are all faced with this sort of problem in so far as respect for the rule of law demands that we presume (i.e. accept) innocence, even though we know perfectly well that many guilty people are acquitted. This combination of attitudes is not always easy, but it is not a conceptual impossibility. Rules of courtesy and etiquette have similar, though less severe features, and the case of my uncle and his dinner host might be placed in this category. Is this a problem? There are clearly a number of issues here, and we may be tempted to conclude simply that there is more than one notion of acceptance at work, and maybe even more than one notion of belief.11 Alternatively, we may just rely on our intuition that distinguishes relevant kinds of context from the others. One rather crude way of restoring our hierarchy, where acceptance is kept firmly at the bottom, is simply to ignore cases of belief without acceptance on the grounds that such cases present no special problems about scepticism and justification, our own chief area of interest. Instead of talking about belief,
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we can perhaps talk about the compound attitude, belief-and-acceptance (which we may, in the interests of brevity, still call ‘belief’) without any significant loss. This strategy will work up to a point. However, we need to remember that, although the context-independence and the truthaiming criteria clearly demand that belief be a stronger attitude than acceptance, the same is not obviously true of our third criterion, involuntariness. On the contrary, this criterion, as currently formulated, rules out not only voluntary belief but also involuntary acceptance. Thus, once again, belief and acceptance become more equally matched, with neither analysable as a special case of the other. Moreover, many philosophers (including Cohen) have argued that questions about what we can and cannot control lie at the very heart of the distinction.
4.2 Voluntariness and ‘directions of fit’ Does it not seem preposterous on the very face of it to talk of our opinions as being modifiable at will? Can our will either help or hinder our intellect in its perceptions of truth? Can we, by just willing it, believe that Abraham Lincoln’s existence is a myth, and that the portraits of him in McClure’s Magazine are all of someone else? Can we, by any effort of our will, or by any strength of wish that it were true, believe ourselves well and about when we are roaring with rheumatism in bed, or feel certain that the sum of two one-dollar bills in our pocket must be a hundred dollars? We can say any of these things, but we are absolutely impotent to believe them 12 William James’s chief target in his lecture concerns religious belief, and he goes on to deplore Pascal’s wager (about which, more later). Yet, although what he says here is eminently plausible, the passage quoted (and, alas, most of his lecture) is pure rhetoric. What we want is a proof that voluntary belief is impossible, and this is a bit harder to find. The most famous attempt to supply such a proof is by Bernard Williams in his paper ‘Deciding to Believe’.13 He argues that voluntary belief is a conceptual impossibility, that is to say, rests on more than just a contingent fact, such as the fact that I am unable to blush at will. Moreover, it is precisely the fact that beliefs aim at truth which demonstrates this: If I could acquire a belief at will, I could acquire it whether it was true or not; moreover I would know that I could acquire it whether it was true or not. If in full consciousness I could will to acquire a
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‘belief’ irrespective of its truth, it is unclear that before the event I could seriously think of it as a belief, i.e. as something purporting to represent reality. At the very least, there must be a restriction on what is the case after the event; since I could not then, in full consciousness, regard this as a belief of mine, i.e. something I take to be true, and also know that I acquired it at will. With regard to no belief could I know – or, if all this is to be done in full consciousness, even suspect – that I had acquired it at will. But if I can acquire beliefs at will, I must know that I am able to do this; and could I know that I was capable of this feat, if with regard to every feat of this kind which I had performed I necessarily had to believe that it had not taken place?14
The point may seem clear enough, but there are several difficulties here. Most notably, as Williams himself recognizes, there are various artificial, indirect ways in which I can deliberately acquire a belief. I can, for example, decide that I would be much happier if I believed something or other for which there is not much evidence and, in consequence, voluntarily undergo a course of hypnosis or brainwashing (or whatever) that leaves me with this belief. Less drastically, I might just choose to immerse myself in evidence in favour of the claim and ignore evidence against it. True, it may be hard to retain this belief if I come to realize that that is how I acquired it, though perhaps we might be able to get around even this. After all, some people do believe the most preposterous things, and not everyone is especially good at putting two and two together. However this is perhaps irrelevant. What is distinctive about belief, and what is of most importance, perhaps, is that it is impossible to will a belief ‘just like that’, as we say. I cannot come to believe that p in the same immediate sort of way that I can just raise my arm. It is only by indirect, unconscious or otherwise devious methods that belief can be brought about by the will alone. Yet, as Jonathan Bennett (1990) points out, Williams’s argument fails to make adequate use of this distinction between mediate and immediate volition, and so, if sound, would prove far more than it should. Ergo, it is not sound. Many others have entered the debate.15 However, it may be protested that these issues should not concern us unduly, since our chief concern is not whether there can be voluntary belief but whether there can be involuntary acceptance. That is to say, it is not whether aiming at truth implies involuntariness that we need to investigate, but the converse. This seems to be a very different problem.
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Nevertheless, there is more of relevance here than it might seem. Most importantly, the debate about voluntary belief and its connection with truth-directedness has helped to bring into focus some fundamental questions about what is really meant by saying that beliefs aim at truth. Our own preferred formulation TN talks about what we should aim at, but many have felt that beliefs must be directed towards the world in a far more basic and robust sense. After all, if aiming at truth were merely a normative requirement, would it not follow that believing at will would be no more than a kind of normative failure – that is to say, something that we just should not do? Yet the whole point is that voluntarily manipulating our beliefs (directly, immediately and in full consciousness of what we are doing) is not merely an epistemically vicious activity, something that is forbidden by the rules of good cognitive behaviour. It is, we instinctively suppose with James and others, just downright impossible! If it is the fact that beliefs aim at truth that is to explain why this should be so, then it seems to follow that this fact must amount to much more than just something normative. It is in this context that we often talk of ‘directions of fit’. The distinction, which originated with G.E.M. Anscombe, is most typically used nowadays to explain the difference between belief and desire.16 The direction of fit of belief is said to be ‘world-to-mind’, and this means that should there be a mismatch between the world and how we believe it to be, then the mistake is in the belief, not the world. By contrast, the direction of fit of desire is ‘mind-to-world’, and this means that, should there be a mismatch between the world and how we desire it to be, then the mistake is in the world, not the desire. This is how many understand what is meant by saying that beliefs aim at truth, whereas desires aim at satisfaction. However, this distinction is much less straightforward than it seems. Most immediately, we want to know what is meant here by a ‘mistake’ (Anscombe’s original word). If it just means that something is not the way it should be, then we are still within the realms of the normative. If it refers to some kind of intrinsic, pre-normative malfunction, on the other hand, then we need to be much clearer about what sort of function we are talking about. We know (more or less) what is meant by saying that the function of the eye is to see and that the function of the heart is to circulate the blood. Biology textbooks expand on this sort of thing. However, it is significant that they do not tell us that the function of belief is to represent the world truly (though they might tell us that the function of perception is to give us information about our environment). In fact, even comparatively innocent claims
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about biological function become controversial if they are expected to carry any metaphysical weight, as Aristotle’s celebrated ergon argument illustrates.17 To say, ‘Well, that is just what they are for ’ in answer to the question, ‘Why should beliefs aim at truth?’ is not really all that helpful. In fact, even if we did avail ourselves of some kind of intrinsic functional quality supposedly possessed by belief, it would not obviously advance the argument, and for two reasons. First, as Paul Noordhof points out, any system, however well designed, can malfunction in a number of different ways, and we need to explain why even a malfunctioning person cannot just choose what to believe.18 Secondly, and relatedly, it is unclear why uncovering an intrinsic truth-seeking ergon of belief would add much to our original normative approach, since functions and norms essentially go together. For example, if we agree that the function of the eye is to see, then that instantly tells us what the eye should be doing, as well as the difference between a good eye and a bad one. Indeed, the normativity may reasonably be regarded as definitive of the functional quality (after all, without the normativity there would be no function, just as without the function there would be no normativity). So maybe our TN criterion does not really ignore the ergon of belief, whatever that turns out to mean. We concentrate on the norms per se because they are what are of immediate relevance. Of course, it may be that the function is pre-normative in the sense that it yields a non-circular derivation of the norm. Nevertheless, even if it did manage to yield an interesting kind of inference from is to ought, it remains obscure why this should help us, since we still lack any reason for supposing that the is is relevant except in so far as it yields the ought – which is why we still have our mystery. Why should it be not just normatively forbidden (or symptomatic of a deep malfunction of some kind) but conceptually impossible to believe (consciously, immediately and so on) at will? This sort of functional talk is evidently not getting us very far. We might, indeed, reasonably protest that it merely adds bogus complexity to what is actually very simple, and that the proof we need was quite adequately expressed at the outset by Williams. If a person manipulates his judgement whether p at will and is conscious of doing so, and also knows that the truth or falsity of
is independent of his will (i.e. he knows that he cannot make it true or false that p just by willing it), then he is plainly not interested in whether his judgement that p is true or not. In short, he is ignoring the truth-norm TN with respect to
. Therefore, his attitude here, whatever else it may be, is not a belief. What better reason can we have to say that he is not aiming at
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truth with respect to a given question if he comes down on one side or the other for reasons that he himself knows perfectly well have nothing to do with truth? It may be protested that we are in danger of trivializing the point if we just stipulate that someone does not count as aiming at truth in such situations. An immediate response, of course, is that conceptual necessities usually do turn out to be no more than moderately interesting when we understand them fully! But, more to the point, our solution is not all that trivial; for when we emphasize Williams’s point in this way, we can, perhaps, answer Bennett’s objection. Specifically, if someone acquires a (putative) belief by indirect or unconscious voluntary means, this leaves us room to suppose that he might still have some sort of residual aim to be getting things right, even if he has some stronger, inconsistent aims as well. The subject’s lack of insight makes it possible to attribute to him the required degree of motivational incoherence. What is not compatible with having such a residual aim, however, is the fully conscious and immediate manipulation of the judgement. Perhaps the matter is not always quite as simple even as this. Yet although there may be further difficulties in knowing when, in general, we can safely attribute a given aim to someone (after all, we are complex creatures full of tensions and uncertainties), this does not argue against the thesis that this really is all there is to the question of why belief is typically involuntary. This claim may still leave us with many disputed awkward cases, but that is better than over-simplification of the phenomena. This account shifts attention away from the beliefs themselves to the believers, and this is significant. It was always slightly odd to say that beliefs aim at truth, since that suggests that the beliefs themselves have aims, objectives or other conative attitudes – which, of course, they do not. Rather, it is the believers who have the aims, and they are believers by virtue of having them; and there is no particular difficulty in explaining what is meant by saying that a person is trying to get at the truth. This may seem a small matter, but it does point to another contrast with the biological examples we have considered. We might say that the eye ‘aims’ at vision, and we can more or less understand what this means, even though we do not seriously attribute any conative attitudes to it. However, we obviously cannot gloss the claim in terms of the seer’s aims. So, if beliefs aim at truth, it is not in the same sort of way as the eye aims at vision, or even as perception aims at representation of one’s environment. However, in many ways, the claim about belief is much easier to understand. It just seems to involve an additional mystery if we ‘ontologize’ beliefs in a way that sharply differentiates belief-states from
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the believer-attitudes that constitute them. Separate the two, and we shall indeed wonder how believer-norms could determine belief-norms, and how intrinsic functional qualities can arise through conceptual necessity alone. But there is no need to do this. Yet even if belief-aims derive primarily from believer-aims, we might still wonder if they can be completely reduced to them. In particular, it may be suspected that we have confused (a) beliefs aiming at truth with (b) aiming at true beliefs. The former, it may be protested, concerns an internal doxastic goal; the latter an external justificatory or epistemic goal.19 However, although there is obviously a formal difference here, just as there is between people desiring wealth and desiring wealthy people, it is unclear that it points to a major distinction. David Velleman, for example, concedes that [a] person can aim cognitions at the truth without necessarily framing intentions about them. Suppose that one part of the person – call it a cognitive system – regulates some of his cognitions in ways designed to ensure that they are true, by forming, revising, and extinguishing them in response to evidence and argument. [T]he system carries on this function more or less automatically, without relying on the subject’s intentions for initiative or guidance.20 This leads to a spectrum of possibilities. At one end, the subject may identify with this system; at the other, he may be almost wholly dissociated from its workings, and wish they would cease. In the latter case, the resulting cognitions will not count as having been regulated by him. Yet, as Velleman adds, They will still have been regulated for truth, and hence aimed at the truth, albeit by a part of him with which he doesn’t identify. They will still be attempts at accepting truths, even though they will be attempts on the part of a cognitive system rather than the person as a whole. As cognitions aimed at the truth, they will still count as beliefs, according to my conception.21 This is surely the right approach; and in so far as a person can be thought of as a combination of systems each functioning as something like a subperson, we can thereby extend our account in a way which handles these objections. Specifically, we can still reduce belief-aims to believer-aims if ‘believers’ include these ‘sub-believers’; and we have already agreed that our motivational systems are complex. The person may thus fail to
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aim at gaining true beliefs even though, thanks to sub-personal activity, his beliefs still aim at truth; and this gives us the contrast we want. There may be further distinctions between doxastic and justificatory goals that may be relevant here, but unless they can be explicated in a way consistent with the above, it is hard to see how we can avoid our earlier difficulties. Another objection to this account, however, is that, although it explains why I cannot transform a belief that p into a belief that not-p using direct will-power alone, it does not explain why I cannot transform it merely into a non-belief that p. After all, what is to stop me (or a part of me) from simply altering my aims with regard to the question? We may agree that, if I believe that my glass is empty, then I cannot decide ‘just like that’ to believe that it is not, however much I might want to. Nevertheless, is it not equally impossible to go just half way in this respect – that is to say, simply rid my mind of this unwelcome belief and thereby become agnostic on the question? Appeal to sub-personal activity will not help us here, for there is no cast-iron guarantee that such activity will continue in an appropriate form. If belief is sustained entirely by the aims of the believer (or sub-believer), as we suppose, then the belief should disappear with the change of aims. But, of course, it does not. How do we explain this? The answer is that to believe something is not simply to feel that it is true, but to be disposed to feel that it is true. If I lose the desire to investigate whether my glass is empty or not, then I may lose the feeling that it is. However, if at a later stage I recover my interest in the question, then I shall recover the feeling. Yet my belief did not disappear and then re-appear because, throughout the period in question, I still had the disposition to feel that it was full. More precisely, it remained the case, throughout that time, that if I had considered the question, ‘Is it empty or not?’ and if I had aimed at truth whilst doing so, then I would have felt that it was empty. Essentially the same point applies to sub-systems. This is what really constitutes belief. If I had asked this question without aiming at truth, then we should lack any grounds for supposing that the resultant feeling that the glass is empty (or not empty, as the case may be) reflects a belief, as opposed to a desire, a piece of wishful thinking, or other attitude that fails to satisfy anything like TN. So, to lose the belief that the glass is empty, I should not merely have to lose the feeling but the counterfactual feeling as well. Even if I seldom interest myself in truth, we can still ask, ‘What would I have felt if I had been interested in truth with regard to such-and-such an issue?’ and correct answers to questions of this type will typically be outside my direct voluntary
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control – and for the same reason as before. Of course, if my interest in truth is very meagre in this respect, we may conclude that I would not have felt anything determinate here (i.e. the categorical facts are too thin on the ground to be able to sustain a viable counterfactual answer either way); but in such a situation, it surely would be appropriate to say that I had no real beliefs on the matter. Does this make it a conceptual impossibility to lose a belief at will? We might still want to quibble here. Our account hinges on the fact that we cannot alter our counterfactual feelings ‘just like that’, but the impossibility here is surely ultimately psychological, rather than conceptual. We can always upgrade it, of course, if we stipulate that anyone who could alter his states so readily should never have counted as having the belief in the first place. There is perhaps some room for manoeuvre here, and we might avail ourselves of this strategy. However, should beliefdispositions be grounded in categorical facts about ourselves (I do not know whether they are or not), then it is not at all clear why it should be conceptually impossible for such facts to be rapidly altered back and forth, even if it would be utterly extraordinary to be able to perform the alterations directly and immediately. In any event, the distinction between what can be done ‘just like that’ and what can be done as a result of a lengthier period of voluntary self-transformation is fuzzy at the borderline, and there is no need to go any further into this than we have done. We also need to remember that, although believing something at will may be impossible, merely accepting it need not be (and likewise, imagining it, pretending that it is true and so on). Our solution may look a bit dull but, once again, we must avoid trying to prove too much. Acceptances, imaginings and pretences are all representational, and they are all expected to answer to the world in some respects, even if it is inappropriate to talk of ‘directions of fit’. Yet it is only belief that is outside our direct voluntary control, and so it must be something very specifically to do with belief that is relevant here. Nevertheless, some may be unhappy with this, and think that we should be able to prove rather more. For example, imagine a person with no beliefs at all in the strict sense. He gets by entirely on acceptances which he directly and consciously chooses on purely pragmatic grounds, and has no interest in truth whatsoever. Is such a person genuinely possible? Many will insist that he is not, and that a satisfactory argument against the voluntariness of belief should, among other things, be able to show this. After all, it may be complained, what is the point of an argument that supposedly shows that beliefs cannot be voluntary – and yet allows that there could
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be states very similar to beliefs which do the same sort of job, but which nevertheless can be consciously and directly manipulated? Even if we allow that these surrogate beliefs are not strictly speaking beliefs (and many will not concede even this much), a solution that enables us to get round the problem as easily as this, it may be protested, is surely not much good. The trouble, once again, however, is that it is not at all clear that these alternative scenarios really are conceptually impossible. They might, at best, be psychologically impossible, but nothing more. However, the question of whether truth-aiming is itself a necessary or desirable activity introduces a wide range of rather different issues, and we shall postpone our treatment of them until Chapter 6. For the moment, we should simply note that the questions, ‘Could our beliefs be made voluntary?’ and ‘Could our beliefs be adequately replaced by voluntary states?’ are logically quite distinct. What is important for present purposes is that we have established that we can give a satisfactory account of belief, in particular of the fact that beliefs are essentially geared towards the truth, in a manner that does not go beyond the norms of the believer. It ensures that we can remain confident of our claim that TN really is what is constitutive of belief, and that we have not overlooked any additional essential qualities that might complicate or undermine our overall thesis. Let us therefore grant that there cannot be voluntary belief (given suitable qualifications). What about involuntary acceptance? Our central task in this chapter, it will be recalled, is to show that we can devise a new attitude which is stronger than mere acceptance in so far as it is non-contextual and involuntary, but which is weaker than belief since it does not aim at truth (at least, in the full-blown, ‘extensional’ sense). We may agree, subject to the above qualifications, that the aiming-attruth criterion implies involuntariness, but what about the converse? This seems less plausible. For suppose, to continue our earlier strategy, we stipulate a new attitude, acceptance**, defined as follows: (A**) S accepts** that p =df S involuntarily accepts* that p (i.e. S involuntarily accepts that p in all contexts). Must ‘accept**’, so understood, be substitutable for ‘ ’ in the truth-norm schema (TN) We should that p only if
is true
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even though neither ‘accept’ nor ‘accept*’ is? If so, we must ask once again what could underlie the inference, enthymematic or otherwise, from A** to TN, so substituted. Accepting** is indeed a stronger attitude than accepting*, and not merely in so far as the former entails the latter. It is also psychologically more powerful since anyone who accepts** something must be so impressed by what he accepts* as to be unable to get away from it. This brings it closer to belief, but why must it come so close as to be indistinguishable from it? Just because I am under a psychological compulsion of some kind, this surely does not mean that I am aiming at truth. Voluntariness is relevant to the distinction between theory and observation in as much as theory-choice is, indeed, a matter of choice. (Some choices are more sensible than others, of course, but where there is underdetermination, I am not usually forced in any particular direction.) By contrast, I cannot control what I observe (I can control what I look at, of course, but cannot control what I see when I do so). Does this fact support the constructive empiricist view that theories are a matter for acceptance, whereas observations are a matter for belief? It may seem so, even though van Fraassen does not stress this point. However, matters become more difficult if we insist, as we do, that theoreticity is just a matter of degree, and that all observations are theory-laden to some extent. Thus, suppose that I observe a burning match. Is the sentence, ‘The match is oxidizing’, one that I am not forced to accept, inasmuch as ‘oxidizes’ is a theoretical property and I could always choose to adopt a phlogiston theory over an oxidation theory of combustion? We may protest that phlogiston theory is not empirically adequate, but maybe it could be made so if it were manipulated in a suitable way. Perhaps, then, there is an element of voluntariness here, though a chemically educated person would have a great psychological difficulty in accepting a phlogiston theory for any length of time. But what about the sentence, ‘The match is burning’? We might insist that this is a pure, theoretically neutral observation; but, regardless of how we understand the concept of burning, physical objects of any kind have independence and permanence, features which go beyond what is strictly observed. It sounds strange to declare, as we and many others do, that the existence of external physical objects provides the best ‘theory’ that explains the course of our perceptual experience, since it suggests that scientists once debated the question, carefully considered the alternatives, and then eventually made a rationally motivated choice to adopt the theory of external physical objects. Yet even if we are uneasy about the use of the word ‘theory’ here, we do have underdetermination, as we established
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in Chapter 2. It is ultimately pragmatic considerations of simplicity that justify the standard view over the alternatives, which means that only acceptance, not full belief, is justified here. Yet we hardly have a ‘choice’, in any psychologically meaningful sense. We might consider alternative hypotheses, but we are unable seriously to accept them except, perhaps, for very short periods of time. Regardless of whether this is rationally justifiable or not, ordinary opinion soon overwhelms any attempt to think original thoughts here. The point is that, when we consider the most basic perceptual phenomena, it is not just belief but also acceptance that is involuntary. Moreover, this cannot be for the sort of conceptual reasons that we considered earlier, for acceptance does not aim at truth. What we have, rather, is pure psychological compulsion. This seems to vindicate our claim that there really is a kind of state which resembles belief sufficiently well to be able to replace it, but is nevertheless sufficiently different from it to enable us to avoid scepticism. Such a non-contextual, involuntary acceptance has, it seems, most of the right features, and none of the wrong ones. However, we need to be careful here. Our assumption is that, although our acceptance of basic empirical facts is involuntary, it nevertheless remains a genuine species of acceptance. Yet might it not be that, as we move along the scale from theoretical facts to observational ones, as voluntariness diminishes so does acceptance? We do not notice this because, as acceptance fades out, belief fades in – and with it, the truthnorm. Now, this may seem unintuitive, for if we asked an ordinary person the questions, ‘Do you believe that there is a tree in front of you?’ and ‘Do you accept that there is a tree in front of you?’ the answers would be ‘Yes’ in both cases. However, most people will not automatically understand the acceptance/belief distinction as we do, so this is inconclusive. What is significant, however, is that belief certainly does fade in as we move to more and more basic empirical facts. If this is not in order to replace the original more circumspect sort of attitude, then why else? We are trying to show how to dispense with belief, and we agree that this is, at best, a psychologically difficult task, but we still have not really explained why belief insists on remaining there in the first place. Now, an immediate answer is that belief is just a very natural sort of reaction to direct perceptual data. Some, indeed, suggest that this is what really underlies the involuntariness of belief.22 This is fair enough as far as it goes, but it does not explain why belief stubbornly remains even when we become convinced that it is unwarranted. Thus, I, for
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example, have established – to my own satisfaction, at least – that my belief that there is a tree right in front of me is unwarranted, though my (non-contextual, involuntary) acceptance of this is not. Why is it, nevertheless, that my belief still remains (which, of course, it does)? Since belief aims at truth, it ought not to. Such embarrassing problems do not happen with non-perceptual examples. For example, if I discover that the evidence I originally had for supposing that there is a tree in some quad which I have never visited is far less convincing than I originally thought, then my belief that there is such a tree there will typically vanish as a result. Of course, it could be replied that the original tree-belief remains simply because I do not really believe (or even accept) that my own sceptical arguments are sound. No doubt, there is plenty of room for self-deception here; but I can only say in response to this that they appear sound to me, and I have explained at length why I think so. Another reply is that I do not, in fact, believe that there is a tree in front of me after all. I just involuntarily accept it – just as I say I should. However, this does not psychologically appear to me to be so. Truth-aiming in the full-blown unqualified sense is not something that one can so easily get rid of. The philosopher who is most famously sensitive to the impotence of sceptical argument in these sort of cases is, of course, Hume. He recognizes that Reason cannot establish, for example, the continued and distinct existence of ‘body’, and that there are other, equally wellgrounded hypotheses about what causes us to have the impressions we do: for example, a Berkeleian God; or nothing whatsoever. Yet he also recognizes that, despite this, he is quite powerless to rid himself of standard opinions. In his conclusion to Book I of the Treatise, he agonizes over the dilemmas forced on his mind by the conflict between Reason and Nature. How do we rescue Hume from his torment? Neither of the replies considered above is at all convincing. Hume clearly does regard his sceptical arguments as sound, and he also realizes that he still genuinely believes that most ordinary opinions are true in spite of this. He does not merely accept them for pragmatic reasons, though he does recognize the relevance of pragmatic considerations – after much soul-searching, he eventually concludes, ‘In all the incidents of life we ought still to preserve our scepticism. If we believe, that fire warms, or water refreshes, ’tis only because it costs us too much pains to think otherwise.’23 Nevertheless, his deeply pessimistic conclusion is that we survive these problems simply because Reason has only minimal influence in our lives. Intellectual effort is powerless to override such forces as carelessness, inattention and backgammon.
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We might also remember, once again, the problem of induction, a problem which Hume was the first to identify, and which underlies our overall sceptical argument. We agree with Hume that the problem here is genuine; that inductive inference, being ampliative, cannot be legitimized either by experience or by ordinary deductive logic. Yet we also insist that reliance on such inference is ‘rational’ in a weaker, but nonetheless quite effective sense. The pragmatic justification achieves that. Yet, this justification exhibits an unnerving resemblance to the infamous ‘proof’ of the existence of God embodied in Pascal’s wager. Indeed, the following diagrams are obviously similar: (1) The pragmatic justification
I use induction I do not use induction
Induction works
Induction does not work
Success Failure
Failure Failure
(2) Pascal’s wager
I believe in God I do not believe in God
God exists
God does not exist
I go to heaven I go to hell
Nothing Nothing
Given the alternatives (and ignoring the usual theological complexities), it is obviously a more reasonable ‘bet’ to be a theist, since heavenor-nothing is a more attractive option than hell-or-nothing. William James, as we noted at the beginning of this section, was appalled by the idea of believing in God’s existence as a result of the Pascal argument, since the wager implies a deliberate and therefore voluntary calculation, and genuine belief cannot be voluntary.24 Such an argument therefore cannot prove that it is rational for us to believe that God exists (obviously it does not prove His actual existence). Now where we do appear to have a difference between these two examples is that whereas nothing in my nature actually forces me to adopt one religious position rather than another, the same is not true with induction. I really cannot help but adopt an inductive strategy. Does this now mean that it is not only acceptance of induction, but also actual belief in it that can be justified? After all, the James objection concerning voluntariness is no longer effective. We say not. This is partly because, as we noted
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in §2.2, such pragmatically justified norms tend to be locally based. They make incompatible demands on grue-users, and therefore lack the unrestricted universality characteristic of belief-based justifications. Yet also, and more immediately, it should be evident that the pragmatic solution, like Pascal’s Wager, is just not truth-directed. It is manifestly clear, in both cases, that we are given no reason to suppose that this rather than that will genuinely happen. However, as with the perceptual example, it is a disconcerting fact that, although inductive belief is unwarranted – visibly so – it inevitably arises, and there seems to be nothing that we can do about this. Our account points the way to a solution. Hume assumed that the only alternative to belief was scepticism of the wholly unrealistic Pyrrhonist type. Our view is that a kind of pragmatic acceptance which is noncontextual, involuntary, but not fully truth-aiming remains an adequate alternative. Of course, the replacement of belief by this alternative is also a very ambitious target, and we have not yet shown how to achieve it. Nevertheless, it is evidently less horrific than the undertaking that Hume supposes that Reason demands of us. So it may not be too much to hope that Reason and Nature can eventually be reconciled.
4.3 Degrees of belief So far, we have said very little about probability, and this may seem surprising. After all, our sceptical challenge is based ultimately on the problem of induction, and induction and probability go together. More immediately, our task in this chapter is to show that there can be cognitive states which are similar to beliefs, but significantly weaker in certain respects. Yet the most well-known development of this idea is the thesis that ordinary belief is not an all-or-nothing matter but rather comes in degrees. Moreover, according to ‘subjective’ (or ‘Bayesian’ or ‘personalist’) theories, it is precisely these degrees of belief that underlie probabilities, in the sense that to believe that a proposition has probability x of being true is just to believe to degree x that the proposition in question is true. Might it not be, then, that these degrees of belief are exactly the sort of thing that we should be looking at? The answer is ‘no’. The kind of weakened beliefs that we need to be concerned with will turn out to be rather different from the weakly held beliefs that are discussed in probability theory. However, it is important to be able to show this, so that it becomes clearer what our position amounts to.
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According to subjective theories, we should not talk of the (unqualified) probability that an event E will occur. Rather, the central notion is the probability that a given individual A assigns to an event E, and this is understood, roughly, in terms of how much A is willing to bet that E will occur. More precisely, we define a ‘betting quotient’, a number q between 0 and 1. To determine q, we choose a ‘stake’ S, which is a sum of money, positive or negative, which is small in relation to A’s total assets. A will receive qS (if S is positive) or have to pay –qS (if S is negative) if E occurs. The point is that A does not know in advance what S is – in particular, she does not know whether it is positive or negative. She herself then has to decide the value of q given her level of confidence that E will occur, and this is then defined to be the probability p E that A assigns to E. The central technical result here is the Ramsey–de Finetti theorem, which states that the probabilities, so defined, which A assigns to a set of events will satisfy the standard axioms of probability if and only if the assignments are coherent in the minimal sense that another gambler, betting against her, has no logically guaranteed winning strategy (i.e. he cannot make a ‘Dutch book’ against her).25 On this approach, we need not talk of ‘propensities’ or objective probabilistic features of the world, notions which prove to be metaphysically highly intractable. Rather, we just talk of degrees of belief, that is to say, of the extent to which people believe that the events in question will occur. But does the formalism explain sufficiently clearly just what these degrees are meant to be? The mathematical elegance of the technical results should not automatically lead us to suppose that the underlying concepts are precise. For example, it has long been disputed whether, and to what extent, it is the strength of the feeling that accompanies and/or constitutes the belief that is relevant. Matters are further complicated since, according to this analysis, belief is approached only indirectly, that is to say, via action given an assumed desire (to make as much money as possible). It may even be that belief itself is not what should be at issue. Jonathan Cohen, for example, insists that it is acceptance, not belief, that is the relevant attitude here, and he presents several arguments against the view that belief-gradations are what are needed to underpin a theory of probability of the above kind.26 Most notably, one’s betting strategy is typically a voluntary matter, unlike belief. The same, indeed, is true of any kind of strategy. Also, if I am completely agnostic on whether E will take place, then my belief that E will occur and my belief that E¯ will occur (i.e. that E will not occur) will both have very low degree, which contradicts the complementational prin¯ = 1 − p E. However, a problem emerges here, namely ciple that p E
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that acceptance, unlike belief, does not appear to come in degrees at all. One either accepts something or one does not (acceptance-worthiness comes in degrees, of course, but that is a different matter). This certainly appears to be the case if acceptance is understood in Cohen’s way. However, it may be that, given our own limited preoccupations, these objections do not prove all that much. The idea of a betting strategy is a useful mathematical device, but most scientific thought takes place away from the gaming halls. What really underlies the degree to which a belief is held is the readiness to abandon it in the face of difficulties. If, when confronted with some recalcitrant experience, I am more disposed to abandon belief B1 rather than belief B2 , then (other things being equal), this means that the probability that I attach to B1 is less than that which I attach to B2 . Our web of belief consists of elements of differing vulnerability of this kind, and this is surely what is primarily at issue with regard to probability judgements. This, although undeveloped, indicates the beginnings of a more direct analysis, and, unlike the idea of a betting strategy, does not invoke anything outside belief itself. Moreover, it is a distinction which can easily be extended to voluntary acceptances of the Cohen variety, for acceptances are also subject to degrees of vulnerability. Likewise, if I am more disposed to hang on to hypothesis H given new evidence E than I was before, then I regard E as confirming H. The extent of the confirmation varies with how much more disposed I become. Of course, we have yet to explain what a greater or lesser ‘disposition’ means here, but this account is only intended to be sketchy. It is, at any rate, something that certainly comes in degrees, which is what we are primarily concerned with, even if we do not yet know how to measure them. An example should make this clear. Suppose that I believe that the car park I normally use is full. I have not seen this for myself, but this is usually the case at this time of day. The belief is of sufficiently high degree that I plan to park elsewhere. I am then informed by you that the car park has unusually many empty spaces. I thus have to decide whether to alter my original judgement or to reject your testimony. This is exactly the same as deciding which I think is more probable, that the car park is unusually empty or that you, for whatever reason, are not telling me the truth. If I believe you, then I regard your evidence as reducing the probability of my original hypothesis. But what, exactly, is being reduced? It is evidently not the content of the belief in any ordinary sense. Of course, I could reduce my credal commitment by altering its content from ‘The car park is full’ to ‘The car park is at least 75% full’, and because the new commitment is weaker
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than the old (the latter content entails the former, though not vice versa) it is less vulnerable to revision. However, although ‘There is a 75% chance that the car park is full’ also reduces the content, or seems to, the point about subjective theories is it does so only in a rather peculiar and derivative way. Probabilistic judgements do not have truth-conditions in the realist sense of answering to worldly probabilistic facts. Rather, to reduce my credal commitment by weakening the degree to which I hold a given belief is to do something rather different. Strength of credal commitment has (at least) a two-dimensional structure, and there is usually a difference in kind between a weakly held belief with a strong content and a strongly held belief with a weak content. Although our account of how to measure degrees of belief is very undeveloped, it is evidently going to turn out to be rather different from the way in which we decide the entailment-relation, which is what orders the strength of propositional content. However, the central question from our point of view is whether this degree is the same as the normative strength that distinguishes full belief from mere acceptance (and its intermediaries). The crucial difference here is between restricted and unrestricted versions of the universality principle UP. If an attitude satisfies the unrestricted version UUP, then I demand agreement (or, at least, non-disagreement) from all logically possible creatures. If it only satisfies a restricted version, then the domain is likewise restricted. The extent of the restriction yields varying degrees of commitment, and our sceptical argument, developed in Chapters 2 and 3, argues that some universality-restriction of this kind is essential. Is this going to be a restriction of degree in the relevant sense? Ostensibly, it is not; for even if I restrict UP, this surely does not force me to lower my own betting quotient. Conversely, just because I have a degree of belief x towards a proposition, that does not prevent me from demanding a degree of belief x from absolutely everyone else, Martians included. On the contrary, it seems clear we have quite different restrictions, restrictions which could be traded off against each other. However, the matter is not quite so straightforward. Our sceptical problem derives from the thought that alien scientists might entertain hypotheses incompatible with our own. How we deal with this fact, however, depends very much on exactly why they should do so. If it is because they appeal to very different evidence from ours, then a reduction of our own betting strategy might well be the rational response when we come to realize this. Inductive inference is famously ‘non-monotonic’, that is to say, the addition of extra premises sometimes weakens the probability of the conclusion. Should these aliens
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conclude something quite different from what we do as a result of considering evidence of which we were not previously aware, then, on discovering that this is what has happened, it may well be entirely reasonable for us to become less sure of our own hypotheses. However, this is not quite the scenario with which we are primarily concerned. On the contrary, our aliens are supposed to have access to exactly the same data as we have; and for the sake of argument, we may suppose this to be all the data that could be relevant. The underdetermination thesis UTD ensures that this kind of situation is possible. The point is that our aliens have different ways of interpreting the data. However, even this does not quite prove what is needed. Unless we can be confident that aliens could sometimes be justified in attaching different betting quotients from ours to the same hypotheses given the same evidence, then we have failed to prove the point: and we have already noted (in §2.3) that the concept of evidence is not altogether straightforward, a problem to which we shall return in the next chapter. Even if the aliens and we are subject to the same input, should we react to it sufficiently differently, then it could still be said that they and we are not in possession of the same actual evidence. So we still lack a conclusive reason for supposing that the aliens and we could be justified in attaching different values to the same conditional probabilities. After all, if E is not strictly speaking the same evidence as E , then p HE (i.e. the probability of H given E need not have the same value as p HE . If the aliens and we are working with only partial information (which, of course, is the normal situation), then this objection might carry force. However, it surely fails to work against the, admittedly, wholly artificial scenario with which we are primarily concerned, namely one where all the data is available to all parties. This is because of the supervenience of total evidence on total input, which we discussed in §2.4 and to which we shall return in §5.1. Of course, we had to qualify this principle in the light of externalist criticisms, but it is hard to see how this can help. Let us suppose we have an ordinary person A and a grue-user B who both have access to all the data there could possibly be about the world before midnight tonight. If H is the hypothesis that emeralds will be green after midnight, then A will assign a very high probability to H even though B will assign a very low probability to it. The divergence is not resolvable by appeal to any further pre-midnight evidence, in any useful sense. Even if we insist that A’s evidence is not strictly the same as B’s evidence (since they are conceptualized differently), both A and B will still have all the evidence that could conceivably be available to each of them – and yet will still assign very different probabilities to the same hypothesis.
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Moreover, this is exactly what both A and B ought to do. Their local inductive norms demand it. This is the central argument against UUP, which we defended in §2.2. It would be wholly inappropriate for either of them to feel that their betting quotients ought to converge. Indeed, such convergence would be methodological suicide for both of them, an absurd transgression of the pragmatic considerations that ultimately underlie the legitimacy of any sort of inductive inference. Therefore, the kind of reduction in attitude that is appropriate here must be different from the reduction in the sort of degree of belief that is relevant in probability theory. This fact can sometimes be difficult to see since many proponents of subjective probability theory have unrealistic expectations of what a Bayesian approach can actually achieve, and there are some further technical results here that seem to justify this excessive optimism. Although Bayes’ theorem itself is almost trivial, there are more complex and interesting ‘stable estimation theorems’ that suggest that convergence of opinion is inevitable if all parties follow Bayesian rules.27 However, as Glymour (1996) has persuasively argued, there are inevitably many nonmathematical assumptions that need to be made here, notably about which evidence is relevant to which hypothesis. Seriously odd possibilities tend to be ignored; and although that is perfectly reasonable in most circumstances, it is not so here. The ‘new riddle of induction’ remains our chief concern, and it is just not going to be solved mathematically. Likewise, the possibility of ‘grue-users’ is not to be refuted by advanced statistical argument. The assumption that rational opinion must inevitably converge is just a dogma, although a powerfully entrenched one, as we noted in our discussion of Quine and Davidson in Chapter 3. These points should not be construed as objections to Bayesianism as such, however. On the contrary, a virtue of our approach is that it suggests just how such a programme can be made more plausible. In order to work, a Bayesian scientific method needs to be relativized to a basic cognitive outlook, one which excludes, among other things, evidence–hypothesis pairings which are not just seriously eccentric, but systematically so. This is not much of an imposition. However, once this is done, the technical results are more likely to work.28 The point to be remembered, however, is that the relativization involves quite different types of consideration to those found in Bayesian theory itself, and the way in which belief needs to be reduced at the outset is quite different to the sort of weakening associated with degrees of belief. Rather, our credal commitments should be understood as having three dimensions of strength: content, degree, and what we might call ‘restriction level’.
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But are these ‘dimensions’ really independent of each other? We have already noted that content and degree are not wholly separable in so far as the operator ‘It is probable to degree x that ___’ can be understood as modifying content. More to the point, it could be protested that the fundamental cognitive structure that is supposed to differentiate us from what we call ‘Type 3 aliens’ is not capable of being distinguished sharply enough from other cognitive features. We have a cognitive processing mechanism that transforms sensory input into beliefs, but inherited beliefs form part of that mechanism. Remove all of our credal inheritance and we are left with something so minimal as to be virtually useless. There is therefore no sharp distinction to be drawn between processor and processed. This is reflected in the fact, which we shall discuss in more detail in §7.3, that the borderlines between different cognitive groupings are very far from exact. However, the fact that we lack a sharp distinction does not mean that we have no distinction. Although there may be cases where we are unsure just how our credal commitments should be weakened, we can also see, for instance, that extreme cases, such as those that involve grue-users and their kin, give us no reason whatsoever to reduce our betting quotients. Although the right response when confronted with most kinds of alternative well-grounded opinion is a kind of Lockean fallibilism, that is to say, a recognition that even our best knowledge can only be no more than probabilistic in character, a similar strategy would lead to disaster when we consider the full range of possible divergences licensed by cognitive contingency. If we were to attempt to do justice to the equal rationality of our own opinions and those of Type 3 aliens in a Lockean manner, we should have to reduce our betting quotients across the board, and to such a drastic extent that all belief and action would be utterly paralysed. Universality restrictions do not have this effect; and can therefore be seen to be fundamentally different from probabilistic degree-restrictions, even if there are difficult borderline cases. Let us now take stock. Our task is to show that we really can make sense of the sort of restricted beliefs that our theory requires. Have we done this? It may be suspected that we have not. True, we have shown that there is, at least, space for such restricted attitudes to develop. Belief is not an all-or-nothing matter, even when probabilistic degrees have been taken out of the picture. Acceptance, in general, is different from full belief, and we can add non-contextuality and involuntariness to the former without it automatically collapsing into the latter, since the truth-aiming criterion does not follow. But is non-contextual, involuntary acceptance something which differs from belief solely in respect of
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restriction level? It does not appear to, if only because this new attitude looks both composite and contrived in a way in which belief, restricted or otherwise, does not. However, it must be remembered that we do not, at this stage, need to define our new type of attitude precisely. Our thesis is that the attitude-concepts that we need do not yet exist, and cannot be accurately defined from existing concepts. Moreover, it will only be after a radical change in outlook that we can start to adopt the right attitudes. To ignore this is to ignore the highly revisionist character of our thesis. What is important, to repeat, is that there is space for such concepts to develop, and that we can see roughly where we are going. And we have come reasonably close to what we want. However, there clearly remains a vital piece missing. Non-contextual, involuntary acceptances do not immediately look as though they aim at truth in any sense, intensional or otherwise. Moreover, it is unclear that this deficiency can be made good in the way in which we dealt with non-contextuality and involuntariness. The latter conditions were just ‘bolted on’ to our primitive notion of acceptance, but how can a truth-norm or a universality principle, restricted or otherwise, be added in this way? We could, of course, continue with our earlier strategy, and attempt to define an acceptance*** as follows: (A***) S accepts*** that p =df S accepts** that p (i.e. involuntarily accepts that p in all contexts), and may do so only if no-one else in S’s cognitive group ought to accept** that not-p. As before, we might wonder what could prevent these newly described attitudes from collapsing into full beliefs. However, the more immediate problem is how to explain why any attitude constructed in this sort of way really should satisfy such an additional normative feature. Merely stipulating it to be so is hardly good enough, for norms do not emerge from bare acts of will. We evidently need to investigate how, and to what extent, our ordinary epistemological needs, and the normative conditions that go with them, could be served by attitudes similar to involuntary, non-contextual acceptances; and this requires attention to some rather different issues.
5 Belief and Knowledge
In order to show that our modified belief is sufficient for epistemological purposes, we need to examine its relationship to the concept of knowledge. A radically new conception of knowledge – an ‘ecological model’ – will be presented and defended, one which does not logically imply the truth of what is known. We shall also see how this model can give us adequate epistemic justification as a result of a modified kind of transcendental argument.
5.1 What is knowledge? Although we have said a great deal about belief, we have so far said virtually nothing about knowledge. We considered the notion briefly in §2.1 when we discussed different kinds of scepticism. That we might not know that there is an external world, for example, is not that significant, we argued, if that is simply because genuine knowledge requires excessively high standards of justification. As long as we have enough justification to make belief more rational than disbelief, we have all that we really need. Many have taken a similar line. Thus it is widely held that it does not matter if we lack any knowledge altogether. All that really matters is that we have adequately justified true belief. Disrespect for knowledge also has another source, namely the exasperation that many feel about its precise definition. Ever since Gettier’s (1963) famous paper, most have agreed that although knowledge implies belief, truth and justification, these three items do not exhaust the analysis. But nobody has ever managed to find a fourth condition that exactly fills the gap. What has been referred to as ‘Gettier’s salt mine’ can seem a very unrewarding area of research, especially when it is 138
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recognized that, even though justified true belief is not the same as knowledge, it is a more than adequate substitute. Recently, however, there has been a move against this view. Timothy Williamson (2000), in particular, has been influential in recommending a very different picture of knowledge. On this view, knowledge ‘comes first’. It is a prime concept, that is to say, not analysable into components that can be understood in advance, such as truth, belief, justification and so forth. It does imply these things, of course, but that does not mean that it is composed of them. (Consider: red implies coloured, but is not analysable into coloured plus some further mysterious ingredient.) More interestingly still, it is argued that the concepts of belief and justification cannot be understood except in terms of knowledge. On his view, belief does not (merely) aim at truth; it has to be understood as aiming at knowledge. And not only is knowledge not to be understood as belief plus something else; rather, the whole direction of analysis is the other way round, and (mere) belief needs to be understood as a kind of failed knowledge. Likewise, we cannot understand justification except in terms of a prior understanding of what counts as knowledge. If this is right, then it has serious implications, for the ordinary notion of knowledge must surely be a major casualty of our approach. We claim that there could be alien belief-systems which are as well justified for the aliens as our belief-system is for us (once the concept of belief is suitably modified, of course). Yet since alien ‘beliefs’, as we shall continue to call them, are typically false, they can hardly amount to knowledge, as ordinarily understood. The aliens may rationally think otherwise, of course; but since we – from our perspective – must suppose their ideally rational beliefs to be false, we – from that same perspective – must always refrain from attributing the status of knowledge to them. Aliens are so constituted that they can never know anything, we must say, but they nevertheless can have superbly well-justified beliefs. If Williamson is right, however, then we cannot say this; and much else that we say must also be fundamentally wrong. It is clear where the locus of one major disagreement is to be found. Consider induction, once again. The pragmatic justification is, on our view, a genuine justification. It does not go as far as one might wish, and it is not sufficient to justify inductive beliefs in the strong, ‘extensional’ sense; but once the concept of belief has been suitably modified, it works well enough. It has to, for there is nothing else! Likewise, when it comes to choosing between empirically equivalent theories, which we need to do all the time given our extended meaning of the word ‘theory’, we must rely on pragmatic criteria such as simplicity. These criteria have
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nothing to do with truth, if only because what is simple for us will not be simple for aliens nor vice versa, and so can have nothing to do with knowledge, given that knowledge implies truth. Yet they license justified belief of a kind. Ergo, the relevant notions of belief and justification cannot be thought of as derived from a conceptually more basic notion of knowledge. Belief, justification and truth just will not connect up in the right sort of way. Williamson is dismissive of pragmatic considerations, reserving the term ‘pragmatic’ for types of justification that are not only not strictly evidential, but are altogether non-cognitive. He gives the example of a woman who believes, without any evidence at all, that her child somehow survived an air crash, and will one day return to her. The belief is the only thing that keeps her going; without it she would kill herself. Perhaps it is on balance a good thing that she has the belief, and in that sense the belief is justified. But this is not the sense of ‘justified’ in which justified belief appeared to have marginalized knowledge within epistemology.1 Williamson rejects the idea that some considerations which we call ‘pragmatic’ may be cognitive despite being non-evidential – considerations (such as simplicity, familiarity, symmetry, heuristic value and so forth) that enable us to make reasonable theoretical choices when all the empirical evidence has been gathered in. This is primarily because he argues that evidence is not something on which knowledge is based: rather, evidence just is knowledge, and vice versa. This ‘E = K’ principle itself undermines the underdetermination thesis UTD, construed as underdetermination of theories by evidence, and hence, it might seem, the kind of scepticism on which our approach is based. This is because, given E = K, UTD reduces to the thesis that theories are underdetermined by knowledge, a thesis which can have no plausibility unless one has some reason independent of UTD for being sceptical about theories; and Williamson suggests that such a reason may be hard to find.2 We have already discussed the concept of evidence in Chapter 2. There we argued that UTD is correct provided that ‘data’ is understood to mean input rather than evidence, and there does not appear to be in Williamson’s thesis anything that undermines the notion of ‘geometrical underdetermination’ that we expounded there. However, we did examine the relationship between evidence and input. Originally, we suggested that the connection was that total empirical evidence always
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supervenes on total input. Without a constraint of this type, we apparently lose sight of the fact that our senses provide the only source of empirical evidence. However, in the light of externalist criticisms, we relaxed this principle slightly and suggested instead that total evidence must always supervene on total input plus total mental content construed as sometimes ‘reaching out’ into the world (via causally generated meanings, and so forth). Since the input must affect the mental content if it is to be any use, we can simplify this principle as follows: total evidence supervenes on total mental content. However, we concluded that, even with this modification, total evidence must always fall a long way short of what we ordinarily believe. But do we have to accept any form of empiricism at all? Williamson’s E = K principle is, in many ways, highly intuitive. After all, unless you know a thing to be the case, you are hardly entitled to use it as evidence, for what use is so-called ‘evidence’ if it is not known to be reliable? And conversely, if you do know something to be the case, then you are surely entitled to use what you know as evidence for other things (why ever not?). Total evidence must therefore equal total knowledge, and so it follows that if our knowledge extends beyond the empirical minimum (whatever that turns out to mean), then so does our evidence. Indeed, the notion of a peculiarly basic sort of ‘empirical’ evidence upon which everything else is grounded is, perhaps, no more than an echo of the foundationalist model of justification that most empiricists nowadays claim to have outgrown. Against this, however, we need to remember, first, that the issue of sensory origin will not go away. Unless knowledge is to be miraculous, it must have some sort of empirical grounding. Secondly, even if we abandon the thesis that knowledge must be based on evidence in a sense that conflicts with E = K, we cannot abandon the thesis that all reflective knowledge must be supported by evidential links – links which are often tenuous.3 Every knowledge-claim must be justifiable (i.e. defensible) if it is to survive reflective criticism, and the premises of the justifying argument will usually not logically imply the conclusion. Rather, inductive inference of one sort or another will typically be needed. We can maintain this even though we agree that the distinction between evidence (premises) and knowledge (conclusion) is context-dependent and does not reflect an intrinsic distinction. However, since the evidential links are typically inductive, we shall still have all the sceptical problems associated with such ampliative inferences that we discussed at length in §2.2. This remains so even if such links are not to be understood as fixed relationships between one class of propositions (our Evidence) and
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another (our Knowledge). The context-dependence and general fluidity of evidential connections do not affect the point. If E = K, and total evidence supervenes on mental content, then it follows that total knowledge also supervenes on mental content. That itself might indicate a need to distinguish a basic form of empirical evidence from other kinds, but, oddly enough, this does not affect Williamson’s own position. This is because he maintains that knowledge is (entirely) a mental state as opposed to a composite mental-plus-world state, which, of course, is what it is usually thought to be. He develops a strongly externalist theory of mental content largely in order to sustain this view. However, we have already argued in §2.4 that this strategy will not really help us against the sceptic. To some extent, Williamson can concede this in so far as he claims that knowledge is ‘non-luminous’, and that we might, in fact, know something without ever being able to know that we know it. However, knowledge of this kind surely falls a long way short of what we need, especially given the radical, all-encompassing character of the scepticism that we have been able to defend. It is the connection between knowledge and truth that is especially hard to elucidate. Williamson understands knowledge to be a ‘factive mental state’, and he shows considerable ingenuity in defending the possibility that a state can be both factive (i.e. truth-implying) and wholly mental. But is knowledge really factive in this sense? It may seem absurd to talk of knowing what is false, but it can be argued that the link between knowledge and truth is not a straightforward logical implication. For example, J.L. Austin (1962) famously regarded sentences such as ‘I know that p’ as performatives, somewhat akin to promises. The idea has been developed by Austin Duncan-Jones (1964), and more recently by J.R. Cameron (1997). An endorsement is a speech-act which does not behave entirely like an ordinary descriptive statement, although it may have a descriptive component. If knowledge-attributions are understood as endorsements in this sense, then we can allow for more subtle connections between knowledge and truth than simple logical implication. More recently still, Jay F. Rosenberg (2002) has argued that knowledge is best understood simply as adequately justified belief. Truth is not a part of the definition at all. This may sound extraordinary but, following Peirce, he develops a ‘perspectivalist’ approach to knowledge. So understood, we should not ask simpliciter what it is for S to know that p. Rather, we should ask what we ourselves are doing when we, from our own perspective, claim that S knows that p. If we claim that S is adequately justified in believing that p, then it is our standards of
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justification that are being projected. Yet if we ourselves are satisfied that
should be believed, then we shall call it true. We thus do not need truth as an additional component of knowledge. The Gettier problem can also be dealt with in a similar manner. Following Fogelin (1994), Rosenberg argues that the problem typically arises because of the difference between the information available to the subject (who has the justified true belief that p) and the superior information available to us (who are thus in a position to deny that she really knows that p). By treating inquiry as a dialectical process, and by contextualizing attributions of knowledge in this manner, a number of problems can be neatly solved. Unlike Cameron, Rosenberg does not suppose that knowledge-attributions have a non-descriptive component (which can lead to well-known difficulties when they are embedded in unasserted contexts – the ‘Frege–Geach problem’), even though calling something ‘adequate’ has a projective aspect to it.4 On his view, nobody can be adequately justified in believing what is false. However, this is not because ‘S is adequately justified in believing that p’ logically implies ‘p’. Rather, it is because it is pragmatically self-defeating to suppose the first and not the second. We have, of course, met this phenomenon before. Can we make use of such ideas? The central problem, from our point of view, is that knowledge is traditionally required to be both factive and what inquiry should aim at, and yet the alien scenario reminds us that these conditions conflict. Aliens should end up believing what is, in fact, false – even when their inquiries have been taken to the limit. Truth is just not a direct consequence of optimal cognition. This gives us two options. On the one hand, we might continue to insist that ‘S knows that p, but not-p’ is self-contradictory, and that knowledge is factive in the traditional sense. This means that aliens are incapable of knowledge, even though their cognitive system works as well for them as ours does for us. The alternative position – a version of which we shall develop, though in an unfamiliar, pluralist way – is to identify knowledge simply with optimal cognition itself, and claim that truth follows only in special cases, not through logical implication, but as a pragmatic requirement. The advantage of the first option is that it accords with the powerful intuition that one cannot, by definition, know what is false. Its disadvantage is that even if truth is deemed to be an essential component of knowledge, it still does not explain how it connects up with warranted belief, for there is no logical implication from the latter to the former – even in the human case, and even if the warrant is ideal. If we simply conjoin the two conditions, as traditional justifiedtrue-belief analyses do, then Gettier problems instantly emerge since the
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target proposition may be true for reasons insufficiently connected to the justification (and treating knowledge as prime as well as factive, as Williamson does, leads to problems that we have already discussed). The advantage of the second option, however, is that it does not force us to suppose that we are the only creatures capable of knowledge, a view that fails to do justice to the fact that alien cognition is, in a sense, just as good as ours. Obviously, we shall need to reconstruct the concept of knowledge to allow for this, but we have already gathered that much anyway, and we can now see how we might proceed. In describing a creature’s belief as ‘adequately’ justified, we can indeed project our own standards, as Rosenberg says – and we usually do. However, if the creature is alien, and we realize this, then we might no longer wish to do so. Instead, we might mean simply that the alien’s belief is adequately justified according to local standards which are irreversibly different from ours. In such a case, we could, perhaps, describe what we are doing as attributing false knowledge. This does, however, mean that we need to look more carefully at what we should understand by ‘adequate’ justification here. Likewise, when we talk of ‘ideal’ warrant or ‘optimal’ cognition, we need to explain what these qualifiers really amount to. To do this, we evidently need to understand better the point of knowledge.
5.2 An ‘ecological model’ One reason why many are uneasy about compound analyses of knowledge is that it makes it hard to see why knowledge should matter. Given the extraordinary difficulty of finding a set of defining conditions that admits of no counterexamples, we might wonder why the components should only yield anything of genuine importance when they are so compounded.5 Moreover, the fact that we can usually tell without too much difficulty whether a putative counterexample really does fail to amount to knowledge, even if we are unable to provide a better definition, suggests that we already have a pretty direct idea of what we want from knowledge. What could this be? There are several desirable characteristics, of course, but one is of particular interest to us. Someone who possesses knowledge as opposed to mere belief is essentially in tune with her environment. False beliefs are, in ordinary cases, a sign of maladaptation of some kind, and their replacement with true ones is a kind of environmental or ecological improvement. In the case of knowledge, as opposed to accidentally true belief, or true belief based on insufficient justification, or justified true belief with some sort of
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Gettier problem attached, the knower is also sensitive to her environment, in the sense that counterfactual changes to the latter result in counterfactual changes to the former. We shall not enter into the details of exactly what this sensitivity consists in, nor need we adjudicate the many debates in this area.6 It is enough that there be more than a kind of accidental harmony here. There needs to be a natural connectedness of some kind as well. So much is fairly straightforward. It reflects the fact that knowledge is desirable because it enables us to find our way about in a reliable sort of way. Now, consider four cases. In case A1, a normal human being is situated within a normal environment, that is to say, one which is similar to the kind of environment that we typically suppose ourselves to be in. Her beliefs will therefore be mostly true in a familiar sort of way. In case A2, a normal human being is situated within a deviant environment of a kind permitted by what we call geometrical underdetermination. This is essentially the idea we first introduced in §1.2. Such an environment presents exactly the same surface irritations, the same causal input, as was received in case A1, which ensures that our subject finds cases A1 and A2 indistinguishable; in consequence, she acquires the same beliefs as her counterpart has in A1 (modulo content-externalism). However, although indistinguishable from case A1, our subject’s beliefs are now mostly false. Nevertheless, the surroundings count as a genuine environment in so far as there are continuous causal chains between them and the subject of the kind explained in §2.3. In case B1, a Martian, grueuser or otherwise highly alien creature is situated inside an environment identical to that of A1; and in case B2, it is situated inside an environment identical to that of A2. In both cases, the alien has (roughly) the same beliefs, but in B2 they are true, in B1 false. We argued in Chapter 2 that A2 is a genuine possibility, but had yet to do so with cases B1 and B2, since we had not then proved that alien belief-systems are possible, an omission which we rectified in Chapter 3. It therefore now seems reasonable to suppose that all four cases are genuine possibilities. The question therefore is, in which of these four cases do the subjects’ beliefs count as knowledge? Clearly they do in case A1, if knowledge is to be had anywhere. Let us assume, then, that this is so. Yet if that is so, then symmetry suggests that they should also do so in case B2. In this situation, the Martian has latched on to a belief-system that is very different from our own, though empirically equivalent to it, and because it has that sort of cognitive constitution. Furthermore, for reasons that may well go beyond mere luck (we may also suppose that the Martian’s beliefs are sensitive to
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changes in its environment in the sort of ways discussed in the context of the Gettier problem), it is immersed in a world empirically equivalent to our own which matches up to its beliefs. This leaves cases A2 and B1, where there is a mismatch between belief and surroundings. What should we say here? On the standard understanding, such cases do not count as knowledge, and for the simple reason that the beliefs turn out to be false, even though no amount of checking will reveal this to their subjects. Such cases make up the kind of nightmare sceptical scenarios which philosophers have strived so valiantly for so many years to prove impossible. Descartes, for example, argued that a benevolent God could be relied on to guarantee a kind of mind–world harmony that precisely rules out anything like case A2. Arnauld justly pointed out that Descartes’ argument is circular, and the ‘Cartesian Circle’ has proved to be very difficult to break. Some have argued that natural selection may be able to achieve what God could not, and that evolution may have equipped human beings with a truth-seeking mechanism.7 Yet if that implies a truthfinding mechanism, then this is very implausible. At first sight, it might seem reasonable enough, for how could any organism survive if it kept making mistakes about its environment? However, upon further reflection, all that is actually required is that the organism’s belief-system be empirically adequate. That is all that is really needed to avoid bumping into trees, falling off cliffs, getting eaten by tigers, and other evolutionarily disadvantageous experiences. After all, such experiences essentially involve undesirable input. It follows that, as long as its belief-system is geared to the avoidance of such input, then the organism will have an adequate survival strategy. This remains so even if the organism does not represent the dangers in anything like the way we do. Any empirically adequate belief-system will achieve this end (together with the usual sort of self-interested desires); and the best one, from a purely biological point of view, is surely just the one best suited to the organism’s internal design. Furthermore, natural selection has permitted a vast array of designs to flourish. Truth has nothing to do with it. In fact, this claim can be used to turn things around the other way. Suppose that evolution somehow does ensure that an organism’s belief-system is mostly true, and not merely empirically adequate. Then since the deviant environment of cases A2 and B2 are possible, it follows that creatures who evolve in it are likely to become like our Martians as opposed to ordinary human beings. In short, we have another argument for the possibility of Martians! Moreover, since the standard and deviant environments are the same as far as each organism is concerned, it follows that a Martian
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would do just as well as before if magically transported into our world. By symmetry, we would equally do as well in the deviant world. It might be feared that we have now overreached ourselves and have shown that even intensional truth-aiming is dispensable. After all, if it is only empirical adequacy that matters, then why not forget about truth altogether and aim only at the former? It would certainly yield a much simpler overall thesis! The point, however, is that we are not forced to do this, and we should not embrace any more revisionism than is strictly necessary. After all, to abandon all interest in truth is a very peculiar and unattractive policy – perhaps even psychologically impossible for us, a point which we shall develop in more detail in the next chapter. In practice, at any rate, the easiest way to aim extensionally at empirical adequacy is surely to aim intensionally at truth. Indeed, it is hard to imagine any other way – at least, when dealing with ordinary, non-theoretical empirical matters. Another problem is whether aliens could adapt in a world where their beliefs are typically false. Even if pragmatically conditioned empirical adequacy is sufficient to guarantee successful functioning at any one time, rather more may be needed to ensure that long-term adaptation and evolution can happen effectively. No doubt this is so, but it is unclear why it is truth or even a high degree of verisimilitude that is needed. As noted, natural selection has permitted a vast array of designs to flourish – we know this for a fact – so it would be odd if adaptation methods needed to be so tightly circumscribed. If it is logically possible for aliens to survive with false beliefs at any one stage of their development, then it should also be possible at all the relevant stages through a single developmental process. True, we need to have adequate counterfactual connections between alien beliefs and the world if there is to be a genuine ecological interaction over time. But there is no a priori reason why we should not have them.8 It would seem, then, that Nature has no reason to block scenarios A2 and B1 after all. What now needs asking is whether a benevolent God would also wish to forbid such possibilities. In supposing that He would, it is assumed that there is something malign about them. But what exactly? In all cases, A1, A2, B1 and B2, the subject is ideally tuned to the environment in the sense that (a) the belief-system is complete and as elaborate as anyone could wish, and – crucially – (b) any relevant changes to the subject’s beliefs would not improve life for the subject, but only make things worse. If we attempted in A2 to believe (what is in fact) the truth we would suffer severe internal psychological damage, and a damaged organism is less well suited to its environment than a healthy
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one. This is as much true of a deviant environment as the familiar one. Of course, we all intuitively feel that there just must be something intrinsically wrong with falsity regardless of what is beneficial to the subject. Nevertheless, there do not seem to be any good arguments that support these intuitions. On the contrary, if knowledge is what belief should aim at (as Williamson, for example, claims), and if it is to be understood as a kind of ideal ecological harmony between an organism and its environment, then, amazingly enough: we obtain knowledge in all four cases. There is nothing cognitively wrong with any of them. Although we described A2 and B1 as ‘nightmare sceptical scenarios’, the interesting point is that they are not, in fact, to be feared at all. What we need to remember is that, in all cases, the subject could still be aiming at truth in an intensional sense. It is just that, in cases A2 and B1, truth is not arrived at, or even extensionally approached, and it is the possibility of these kinds of situation that reveals clearly why the retreat to intensional aiming at truth is a much more controversial move than it might have appeared when we first introduced the idea in §1.4. We can see how our account leaves room for this possibility, but it remains to be shown that this can really work. In the previous chapter, we showed how pragmatic acceptance, our original minimal cognitive state, can be strengthened to include many features characteristic of belief, notably context-independence and involuntariness, without its collapsing into full belief. What we did not show, however, is how a weakened, intensional truth-aiming feature can also be added. The criticism may therefore be that, without a convincing proof that an amplified state of the relevant kind can exist, the so-called ‘ecological model’ remains pure fantasy. Although we know what we want our ‘weakened beliefs’ to be like (they need to be just like normal beliefs, but with a restricted universality principle), we still have not proved convincingly that such states are a real possibility. We can build states up from below, but it is unclear how we can ‘build them down’ from above. That is to say, conditions can more easily be added than subtracted. Since it is unclear how a weakened truth-aiming criterion or a restricted universality principle can simply be added (norms cannot just be ‘bolted on’), we appear to be stuck. However, the situation is not quite as bad as it might seem, and for two reasons. First, it must be remembered that it is unreasonable to expect us to be able to give a precise definition of our modified belief from existing concepts. This would be to ignore the highly revisionist character of our thesis, and the fact that we do not expect to develop the right concepts until we acquire a very different metaphysical outlook.
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If we can roughly situate where such new concepts are to be developed, this is all that can sensibly be demanded of us at this stage. Secondly, it is also unreasonable to suppose that the ecological model cannot be developed until the relevant concept of belief is already fully in place. This is to assume the traditional direction of analysis, where knowledge is defined in terms of belief. This assumption is highly questionable. Indeed, we have already noted that Williamson argues that the direction of analysis is precisely the other way round, and that (mere) belief can only be understood as a kind of botched knowledge. A third, and intuitively more plausible view, which we shall adopt, is that the connection between belief and knowledge is one of mutual dependence, and that neither can be analysed reductively into the other. After all, reductive analyses seldom do work (and this never seems to matter all that much!). Connective analyses work well enough in most contexts, and it is reasonable to suppose that this also holds true here. The upshot is that we can use the ecological model to help to shape the conception of belief that we need. This, indeed, is the main reason why such a model is needed. Although the relevant concepts are not yet fully developed, we have actually made considerably more progress than it might appear. The central notion of non-factive, optimal cognition, after all, certainly makes a good deal of sense. The model does give a clear answer to the question of what knowledge is for, and this is helpful when it comes to characterizing the norm that says that beliefs should aim at knowledge. And this norm is important, for the problem with the norm that beliefs aim at truth, understood merely in the intensional sense, is that, for aliens, the aim will never be satisfied. This has, indeed, led us to wonder even if we can sensibly demand that aliens have this aim. It would certainly be unsatisfactory if that were all that we could say about what alien cognition is for. However, the virtue of the norm that says that beliefs should aim at knowledge, as understood in the ecological, non-factive sense, is that the target can not only be aimed at, it can also be hit – and typically will be, humans and aliens alike. What is most disturbing about empirical cognition, and the feature which concerns us so fundamentally, is the apparent unconnectedness between the first stage of the process, where information from the object outside is encoded in the form of stimulations of the surface of the organism, and the second stage, where these stimulations are processed into a model of the original. The first stage loses information drastically, and the second stage apparently recovers it, but there is nothing which metaphysically guarantees that the information ‘recovered’ matches that which was originally lost. Apart from anything else, the processes
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involved in the two stages are spatially just too far apart for any such guarantee to be credible, and this gives such cognition a strangely accidental and hazardous quality. Now, an important virtue of the ecological model is that it enables us to restore a more than accidental harmony here. Biological diversity ensures that there is indeed no unique route from object to representation, but the relationship between what is inside and what is outside a given organism is no mere coincidence either. It falls a long way short of the divine harmony posited by Descartes, of course, but it is a naturally constrained relationship of a type which automatically confers a good measure of legitimacy. For example, it would be absurd to doubt that bats have genuine empirical cognition, for they are naturally evolved creatures with their own ecological niche. Had they been presented to us as mere thought-experiments, however, we should have been rather less certain on this point. Likewise, although our ‘Martians’ may lack credibility in certain respects, if we discovered that creatures of this kind were a real part of nature, and were connected to their environment as a result of a long process of biological adaptation, then to deny them genuine cognition would be equally perverse. After all, cognition is ultimately a biological notion, and it is therefore biological facts that ultimately count. We may still balk at the idea that alien knowledge could, in any sense, be ‘as good as’ ours. If alien representations are systematically false (as we see them), then it might indeed be wondered what entitles us to describe them even as representations at all, a point to which we shall return in §8.3. At the very least, we can hardly regard the process whereby reality is encoded in such ‘representations’ as having the same status to our own processing. Against this, it may be conceded that our own cognitive processing is bound to look intrinsically better than the alien version – but only because we are bound to regard our own theory of the world as better for us than its alien counterpart. Moreover, our ‘amplified theory of the world’ (ATW), namely our theory of the world that includes an explanation of why our basic theory of the world (BTW), rather than any of the alternatives, is our BTW, is bound to look more natural than alien ATWs, as we noted in §3.4. Our BTW and the theory which explains why we think that this theory is true are not just lumped together, but are closely integrated in a single amplified theory (or will be when we learn more about how our cognitive processing mechanism works), so of course our processing will look intrinsically ‘right’ in a way that alien processing must look intrinsically ‘wrong’. It may nevertheless be wondered just how we can describe certain alien states as beliefs, or as anything like them, if they lack a world-to-mind
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direction of fit, as they apparently do. We must say that the states lack this central functional characteristic, and so we must deny them the status of beliefs, it may be felt. If we treat these states as entities independent of the attitudes that constitute them, then this might indeed be a problem. However, we have already seen that this is not a good way of looking at such states. The concept of a direction of fit, after all, will also admit of intensional and extensional versions, namely, (IDF) The organism should aim that (it has belief B only if B is true) and (EDF) (The organism should aim that it has belief B) only if B is true. If we are allowed to keep the belief within the aiming-context, so to speak, then IDF becomes an available reading of the direction-of-fit principle, and we can see that alien ‘beliefs’ will satisfy it. We might still feel that beliefs are states in their own right, and have a reality apart from their possessors’ attitudes towards them. It is unclear what could justify this feeling, but even if we agree with it, and concede that these alien states are not genuine beliefs, we can still say that they serve a legitimate cognitive purpose. Further, given our own sceptical argument, we might need to say that our own ‘beliefs’ can only satisfy IDF rather than EDF. In any event, as we noted in §1.4, it is surely unduly severe to say that if we had evolved in a world like A2, then we would have lacked beliefs altogether. Such states, to repeat, would certainly feel like beliefs, and would be functionally far more useful to us than states (or the methodologies which generate them) which really did (extensionally) drive us towards the truth. There is no need to get too worked up about terminology, of course, especially since we have agreed that our newly designed reduced-beliefs are indeed different from the original. The point, however, is that even if reduced-beliefs are not real beliefs, they are not nothing either. In fact, they are all that we really need. A more fundamental objection is that environmental harmony is only one desirable characteristic of knowledge. We also value knowledge because people with knowledge (as opposed to accidentally true beliefs, for example) make more reliable sources of testimony. However, if these people are liable to ‘know’ what is in fact false, then their ‘knowledge’ is of no use to us at all. There is a social dimension to epistemology which purely biological considerations ignore. If we are to find our way about, then we must be able to rely on other people’s knowledge and not just
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our own observation. Yet reliability in this sense surely requires truth. This is right, of course, but it does not prove all that much. Undoubtedly, we shall not rely on Martians to tell us what is going on around us – but if we know that they are Martians, we are not likely to be tempted to do so! One indispensable reason why we form appropriate social relationships only with other human beings is just that we are all cognitively similar. Since we share the same epistemic perspective, we naturally insist that all our epistemic judgements be true. What has happened here is that the pragmatic feature which Peirce and Rosenberg emphasize has been projected into a wider social community of knowers. Yet we can still maintain that knowledge is nothing more than adequately justified belief, and this leaves open the right to attribute false knowledge to aliens, creatures who are not part of such a community and are not expected to be. If our reconstructed knowledge does not logically imply truth, we need to explain why it appears so strongly that it ought to. Up to a point, we have already done this, though there are some more general metaphysical issues as well that we shall develop in the last chapter. We shall see there in more detail how our predilection for the Olympian standpoint, or ‘God’s eye point of view’, goes some way towards explaining why certain kinds of sceptical scenario appear to need ruling out in a stronger sense than is either necessary or possible. We shall also see, in §7.1, how the apparently relativist implications of our view can be handled without paradox. However, we need to look more carefully at the connection between truth and weaker epistemic notions, such as ideal warrant, if we are to explain this puzzling tendency for certain pragmatically selfdefeating claims to be wrongly elevated into genuine contradictions. To do this, it is helpful to examine the logic of such notions. Suppose that we introduce a class of sentential operators ‘WA ’, ‘WB ’ and so on, where ‘WA p’ is to be read as ‘A would be ideally warranted in believing that p’. We have argued that, although ‘A knows that p’ entails ‘WA p’, it nevertheless does not entail ‘It is true that p’.9 Our task is therefore to explain why it sometimes seems as though it does. It is the behaviour of iterated operators that are of special interest here. In general, there is no reason at all for such operators to commute, that is, for ‘WA WB p’ to be equivalent to ‘WB WA p’. More surprising, however, is the failure of idempotence, that is, the equivalence between ‘WA WA p’ and ‘WA p’. At first sight, such iteration looks like nothing more than idle repetition. Nevertheless, as we already noted in §3.4, if A and ourselves can disagree about everything else, then we can disagree about what is optimal for A. There is less reason to doubt the equivalence between
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‘WA WA WA p’ and ‘WA WA p’, however, and likewise with even higherorder iterations, since we can reasonably build it into our interpretations that we make no distinctions here. As we observed, interpretations are things that we confer upon aliens: they do not have to be shared (and, given their alienness, they cannot be). This enables us to impose coherence conditions that, among other things, require higher-order idempotences. We might expect that our own system should have favoured properties, given the advantages gained from attitude-reduction, but this is also not the case. There need be no immediate problem with idempotence, of course, but if ‘WI p’ means ‘I am ideally warranted in believing that p’ then it will still not be logically equivalent to ‘p’ – even from within my own perspective (although it would be pragmatically self-defeating to hold the one without the other). If it were, then ‘WA WI p’ would become equivalent to ‘WA p’ (assuming, as is natural, that equivalent sub-formulae are always inter-substitutible), which would require, implausibly, that A regard me as cognitively the same as him. However, ‘WI (WI p ↔ p)’ is still allowed to be logically valid, even though my own system requires me to regard ‘WI p ↔ p’ as invalid.10 Such a result is similar to the very striking theorem of standard doxastic logic, ‘B Bp → p’, which appears to demand a belief in one’s own infallibility (even though ‘Bp → p’, of course, is not a theorem).11 Another interesting point that emerges, however, is that ‘WI p’ can be treated as equivalent to ‘p’ without paradox if the ‘I’ in ‘I am ideally warranted in believing that p’ is treated as a pure indexical rather than as a rigid designator. For example, the ‘I’ in ‘A is ideally warranted in believing that I am ideally warranted in believing that p’ will now refer to A rather than to me, the author, when understood in this way, thus blocking our earlier argument. More generally, the reason that the sentence ‘WI p & ∼ p’ does not express a contradiction is because, and only because, there are possible worlds in which it is true, namely the A2 type scenarios considered above, where I am situated in a deviant environment which presents the same stimuli as the ordinary world. However, such scenarios only make sense when viewed ‘from the outside’, where a certain distance is maintained between the ‘I’ within the deviant environment and the ‘I’ who is commenting on the situation. No such distinction is available with transcendental egos, however. Such egos transcend all contexts and boundaries. If the ‘I’ is purely indexical, then we cannot construct possible scenarios where ‘WI p & ∼p’ is understood as true, and neither with ‘∼WI p & p’, and for similar reasons. In consequence, ‘WI p ↔ p’ emerges as logically valid.
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What essentially is happening here is that, if we allow the ‘I’ to float untethered through all logical contexts, then phrases such as ‘I am warranted in believing that’ become merely ‘parenthetical’, in Urmson’s (1952) sense, and amount to little more than diffident throat-clearing.12 This is important because, if we take the purely indexical ‘I’ seriously, we can see how the standard model of knowledge derives from ours as a limiting case. Knowledge, as standardly conceived, is knowledge from the perspective of the transcendental ego, a free-floating ‘I’ that has no empirical boundaries at all.13 If we ignore our essential situatedness, our cognitive contingency, then we shall succumb to the illusion of supposing such an utterly neutral and featureless perspective to be our own, and shall in consequence suppose that our ideal cognition must be genuinely factive, and not just something that we, from our own very specific perspective, must assume to be true because it would be pragmatically self-defeating to suppose otherwise. However, real people are different from transcendental egos, and the formalism helps to explain why this is relevant. This may be a little difficult to see, and the reason is that the ‘standard model’, as we call it, is very hard to characterize. It is centred around adequately justified true belief, and yet we both want and do not want the truth criterion to follow automatically from the adequately justified belief criterion. We want it to follow, partly in order to prevent Gettiertype problems from arising, and partly to forestall the scepticism that automatically seems to arise if fully justified false belief is allowed to be even a logical possibility. And yet we also want it not to follow, because if truth and justification are too closely related, then we obtain either idealism (a world constructed out of belief) or else an extreme reliabilist model of justification that makes it impossible for us to know that we know what we know. Much of contemporary epistemology consists of unsuccessful attempts to get around these dilemmas. On our view, knowledge is simply a species of biological interaction between an organism and its environment; and if aliens do better, biologically speaking, in believing what is false, then that is plainly what they should do. Traditional factive knowledge is clearly something that the aliens are better off without. Indeed, we are all better off without it, since we shall continue to misunderstand the relationship between knower and known if we retain it. In describing our model as ‘ecological’, we are deliberately alluding to ‘deep ecology’ and the idea that the human perspective must not be thought of as superior to others, but rather as just one of many. We do not ‘look down’ on empirical reality from an external vantage point.
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Rather, we are essentially a part of this reality, and we interact with it. There are some important disanalogies, of course. Human epistemology does not depend on non-human alternatives in the immediate sort of way in which human life depends on being part of a wider ecosystem. Nevertheless, we noted at the end of Chapter 3 that a full understanding of human intelligence requires the ability to locate it within a space of possible alternatives, and that a long-term research programme should be to understand ourselves within this wider cognitive context. This will give us what we call an ‘amplified theory of the world’, a theory that is far more valuable and instructive than a ‘basic theory’. Furthermore, the ‘ecological’ label helps to emphasize one of the most important aspects of our overall position, which is that the possibility of radical cognitive alternatives is not in any way to be feared. Most other approaches find the idea of alien belief-systems to be severely embarrassing – a possibility ideally to be refuted altogether – or, failing that, to be systematically ignored as methodologically unhelpful. We, by contrast, relish the thought! Our view is that our own self-understanding can only be enhanced by comparing ourselves with aliens in a non-hierarchical way. We also have a different image of the ultimate end of knowledge. Ideal knowledge does not assume anything like a perfectly neutral, God’s eye view of the world. Nor does it even require ultimate convergence by all parties who genuinely aim at truth. Rather, it implies a kind of ultimate harmony between organism and environment, but one which permits and celebrates diversity. It is an elusive image, and the relativism that it embodies needs to be guarded carefully from a familiar sort of abuse, a point to which we shall return in Chapter 7. However, the virtues of this new model are considerable, as we have seen. We can also see that our proposed revised notion, although undoubtedly odd, does not require us actually to say odd things except in philosophically special circumstances. After all, we always do work from within our own perspective, and therefore always assume that what we and our colleagues know is true. Although our account is, in many ways, very sketchy (inevitably so, for we have only the haziest idea of what alien cognition could be like), it is consistent with most of what we assume to be characteristic of knowledge.
5.3 Justification regained Our task is to show that the sceptic can be answered if we modify our concept of belief in a certain way. We have already shown that such modification is necessary. We need to be sure, however, that it is also
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sufficient, and we may still be uneasy on this point. The ecological model is concerned primarily with what is best for an organism, where ‘best’ is understood in a biological, adaptive sense. However, it is far from clear how any kind of normative concept, such as justification, can be fully grounded in purely natural facts about how organisms best interact with their environment, where ‘best’ is understood in this rather limited, naturalistic sense. Yet what else can we appeal to apart from nature? The answer is a weakened sort of transcendental argument. We have already examined arguments of this kind in §2.5, and we noted a number of difficulties. We agree with Stroud and others that, at the very best, they show only that we must have beliefs of type X if we are to have experiences of type Y. They will not prove anything interesting about the world itself, only what we must believe the world to be like. However, we were dissatisfied even with this, since the notion of ‘belief’ carries more weight than such arguments can bear. We may agree that we must adopt an inductive policy or else everything collapses into ruins, for example. However, this does not license the belief that induction will work if belief satisfies the UUP. And even if it could be shown that specifically beliefs (and not some weaker attitudes) are required for us to have the kind of experience we have, this does not automatically warrant the beliefs. It may just be that the experience itself is unwarranted and should be adjusted by altering our thoughts about it. Yet despite these strictures, we can recover something from this type of argument. Kant’s central point, with which we entirely agree, is that cognition is a complex business. It is not, as the classical empiricists supposed, simply a matter of passively receiving data from outside. Rather, it is the product of a delicate interaction between internal and external elements. The faculty of understanding provides the internal component, the central processing that is needed to turn raw data into something that we can consciously grasp and make judgements about. The legitimacy of this internal element is secured not by a guarantee of some mysterious kind that it corresponds to how things are in themselves, but rather because without it cognition would not be possible at all. To reject the internal element is thus to reject human cognition altogether. Now, it is perhaps possible to reject human cognition in some sense, though Kant does not take the possibility seriously. We might want to reject alien cognition on the grounds that the aliens’ constitution is just ‘wrong’, that is to say, can only process data in such a way as to lead to error. We might then have the disturbing thought that perhaps,
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instead, it is our constitution that is ‘wrong’, and that we should therefore reject our own minds. Yet although there may be no strict logical error here, the perversity is massive. If we are justified in anything, it may be felt, then we are justified in not having to do that! There is a biological imperative here that cannot seriously be ignored. It may be protested that such an imperative does not really yield a justification of the appropriate de jure kind. It may be that we cannot help being human, it may be said, but can we not also see how wretched our condition is? An epistemological St Paul might insist that salvation can be attained only to the extent that we can transcend our despicable animal natures and ascend to a state of pure cognition uncontaminated by biological contingencies. Indeed, the desire for a God’s eye view of reality is deeply ingrained in us. However, we are not forced to adopt this attitude, and it is plainly more reasonable not to. Empirical cognition may have essential limitations, but it is foolish to aspire for anything better since such aspirations are doomed to failure. Such justification that we are left with may not have the purity that this kind of super-rationalist might hope for. Nevertheless, it is justification of a sort that is quite adequate. Our justification differs from Kant’s in a significant way. Kant thought that the internal processing, in particular the subsumption of data under the categories, provided an a priori condition for all possible empirical cognition; and for Kant, necessity and universality are marks of the a priori. However, we do not regard the internal processing as a priori in any significant sense. It is non-empirical inasmuch as it does not come from outside, but that is all. It has its origin in local biological facts, not universal necessities, and we do not have much a priori knowledge about how it works. We reject what Kant calls ‘transcendental psychology’, and insist on a metaphysics that is wholly naturalistic. There are evident advantages to this approach. Transcendental psychology was always mysterious, Kant’s list of categories has always seemed rather too simpleminded, and his a priori arguments have always attempted to achieve more than is plausible. But can we justify the empirical in terms of the empirical, as our approach seems to demand, without circularity? The answer is ‘no’; but not all circularities are vicious. Foundationalist accounts of justification have well-known difficulties, notably that they require chains of justification whose termini are self-evident in a way that is hard to make plausible. A ‘naturalized epistemology’, such as Quine’s is far less open to criticism in this respect. On this approach, we do not attempt to justify empirical science from a pre-scientific starting point. On the contrary, we begin and end with empirical
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science and show how our cognition can be accounted for within it. The suspicion remains that this approach does not really refute scepticism, and it is surely true that there are some kinds of extreme sceptical argument which this approach cannot answer. However, it must be remembered that we have not set ourselves the task of refuting every kind of sceptical argument. It is only a certain kind of argument that we are concerned with, one which concerns the possibility of alternative belief-systems, and this argument emerges from within our ordinary scientific picture of the world. Nor is our restricted approach at all arbitrary. What makes the kind of scepticism that we are concerned with far more important than most other kinds, it will be recalled from §1.4, is that it does not arise from some artificial scenario based on something’s going inexplicably wrong: some unverifiable intervention, some arbitrary breach of normal functioning or any other essentially groundless fear. On the contrary, our problem is one which arises even if everything goes right, even if all parties reach optimal cognitive performance. We do not need to allow for the possibility of the falsity of science in any relevant way. Our scepticism is one which originates from within the system and derives naturally from our ordinary inquiries themselves. It therefore does not suppose that the system needs to be given some external, system-independent justification. What is a priori is that empirical cognition is always the product of both external input and internal processing. This much is just conceptual analysis. We may therefore conclude, (1) Necessarily, for each individual, there is an internal element in her cognition. We may not, however, infer (2) There is an internal element such that, necessarily, for each individual, that element is in her cognition. Claim (1) is of the ‘ ∀ ∃’ form, whereas (2) is of the much stronger ‘∃ ∀’ form. Claim (1) allows the internal element to be empirically conditioned in so far as it may depend on empirical features of each individual selected (brain structure, and so forth). However, (2) gives us an internal element rather like the Table of Categories, a universally necessary method of interpreting experiences of any kind. Our system neither permits nor requires this. However, we can strengthen (1) to
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allow that each individual should have the internal element it has as a matter of de re necessity, or: (3) For each individual, there is an internal element such that, necessarily, it is in her cognition. This is of the ‘∀ ∃ ’ form which is stronger than (1) though weaker than (2). However, such de re necessities are typically empirical, and not of the Kantian kind. They are more like Aristotelian essences, and are as various as biology permits. Now, what justifies the use that any individual makes of the internal element that is part of her essence in the above sense? Since she is unable to use any other element, the question is surely self-answering. As we noted earlier, it is like asking what justifies my being a human being (as opposed to a Martian, or God, or nothing at all). To deny my right to use my own mind, rather than someone else’s, embodies a kind of neurotic self-rejection that is barely intelligible, let alone intelligent. It may nevertheless be protested that we are placing too much emphasis on how we are compelled to think, and that it is unclear what would prevent us from legitimizing certain artificially generated scenarios. Why, for example, should we not attribute the status of knowledge to the beliefs of brains in a vat? Or the victims of overwhelmingly powerful hypnosis? After all, they too are biologically compelled to think as they do. However, the ecological model can be used precisely to exclude certain kinds of artificiality. The question, ‘Does X has knowledge?’ is essentially the same as, ‘Does X have optimal cognition?’ We can reasonably say that a brain in a vat does not have optimal cognition, since the brain would be far better off it were put back where it naturally belongs! This remains so even though its current belief-system is highly coherent. By contrast, we are not similarly inclined to say that Martians would be better off if their brains were to be replaced by human ones – even though the result would be that they, like the formerly envatted brains, would at last start to believe what is true. Of course, we can have awkward borderline cases: for example, the film The Matrix suggests a world in which sensory stimulation from a computer program is almost more ‘natural’ than that through the sense organs, even though its inhabitants did not naturally evolve that way. Yet we still have a serviceable distinction here, and it has some intuitive plausibility. True, we are relying heavily on the idea that, ultimately, what is natural is right. But we are not demanding a simple direct inference here, an ought
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inexplicably derived from an is. A more general world-picture is needed to sustain the connection; but we have already indicated the virtues of such a picture, and this gives us a workable conception of justification. No doubt a sufficiently resourceful sceptic can continue the argument, and we shall see in §7.3 that the limits of our cognitive apparatus are more open-ended than might be suggested by talking of biological essences. However, we have established enough for present purposes. This modified transcendental argument does give us an entirely adequate kind of justification. In a way, this has been obvious all along. We defended our use of induction on the grounds that we cannot seriously not use it. However, in describing our justification of our inductive practices, more specifically those which project properties such as green as opposed to grue, as pragmatic, the inevitability can be obscured, since the word ‘pragmatic’ has unfortunate overtones of practical convenience, something which we can just take or leave as we see fit. This ties in with our earlier point that acceptance, as opposed to belief, is typically voluntary. Yet, in our parlance, the word is simply to be contrasted with ‘evidential’, and ‘evidential’ does not mean the same as ‘cognitive’. The internal component in our cognition is nonevidential, but is still cognitive. Why? Because cognition itself would not be possible without it. Of course, not all of what is called ‘pragmatic’ in the philosophy of science can be defended in this way, but we do not expect this. Our purpose is simply to defend some very basic non-evidential criteria, enough to get us past the traditional problems in the theory of knowledge. It is a moot point as to exactly how far this strategy extends, but it certainly extends far enough. Can we still be said to be aiming at truth? In the most ordinary, downto-earth sense, we surely can. For what more can we do to discover the truth than to investigate the world as carefully and as thoroughly as we can, relying solely on the data available, and making the best possible use of our cognitive apparatus, such as it is, to interpret these data? That is all that aiming at truth can possibly amount to as far as we are concerned; and were it not for subtle philosophical objections, no one would have the slightest problem with this. Nevertheless, these subtle objections do need to be answered, and we must ask to what extent we have done so. In particular, we must ask how well we have been able to resolve the problem that we left hanging at the end of the last chapter: namely, exactly what more do we need to add to non-contextual, involuntary acceptance to yield the weakened notion of belief that we want? And, furthermore, how do we add it? The modified transcendental arguments that we have considered are important here because they suggest
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that actually very little extra is needed. If an acceptance is genuinely involuntary in the strong sense of being beyond our power to alter (given the data), and if this is due to our very natures, as opposed to some artificial influence, then this gives it a kind of justification that a merely voluntary acceptance does not have. Hume recognized this. This is not quite the same as saying that non-contextual, involuntary acceptance just is the final state that we want, and that a restricted truthnorm must automatically emerge without any further ado. What it does show, however, is that the location of our final state is now very tightly circumscribed. Not only can we approach it very closely from below (via non-contextual, involuntary acceptance) and from above (traditional belief, but with a restricted truth-norm), we can also situate it via the ecological model of knowledge, as we showed in the previous section. Furthermore, as we have now shown, the connection between the latter and our final state can be further explicated by means of a conception of justification that can be given a quasi-Kantian treatment. Together, these connections form an elaborate web of concepts and constraints, and it would therefore be unreasonable to maintain that our desired modification of belief is no more than an idle fantasy. On the contrary, the idea is very well supported, and at many levels. Furthermore, it yields a system that provides a very successful and original answer, not only to our own peculiar sort of scepticism, but also to many traditional sceptical arguments as well, and this itself is a very powerful point in its favour. Having achieved this, we must now ask what more needs to be done. We have shown that it is possible to aim at truth successfully, albeit in a restricted sense, and that many of our ordinary epistemological practices can be justified should we wish to engage in them. However, we have yet to explain fully why we should engage in them. Of course, if truth is to be our goal, then such practices become mandatory. But why should truth be our goal? Most have assumed that we just have to aim at truth in at least some sense or other. Yet we have already seen, for example in §4.2 where we examined the current debate about whether voluntary belief is possible, that this is not entirely obvious. At the very least, we need to consider more carefully what might happen if we did not aim at truth; and this we shall now do.
6 Pragmatism and the Value of Truth
We have now established that our ordinary beliefs about the world can be protected from a certain kind of sceptical attack provided that we weaken the notion of belief in a certain kind of way. But how far should we weaken it? Our sceptical argument sets an upper limit to how strong our revised notion can be; but we also need to establish a lower limit, and ask what would go wrong if our belief-substitutes were to fall below it. The most obvious answer to this question is that if we weakened our conception of belief any further than we have done, then we would end up with nothing better than pragmatic acceptance, and thereby cease to aim at truth in any sense, extensional or intensional. This is right; but we have not yet shown that such a move would be a bad thing for us. We have assumed, along with most people, that we ought to aim at truth in at least some sense or other, but we need to justify this assumption. That is to say, we need to show that our lives really would be impoverished if we were to replace all or most of our beliefs by mere pragmatic acceptances. This will prove to be a subtler and more difficult task than might be expected.
6.1 Rorty on pragmatism We have already examined on several occasions the importance of pragmatic considerations. In Chapter 2, we considered in some detail the distinction between evidential and pragmatic criteria for theoryselection, and our most fundamental weapon against wholesale scepticism turned out to be the pragmatic justification of induction. We have also argued that certain key ideas are not really logically inconsistent, as is generally supposed, but merely pragmatically self-defeating. Given this extensive reliance on pragmatic considerations of one sort or 162
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another, it would be quite understandable if the label ‘pragmatist’ were to be used to characterize our overall position. Nevertheless, there are important ways in which such a label would be misleading. We certainly repudiate the pragmatist theory of truth, that is to say, the view that truth is actually constituted by what it is ideally rational to believe. As far as we are concerned, truth is an entirely minimal notion, and we shall argue in Chapter 8 that such additional epistemic constraints are not only unnecessary but inevitably lead to metaphysical distortion, especially when pluralized. However, we are more sympathetic towards ‘pragmatism’ considered as a theory about the nature of belief, rather than truth. If we were to say (as pragmatists typically do) that the function of belief is not to represent or picture things as they are, but simply to help us to find our way around, then what we have is (very roughly) the thesis that we should replace our beliefs, as traditionally understood, by what we call acceptances (and adjust assertoric force appropriately). Such a view is indeed very similar to our own; but the fact that we require that our modified beliefs aim at truth in a way that pragmatic acceptances do not marks an important difference. This might be disputed on the grounds that pragmatists have a different understanding of truth and what aiming at it would amount to, but it seems unlikely that this will make the necessary difference. What we call (mere) pragmatic acceptances fail to be constrained even by minimal truth (i.e. the norm ‘We should accept that p, only if p’, fails – even when read intensionally); in which case, they will certainly not be constrained by more substantive kinds of truth either. Of course, this is largely because such acceptances are typically both voluntary and context-dependent, so the sort of pragmatism that we are talking about is considerably more radical than anything that can be found in either Peirce, James or Dewey.1 For that reason, it may still be felt that our own view remains very close to theirs, particular Peirce’s. We shall say more on this in §8.2. However, more extreme kinds of pragmatism are worth examining for their own sake. One of the most influential contemporary philosophers who is happy to describe his position as pragmatist is Richard Rorty. He strongly rejects the thesis that truth is something that should specifically be aimed at, and instead argues that virtues such as conversability (i.e. the willingness to engage others in conversation) and intellectual curiosity are far more to the point. No very useful distinction can be drawn, he claims, between people who aim at truth and those who do not, but the contrast between people who exhibit these other virtues and those who do not is of much clearer intellectual and moral importance.2 He also contrasts pragmatism
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with what he calls ‘realism’, which is the view that ‘truth consists in an accurate representation of how things really are’: Pragmatists think that if something makes no difference to practice, it should make no difference to philosophy. This conviction makes them suspicious of the distinction between justification and truth, for that distinction makes no difference to my decisions about what to do.3 However, we have already seen, in §1.2, that this is a mistake. As Huw Price (2003) shows, unless truth is treated as a norm different from that of justification, one of the most important rules of ordinary conversation ceases to apply, specifically the rule that says that if I believe that p, then I must oppose your assertion that not-p, what we call the universality principle. It is not just that I must regard ‘p and not-p’ as a contradiction, something that could never be true. Rather, I must suppose that you ought not to have made that assertion, and must therefore try to get you to change your mind. The same normative result does not emerge if I merely accept, rather than believe, that p, which shows that this conversational rule involves much more than just the law of non-contradiction. It is a rule that looks trivial, but is not. Moreover – and this is the point – it is not derivable from any evidential norm that says that you should not assert that p unless you have some justification for doing so, or anything along similar lines. This ‘truth norm’ makes no reference to justification whatsoever. Indeed, it may well clash with evidential norms, since the evidence available to you may be very different from that which is available to me. If Price is right, then Rorty is just mistaken in supposing that the virtue of conversability is detachable from a respect for truth. Unless we aim at truth, we cannot follow one of the most elementary rules of conversation. However, this does not conclude the argument. Rorty might (and should) concede that we ought indeed to aim at truth in the minimal sense demanded by Price, but nevertheless insist that what makes conversability desirable is not the antecedent importance of truth per se. It is not that we should converse in a certain sort of way because we should aim at truth. On the contrary, what makes conversability a virtue is political, not metaphysical. Unless we are conversable, we cannot promote such goods as social inclusiveness, non-violent methods of resolving disputes, and other essential features of a just, democratic society. It makes real sense to ask whether a person is engaging in these
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desirable political-cum-social activities; but to wonder whether such a person is ‘aiming at truth’ is something that only a professional philosopher could see the point of doing. Of course, if we say that ‘aiming at truth’ just means following the conversational rule just mentioned, we can now see what is being wondered about; but it remains a misleading way of describing this person’s motives, because the notion of Truth (with or without a capital ‘T’) plays no important part in what is going on. The political and social goals are doing the real work. They do not need a metaphysical foundation, and attempts to provide one will only get in everybody’s way. Now, we may agree that it is wrong to suppose that truth is something whose importance can be isolated from everything else. Rather, we need to think of truth as just one node in a web of interdependent desirable goals, and it may indeed be the case that these other goals are largely political and social. Not much can be deduced from this point alone, however. We might try to conclude that we can discard truth as an ultimate goal, since it is just one element among many such goals, and instead get all the other nodes in the web to take the full strain. This is how web-structures work, so maybe this could be done, though it would indeed place some noticeable extra strain all round. Yet exactly what would be the point? Rorty’s claim is that aiming at truth explicitly is not merely dispensable, but that it ought to be dispensed with. Just as religious belief is not merely unnecessary to sustain our ethical lives but actually harmful in this respect (claims Rorty), so a preoccupation with truth actually disrupts our intellectual well-being. In a ‘post-metaphysical world’, that is to say, one where we stop worrying about whether what we think and say is ‘really’ true, we can make far better progress. In short, the web would be stronger, not weaker, if truth were excised from it. Yet this remarkable conclusion is not sustained by anything that we have seen so far. Why, then, does Rorty draw this conclusion? This, unfortunately, remains very unclear. To some extent, it may be explained by his general scepticism about the notion of an ultimate goal, or an ‘intrinsic value’, something which plays a significant role in his counter-critique of Bernard Williams.4 But even if we agree with Rorty that there is no real distinction to be drawn between intrinsic and instrumental value, and that we cannot isolate what we value from the context in which we value it, this will not yield the required result. It is worth looking in a little detail as to why this is so. We have already talked about ‘webs’ in explaining how values are interrelated, and the term is a deliberate echo of Quine and Ullian’s
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phrase, ‘the web of belief’. When the web is restricted to beliefs, we obtain the familiar coherentist approach to justification. This implies a strongly anti-foundationalist strategy. ‘Lines of justification’ do not always point in the same direction, namely towards self-evident termini. There are no such termini, and all justification is ultimately circular; but circular justifications are quite adequate for normal purposes provided that the circles are large enough. This is not to deny the existence of a reality outside the web. For example, we need not deny the importance of experiential input, for sensory perception causes us to have beliefs that we would not otherwise have. There is, of course, room for considerable debate about how this process works, and about whether there are any peculiarly experiential beliefs. However, although sensory influence is, metaphorically speaking, on the periphery of the web, this does not imply that it can only act on nodes which are ‘peripheral’ in a sense which demands a foundationalist treatment. Justification is holistic, and the rational response to any anomaly, however it comes about, is always conservative – in accordance with what Quine splendidly calls the ‘maxim of minimum mutilation’. Now, what happens when desires are included in the web? We shall end up with a system that is also coherentist, but in the sense that desires can only be justified in terms of other desires. Answers to questions of the form, ‘What is the point of X?’ are always of the form ‘Because without X, you cannot get Y (and Z, and so on).’ For this reason, we should indeed be suspicious of the traditional distinction between intrinsic and instrumental value; for intrinsic values are the conative analogues of self-evident beliefs, elements that are ultimately required to justify everything else but which themselves require no independent justification. If ‘X has intrinsic value’ means that X is valuable quite regardless of anything else it might bring, then we should say that nothing has intrinsic value. There are no foundational termini. Equally, if ‘X has merely instrumental value’ means that X is not itself valuable, although it is needed for something else that is, then we should say that nothing has merely instrumental value. If X is needed for something valuable, then it is ipso facto valuable (though the amount of value it possesses may be very small and transient compared to that which it is needed for). This is not to say that there is no sort of distinction to be had here at all. Of course, there is. It is just that any such distinction should take the form of a continuum or sliding scale, depending on how many and how well entrenched the links are between the desire to obtain the item in question and other desires. Nevertheless, on our view, there are no self-standing values, that is to say, values that would remain operative
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in the absence of all other values. This may sound rather alarming, but it should be remembered that to envisage the absence of all other values is to consider a wholly extraordinary type of situation, a situation that nobody need fear might actually come to pass. There are a number of controversial issues here, of course. It might, for example, be insisted that the intrinsic/instrumental distinction is much more than just a matter of degree, and that the above argument merely shows that most intrinsically valuable things are also of instrumental value to other intrinsically valuable things. That many things possess both kinds of value is a fact that nobody need dispute. This does not fully address the problem of what makes things intrinsically valuable, however. For suppose we ask, once again, why X is valuable, where X is supposed to be of intrinsic value. We naturally do this by citing other valuable things, such as Y and Z. Plainly these other values will only be relevant if X helps us to attain them; which means that X must have instrumental value with respect to Y and Z. Indeed, it is the fact that X has this instrumental value that constitutes our answer. However, if the two types of value are conceived as fundamentally different, then the objection arises that we have not yet explained why X is intrinsically, as well as instrumentally valuable (which, presumably, is the main point of the question). Yet if we are not allowed to cite other valuable things, then it seems that we are inevitably stuck with the answer, ‘Well, it just is’, an answer that is virtually useless. You either see it or you don’t, and if you don’t then there is nothing more to be said. Reasoning about intrinsic values thus becomes impossible; from which we might not unreasonably conclude, with Rorty, that this whole conception of intrinsic value is also useless. We have spoken of desires, rather than values, and in doing so have assumed a broadly Humean picture of value as grounded in ‘passions’. We shall not attempt a more elaborate justification of this picture. It is sufficient for present purposes that it be consistent with, and broadly similar to Rorty’s approach. It is also very plausible in its essentials. No doubt, we could quibble at the details, but it is undoubtedly true that most of things we want do not easily fit into either of the two traditional categories, intrinsic versus instrumental. Good health, happiness, education, freedom, justice, sufficient money, a wide circle of friends and much else besides are all valuable both in themselves (to some extent) and in relation to other things: and it is entirely in order to justify the worth of any one of them by appealing to the others. We are certainly never forced to reply, ‘Well, it just is’ to the question, ‘Why is it valuable?’ What we cannot do, of course, is to justify the whole
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web in one single move. To attempt to do so from within the system would yield an answer so trivial that it could not count as any kind of justification: and, pace Plato, Kant and other traditional rationalists, there is nothing outside the web that can be appealed to. Nevertheless, we may insist, with Rorty, that it does not really matter that we cannot give this kind of super-justification. What we really need to know is how the web is internally constructed, and there is plenty to be learnt here. If someone persists in asking for a global justification, we can only say that this is simply how we are at this point in time, and that although we can understand and improve our nature and situation from within (up to a point), we cannot transcend it altogether. We need to learn how to live with the slightly unnerving sense of contingency that this outlook brings; but this is quite possible. So, is it of intrinsic importance, as traditionally understood, that we aim at truth? Evidently not. But it may still be the case that truth is of very great importance, and that it is closer to the ‘intrinsic’ end of the continuum we mentioned. The need for what Williams calls ‘Sincerity’ and ‘Accuracy’, for example, remains unchallenged as yet, since it is not essential to his more detailed claim that they need to be formulated using the terminology of ‘intrinsic value’. If it can be shown that removal of the desire for truth, and intimately related notions, will cause serious harm to our webs, that is to say, to our overall system of values, then that is quite sufficient for our purposes. It remains baffling that Rorty should suppose that there will be no such harm, but rather a great improvement. Of course, it may be that Rorty is still preoccupied with a certain philosophical picture of truth as a pure correspondence to reality, and likewise belief as a pure representation or ‘mirror’ of nature. If so, we certainly agree that there are serious philosophical errors here, and that they embody a picture of the world and our relationship to it that we should be far better off without. Yet it is simply a mistake to suppose that we need to adopt these false theories in order to conclude that we ought to aim at truth. The importance of truth can be well explained by its internal connections with our actual investigative practices, with the fact that we simply cannot take these practices seriously ‘from within’ if we do not suppose them to be truth-directed (at least, outside the more rarefied areas of theoretical speculation, perhaps), and further, that we cannot abandon these investigative practices without also abandoning, or seriously damaging, a whole range of other objectives that we hold dear. And the burden of Chapter 1 was to show that the notion of truth that is needed to formulate all this is metaphysically wholly innocuous.
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And yet, there is a way in which a kind of pragmatism can undermine the value of truth, as we noted at the beginning. We still need to ask ourselves what would happen if we were to abandon our beliefs altogether and replace them with pragmatic acceptances, that is to say, weaker cognitive states that do not aim at truth in any sense, intensional or extensional, and whose legitimacy is secured rather by a more direct appeal to practical convenience. The assumption that our web of beliefs should consist of beliefs rather than something else is, perhaps, too basic to count as just another node within the web itself. At least, it can certainly be made to look that way. Perhaps, then, there is a sense in which the importance of truth has to be secured outside the web, and this would tend to confirm Rorty’s suspicions that a preoccupation with truth carries more metaphysical weight than it ought. However, the only way to explore this possibility further is to ask what would actually happen if we really did replace beliefs with mere acceptances. We shall see that this idea is, alas, not quite as absurd as it might sound; and that, although the kind of ‘pragmatism’ it leads to would probably be very uncongenial to Rorty’s liberal intellectual temperament, it is not easy to say exactly what is wrong with it.
6.2 The autonomy of belief As we have already noted, one of the key differences between belief and acceptance is that the latter is typically under our voluntary control, whereas the former is not: we can (sometimes) accept what we want, but we cannot believe what we want. Since we have now introduced desires into the web itself, this means that replacing beliefs by acceptances will introduce some additional connections that need to be understood better. The relationship between cognitive and non-cognitive attitudes has been extensively examined in the literature. Hume famously declared that ‘belief is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them’, but this is an idea that can be understood in more than one way.5 Hume himself was talking about the influences on the will, and hence the explanation of human action; and his main point was that belief alone will not lead to action. A ‘passion’ (or desire) is also needed, and passions cannot be justified intellectually. All reason can do is to tell us the best way for a given passion to be satisfied; it cannot tell us whether the passion itself is one that is worth satisfying. Practical reason, in other words, is purely instrumental. Let us call this the ‘inertness of belief principle’
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(IBP). As it stands, though, what it suggests is a rather more symmetrical relationship between belief and passion than that of slave to master; for although the former cannot lead to action without the latter, the converse is equally true. Beliefs without desire may be inert, but desires without beliefs are undirected. In reality, beliefs and desires function together in a (more or less) harmonious and integrated system. One might conclude, therefore, that in a healthy soul, the appropriate relationship between reason and passion is one of mutual dependence and cooperation, and that the Humean idea that the latter should enslave the former is as unwarranted as the original Platonist idea against which Hume was reacting, namely that the former should dominate the latter. However, there is different kind of asymmetry between belief and desire which is less often noticed, and which demands that beliefs be autonomous in a way that desires cannot be. It has less to do with the philosophy of action than with epistemology. The basic idea is that, although it is quite permissible to change one’s desires in the light of new beliefs, it is not permissible to change one’s beliefs in the light of new desires. The web of our beliefs should form an autonomous subsystem of the larger web of our beliefs-cum-desires. However, the web of our desires is not, and should not be, a similarly autonomous subsystem. We shall call this the ‘autonomy of belief principle’ (ABP). What does this amount to? Flexibility and responsiveness are important virtues in a belief–desire web. If someone persists in believing something even though it conflicts with many other beliefs, then the whole system is likely to suffer. This reflects the fact that dogmatism and the refusal to admit that one may be mistaken are epistemic vices. Likewise, if someone persists in trying to get something even though this ensures that many other things that are also desired cannot be obtained, then the results will not be at all beneficial. Human practical intelligence consists largely of the ability to find ingenious ways of resolving the tensions within our desires by devising new methods of getting from A to B. Of course, the acquisition of new beliefs plays a vital role here, and we should therefore expect beliefs and desires to be mutually responsive. It is at this point, however, that the asymmetry becomes noticeable. An example will make this clear. Suppose that I wish to cross a river, and observe that there is only one bridge for that purpose. The belief that the bridge is the only way across will lead to a desire to walk across that bridge, thus apparently contradicting Hume’s thesis about the inertness of belief. The contradiction is only apparent, of course, for the motivation really derives from the desire to cross the river. Likewise, if, upon inspection, I acquire the belief that the bridge will not support
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my weight, then I may lose not only the desire to walk across the bridge, but also the desire to cross the river. Again, though, this does not really contradict the inertness principle, for what is doing the work here is the desire not to fall into the river. However, consider these three states of mind: (D1) My desire to cross the bridge; (D2) My desire not to fall into the river; (B)
My belief that crossing the bridge will lead me to fall into the river.
Together, these states form an unsatisfiable trio: if I am to proceed, then one of them must go. Clearly, either one of the desires might do this in a way that could be rational (though we need to take other beliefs and desires into account to be sure of this). Saying to myself, ‘Since crossing the bridge will lead me to fall into the river, and since I do not want that, I had better not cross the bridge’ is a quite acceptable piece of practical reasoning. Likewise, saying, ‘Since crossing the bridge will lead me to fall into the river, and since I really must cross the river somehow or other, I must therefore prepare for a swim’ is also acceptable. Exactly which of these arguments proves to be the better will depend on other beliefs and desires not mentioned. However, it is surely quite unacceptable to reason as follows: ‘Since I wish to cross the bridge, and also wish to avoid falling into the river, I must conclude that the bridge is safe to cross.’ Of course, we sometimes do reason in this way, but we clearly should not. This is the ABP. Beliefs should only be influenced by other beliefs, not by desires. But why should we accept ABP? The web model demands flexibility and mutual responsiveness to outside pressures, as we noted, and isolating our cognitive states within an autonomous sub-web merely adds massive restrictions in how the web as a whole can evolve without any obvious compensating advantages. Indeed, the demand that beliefs form an isolated sub-web smacks of a rather stubborn form of Platonic elitism. Moreover, it is not that we never feel the temptation to abandon this constraint. On the contrary, what we call ‘wishful thinking’ is an entirely normal part of human nature, and many self-styled practical people can quite easily suppose that intellectual integrity (or whatever one wishes to call the opposite of wishful thinking) is best left to intellectuals. The bridge example might suggest that breaches of ABP are so obviously irrational that the principle is self-evident, but a small modification in
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the story should make one reconsider this. Suppose instead that I am not concerned with whether I myself should cross the bridge, but with whether a subordinate should do so. Unless I myself can be made to suffer for injuries inflicted on others, then my belief that the bridge is safe for my subordinate to cross need not be irrational in any sense that I need automatically be concerned with. In a similar way, construction companies under pressure can find it easy to convince themselves that safety standards are being upheld, and it can, alas, sometimes be in their interests to be so convinced even if they are mistaken (more on this later). If this example does not convince either, then consider the following trio:
(D1) My desire to receive first class public services; (D2) My desire for low taxes; (B)
My belief that first class public services require a lot of money.
Once the matter is put this starkly, we can see clearly that the two desires do not themselves justify abandoning the belief; but no one who works in the public sector should be in any doubt that many people do reason in this way! Moreover – and this is the crucial point – it is not always easy to persuade such people that doing so is not in their interests (as opposed to ours). We may note that the involuntariness of belief does not provide a decisive objection here. All that we established in §4.2 is that our beliefs cannot be manipulated directly and in full consciousness of what we are doing. Indirect manipulation has not been excluded, and it is unclear that wishful thinking, or the natural evolution of our integrated cognitive/conative web without the ABP restraint, is voluntary in any relevant sense. It may nevertheless be protested that we are just confusing theoretical and practical reasoning. However, it needs to be explained why we should ever have separated the two so sharply to begin with. We can certainly see why pragmatists might want to subvert the distinction, given their insistence on the primacy of practice. Of course, it would be absurd to suppose that there is no difference at all, but nobody is required to say that. Theoretical reasoning is still reasoning about what to think, whereas practical reasoning is reasoning about what to do; we need only look at the type of conclusions reached to see that there is a sharp and unambiguous difference here. Perhaps we just do not need
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any deeper methodological division. Of course, we do in fact have such a division, but we need to justify it. It may, however, seem quite obvious that ABP is correct. In effect, it just says that I can have no reason for believing that something is true just because I want it to be true. The world is independent of my will. Yet the fact that I cannot make something true just by wanting it to be true is not enough to give us ABP unless we make use of constraints peculiar to belief. There is no harm, for example, in pretending that something is true just because I want it to be so, and I do not need to forget that the world is independent of my will in order to do so. It could, likewise, be argued that accepting that something is true might similarly be permissible in such circumstances. It is the fact that belief aims at truth, whereas pretence and acceptance do not, that makes the difference. Yet, of course, this is just where some difficult questions arise. First, it needs to be shown that our weakened, intensional sort of beliefs are still strong enough to imply ABP, and this is not especially obvious. Secondly, even if we agree that they are, we might still wonder why a person should not instead replace them by even weaker cognitive states – contextualized pragmatic acceptances, for example – which do not imply anything analogous to ABP. Given the greater flexibility afforded by a full integration of the cognitive part of the web into the overall system, such a person might indeed do rather well, and turn out to be rather more successful at navigating herself around life’s obstacles than the old-fashioned intellectual who retains a stubborn preoccupation with truth. We can certainly see why pragmatic considerations might push us in that direction. The isolation of the cognitive part of the web, as demanded by ABP, can seem inevitable if one assumes, as many do, that beliefs have no rivals. Once it is recognized, however, that all – or (more plausibly) some – of one’s beliefs could be replaced with something similar, though weaker, then a number of disturbing possibilities arise; and the question of whether one should aim at truth in even our weaker sense is put seriously in doubt. Let us begin with the first problem. The reason why it is not obvious that our reduced beliefs satisfy ABP is that their justification depends so fundamentally on internal, non-evidential factors. If it is pragmatic considerations, rather than some kind of transcendentally guaranteed resemblance between mind and world, that ultimately licenses our choice of empirically equivalent theories, then why should not our basic desires also be allowed to influence cognitive functioning? The abandonment of ABP in favour of a more fully integrated system can be given a clear pragmatic defence, as we have just noted, so why should
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only some pragmatic considerations be acceptable in this context and not others? However, we can give a partial answer to this. The modified transcendental arguments expounded in §5.3 legitimate some, but only some pragmatic considerations. We just cannot abandon certain ways of discriminating between theories, for cognition would not be possible if we did so. It is for this reason that we classify these discriminatory dispositions as cognitive, even though they are non-evidential. By contrast, allowing desires to influence beliefs could at best be justified in terms of additional practical convenience, rather than as a fundamental sine qua non. As long as our beliefs, or whatever we wish to call them, aim at truth rather than convenience, then we have every reason to resist the influence of desires, even though we cannot, and should not, resist such non-evidential influences that can be proved to be indispensable. Of course, if we make use of any kind of non-evidential influence, whether or not backed by transcendental argumentation, we risk ending up with something other than the truth, and there is no way that the aliens and we can both have true beliefs. However, we can all still be said to be aiming at truth in an intensional sense if we rely only on such pragmatic considerations that are utterly indispensable (as well as essential to our natures). Remove the indispensability clause, however, and this is no longer the case. Nevertheless, this argument is not entirely satisfactory because the dividing line between these different kinds of pragmatic consideration is not always clear. For example, the most obvious defence of our preference for simple hypotheses is, as already noted, our desire to avoid unnecessary work. This does not sound like a matter of necessity as opposed to practical convenience, even though simplicity plays a crucial role in scientific thinking. Perhaps a more elaborate defence can be given, but the suspicion remains that if we are allowed to admit some kinds of pragmatic consideration into our cognitive deliberations, then we might benefit even more if we were to admit some others as well. Perhaps we could no longer convince ourselves that we are still aiming at truth if we were to do so; but – and this is the point – we still have not shown conclusively that aiming at truth is something that we really need to do in any sense, extensional or intensional. It is often said that beliefs are indispensable to action, but this is highly contentious. The classical pragmatists insisted that nothing counts as a genuine belief unless one is prepared to act on it, but their conception of belief is rather unusual (albeit stronger than what we call ‘mere’ pragmatic acceptance). Indeed, their main objection to belief, as traditionally conceived, is precisely that it does not link sufficiently with
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action. Moreover, although belief/desire models are standard in philosophical accounts of how to explain action, the importance of belief has been disputed. For instance, David Velleman points out that weaker states, such as imagining, often lead to action. He considers the example of a child who pretends to be an elephant, and a man who shouts at the referee whilst watching a match on television. The child does not actually believe that he is an elephant, nor does the man believe that the referee can hear him, but they both imagine the relevant things and this is sufficient to produce, and explain, the consequent actions.6 Such examples are perhaps of limited significance since the motivational power of imagination is clearly much less than that of ordinary belief, but there are other reasons for questioning the belief/desire model. For example, Jonathan Cohen insists that, although such a model is good at explaining the behaviour of infants and non-human animals, it is hopeless at explaining rational, goal-directed actions.7 The problem is that beliefs and desires are both involuntary, and consist simply of the disposition to feel various things. Yet what matters is not what the intelligent agent feels involuntarily to be true, but what he deliberately accepts in his reasoning. Similarly, instead of desire, what is relevant is the deliberate adoption of a goal; and this is something that rational agents can do – but only rational agents, not infants and animals. Does this affect our argument? It is significant that Cohen regards not only beliefs but also desires as involuntary, and that we therefore need an independent concept of goal-adoption, one which relates to desire rather as acceptance relates to belief. If this is right, then it further undermines the thought that it is most obviously the involuntariness of belief that sustains its independence from desire in the sense of ABP. However, it is not clear that desires are involuntary to anything like the extent to which beliefs are. If I deliberately adopt a goal that I do not antecedently desire – and which may even be contrary to what I desire – then a desire to achieve the goal will usually follow fairly rapidly. For example, I may not want to go to the dentist since I dislike having my teeth drilled; but, as soon as I decide to go, I shall also want to go. This is evidenced by the fact that, should I be thwarted in my goal, then my desires will typically also be thwarted (for example, unless I am seriously averse to dentistry, I shall want the traffic jam to disperse so that I shall be on time for my appointment). True, I cannot easily alter my desires ‘just like that’; and even if I can introduce new desires at will, albeit indirectly, as a result of deliberate goal-adoption, getting rid of old ones remains trickier since it is all too easy to retain conflicting desires. Nevertheless, such manipulation is not unusual or pathological
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in the way in which the voluntary manipulation of beliefs has to be. This is not surprising, for desire has nothing analogous to the truth-aiming constraint, which guarantees involuntariness in a very strong sense. Nevertheless, the fact that beliefs are downgraded in favour of acceptances even in normal cases is significant, though we need to remember that Cohen’s conception of the belief–acceptance distinction is not quite the same as our own, as we noted in §4.1. The question naturally arises, therefore, whether acceptances should be autonomous with respect to goal-adoptions in the same sort of way in which beliefs are autonomous with respect to desires in the sense of ABP; that is to say, whether it could ever be rational to abandon something hitherto accepted simply because of new goals adopted. Even if acceptance is not answerable to truth in the way in which belief is, the suggestion that we could do this still sounds rather odd, and we may instinctively feel that there is something not quite right about such behaviour. However, this might be simply because it is so often wrong in practice to accept something which one does not believe to be true (or, even worse, which one believes to be false), and not because of something intrinsic to acceptance itself. To return to the bridge example, if a member of the board of the construction company that built it asks why it is company policy to maintain that bridges constructed in that way are safe to cross, he may be reminded by his colleagues that it is because the company has certain goals that it wishes to achieve (e.g. to retain the contract for bridge building, even though it needs to slash costs). Of course, this does not give him grounds to believe that such bridges are safe, but the policy of acceptance has, unfortunately, been most ably justified. We might want to call someone who adopts this policy for this sort of reason many things, but ‘irrational’ should not be one of them. Despite this, the obvious immorality of such behaviour may seem to prove that a systematic replacement of beliefs by acceptances is not a defensible option. Nevertheless, might not the problem lie simply in the fact that most other people (including bridge-crossers) still take company claims about safety to reflect beliefs? If, instead, we were to live in what we might call a ‘post-alethic world’, where everyone knows that such assertions are not automatically meant to be true, then matters become much less clear. We might wonder why anyone should ever accept what anyone else says in such an environment, but there is surely nothing which inevitably prevents local truth-aiming contracts from arising as and when it is pragmatically desirable. The thought that social cohesion requires universal truthfulness perhaps hinges too much on our own contingent social arrangements (or a rosy picture of them).
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Cohen does not consider these sorts of possibility. His view, in any case, is that beliefs and acceptances have quite different roles, and neither are replaceable by the other. The idea of weakening a belief so that it becomes more like an (mere) acceptance, which informs much of our project, is therefore one which he would reject as confused. Our position is different, however, and we are very much concerned, as Cohen is not, with what might happen if our ordinary intellectual practices were to be very different from the way they currently are. Truthfulness is generally valued, but this hinges on the fact that our cognitive states and their overt linguistic expressions are of a particular kind, and we have still not found a convincing reason for supposing that this fact is either necessary or desirable; which ensures that there is still much more to be said.
6.3 Wishful thinking So what happens if we do not aim at truth? More specifically, suppose that we allow our desires or goals to influence our beliefs (or, rather, whatever we have in place of beliefs) in the manner indicated above. What, if anything, will go wrong? This turns out to be a surprisingly hard question to answer convincingly. Again, it may seem that the answer is obvious. Any attempt to navigate around life’s obstacles demands accurate representation of our environment; so if we get things wrong, then our projects are less likely to succeed. However, things are not quite so simple. First, as we have already argued at length, what matters at best is that our beliefs are empirically adequate. Secondly, even if our beliefs could be confuted by some experiment, this may not make any real difference to us unless the experiment is actually performed. Thirdly, as the bridge example showed, even if it does make a real difference, it may not be the person with the false beliefs who suffers as a result. Social, political and economic power can often be used to counterbalance any such cognitive shortcomings, and it is a depressing fact that intellectual integrity can seem more of a handicap than an advantage to a certain kind of person with a certain kind of power. The first problem is a problem primarily because of the possibility of alien belief-systems, and is therefore of no particular relevance here. Intensional aiming at truth is unaffected. The second problem derives from the fact that one can escape direct refutation by simply not putting the matter to the test. We often do succumb to this temptation, and just refuse to investigate something that we fear might reveal inconvenient
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truths. However, there is an important and quite general disadvantage to this, and that is that individual beliefs have effects that go beyond what we can easily predict. Beliefs may relate directly to experiences (‘vertical links’), but also relate to each other in the web (‘horizontal links’). It may pay us in the short term to adopt a false belief, but that belief will affect other beliefs and will therefore have an indirect relevance to an indefinite range of situations. To refuse to investigate any of these situations is not really a viable option. What is more likely to happen is that the horizontal links themselves will deteriorate, and this will significantly weaken our entire cognitive faculty. A reflective person is one who connects ideas and who uses information gained from one area to criticize assumptions made in others. By contrast, the sort of pragmatist who ‘believes’ only what brings him direct advantage will inevitably turn out to be intellectually shallow. Perhaps such a person can afford to be, given an appropriate degree of power over others, as we noted, but the price is rather high: ‘For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’ (Mark 8:36). Loss of soul is not a bad description of what happens when one’s inner web disintegrates, and is superficially held together only by external contingencies. If it can be shown that such disintegration is an inevitable consequence of this kind of policy, then it would seem that we have explained very clearly why we should aim at truth, and why pragmatic acceptances are no substitute for beliefs. Massive disintegration of this kind must surely be a fearful individual tragedy, and a society which encouraged it nothing less than an Orwellian nightmare. Nevertheless, the connection between inner harmony and a respect for truth is not that straightforward, and there is room for considerable confusion here. Most significantly, what we have been calling ‘wishful thinking’ should not be confused with ‘self-deception’, even though the terms are often used interchangeably. The ‘wishful thinker’, as I use the term, is simply one whose ‘beliefs’ (for want of a better word) are systematically influenced by her wishes, desires, hopes, fears, and other noncognitive states. There need be no deception involved, either of herself or of others, unless these ‘beliefs’ are mistaken for something else, namely orthodox, truth-directed beliefs. To deceive is to deliberately mislead; but if everyone knows that I am not making genuine assertions when I make various expedient noises, but am instead just ‘going through the motions’, then no one will be misled, as we noted when discussing the bridge example. It is only against a background of assumptions about normal speech-acts that wishful thinking (or its linguistic expression) becomes dishonest or disingenuous. Perhaps dishonesty needs to be
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argued against explicitly, but that is not something that we are required to do here. This is partly because moral philosophy is not our topic; but also, and more immediately, because dishonesty does not seem to be either necessary or sufficient for supposing truth to be unimportant. It is apparently not necessary, for the reason just given. And it is not sufficient either, for a liar – even an habitual liar – must herself value truth, at least to some extent, in so far as she thinks that it is something worth concealing.8 We might add that it is also possible to be both dishonest and to fail to value truth, since there are other forms of dishonesty besides lying (and, to complete the tetrad, it is of course possible both to be honest and to value truth). It would evidently follow, then, that honesty and the valuing of truth are logically quite independent of each other. The wishful thinker might turn out to be dishonest, but that is not an inevitable concomitant of her wishful thinking. Still, we have a problem in trying to envisage an honest wishful thinker, since it is hard to imagine away the generally shared assumption that most declarative utterances should be understood as truthdirected assertions. Various examples have been given, but they all seem to involve some kind of pathology. For instance, David Velleman cites the case of Ronald Reagan, who, according to many sources, used to tell stories that were ostensibly about his own wartime experiences, but which in fact came from the (purely fictional) plots of films in which he had acted. He would continue to tell his stories as if he were reporting actual historical events, even when told repeatedly, and with full supporting evidence, that he was confusing his film roles with reality. Did he genuinely believe what he was saying? I am assuming that the President was not deliberately lying. I’m also assuming that he didn’t find grounds, however spurious, for discounting the corrections that were offered to him. Finally, I am assuming that he wasn’t engaged in any complex form of self-deception, unconsciously orchestrating the evidence that was allowed to enter his thinking. Rather, I assume that he was just as he seemed, blithely impervious to the facts. And on that assumption, I am inclined to think that he did not believe what he was saying. He may have believed that he believed what he was saying; but what he was saying conveyed the content of fantasies on his part rather than beliefs. To describe the attitudes expressed in President Reagan’s anecdotes as beliefs would imply that Reagan should have discarded them or revised them so as to conform with historical reality. All he should
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have done, however, was to reclassify them – to re-shelve them, mentally speaking. The President wasn’t so much a bad historian as a sloppy mental housekeeper. If we want to cut him this much normative slack, however, we have to think of his anecdotes as reporting the contents of misplaced fantasies rather than irrational beliefs.9 Ostensibly, Reagan fits our description of a wishful thinker in so far as, where we would expect to find beliefs, we actually find attitudes of a different kind. Nevertheless, this example is pathological if we suppose, as Velleman cautiously does, that Reagan believed falsely that he believed what he saying. In so far as he had any kind of false belief, he must simply have been in error. Only when all false beliefs have been replaced by attitudes which do not aim at truth to begin with do we get the kind of wishful thinker that is of real theoretical interest. Perhaps we could modify this example, however. Assume that Reagan did not believe that he believed what he was saying (nor did he believe that he believed that he believed what he was saying, and so on). We now have the problem of how to interpret his answer to the question, ‘Are these stories true?’. Of course, a good raconteur might want to continue the fantasy for a bit longer, but sooner or later most of us feel impelled to go back into ‘assertion mode’. If someone were to remain permanently in ‘story-telling mode’, then the fantasies may need to become global if they are to withstand a more searching examination. Could a person live effectively in these circumstances? Could the most powerful man in the world have done so? It is an entertaining possibility, but there may be more down-to-earth ways of describing what was going on in the President’s mind when he was relating his wartime stories, and there is no reason to suppose that these eccentricities really did extend across the board. True, it is often said that many of Reagan’s public utterances were not designed to be true at all, but simply to make his listeners feel good about themselves; and some have also said, in despair, that most of the American people went along with this, not only willingly but also quite knowingly. Yet such claims are surely exaggerated, and they cannot be generalized in any relevant way. The suggestion that most Americans lack political beliefs altogether may make good satire, but it is nevertheless false. However, even if we agree that human psychology is slanted towards truth-aiming, this does not fully address the deeper theoretical questions. Certainly, we do have beliefs and not merely pragmatic acceptances about most things, but might we not one day find that human nature would improve if this changed? Would not the additional mental
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freedom enhance rather than diminish us? After all, as we noted in the last section, isolating our cognitive states within an autonomous subweb adds massive restrictions to how the web as a whole can evolve. And even if it turns out that human beings could never attain this sort of freedom, might not other rational creatures be able to do so – if not Martians (who have a different theoretical role) then, let us say, Plutonians? We may find it hard to imagine such a super-pragmatist, human or Plutonian, but this does not itself prove very much. After all, it is always hard to imagine the future successfully. It may be protested, once again, that such speculation can amount to little more than whistling in the dark. Nevertheless, these ruminations are not merely the product of our own peculiar agenda, but need to addressed by anyone seriously concerned with the nature of belief. As we have already seen, apart from not aiming at truth there are two main ways in which pragmatic acceptances differ from beliefs, namely voluntariness and context-dependence. In asking why this should be so, we need to guard against certain confusions. In the case of voluntariness, we have already noted the unfortunate tendency to conflate the questions, ‘Could our beliefs be made voluntary?’ and ‘Could our beliefs be adequately replaced by voluntary states?’ We argued, with Bernard Williams, that the answer to the first question is negative, and that it follows directly from the fact that beliefs aim at truth. Furthermore, we agreed that (with a few detailed qualifications) this is a matter of conceptual necessity and is therefore, at heart, a trivial fact. If it seems otherwise, then we insisted that this is probably because the two questions have become confused. We postponed giving an answer to the second question; but, in the light of what we have since argued, we can now see that it cannot be a clear negative. Indeed, if it is negative at all, it is almost certainly as a result of a deep psychological contingency, as opposed to a conceptual necessity. Yet – and this is the point – to ask of any true statement whether it is true as a matter of conceptual necessity as opposed to a deep contingency is inseparable from asking whether we can make sense of certain fantastic scenarios (namely, where the statement in question is imagined to be false). Speculation about ‘Plutonian pragmatists’ and so forth may seem pointless, even self-indulgent, but it is essential to the whole debate about how belief and voluntariness are connected; and this debate, rightly or wrongly, is widely regarded as being central to the whole issue of what is meant by saying that beliefs aim at truth. The issue of context-dependence is, perhaps, even more significant here. The most convincing argument against replacing beliefs by
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pragmatic acceptances that we have seen so far is that it would lead to a kind of internal disintegration. Serious intellectual investigation demands that contexts be brought together. Yet might it not be that the horrors that we associate with disunity are essentially those that would arise if beliefs were contextualized – or, more accurately, if our cognitive states were still required to function as genuine beliefs even though they lacked contextual unity? Must internal damage also arise if such disunity were exhibited instead by proxy states which were never expected to be context-independent in the first place? It is much less obvious why this should be so. True, it is often desirable that we converge across contexts, but there is nothing that obviously prevents our pragmatists from doing so on such occasions. Their justification for doing so would simply be that it is thus desirable! And on those other occasions where it would be better if contexts were kept separate, they will do likewise. The additional flexibility ensures, it would seem, that they can have the best of both worlds. Rather than losing their souls in the sense bewailed by St Mark, such pragmatists simply have souls of a different kind: diverse, multifaceted and supple. There is still the risk that they might remain intellectually shallow, as we noted earlier, but perhaps they have many compensating advantages. After all, the loss of integrity applies only to the cognitive part of the mind, and the autonomy of belief principle was abandoned precisely in order to ensure a broader psychological integrity, one which unites cognitive and conative elements in a less invidious and hierarchical sort of way. They might, indeed, be no match for us at all, and look on us with amused condescension, as creatures so backward and constricted that we have to regard intellectual integrity as a virtue! The ‘post-alethic world’ that we are starting to envisage may be strange and a bit alarming, and it is certainly different from the ‘post-metaphysical world’ that Rorty champions; but it need not be an Orwellian nightmare, and there may still be much to be said for it. It certainly cannot be ruled out of court merely by insisting, with Michael Lynch and others, that truth itself is just a basic, incontrovertible value. This is just what we have been unable to establish. Still, even if this kind of super-pragmatism is appropriate for Plutonians, we may still be nervous should human beings look as if they might be going in that direction, if only because we currently have no idea of what could prevent such intellectual disunity from being abused. After all, most actual examples of wishful thinking and convergencefailures do not look particularly edifying. If we cease to value truth, then we need to value something else instead, and we currently have no idea of what that could be. Virtues acclaimed by Rorty, such as honesty,
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intellectual curiosity, conversability, solidarity, and the avoidance of cruelty, may not be sufficient to handle a kind of pragmatism far more radical than anything that he himself envisaged. Perhaps we should be satisfied with the conclusion that we ourselves should aim at truth, even if we cannot generalize this across the board. After all, jokes about politicians aside, it is impossible to imagine a successful human being who was never interested in truth. Unfortunately, even this does not conclude the matter. At best, it shows that we should not replace all of our beliefs with pragmatic acceptances; but it may still be the case that we can replace a good many of them. And it might still be the case that we should be better off if we did. The main objection that we have seen is that too much compartmentalization will weaken our cognitive system considered as a systematic whole and with it, perhaps, our personal integrity. This suggests a direct connection between aiming at truth and the unity of the self, and there are echoes here of the Kantian thesis that the unity of consciousness requires consciousness of a unified world. But how much unity do we need? Obviously, we need some degree of integration, but surely not that much; and we should resist the intellectualist idea that our beliefs are the only things that matter as far as our personal integrity is concerned. Indeed, it could be argued that a wholly consistent belief-system would not only be quite unnecessary to secure internal harmony, but actually a spiritual disaster: for such a system would lose the tensions and inconsistencies that make us distinctively human. Can we be too interested in truth? In a certain sense, obviously yes. If our passion for accuracy leads us to neglect all our other needs, then something has clearly gone wrong. There is only a limited amount of time and energy that can reasonably be assigned to any one task, or group of tasks, and this remains the case even if the task in question is the avoidance of error. However, there may be a more interesting sense in which a desire for truthfulness can become excessive, and this relates to this question of total consistency. If a healthy soul needs tension, movement and contradiction, as opposed to static Platonic perfection, then too much truth is evidently a bad thing. This idea is familiar to us in ethical contexts, where Isaiah Berlin, Bernard Williams and others have insisted that it is impossible to integrate all our ideals into a single perfectly coherent system. Perhaps it is also true that the human mind is so constituted that it cannot free itself from contradictions even when dealing with purely factual questions. Again, we are reminded of Kant, who insisted that the human intellect will inevitably meet with antinomies and paralogisms, and so forth, if it attempts to pursue inquiries
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beyond a certain point. We may laugh at the Catholic neurophysiologist of legend who believes in determinism on weekdays and free will on Sundays, but the fact of the matter is that we all compartmentalize our views on these types of issues to some extent. The maddening unsolvability of deep philosophical questions ensures that we have little choice! Of course, we might still insist that we have a duty to try to resolve these contradictions no matter how unlikely it is that we shall succeed. Yet although we professional philosophers might conceivably wish to impose such a norm on ourselves, it would surely be unreasonable for us to impose it on everyone else. There are limits to how much truthaiming that anyone can stand. So why is truth important? What we have shown is that it is unlikely that we shall ever find a simple answer to this question. We may view with horror the extreme anti-intellectual who despises truth-seeking but manages to get his own way anyhow, but that does not mean that we can ever find a non-question-begging way of convincing such a person of the need to mend his ways. It may ultimately be no more than just a brute psychological fact that most of us attach importance to truth. However, the depth of the contingency ensures that we cannot easily imagine not being this way. And because we can draw many connections between our preference for truth over falsity and many other things that we contingently value, we should not read too much into the ‘brute’ of ‘brute psychological fact’. Nevertheless, even if we agree that only a monster could fail to value truth to some degree (and even this is not entirely obvious), that still does not get us past the fact that it is not at all clear just how much importance should be assigned to truthseeking. We certainly cannot dismiss as a monster anyone who fails to qualify as an intellectual. What we appear to have, rather, is a situation where a desire for truth has a central role within our belief–desire web, and it is primarily the presence of this particular node in the system which ensures that pragmatic considerations do not lead us to engage in wishful thinking – at least, not too much. It would be nice, perhaps, if we could find something a bit less contingent to support the truthseeking enterprise and the orthodox distinction between theoretical and practical reasoning. However, given that our whole cognitive structure has been shown to be full of contingencies, it may not matter too much if no such additional support can be found. It might even be a good thing if we learnt to appreciate just how fragile the value of truth is.
7 Relativism and the Limits of Conversability
In Chapter 3, we concluded that divergent belief-systems are a genuine possibility and that this presents us with a serious epistemological challenge. We argued in Chapter 5 that this challenge can be met, but we did not explore the relativist implications that apparently follow in any detail. We need to do this, however, if only to assure ourselves that our version of relativism does not suffer from the serious difficulties associated, rightly or wrongly, with other versions. This is the task of this chapter.
7.1 Relativism and error How does our own doctrine fit into the more general debate about cognitive relativism? This is not easy to answer, since this debate is very diffuse, and there is a massive difference of opinion even over the two most central questions, namely: (a) Exactly what is it that should be relativized? (b) Exactly what should it be relativized to? Our version answers ‘ideal belief and assertion’ to (a), and ‘cognitively similar groups’ to (b). Other candidates for (a) include truth, conceptual schemes, methodologies and many others. Candidates for (b) are nearly always groups of people, but they are usually far more narrowly defined than we construe them. However, we shall not attempt a comprehensive treatment of this topic.1 Rather, we shall simply examine the implications of our own view. Relativism is often thought to undermine the distinction between truth and falsity. Indeed, the very idea of an objective world is visibly 185
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threatened by the thought that alternative world-views are, in some sense, equally valid. How can I take my own opinions seriously, the complaint runs, if I must suppose that alternative opinions are just as ‘true’ as my own? And how can I suppose that there is an objective world to which all opinions should answer if all these alternatives meet this constraint equally well? The understandable fear is that if we go down this road, then we shall end up in a postmodernist chaos where all intellectual debate collapses into a kind of facetious indifference. There are indeed disturbing currents of this kind in contemporary thought which should worry us all. However, it is a mistake to suppose that our sort of relativism has these implications. On the contrary, we shall see that our account provides a very effective counter-strategy to this kind of malaise. First, it should be noted that we do not relativize truth itself. It is easy to see that if truth is to satisfy the equivalence schema: (ES) < p > is true if and only if p then it cannot be relativized. If the relativized predicates ‘true for A’ and ‘true for B’ can each be substituted for ‘true’ in ES, then they must necessarily coincide, given that ES is a logical equivalence and that logical equivalence is a transitive relation. If relativism about truth is not to fall at the first hurdle, we must therefore assume that relativized truth does not satisfy ES. But in that case, given the fundamental importance of ES in our understanding of truth, we should wonder why we are dealing with relativized truth. What could justify the ‘true’ in ‘true for A’? The only answer can be that truth is also intimately connected to optimality, to ideal belief, and we agree that the latter can and should be relativized. Nevertheless, it is unclear that ‘is true for A’ really is a good alternative formulation of ‘should ideally be believed by A’. More to the point, even if we did adopt it, relativism about truth in this sense would not fracture reality in any obvious way. This is because the link between ‘truth’, so called, and ordinary reality is lost when ES is abandoned. We, however, shall not abandon ES, and consequently will leave the ordinary concept of truth well alone. As we showed in Chapter 1, we are assuming very little in doing so. Having said this, it is instructive to see what happens when we attempt to formalize the idea of relative truth. Suppose that we introduce a class of sentential operators ‘TA ’, ‘TB ’ and so on, where ‘TA p’ is to be read as ‘It is true-for-A that p’, meaning roughly that A should ideally believe that p. What is the logic of such operators? We have already considered, in §5.2,
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the logic of ideal warrant, and it may be thought that this is exactly the same notion. However, there are some differences. Unless A has a very peculiar cognitive structure, then ‘TA ’ should distribute across conjunction: that is to say, ‘TA (p & q)’ should be equivalent to ‘TA p & TA q’. Ideal warrant operators will do the same. Disjunction is different, however, for there may be many sentences which are undecidable in the sense that neither they nor their negations are optimal (the finiteness of A’s intelligence will almost certainly guarantee this). As long as such operators are read doxastically, this does not matter. However, if we are using them in order to make sense of alternative realities (e.g. the-worldaccording-to-A, understood metaphysically), then we expect consistency and completeness. One way out is to retreat to a non-classical logic such as intuitionism, a strategy favoured by Dummett. If truth is to be epistemically constrained, then it may well seem as if some such anti-realist policy will be required. But we do not need the constraints to be all that severe. All we need is that truth-for-A not contradict what A is optimally required to believe. We need not demand that A’s reality be ‘blurred’ in those areas beyond his knowledge (we do not, after all, expect this in our own case, pace Dummett). We can handle this formally by noting that every logically closed but incomplete set of sentences, for example the set of sentences that A optimally believes, can be extended into a consistent and complete set. We may then pick just one such complete set A (A does not need to know which one it is), and stipulate that ‘TA p’ holds if and only if ‘p’ belongs to A . In this manner, ‘TA p ∨ TA ∼ p’ becomes logically valid. More generally, ‘TA ’ will distribute across disjunction and will commute with negation (i.e. ‘TA ∼ p’ will be equivalent to ‘∼TA p’). We might protest that the arbitrariness involved in the construction of A is unacceptable. However, if we are willing to accept the idea of verification-transcendent relative truth (and this is what led us here), then we can just stipulate that A’s reality is genuinely and unarbitrarily complete. It is just that nobody knows exactly what it is like. The identity of A is therefore not arbitrary at all, we may insist, merely unknowable. Predicate logic is less straightforward. A’s ontology will very likely be different from ours, so the equivalence between ‘TA ∀x x’ and ‘(∀x)TA x’ will fail, and in both directions. The same, of course, applies to the existential quantifier. Iterated operators can be expected to behave in much the same way as ideal warrant operators. Thus, there is no reason at all for such operators to commute, that is for ‘TA TB p’ to be equivalent to ‘TB TA p’. Likewise, we can expect a failure of idempotence, that is the equivalence between ‘TA TA p’ and ‘TA p’. Our own system will also lack favoured properties. If ‘TI p’ means ‘It is true-for-me that p’
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then it will still not be equivalent to ‘p’ (although it would be pragmatically self-defeating to hold the one without the other), for otherwise ‘TA TI p’ would become equivalent to ‘TA p’ (assuming, again, that equivalent sub-formulae are always inter-substitutible), which would require, implausibly, that A regard me as cognitively the same as him. However, as before, ‘TI p’ can be treated as equivalent to ‘p’ without paradox if the ‘me’ in ‘It is true-for-me that p’ is treated as a pure indexical rather than as a rigid designator. It therefore follows that the standard model of truth derives from ours as a limiting case, just as we showed that the standard model of knowledge is a limiting case of our ecological model. Absolute truth is truth from an entirely neutral and featureless perspective, that is the perspective of the transcendental ego. We can also develop an unqualified notion of truth if truth-bearers are conceived to be, not propositions, but speech-acts and owned beliefs. The trick is to rephrase ‘It is true-for-A that p’ as ‘A’s belief/assertion that p is true’. Since A’s assertion that p and B’s assertion that p are different speech-acts, there is no contradiction in supposing one of them to be true and the other false in this sense. This will partition all speech-acts (and, likewise, owned beliefs) into two categories – the True and the False. However, since A and B may well partition the same set quite differently, we should not treat the relevant notion of truth as absolute even if it is, in a sense, unqualified. This notion has some virtue in so far as it enables us to fashion something like a correspondence theory of truth, where the terms that correspond are now the internal and the external states that are biologically connected in the manner indicated by our ecological model, though we shall not develop the point here. Does this mean that the notion of relative truth can be rehabilitated? We can certainly make respectable some sort of notion here, but the essential problem remains why it should be thought of as a species of truth. Where the analogy between relativized knowledge and relativized truth breaks down is that we already had reason to be suspicious of the standard model of knowledge. By contrast, we have shown that the standard notion of truth is entirely harmless. Moreover, although it is not entirely far-fetched to regard epistemic operators (and ideal warrant operators) as non-factive, as we require them to be, it seems highly perverse to suppose that truth operators could be.2 The failure of these relativized truth-operators to satisfy ES ensures that, interesting as they are, such operators should be understood non-alethically, and that consistent and complete sets such as A should not be supposed to carry any serious ontological significance. This could still be disputed, of course. If we were to treat such sets as depicting plural realities of
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some kind, then ordinary semantic relations of meaning and reference could perhaps also be pluralized. We shall examine these and related metaphysical theses more carefully in the next and final chapter. At this stage, however, it is sufficient to note that, without some highly elaborate ontological pluralization of this kind, the notion of relative truth has obvious drawbacks, and there is no obvious need for any revisionism here. It is largely for this reason that we are uneasy about Bernard Williams’s description of postmodernists and other extreme relativists as ‘truthdeniers’.3 Ordinary truth is too basic and insubstantial a notion to be intelligibly rejected as such. What such people are really denying is, we shall see, something slightly different. What is very important to recognize is that our sort of relativism does not imply the impossibility of error. The main reason why relativism is abominated by most philosophers is because it supposedly forbids criticism, not only of alternative positions, but also of our own. There is indeed an influential, though naïve, sort of relativism which does do this sort of thing, but our version is not committed to anything like this. On our view, cognitive norms are various in the sense that the norms which apply to A need not apply to B, and vice versa. Yet although various, they can still be robust in the sense that they sustain a firm distinction between what someone actually thinks and what they ought to think. To put it another way, our view allows that it is possible, for some A, B and p, for it to be the case that A ideally ought to believe that p and yet B ideally ought to believe that not-p. This does not imply that either A or B currently believes what they ideally ought to. Schematically, we have the following differences: What A ought to believe
What B ought to believe
What A actually believes
What B actually believes
Just because we insist on ultimate divergence, and therefore a significant horizontal gap in the upper row, it does not follow that the vertical gaps must collapse. (The only qualification, of course, is that the notion of belief employed here must not satisfy the UUP or else the upper horizontal gap is automatically ruled out.) Everyone, including our aliens,
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needs to be constantly aware that they could be holding beliefs that they should not; we are allowed to remind the aliens of this, and they are allowed to remind us. There are, of course, difficulties here, and we have already discussed in Chapter 3 some of the problems involved in communication with aliens, and we shall return to this shortly. Yet we also noted that to qualify as an alien in our sense, creatures need to be extraordinarily different from ourselves. Martians and grue-users aside, if you meet someone who says ‘I come from a radically different culture from yours, and you are not allowed to criticize what I say’, you may safely reply ‘You don’t, and I am.’ You may add that even if the first part of what he said were true, the second would still be false. Our local cognitive norms permit – indeed, require – that we criticize all comers. The sheer alienness of our sort of aliens makes it difficult to see how this is expected to work, but the general idea is straightforward when applied to more familiar examples. Thus, suppose, for example, that an al-Qa’ida terrorist insists that we have no right to judge his actions by our liberal Western standards.4 Our point is that, even if we did agree that his value system is equally valid to ours, though irretrievably different, that does not mean that we can only remain silent. We can, for example, point out that his actions are incompatible, not only with our norms, but also with his own, namely the teachings of the Qur’an. We can do this regardless of how much we ourselves agree with the latter. This is admittedly not the kind of disagreement that we are directly concerned with, for our relativism is cognitive rather than moral, but the general point remains valid. Normative variation simply does not imply that there can be no difference between what someone ought to believe or do, on the one hand, and what they merely think they ought to believe or do, on the other.5 The postmodernist malaise that worries so many people is therefore not usefully characterized as the denial of truth itself. Indeed, it is not, I think, capable of being characterized by any definite philosophical thesis, even if people who suffer from it occasionally propound philosophical theses. Rather, it consists simply in a general loss of confidence in the legitimacy of our cognitive norms (indeed, any norms). This leads to an all-embracing scepticism that is hard to attack since it is not justified explicitly (how could it be, when justification itself presupposes the legitimacy of some cognitive norm?). We agree that scepticism should be taken seriously, but our brand of relativism arose out of a strategy to neutralize scepticism. Far from leading to a loss of faith, our relativism should lead to a restoration of confidence. We have already seen, up to a point, how this works. For example, we can maintain our assertiveness in the face of irresoluble alien disagreement, by modifying our understanding of what
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it is to make an assertion. Nevertheless, we need to say more about how our actual practices will be affected by adopting our theoretical views.
7.2 Tolerance Before doing so, however, we must examine another motivation for relativism, one which is not so much epistemological as political. One reason why many feel uneasy about the authority of Western science, for example, is that it is thought to embody a kind of oppression. Appeals to reason, objective truth and so on should, it is felt, be unmasked and revealed to be about power structures, not rational persuasion (as originally understood). It is easy to dismiss such talk as just silly, and much of it certainly is. However, the more general question of whether, and to what extent, we should tolerate what we disagree with requires an answer, and we shall see that the cognitive norms that we have been defending are inherently problematic in this respect. The right to think, speak and write whatever we believe to be true is a vital principle of liberal democracy. Yet, because people disagree, if I am to uphold this right then I must, on occasion, insist that you have a right to think, speak and write what is (according to me) false – perhaps even outrageously false. Moreover, since tolerance should not be confused with mere indifference, to attribute this right to you must be more than a mere failure to attribute a contrary duty. Toleration must have a positive quality about it; and it must apply in cases where I genuinely do think that you are wrong. To tolerate only those claims that we are not interested in, or for which we have some secret sympathy, is no particular virtue – just as it is no virtue to forgive only those sins that we never really believed to be sins in the first place, as G.K. Chesterton powerfully reminds us.6 Now, it is often said that these sentiments, admirable though they are, and which may well have given birth to relativism in the first place, are, in fact, sentiments which relativists themselves cannot consistently hold. This is because this belief in toleration is itself a product of a particular culture, namely the Enlightenment. Relativists therefore cannot attach the importance that they do to tolerance (the argument continues) without attributing a universal validity to their own local, liberal culture in a manner that their relativism forbids them from doing. Only if the tenets of this liberal culture are treated as absolute, universal truths can such a principle of universal tolerance make sense. This line of argument is well known and very important. Yet it addresses only half of the problem. There is a more immediate difficulty,
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namely that the norms of tolerance are in flat contradiction with the norms associated with the principle that we should all aim at truth. As seen from the inside, it will be remembered, this principle ensures that if you say what I believe to be false, then I must conclude that you ought not to have said what you did. This is what our universality principle says. Yet it is also precisely what our norms of tolerance forbid us from concluding. Relativists may have difficulty making sense of the virtue of tolerance, but so do non-relativists. It may be insisted that the paradox here is only superficial. We have already granted that what we say is subject to several norms. For example, we agree with Huw Price that assertions are expected to be not only true, but also sincere and supported by evidence: and it is not hard to construct situations where these norms conflict. Normative systems often do conflict in this way, but that does not mean that we have to reject a whole system when we allow another system to override it on a particular occasion. This is a bit too glib, however. What is worrying about our truth and tolerance normative systems is that they seem to conflict all the time, not just every now and then, and this implies a degree of tension that cannot so easily be ignored. It may be protested that this tension is to be expected, and that the above objection rests on a failure to understand what tolerance actually is. The point is that if I tolerate your doing X, this does not mean that I think that you are allowed to do X, even though it may appear to. On the contrary, it can only mean that I think that you are not allowed to do it – for if X were allowed then there would be nothing to tolerate! Again, we are reminded of Chesterton. If there is a paradox here, it may be insisted that it is internal to the notion of toleration itself, and does not reflect an inconsistency between it and the demand for truthfulness. Yet although we often do understand the concept of toleration in this way, this does not really do justice to the desirability of free speech, to the fact that it does not appear to be wrong at all, even if what is said is false. Another strategy is to treat the tolerance-norms not as contradicting the truth-norms, but rather as providing constraints on how breaches of the latter should be acted on. Thus, when you say something which I believe to be false, I am indeed obliged to try and get you to change your mind. This is because of my respect for you as a rational being, someone who ought to believe only what is true. However, the tolerance-norms inform me that I may not use force or other disrespectful means to achieve this end. I may on occasion do things to disadvantage you (for example, if I am an examiner and you are a candidate), but I may not
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threaten or browbeat you, or even say anything at all when you have made it clear that you do not wish to listen to me. There is no obvious inconsistency here, and this combination of policies makes a good deal of intuitive sense. It is not clear, however, if this is really to do justice to the demands of tolerance. The distinction between legitimate and illegitimate kinds of persuasion is a delicate one, and the complaint may be that Western paradigms are so powerful and all-encompassing nowadays that they cannot fail to be oppressive, no matter how sensitively we attempt to apply them. This is one of the main ideas behind postmodernism. In any case, when I insist, with Voltaire, that although I disagree with what you say, I shall fight to the death for your right to say it, am I just fighting to the death for there to be limits to what people can do to you to prevent you from saying it? There is surely a bit more than that to having a ‘right’! No, it may well be that the only way to take seriously the right of people to say what they want is to abandon the demand that they should say only what is true: which brings us back to an extreme form of relativism. The only alternative to extreme relativism may therefore be to admit that we should be far less tolerant of error than we sometimes like to pretend we are. It is certainly not hard to think of cases where such tolerance would be wholly out of place. If you have unduly original ideas of how to fly a passenger aircraft or how to remove an appendix, for example, then my liberal principles are unlikely to extend very far; and if I am your employer, then I may well be duty-bound to damage your career irretrievably. It may be protested that, in such cases, it is not your freedom of thought that is the problem, but your lethal behaviour, and nobody need doubt that we have a right to curtail that. If, by contrast, you are simply expounding an original thesis about aerodynamics or surgery, and are in no position to put any of your ideas into practice, then I have no reason not to be tolerant. However, such tolerance is arguably little better than indifference: I do not mind you thinking these strange things, because it simply does not matter. Of course, when we talk of ‘freedom of thought’, we are usually thinking of areas such as politics or religion, where it is much harder to prove conclusively that one party to a dispute is just wrong. Yet the media, for example, do not give equal footage to all political or religious opinions regardless of how bizarre they might be, and we could not seriously want them to do otherwise. Nor is this because the bizarre views are harmful (very likely they are not). A pure doctrine of tolerance is likely to destroy its own foundations, and it could be argued that tolerance can only exist within a framework that is itself fundamentally intolerant. This sounds
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odd, since the word ‘intolerant’ has negative overtones for many of us, but the idea nevertheless makes a certain deal of sense. At any rate, we should not pretend that we can aim at truth, and demand that others do so as well – and yet have no problem at all with the virtue of tolerance. The difficulties are most clearly seen when we consider the universality principles. Yet our version of relativism derives from a retreat to a restricted version: we demand non-disagreement only from creatures cognitively similar to ourselves. That does not mean that we cannot criticize aliens, as we have already observed, merely that such criticisms must take a different form. Nevertheless, our most important problems about tolerance concern our relationships with our fellow human beings. The aliens are simply irrelevant here; and this might lead us to wonder if we have been drawing the line between aliens and non-aliens in the right place, given that they entered the story precisely in order to handle the problem of irresoluble disagreement. The fact that our aliens are so utterly exotic does indeed make our version of relativism rather different from most kinds, but it would be wrong to suppose that we are misrepresenting the relationship between relativism and tolerance. Even if we individuate cognitive groupings more finely, and therefore more conventionally, we are still going to have problems about how much, and in what way, we should tolerate differences within our own group. This is a point that relativists typically overlook, for unless we treat each individual as an independent cognitive group, there will always be intra-group disagreement that needs attention. Moreover, it is the disagreements with our neighbours that make the most demands on our tolerance. Because we are within the same group, we cannot justify the need for tolerance by saying that we are subject to different standards, so something else is needed here, something that has nothing to do with relativism. Now, of course, some relativists do treat each individual as an independent culture, and it may be largely because of considerations of this kind. Nevertheless, such a view is so extreme that it is hard to take seriously, unless the notion of sameness and difference of cognitive grouping is itself understood in a wholly anodyne way. In general, the question of how much we should tolerate and why is one which is evidently going to be difficult to answer regardless of whether we endorse relativism, and we should need to go much more deeply into political philosophy in order to take the matter further. Nevertheless, there are more general issues raised here about conversability and styles of communication which are of more central interest.
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Even if we focus on debate between individuals A and B who unquestionably belong to the same cognitive group (perhaps they are members of the same department, or co-researchers on the same project), there can still be a fundamental tension in the rules of the conversation. We can see this when we consider Rorty’s point that we often do not want such conversations to reach a terminus: indeed, it often seems that the point of the conversation is not to bring about agreement between the participants, nor to discover the truth about the matter in hand, but rather just to continue the conversation itself. Conversation, it seems, does not aim at truth but what Rorty calls ‘edification’. Now, this idea makes a good deal of sense when we consider, for example, philosophical conversation. When we debate the mind–body problem, for example, we do not seriously expect to reach final agreement. We do not suppose that the ultimate truth of the matter, if we may speak of such a thing, will ever be found at all, and we laugh knowingly at the expense of those cognitive scientists who inform us that a solution to the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness is just around the corner. Rather, we expect the debate to go on forever, and we relish the fact. Yet there is something paradoxical here. If the conversation is not to degenerate into a mere series of polite remarks, then it needs the friction that arises from obeying Pricean rules. That is to say, if A asserts that p, and B believes that not-p, then B is bound to try to get A to change his or her mind. Disagreement is thus something that both sides should try to eliminate. However, on the Rorty model, disagreement should be encouraged to continue. Yet even within this model itself, we still need to aim at truth (and therefore agreement) when actually engaging in each move of the conversation, otherwise we lose the essential friction that keeps the conversation alive (and edifying). We are thus required to adopt a schizoid attitude towards our own practices. How serious a problem is this? It may be thought that it is a thoroughly artificial paradox, and that it in no way undermines the legitimacy of edifying conversations of the type in question. If philosophical debates are to remain interminable, it is surely not because we have to sabotage our own attempts to reach solutions to problems. Rather, it is because we know that such attempts will fail regardless of how hard we try to discover the truth. What ensures this is the hardness of philosophical problems as such, not the existence of artificially ambiguous rules of philosophical debate. Yet this does not fully explain Rorty’s point that we often actually want the debate to continue indefinitely, and that the real purpose of the debate is frequently not so much the solution of the problem itself (which often has a rather contrived quality) as the
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development of conversability, intellectual curiosity and other virtues. Of course, we are not forced to accept all of Rorty’s claims here. Yet the very fact that we can see what he is broadly getting at, even though it is ostensibly paradoxical, ensures that the norms of conversation are rather subtler than we have tended to suggest. Although they will typically include Pricean rules, there will also be many other countervailing norms which together add up to a richer system that is full of internal tension. Once we recognize this, we can see how it might be possible to extend the limits of communication so as to encompass creatures that are more seriously alien to us. We touched on this question in §3.4, though were unable to specify in any detail what conversation with an alien could be like. The fact that it has to be non-Pricean is certainly sufficient to make the idea baffling, but the fact that the Pricean rules are only partially valid even within our own homegrown conversations suggests that we have rather more room for manœuvre here than initially appeared. Although it remains pointless to describe in any detail what conversation with an alien would be like in the absence of either the alien itself or, at the very least, a detailed description of it, we can at least begin to see our way ahead. We can also see that there is, perhaps, a dark side to Rorty’s conception of conversability. We may applaud his insistence that we should try to include as many people as possible within our conversation, and to engage in dialogue with as wide a variety of opinions as possible, but the spectre of imperialism re-emerges if we suppose, as Rorty does, that communicability demands a central core of agreement, as is required by the ‘transcendental argument to end all transcendental arguments’ that we examined, and rejected, in §3.3. If we are to avoid this risk, then conversations with aliens must be more radically non-Pricean than even Rorty allows, or else we run the risk of refusing to attribute any mentality at all to them, and simply because we cannot agree with them at any level. Yet if our ‘amplified theory of the world’, as we call it, which includes an understanding of how neurophysiology grounds theorychoice, tells us that our aliens do have something like beliefs, albeit beliefs radically different from our own, then we should not reject this conclusion just because our ‘big tent’ is not big enough to include them. On the contrary, we need to recognize that our tent, however generously proportioned, can never include everyone. This does not mean that those outside the tent are to be ignored or despised, but merely that we must recognize that what is right for outsiders to think and say is irresolubly different from what is right for insiders to think and say.
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This is what cognitive contingency demands of us, and it is to our own benefit if we are able to locate our own intelligence within a wider space of possible intelligences in this manner. We shall come to understand ourselves much better. It is in this way that our relativism needs to be taken seriously (and we can see that Rorty himself does not qualify as a relativist at all – which, of course, is exactly what he himself repeatedly says, although many of his critics fail to accept this). Conversability is a much more complicated virtue than might be thought, and it certainly includes more than just a willingness to engage in endless Pricean conversations with all and sundry. The virtue of tolerance is likewise seen to be far more complex and multifaceted than might be supposed, since the norms of conversation and the handling of disagreements are much less obvious than they initially appeared to be. However, there remains a further theoretical problem that needs to be resolved, and that is how the boundaries of any cognitive ‘tent’ are to be drawn, and this leads us to another and potentially more serious criticism of our version of relativism.
7.3 The individuation of cultures The use of the word ‘culture’ as a count-noun is of fairly recent origin, though it is now commonplace, not only in social anthropology, but also in ordinary parlance. Nevertheless, it is not as innocent as it sounds. We can all agree that there are cultural differences; to say instead that there are different cultures, however, is not an entirely harmless reformulation. For what are the identity criteria of cultures? That is to say, under what circumstances is it true that X is the same culture as Y? How different are X and Y allowed to be? If we agree with Quine that there can be ‘no entity without identity’, then we need an answer if we are to talk seriously about cultures. But, of course, there is no serious chance of our getting one. We cannot draw a cultural map of the world in the same sort of way that we can draw a political one. Nor is the problem simply one of drawing boundaries that are sharp, a problem that applies to many kinds of entities (such as mountains and earthquakes, for example) that we have no particular difficulty in individuating. When it comes to classifying animals in biology, for example, we attach no definite meaning to the question, ‘Is a dog the same type of animal as a cat?’, and not just because the notion of a type is a bit fuzzy. The problem, rather, is that without further explanation, we have no idea of how to set about answering the question. It is because of this that, in biology, instead of type, we have the more precise concepts of
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species, genus, family, order, phylum and so on: and we do know (more or less!) how to individuate species, genera, families, orders and phyla. We have nothing analogous to such a spread of concepts in social anthropology, however. This does not mean that we just cannot even begin to classify or individuate cultures; only that we have no single over-arching system that applies in all contexts. Nor can we easily imagine one. The questions ‘Is there a single European culture?’ and ‘Is Great Britain a multicultural society?’, for example, need to be given different contexts if we are to reply affirmatively to both, as we might well want to do. And without such background contextualization, the replies have no determinate meaning.7 Does this matter? For the most part, it does not, and the question seldom arises. The problem of how to individuate cultures has a manifestly artificial quality. Nevertheless, it needs to be addressed if we are to take relativism seriously, for if we are to say that something is right for culture A, but wrong for culture B, then we need to have determinate boundaries between A and B or else we shall have an incoherent attitude towards anything that lies in the common area. Note that the incoherence will lie with us, and not just with the cultures themselves. Of course, a small amount of incoherence (or, at the very least, indecisiveness) is probably inevitable when dealing with vague objects, but the operative word here is ‘small’. It may still be protested that human cultures are so full of internal tensions and contradictions that it is wholly unreasonable to expect even moderately clear-cut boundaries between them, regardless of whatever theoretical arguments about vagueness might suggest, but this is to overlook a crucial fact about our type of relativism. We are not just relativizing what people actually think, but what they ought to think. Therefore, it is not just actual belief-systems, but ideal belief-systems that are required to be various, and it is not at all clear that an ideal system is allowed to be full of internal tensions and contradictions.8 This remains especially true if we take to heart the message of §7.1, namely that the gap between what we actually think and we ought to think might be very considerable indeed. A kind of relativism which requires both the ‘vertical’ and the ‘horizontal’ gaps to be large requires clear boundaries between ideal belief-systems, and this is much harder to explain and justify. Of course, one way is simply to insist that all human cultures have the same ideal limit, which neatly absolves us from providing boundaries. Indeed, we have already agreed that the only sort of ‘aliens’ that could be relevant to us need to be very radically different from ourselves. Yet
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problems of individuation are still going to remain when we consider such aliens, even if the differences are more physiological than cultural. In fact, this problem emerged as soon as we restricted the universality principle in §1.3. When we said that the principle of universal non-disagreement should apply, not to all logically possible intelligent creatures, but only to creatures cognitively similar to ourselves, we should have explained (but did not) what is meant here by ‘similar’. Without further clarification, our every utterance will be given a highly indeterminate force. What, then, grounds the difference between human and Martian ideal beliefs? One answer is simply the essential physiological differences that explain why humans and Martians are attracted to different empirically equivalent theories. We say ‘essential’ in order to take into account the fact that there will be considerable physiological difference between human beings as they are now, and humans who have achieved the ideal limit. To suppose otherwise is to fail to appreciate just how utterly massive such an achievement would have to be, just how far removed such a limit is. The same applies to the Martians. This, however, means that we have to explain the difference between essential and accidental physiological features, and there is no obvious way of doing this. True, we know more or less how to do this with individual organisms because we have tolerably clear-cut diachronic identity criteria for individuals, but we are concerned here with species, not individuals. We want to know in what ways a species can evolve without becoming a different species altogether, and this is surely much more of an arbitrary matter. Yet it matters that we be able to say something non-arbitrary here. Recall that, in §5.3, we relied on a modified transcendental argument in order to secure the legitimacy of our beliefs. This justified the internal component in our cognitive processing on the grounds that it was impossible for us not to use it. This is not because this particular internal element is essential to all creatures (the whole point is that it is not), but because it is essential to us. If there were two sorts of processing available to us, then we should lack a justification for preferring one over the other, and scepticism would remain unanswered. Yet without some non-arbitrary criteria for species-identity, such essentialism cannot be justified. This problem is not peculiar to our approach. It arises for anyone who makes use of the idea of an ideal limit of belief, whether as an elucidation of truth itself, as with Peirce, or simply as part of a coherence theory of justification. Apart from the fact that people might arrive at different ideal limits if they started off very differently, there
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is the additional problem that there may not be a unique ideal limit even for a single individual. Why must there be some iron framework, some ineradicable deep structure in the soul, that forces us in only one direction? Why could there not be two quite different ways in which current human cognition could evolve, with incompatible but equally perfect termini? Why not uncountably many? There is no obvious answer. Having said this, it is not unreasonable to suppose that all such human ideal limits will have some common features. It is extraordinary to suppose, for example, that our ordinary belief that there is a realm of independently existing physical objects could fail to survive idealization, and it is only these basic beliefs that our anti-sceptical strategy is concerned to protect. Of course, it could be insisted that we have no right to assume even this much. If that turns out to be right, then I agree that our anti-sceptical strategy will have failed; but we can take comfort in the fact that that is probably just as well! For if such beliefs do not withstand idealization, then this surely is a reason for wondering whether we really should hold them at all. We certainly cannot say that they are wholly justified if we also have reason to believe that they would be excluded from an improved system. It might now be protested that it cannot only be the common elements within the various idealizations that are justified, for otherwise the remaining elements can hardly continue to be described as ideal. However, it need not work in that way. Thus, consider an element x that is part of one of our idealisations I1 , but not another I2 . This means, if we are right, that we cannot be justified in believing x. What this still allows, however, is that anyone who has travelled along the I1 -route and is disposed to believe x can no longer treat I2 as an ideal limit for him. This makes sense, for we can currently expect to be disposed to believe, or even to understand, very little of what is to be found in any given ideal limit, and the further we move towards a given limit, the fewer alternative limits remain available to us (branches close off as we progress down the tree). In any event, we are not forced to suppose that our cognitive ‘hard-wiring’ is so hard that it cannot evolve in a variety of different ways. It may be feared that our account still relies too heavily on ideal limits, and that we cannot adequately determine the force of our utterances if we do not understand more than we do about how alternative limits relate to each other. Yet it may be that this does not matter all that much. True, when we restrict our universality principle, our principle of non-disagreement, we need some idea of the scope of our restriction. Nevertheless, we can also tolerate a good deal of open-endedness as
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well, especially if the indeterminacy applies only to possible creatures which we are never likely to meet. It is significant and surprising that we should have to do so, but it is the price we pay for denying ourselves an immutable cognitive nature. The benefits may well outweigh the disadvantages here, even though it may still seem unclear exactly what is at stake. In summary, we might ask, once again, how our views fit into the more general debate. The suggestion that the problem of cognitive divergence should be solved by attitude-reduction across the board has not been previously considered, as far as I am aware, and this is one reason why it is hard to locate our own version of relativism among the alternatives. There are some useful points that can be made, however. Many versions of relativism make heavy use of the concept of incommensurability and its variants. This can seem a natural, and even inevitable response to divergence, but the concept is notoriously hard to make clear. Incommensurability hovers uneasily somewhere in between incompatibility and incomparability, and this is not a very stable position.9 If it veers too close to the former, then we are liable to get either postmodernist scepticism or else a fragmentation of reality in a strong and literal sense that is hard to defend, as we shall see in the next chapter. On the other hand, if it veers too close to the latter, then we are liable to lose the underlying problem altogether, since there would be nothing to prevent us from saying that all parties speak the (absolute) truth. The hope is that if it does neither, then it will avoid these dangers. Yet even if it does manage this, it remains unclear how it can provide a positive solution to the problems that face the relativist. Our solution, by contrast, has several advantages. First, there is the basic point, which we have examined at length, that attitude-reduction ensures that alternative belief-systems can retain local legitimacy even though they are mutually incompatible. This incompatibility is exactly that – logical inconsistency – and we do not need to fudge the issue by saying that we only have some weaker sort of dissonance, an idea that is bound to be hard to elucidate.10 Rather than go down that route, we exploit a difference between truth and what should be optimally believed (or ‘believed’). Moreover, once our attitudes have been reduced, we can adhere to our system confidently, without what Rorty calls ‘liberal irony’ or any other kind of self-deprecation. The second advantage is that we can avoid the central incoherence that seems to plague most versions of relativism. The problem is neatly expressed by Quine: Truth, says the cultural relativist, is culture-bound. But if it were, then he, within his own culture, ought to see his own culture-bound truth
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as absolute. He cannot proclaim cultural relativism without rising above it, and he cannot rise above it without giving it up.11 Not all versions attempt to relativize truth itself, of course; but we still have the more general problem, namely that the doctrine of relativism itself seems to need a kind of absolute, culture-transcendent validity that is ruled out by that very doctrine. Our version, by contrast, is entirely free from this predicament. Force and content are wholly different, and this ensures that attitude-reduction can apply, without paradox, to any statement with any content: including the statement that (absolutely) everybody’s attitudes ought to be reduced. Finally, the framework needed to explain the difference between an attitude and its reduction is well equipped to deal with the subtleties and uncertainties that inevitably plague this area, notably the difficulty in individuating cultural groups. The key difference is what we call ‘restriction level’, and this is analysed in terms of conversational rules. True, we have been unable to say in any detail just what the alternatives to our ordinary practices are; but the point is that rules of this kind are the right sort of thing to be considering. They are highly complex structures, full of internal tensions and subtle constraints, and therefore allow for a great many delicate possibilities. Logical relations, such as incommensurability, by contrast, need to be fundamentally simple if they are to do their job properly, and are therefore unable to provide the kind of sophisticated apparatus needed to handle genuine cognitive divergence which is ‘blameless on both sides’. Of course, our version of relativism is highly peculiar inasmuch as every known intelligent creature is deemed to belong to exactly the same cultural group. This one group is huge – indeed, the only creatures outside it are what we call ‘Type 3 aliens’, creatures so bizarre that considerable ingenuity is needed to show that they are even logically possible. For this reason, many may complain that ours is not a genuine relativism at all. We concede that it is certainly unusual. However, in so far as we recognize the possibility of cognitive divergence, and insist that alien theories are as right for aliens as ours are for us, we clearly endorse something with a relativist flavour, even if ‘perspectivalism’ might be a slightly better term.12 But, terminology aside, what really matters is whether we have provided a solution to our problem; and it would seem that we have.
8 Mind, World and Realism
We have now explained the epistemological aspect of our position, and have outlined some of its metaphysical implications. What remains to be done is to develop the latter more fully. In so far as they promise to be both realist and relativist, they are evidently going to be unusual. Nevertheless, they will turn out to be very attractive in many ways; indeed, the fact that we are able to sustain a naturalistic realism despite drawing heavily on a Kantian epistemological framework provides an important argument in favour of our view. It is widely thought nowadays that mind and world need to be brought together somehow in order to guarantee an appropriate interaction. We, however, shall argue that appropriate interaction actually requires that they be kept very far apart, and that this is the desirable consequence of our answer to the sceptic. We shall also see how this apartness underlies our perspectivalism and the difference between absolute and local viewpoints.
8.1 Types of realism The word ‘realism’, as it appears in philosophical discourse, is formidably difficult to define. This is partly because it has come to mean too many different things. We need only to ask whether the positions occupied by Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Putnam or van Fraassen, to take a very small sample, are ‘realist’ or not to see that both affirmative and negative answers can be given in each case. Of course, it is possible to be a realist about some things and not others, but that is not the chief problem. The real difficulty is to explain just what the contrast between realism and anti-realism amounts to.1 203
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Fortunately, we need to concentrate only on two broad kinds of realism, which we may call ‘metaphysical’ and ‘methodological’. Roughly speaking, to be a metaphysical realist about some subject matter X is to suppose that facts about X obtain quite independently of ourselves – our thought and language, human institutions and so forth. It is in this familiar sense that, for example, Frege was a realist about arithmetic and Berkeley an anti-realist about physical objects. By contrast, to be a methodological realist about X is to suppose that we should aim to discover the truth about X – that this is what the study of X is all about. Failure to distinguish these types of realism has caused considerable confusion in the philosophy of science.2 For example, in the methodological sense, van Fraassen’s CE is anti-realist about scientific theories, whereas ‘internal realists’, such as Putnam and Ellis, are, indeed, realists. However, in the metaphysical sense, internal realism turns out to be a species of anti-realism, whereas CE is robustly realist. Why should these debates matter? The answer is that, despite the many confusions and ambiguities that surround this terminology, the debates between realism and anti-realism still provide a very useful focus when it comes to examining metaphysical and epistemological problems. There are several reasons why this is so. First, their sheer antiquity ensures a useful historical dimension. Secondly, questions of whether, and to what extent, this or that part of reality is genuinely objective are metaphysically fundamental, and we cannot go far without stumbling upon problems of this kind. Similarly, questions about how much we can hope to discover about this or that part of reality are equally basic. More directly, we have already had occasion to examine CE and internal realism, and we need to say in more detail just how these theories relate to our own. Finally, in all such debates, realism is usually considerably more intuitive than anti-realism. Although this is sometimes disputed, the realist view, whether in the metaphysical or the methodological sense, tends to be the pre-theoretical, common sense view, whereas the anti-realist view tends to be the product of philosophical theorizing. Moreover, as the case of CE versus internal realism exemplifies, it is often thought that realism of one kind can be purchased only at the expense of anti-realism of another kind. That is to say, however much common sense may suggest otherwise, one cannot get away with being an out-and-out realist in every sense. It is important to see that, contrary to this general rule, our theory does (almost) manage to be realist in both the metaphysical and the methodological senses. This, indeed, will prove to be a major point in its favour.
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8.2 Transcendental idealism and internal realism The realism/anti-realism distinction is most commonly understood in the metaphysical sense, and this will be the topic of this section. Historically speaking, the most important defender of the sort of metaphysical anti-realism that concerns us here is Kant. The internal realist doctrines of Putnam and Ellis, for example, which we shall consider shortly, are clearly indebted to his approach. Famously, Kant declared that we have no knowledge of things as they are in themselves, and that the things of which we do have knowledge are ‘appearances’ or ‘phenomena’. The latter include ordinary objects in space and time, and they are ‘appearances’ not in the sense of being Berkeleian ideas, items whose esse is percipi, but rather in a subtler and more elusive sense. They are not themselves mental items, but are nevertheless conditioned by the mind, by the ways that we cognize them. This is partly because space and time are not things in themselves, but merely forms of intuition: it is our faculty of sensibility itself which organizes empirical data spatiotemporally. It is also because basic concepts (or ‘categories’), such as substance and causation, have their origin in our faculty of understanding: as Hume rightly observed, we cannot find causal connections by just looking at the items supposedly connected, and all empiricists have difficulties with the notion of substance. Thus spatiotemporal and categorial structure is not something that we just ‘read off’ the world. Rather, we impose it upon it. This ‘transcendental idealism’ (TI) is an important part of Kant’s solution to the fundamental question of how synthetic a priori knowledge – indeed, any knowledge – is possible. Transcendental idealism is clearly a species of metaphysical antirealism in our sense, and it is perhaps at least as startling as the ‘empirical idealism’ of Berkeley’s from which Kant wishes to distance himself. The doctrine that we somehow make the world around us, in whole or in part, is hardly intuitive, to put it mildly! Yet Kant’s arguments for this view are not easily refuted given a certain picture of how human cognition works, and we must take them very seriously since it is a picture very close to the one that we ourselves have defended. The central point, of course, is that empirical cognition involves more than just the passive reception of data. Incoming data need to be processed in various ways before we can obtain genuine self-conscious experience, and the nature of this processing is determined (at least in part) by the nature of our minds, as opposed to the objects that originally gave rise to the data. We shall call this the mind contribution thesis
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(MCT), and it is surely correct: the mind itself does indeed play a crucial role in transforming data into empirical beliefs. Trouble arises, however, when we ask how such mind-conditioned beliefs could be true. If the objects that our beliefs are about are unaffected by the mind, then how can our mind-shaped beliefs represent them accurately? Accurate representation surely requires an appropriate harmony or ‘fit’ between that which represents and that which is represented, but no such ‘fit’ can apparently exist if the former is mind-shaped and the latter is not. We thus reach that extraordinary conclusion, TI, that ordinary reality is itself mind-shaped. Basic structural features of the world – spatiotemporal, causal and so forth – are there because we have put them there – and that is how we know that they are there. Since MCT is so intuitive and TI so unintuitive, there must clearly be far more to the inference from the one to the other than is sketched here, and we shall return to this shortly. Before doing so, however, we need to be sure that TI really is as unacceptable as it appears. This task is not especially easy since the kind of mind-dependence posited by TI is difficult to characterize. For example, merely to point out that items such as the tree in the quad are causally quite independent of human mentality is not enough to refute the doctrine. Unlike Berkeley, Kant is an ‘empirical realist’, and does not suppose there to be any mental dependence of that kind. But what other kind is there? It is true that the concepts that we use to characterize the tree, that it is a tree, green, of such-and-such dimensions, and so forth, are themselves human constructions in so far as they reflect our own particular ways of classifying things. However, this fact by itself yields only a very weak type of mind-dependence. Of course, human descriptions of the tree are mind-dependent; but that does not automatically mean that the tree itself also is in any illuminating sense. Still, it could be insisted that TI is really a quite innocent doctrine, and that it does not actually involve any stronger kind of mind-dependence. However, Kant himself clearly does not regard TI as little better than a platitude, so we must doubt whether this is all that is meant. In fact, the problem becomes clearer if we allow, as Kant did not, the possibility of alternative methods of constructing reality. We have already noted, in §2.4 and §5.3, that our account differs significantly from Kant’s in this respect. The Martian ideal belief-system differs from our own not merely in the concepts used. On the contrary, they are genuinely incompatible. So, if we treat our beliefs as beliefs about a mind-shaped ‘world of appearances’, as TI demands, then we must conclude that the Martian world of appearances is different from our
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own. We thus end up with a kind of pluralized TI, not unlike that expounded by Thomas Kuhn in his later period: there is just one noumenal reality, an unknowable realm of things in themselves, but many phenomenal realities each corresponding to different paradigms. It follows that there really must be a difference between the phenomenal and the noumenal worlds, because if they were identified, then the phenomenal realities themselves would have to be identical with each other, and the incompatibility of the alternative belief-systems ensures that this is impossible: incompatible statements cannot be true of the same world. The duality between phenomenal and noumenal realities must therefore be metaphysically very strong. It is not just a case of one and the same set of objects having different kinds of properties, phenomenal and noumenal.3 Rather, the objects themselves, and indeed the worlds that they inhabit, must be different.4 It is primarily in order to make this point clear that it is philosophically so important to emphasize the contingency of the human cognitive constitution. Many may feel that our preoccupation with Martians is unhealthy, and that fantasy should not be allowed to play so large a part in anybody’s outlook. It might even be wondered if scepticism is really so important a topic. Nevertheless, unless we have a conception of a cognitive alternative, even if it is only a limiting conception, we cannot get a proper grip on the MCT, a thesis which is of fundamental importance not only in epistemology but also in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. And once we do have this conception, we can see that the ontological implications of TI and related doctrines are a good deal stronger and stranger than are often supposed. It is not the interface between phenomena and noumena that is so baffling, but that between alternative worlds of appearances, even if most of them are constructible only by hypothetical beings. We should therefore be suspicious of attempts to argue away the implausibility of talk of multiple realities by saying that it is just a fairly harmless way of saying that there are many profoundly different ways of describing the world. Nelson Goodman (1978), for example, talks of ‘ways of world-making’, and means little more than this.5 But this sort of pluralism is metaphysically quite harmless, since the different descriptions are never supposed to be logically incompatible. Indeed, even with Kuhn’s pluralism, the differences are supposed to be instances of ‘incommensurability’ rather than strict incompatibility, and this leaves us with some room for manœuvre. No such comfort is available to us, however. If we are to go down the idealist route, then we really are going to be landed with some strange metaphysics. We cannot just say that talk
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about ‘many worlds’ is merely a picturesque way of talking about many world-views. In the latter sense, we can say that religious fundamentalists ‘live in a different world’ from Western liberals, for example, and we all know what is meant. Yet we do not literally live in different worlds: if we did, we should never have heard of each other, let alone be able to kill each other! We, however, would have to say that Martians and ourselves really do live in different worlds, in which case it might be wondered why they entered the story – our story – at all. In fact, matters get even worse. We noted in §7.3 that there are no clear ways of individuating ideal belief-systems, and that there may be many possible routes for even a single individual to take in order to reach an available ideal system. Thus, there need be no iron framework in the soul that necessitates a move in only one direction. Now, this in itself is a fairly harmless fact, as we observed, but the situation becomes explosive if each ideal system is required to be realized in a corresponding world of appearances. Not only are we required to countenance a multitude of weird semi-mental realities, but we now cannot even say where one such reality ends and another begins. If I have no unique and definite ideal belief-system, then I likewise cannot inhabit a unique and definite phenomenal reality. And even if there were such definite Erscheinungswelte, my own relationship with them would have to be decidedly odd and indeterminate. Such metaphysics is not merely bizarre or counter-intuitive, but wholly intolerable. One exceptionally perverse argument for plural idealism is that different realities are needed to explain the possession of incompatible belief-systems. This would make sense if our beliefs were completely caused by the states of affairs that they are beliefs about; but the whole point is that they are not. They are also caused, partly, by the ways in which our minds process incoming data. To ignore this is to ignore exactly the premise that led us towards idealism in the first place, namely the MCT! But once we know that differences in what is believed are caused by differences in the believers’ minds, there is no need to postulate any further differences in the world(s) at which these beliefs are directed. We simply need to remember that knowledge of our environment is secured by a combination of internal and external factors. Both these sets of factors are essential, and it is both wrong and unnecessary to conflate them by supposing that the first ‘conditions’ the second. The point might also be expressed in this way. Let us suppose, for example, that the aliens are ideally warranted in supposing that the earth is flat, whereas we are ideally warranted in supposing that it is round (and let us ignore, for the moment, the problem about indeterminate
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limits that we have just mentioned). Let us now suppose, with the plural idealists, that we must therefore inhabit a round-earthed reality, and that the aliens must inhabit a flat-earthed one. We must now ask why the aliens should conclude that the earth is flat if they inhabited such a world. We know why we would conclude this if we were to inhabit such a world, but why would the aliens? The whole point is that they respond to data very differently from us, and so might conclude that this new earth is of some completely different shape altogether – cubical, dodecahedral or something even more exotic! Far from assisting us in our explanation of alien beliefs, an alternative reality seriously undermines it. Having said that, we can see why we might want to introduce a flatearthed world into the discussion, for perhaps the closest we can get to imagining the alien’s viewpoint is to imagine ourselves in a world where p holds if and only if the aliens are ideally warranted in believing that p. Nevertheless, such a hypothetical situation bears only a very tenuous resemblance to the one we are concerned with – even if we were to restrict ourselves to what would go on internally. Differences in stimuli will not adequately counterbalance differences in cognitive structure, no matter how cleverly we choose the stimuli. Such a hypothetical reality – considered as a reality, and not merely as a thoughtexperiment – has little explanatory or otherwise useful function, and its postulation can only serve to introduce a wholly undesirable confusion between the beliefs themselves and the things that the beliefs are about. This is not to deny that we have some sort of notion here. In §7.1, we considered attempts to formalize the notion of relative truth, and introduced sets of sentences such as A , which is a complete and consistent extension of all those sentences which A would be ideally warranted in believing. Complete and consistent sets of this kind are often regarded in formal logic as standing for worlds, but the connection is only tenuous. Moreover, if the claim that A (genuinely) inhabits a world characterized by A is something that we ourselves cannot be warranted in believing, as we have just argued, then such sets become ontologically useless as far as our own project is concerned. Of course, it may be protested that we have just misunderstood the kind of thing that a ‘world of appearances’ is supposed to be. Yet it remains obscure just what else it can be. Although it is meant to match our judgements and beliefs, it is also required to be ‘empirically real’ in the sense of existing independently of such mental items, and it is unclear how anything can satisfy both conditions. There remains also the residual suspicion that TI simply fails to come to terms with the very insights of our original premise, namely the MCT. For what MCT
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tells us is that we do not passively inspect the world, as the classical empiricists, for example, thought. But in that case, the ‘world’, in the relevant sense, had better not itself be belief-shaped, as TI supposes it to be, otherwise a passive inspection becomes entirely appropriate! We now can inspect our beliefs passively, since all the active processing has been completed, and can likewise inspect a belief-shaped reality in the same way. Of course, it may be said that the world gets to be beliefshaped only because we shaped it that way, and that it was not so shaped beforehand. However, this idea of ‘shaping’ a world considered as a mental act is deeply obscure. Alternatively, we can say that the ‘world’ that we do not inspect passively is the world of things in themselves, not appearances, and that the world of appearances is no more than a kind of convenient fiction. Yet the world of things in themselves is supposed to be wholly unknowable and therefore cannot be inspected at all, actively or passively, and the world of appearances is supposed to be empirically real, so it is unclear how such a view can be remotely Kantian. On the contrary, the noumenal world is starting to take centre stage as the real world sans phrase, and the phenomenal world has become little more than a ghostly (and quite unnecessary) duplicate of our beliefs themselves. Still, despite the implausibilities of idealism, we need to block the argument that we mentioned above, which seems to show that TI has to follow from MCT. That is to say, we need to explain how our mindshaped beliefs can be true even though the reality that they are beliefs about is not also mind-shaped. How, to repeat, can there be an appropriate congruence or ‘fit’ between something which is mind-shaped and something which is not? The way to do this is simply to deny that truth requires a ‘fit’ in this sense. Some versions of the correspondence theory of truth do require this, but they typically come to grief precisely because they cannot explain how a given class of entities (facts, states of affairs, and so on) can be both ‘worldly’ and sentence-shaped. Truth-makers and truthbearers are required both to be, and not to be, isomorphic with each other. However, we have already seen that a deflationist account of truth is entirely adequate to our needs, and this does not imply a ‘fit’ in any awkward sense. The equivalence schema (ES)
is true if and only if p requires a parallelism between the left- (‘mind’) and the right- (‘world’) hand sides, but both parts have already been sententialized, so it is
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easy to see how this requirement can be satisfied. It is, in any event, a gross fallacy to suppose that sentences can only characterize something sentence-shaped, or that the mind can only characterize something mind-shaped, a fallacy reminiscent of Berkeley’s notorious claim that, since ideas can only resemble other ideas, we can only form ideas of other ideas. The point is that representation, that is to say, the relationship signified by ‘of’, does not involve resemblance in the relevant sense. Exactly what it does involve is a question to which we shall return, but for the moment it will suffice to be reminded that ES yields an appropriate parallelism that does not imply any theory of representation, and a fortiori, any contentious such theory. However, we still need to be sure that ES really is all there is to truth. We have already shown in Chapter 1 that, despite its appearance of triviality, ES is quite strong enough to yield a powerful framework for investigating what it means to aim at truth. Nevertheless, this itself does not prove the minimalist case; and internal realists, who adopt a view not unlike TI, argue that truth itself needs to be internalized in a sense that needs to be examined more thoroughly. Putnam writes, ‘Truth’, in an internalist view, is some sort of (idealized) rational acceptability – some sort of ideal coherence of our beliefs with each other and with our experiences as those experiences are themselves represented in our belief system – and not correspondence with mindindependent or discourse-independent ‘states of affairs’.6 Immediately afterwards, he writes, There is no God’s Eye point of view that we can know or usefully imagine; there are only the various points of view of actual persons reflecting various interests and purposes that their descriptions and theories subserve. Putnam evidently believes that these two theses go together. Our position, however, is that his first thesis is wrong, but that his second is right; and moreover, that holding the second thesis is exactly what removes the need for us to hold the first. Let us note, first, that the conception of truth expressed in the first thesis really does commit us to idealism. From the internal realist premise
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(1)
is true if and only if we are ideally warranted in believing that p and the equivalence schema (2)
is true if and only if p we may evidently deduce, by transitivity: (3) We are ideally warranted in believing that p, if and only if p. Thus, for example, the moon will have a cold interior if and only if we are ideally warranted in thinking so. The moon’s properties are thus deemed to be mind-dependent; the moon is as it is because we ought to think of it that way. We note that the notion of truth itself has once again dropped out of sight, for (3) makes no use of it – or of any other semantic notions. Instead it posits a metaphysical connection between belief and reality, one which is essentially idealist. If truth is epistemically constrained, then the world must also be. The idealist implications of (3) could be disputed, of course. The original premise (1) might instead be understood as demanding a reliabilist theory of justification: unless
is in fact true, we cannot be said to be completely justified in believing it. So understood, (3) should be understood as expressing not idealism, but rather an externalist theory of warranted belief. However, although it is true that Putnam is sympathetic towards content-externalism (indeed, was one of the very first philosophers to expound it), this is not how he understands internal realism. Point (1) should not be understood as stating the world-dependence of ideal belief, but rather the ideal belief-dependence of the world: the moon has a cold interior because we are ideally warranted in believing so, not the other way round. Perhaps this idea could be modified, and we could instead regard the connection between ideal belief and world as one of mutual dependence. We would thus have a combination of an externalist theory of belief and a mind-dependent theory of the world: beliefs ‘reach out’ into the world, but the world is also dependent on belief.7 The trouble, though, is that externalist theories of the mind are of little use in dealing with the problems that ultimately concern us, as we showed in §2.4, and a theory which combines externalism with idealism will merely combine the errors and inadequacies of each doctrine.
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Although very simple, the inference from (1) and (2) to (3) is a decisive argument, and it applies not only to Putnam’s version of internal realism, but to any epistemically constrained conception of truth. Pragmatist theories of truth, such as Peirce’s, will be equally affected, for example. It is often argued that such theories only have idealist consequences if we also adopt a correspondence theory of truth, a theory which both internal realists and pragmatists firmly reject. Yet, as we have just seen, this is false. The only connection between truth and reality that we have assumed is that implied by the equivalence schema, and this is too weak to qualify as a ‘correspondence theory’ in any real sense. Of course, it can be made to seem otherwise. For example, utterance of the sentence, (4) The belief that the moon has a cold interior will be genuinely true only if the actual moon itself really has a cold interior, in the company of anti-realists will usually raise hackles! Yet the words ‘genuinely’, ‘actual’ and ‘really’ merely serve to add emphasis, not a correspondence theory of truth. Point (4) is a direct consequence of ES, which merely says that a proposition will be true if and only if the world is as it says it is – a straightforwardly Aristotelian view that is correspondentist only in the most minimal and unremarkable sense. There is no mention of any of the things that make correspondence theories controversial – truth-makers, transcendental connections between mind and world or a tendentious conception of representation, for example. Of course, it is still possible to reject ES and the Aristotelian platitude that it formalizes, as we noted in §7.1, but this is unnecessarily heroic. It may be protested that pragmatist theories need not tie truth to the results of ideal inquiry in the way that we have been assuming, and Peirce himself certainly rejected idealism. For example, Cheryl Misak claims that ‘[t]he Peircean response here turns on the distinction between a definition [of truth] and a pragmatic elucidation’. Peirce would have no objection to ES, she claims, but would argue that, while it is laudable to refrain from adding to a nominal definition anything which is metaphysically spurious, something must be added. For, as it stands, [it] tells us nothing substantial about the property truth. [I]t does not tell us what to expect of true hypotheses and it does not tell us how to go about inquiring into the truth of hypotheses. In its efforts to refrain from invoking
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anything mysterious it fails to engage the notion of truth with anything so as to give us a grasp of the predicate ‘is true’.8
Nevertheless, the inference from (1) and (2) to (3) surely cannot be blocked just by reading (1) (or its Peircean analogue) as something other than a definition. As long as it is a necessary truth of some kind, which it is presumably meant to be,9 then it does not matter how else we read it: the inference is too simple and too direct to be evaded in that sort of way. In any case, and more to the point, it still remains unclear why pragmatists want to add anything to ES in the first place. Of course, such a minimal conception of truth tells us nothing about why it is important, how to aim at it, what the rules of inquiry are and so forth, but we have already argued extensively that these issues are more appropriately dealt with by a substantive notion of belief, not by a substantive notion of truth. If a pragmatist theory of truth is not simply a device to block a certain type of sceptical argument – which is probably what Peirce himself primarily wanted it for – then it seems to have no real purpose. And we have argued that it should not be used for that purpose because (a) there are better ways of handling the kind of scepticism in question, and (b), unlike Peirce, we insist that rational inquiries are not bound to converge – even when taken to their ideal limits. Moreover, we do not even want them to converge given our respect for cognitive contingency. Unless we are prepared to countenance incompatible truths (or truths about alternative realities), we had therefore better not tie the concept of truth too closely to the concept of an ideal limit of inquiry. Of course, this should not prevent us from supposing that everyone within our own research community will aim to converge. This is a sound methodological/regulative principle, and it reflects the fact that such a community will consist only of people who are cognitively similar (or, at least, not radically dissimilar). But we do not need a pragmatist theory of truth to underpin this; merely an account of how normal communication assumes the desirability of reaching agreement – as formulated by the restricted universality principle that we introduced in §1.3, for example.10 Despite these arguments, it may still be strongly felt that the link between inquiry and truth cannot be adequately explained unless the latter is constrained by more than just ES; and perhaps the most obvious reason for accepting (1) is that it looks almost identical to our original premise TN, namely that we should aim at truth! Indeed, if we disregard the fact (which is unimportant here) that (1) is a biconditional, whereas
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(TN)
We should believe that p only if
is true
is not, we seem to have almost exactly the same thesis. So how can we aim at truth without being internalists of some kind? However, this is to forget the crucial point that TN can be read either intensionally (‘We should aim for believing only what is true’) or extensionally (‘Only if something is true should we aim to believe it’). Formally, we have the distinction: (ITN)
We should aim that (we assert that p only if
is true)
(ETN) (We should aim that we assert that p) only if
is true. We have already argued that we should aim at truth only in the sense of ITN. This is because the stronger ETN yields the unwanted UUP which is exactly what gets us into trouble with the Martians. However, what ETN also does is enable us to deduce an unwanted theory of truth, that is to say, a theory of the form:
is true iff [such-and-such]. The weaker ITN does not do this, however, because the sub-formula ‘
is true’ is locked within an intensional context, and therefore cannot be made the unwanted centre of attention in this way. This point is of fundamental importance. Because the Martians and we have different perspectives, we shall aim in different directions when we all aim at truth. However, we should not conclude, as it is tempting to do, that we are aiming at different truths. We should not confuse intensionally aiming at X with aiming at an intensional X. For example, if I aim my gun at a donkey which is not there, it does not follow that what I am really aiming at is an intensional donkey. I am certainly not intensionally aiming at one, for I know well enough that intensional objects, whatever they turn out to be, are unlikely to be harmed by bullets. And I am not extensionally aiming at one either, for if intensional objects are anywhere to be found, then they are in the mind; and my gun is not extensionally pointing at anyone’s mind. In a similar way, we should not suppose that intensionally aiming at truth means aiming at some sort of intensional truth – or internalist truth, pragmatist truth, truth in the world of appearances, or whatever else one wishes to call it. There is no such thing, and there does not need to be. The distinction between intensional and extensional truth-directedness is quite sufficient to elucidate all that is going on here, and its formulation requires only an utterly minimal conception of truth itself.11 Furthermore, it achieves this without even a hint of idealism.
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Much the same objections apply to the coherence theory of truth. The most convincing argument in favour of this theory is epistemological. A coherence theory of justification is eminently plausible, if only because it clearly matches our actual practices. But how can such a pattern of justification lead in the right direction unless truth itself is also constituted by coherence – more accurately, by membership of a specific ideally coherent belief-system?12 If truth is not the same as ideal coherence (or, at the very least, very closely related to it), then how can we aim at both at once? Yet it is quite possible for aiming at truth to be constituted by aiming at ideal coherence, even though truth itself is not constituted by ideal coherence, and regardless of whether the aiming is intensional. This is because the notion of aiming at something can mean too many different things. For example, we might think of ideal coherence as something that lies between truth and us. If I am extensionally aiming at your donkey, then I am also extensionally aiming at a point midway between your donkey and my gun. I might even be intensionally aiming at it. To give a better example, when I try to putt my ball straight into the hole, it may be a ‘marker’ on the green a few inches from the ball, rather than the hole itself, that I am consciously aiming at (since I need to keep my eye on the ball). Yet nobody need identify the donkey with the halfway point, or the hole with the marker. Or it may be that I need to aim at truth if I am to arrive at ideal coherence because I need to correct for some limitation or distortion of some kind. It would certainly be odd if someone were to declare, ‘I am just not interested in truth: all I want is ideal coherence’, and we might wonder if she could ever reach her goal if she aimed at it so directly. Further analogies may help here. It may be that when I try to shoot the donkey, I need to aim the gun a few inches above its head to accommodate the gravitational effect on the bullet; likewise, it may be that I need to aim the ball away from the hole in order to accommodate the slope on the green. Failure to adjust my aim in this sort of way will ensure that I shall fail in my real objective.13 The contingency of our cognitive structure could, perhaps, be treated as an inevitable limitation or distortion in this sort of way. Alternatively, and rather more plausibly, it may just be that truth does not compete with ideal coherence, any more than it competes with empirical adequacy, for the simple reason that the only way of extensionally aiming at ideal coherence (likewise, empirical adequacy) that is psychologically available to us is by intensionally aiming at truth. There are many further issues involved here, of course. Nevertheless, just because the ultimate aim of justification is ideal justification (which, of course, it is – what else could ‘ideal’ mean here?), and because the
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ultimate aim of justification is also truth, it does not follow that truth is constituted by ideally justified belief. The notion of an ‘aim’ is just too multifaceted to sustain such an inference. So, the fact that for a belief to be ideally justified is for it to be a member of some ideally coherent system does not support a coherence theory of truth. The same applies to other epistemically constrained theories.
8.3 Representation and the ‘Olympian standpoint’ Evidently, metaphysical anti-realism is something to be avoided, and we have shown how we can block some arguments that appear to force us in that direction. Nevertheless, what underlies our approach is the insistence that we modify our ordinary notions of belief and assertion so that they aim at truth only in a weak, intensional sense. This does not make them quite as weak as the ‘acceptances’ (and expressions of ‘acceptance’) that van Fraassen, for example, uses; but it is clear that there is a risk that we have escaped the clutches of one sort of anti-realism only by landing in the clutches of another, namely the methodological variety – a variety which van Fraassen himself embraces enthusiastically (at least, when restricted to his constructive empiricist account of scientific theories). We have already shown that some of our fears here are groundless. In §5.3, we argued that our ordinary investigative practices can be legitimized without too much compromise, and the chief burden of Chapter 6 was to show that a replacement of our modified beliefs with pragmatic acceptances leads to an outlook very different from the one that we have been able to defend. However, we need to be clearer about the overall metaphysical implications of the kind of perspectivalism demanded by our account. First, we need to complete our examination of van Fraassen’s CE. This view is anti-realist in the methodological sense in so far as it is claimed that we should not even try to discover whether our scientific theories are actually true. Scientific research does not really require us to do so, and it is in any event impossible for such a project to succeed. The underdetermination of theories by data ensures this. Now, we have managed to distance ourselves from this view because we insist that our revised notion of belief is considerably stronger than mere pragmatic acceptance, which is the attitude that CE adopts towards theoretical statements. We do not aim at truth in the original full-blooded sense, but we do not lose all sight of it either. However, this needs qualification. CE requires a fairly sharp distinction between the theoretical and the non-theoretical, but we prefer a sliding scale where nothing is wholly
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non-theoretical. We can agree with van Fraassen that much of what lies on the far-theoretical end is beyond belief, even in our weakened sense. We have no right actually to believe, even weakly, superstring theory or claims about the overall geometry of space – at least, not at present. Such ideas are too far removed from experiment to be deserving of an attitude stronger than provisional acceptance. However, there is no reason why we should not (weakly) believe the atomic theory of matter – at least in outline (never mind the details). This is because we can be sufficiently confident to say that this theory will never be replaced (at least, not by us). Of course, pragmatic considerations are needed here in order to adjudicate between rival empirically adequate theories, but since our conception of belief has been appropriately reduced, this is not a problem. More generally, we can accept a version of the Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) principle: (IBE) If a theory T provides the best explanation for something known to obtain, then that is a good (though, of course, defeasible) reason for believing T to be true. This is interesting, since IBE is often thought to be precisely the sticking point which divides realists from constructive empiricists. But note that both parties endorse the revised principle: (IBE’) If a theory T provides the best explanation for something known to obtain, then that is a good (though, of course, defeasible) reason for accepting T to be true. We should not be impressed by the reference to truth, which appears in both principles. As we noted in §1.1, following Velleman, there is just no difference between -ing that p and -ing that
is true, and regardless of which attitude ‘ ’ stands for.14 The equivalence schema ensures this. The crucial difference, rather, is between belief and acceptance, and our reduced belief is somewhere between the two. This enables us to defend an intermediate principle, stronger than IBE’ but weaker than IBE, which is valid when applied to some theories (for example, the atomic theory of matter), but perhaps not others (for example, superstring theory). This is a very attractive conclusion. Exactly where we should draw the line between these types of theory is hard to say, of course; but it is surely only scientists, not philosophers, who can reasonably be expected to decide such matters. In any event, it is primarily the more ordinary
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down-to-earth empirical facts about the world that we are concerned with here. Nevertheless, the residual fear is that our concept of weakened belief, although stronger than that of mere acceptance, is insufficiently strong to save us from a kind of van Fraassen-style methodological anti-realism writ large. This anti-realism portrays us as creatures who modify their ‘beliefs’ according to their own purely subjective standards, and quite regardless of what might actually obtain in the real world, a world that remains utterly obscure and impenetrable. Such a situation may feel comfortable ‘on the inside’, but in reality it involves a ghastly kind of mind–world dissonance, a total and systematic failure to get to grips with the reality that our ‘beliefs’ are supposedly about. However, we shall embrace something like this option, and show that it is not as intolerable as it appears. The key here is to remember that we strongly repudiate the ‘Olympian standpoint’, or ‘God’s eye point of view’, for it is only from such an illusory perspective that the real world seems obscure and impenetrable. From our own perspective, the world is more or less as it appears to us to be: and we do not need to construct a mysterious semi-mental ‘world of appearances’ to achieve this result. On the contrary, from our own perspective, it is the original world – the world of ‘things in themselves’, if we prefer to call it that – that is our ordinary familiar reality. That is what the real world looks like to us. The fact that it may look differently to the Martians, and even more differently still to God, is not something that should worry us. But why, it may be protested, should an insistence that we abandon the Olympian standpoint help us with our problem of mind–world dissonance? If our beliefs systematically fail to represent the real world accurately, then this sorry state of affairs will surely not improve merely by adjusting our perspective. However, this is to ignore the connection between perspective and the very concept of representation itself. We have already rejected a conception of representation as pure resemblance, but we need also to see that such a conception is intimately tied to the God’s eye point of view. The point about divine cognition is that it is wholly uncontaminated by finite, empirically conditioned contingencies. Representation therefore involves a kind of perfect exactness, an uncompromising reflection of how things just are. By contrast, the point about human (and Martian) cognition is that it is ‘contaminated’ through and through by such contingencies. Things are therefore bound to go wrong if we insist on employing a conception of representation more suited to God than to ourselves.
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But what other conception is there? We should note first that the desire to avoid bias cannot be dismissed as no more than a foolish attempt to become divine. Matthew Arnold famously claimed that one of the chief grounds of culture was the desire to see things as they really are. Such a claim is not at all pretentious, and we can all understand the need to avoid prejudice, unquestioned assumptions, excessive parochialism and other obstacles to seeing the world as it is. We have no intention of denying the value of such striving for objectivity. On the contrary, we applaud it, and for much the same reasons as does everyone else. Our only reservation is that there are limits as to how far we can actually go in that direction, for we just cannot be wholly non-parochial. An empirical viewpoint may be more or less objective, but there is no humanly available ‘view from nowhere’,15 or ‘absolute conception of the world’.16 However, even if we grant this, it may still be felt that no valid conception of representation can survive such a retreat from absolute objectivity. We might certainly wonder if we can continue to call ourselves realists if we were to adopt such a course. Thus Crispin Wright, for example, claims that it is ‘incontestable’ that the idea of representation satisfies what he calls the ‘Convergence/Representation Platitude’: If two devices [e.g. cameras or fax machines] each function to produce representations, then if conditions are suitable, and they function properly, they will produce divergent output if and only if presented with divergent input.17 This leads to an important constraint on realism, namely what he calls ‘Cognitive Command’: A discourse exhibits Cognitive Command if and only if it is a priori that differences of opinion arising within it can be satisfactorily explained only in terms of ‘divergent input’, or ‘unsuitable conditions’, or ‘malfunction’.18 Thus, we do not suppose that differences in opinion about what is comic, for example, demand such an explanation: what causes us to laugh or not laugh is something rather different. Likewise, disagreements in this area need not imply that one of the parties is just ‘getting things wrong’, that is to say, misrepresenting the world. A sense of humour is not expected to ‘track the truth’ in that sort of sense. By contrast, if we disagree about the everyday properties of an ordinary physical
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object, then we suppose otherwise. This is why we tend not to be ‘comic realists’, but do tend to be realists about ordinary physical facts. Yet the whole point about the Martian scenario is that it rejects Cognitive Command in this sense. Neither the Martians nor we need be thought to be ‘getting things wrong’ in any derogatory sense when we disagree even about ordinary physical facts. Divergence is to be explained by a combination of underdetermination and cognitive contingency, and not by divergent input, unsuitable conditions or malfunction. But if we abandon Cognitive Command and the Convergence/Representation Platitude, as is clearly inevitable, must we not thereby reject the representational character of our ordinary empirical beliefs and, once again, surrender to some wholly unacceptable form of anti-realism? The answer is ‘no’. To begin with, we should strongly resist the analogy between human minds on the one hand and simple representing devices, such as cameras and fax machines, on the other. Beliefs do not bear anything like a photographic resemblance to the states of affairs that they are about, and only a very naïve, pre-Kantian empiricism would suggest otherwise. Yet we can still retain many of the insights suggested by such comparisons. For example, the reason why my belief that the tree in the quad is 20-feet high has a representational character, which my belief that the clown in the quad is funny does not have, is because the first belief is (in normal circumstances) caused by the tree’s being 20-feet high, whereas the second belief is surely not caused by objective comic features possessed by the clown (a projectivist story of some kind would instead be more appropriate here). The causal features in the first case will sustain counterfactuals, so that we should expect, other things being equal, that varying the height of the tree will cause a parallel variation of my beliefs about its height. This causally grounded parallelism between input and output may fall short of Cognitive Command as expounded by Wright, but it is surely sufficient to justify the use of the term ‘representation’ in this context, and we can see at least a partial analogy with more elementary representational devices such as cameras, thermometers and so on. What we need to remember, however, is that the height of the tree is not the whole cause of my belief that it has the height that it does, as the MCT reminds us. This leaves room for the Martian scenario, but the latter does not undermine the fact that beliefs about ordinary physical things are representational in the above sense. This applies as much to Martian beliefs (which are also subject to input/output parallelism) as to human ones. Of course, we still have the problem of seeing how we can describe Martian beliefs as representational when, according to us, they
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are mostly false. Surely, we may protest, ‘misrepresentational’ would be a better term! Yet this idea is no more than a direct consequence of our basic point that truth and ideal cognition are not connected in the way that is usually thought. Empirical cognition inevitably has a hazardous and accidental quality about it, since there is no absolute congruence between the information-losing first stage, where the object is encoded into stimulations of the surface of the organism, and the information-gaining second stage, where the stimulations are processed into representations. There is a biological unity, but that is all. Given what we have had to say about the concept of knowledge, it is to be expected that the concept of representation will also require some adjustment in order to accord with our ‘ecological model’. In practice, such adjustments are harmless, and as long as we restrict our attention to human beings, or at least creatures who share our perspective, we may retain appropriately restricted versions of Cognitive Command and the Convergence/Representation Platitude. To share the same perspective is to process incoming data in the same sort of way, and this guarantees localized convergence – which, in practice, is all we are really interested in anyway. After all, the only creatures whose perspective is different, in the sense which concerns us here, are what we call ‘Type 3 aliens’: and they are massively exotic. This may still seem unacceptably strange. Let it be granted that input will only result in representation after it has been conditioned by internal structure, and let it also be granted that there is no metaphysically guaranteed congruence between this structure and the rest of the world. It may be protested, nevertheless, that this is equally true of crude representational devices such as cameras, fax machines, thermometers, speedometers and so on. After all, there must certainly be a massive information loss when the three-dimensional world impinges on their two-dimensional surfaces, a loss that must be made good somehow. Yet could we treat such devices as genuinely representational if they were to get things persistently wrong? Such a situation surely cannot arise; for as long as there is a causally grounded parallelism between input and output of the appropriate kind then, should there apparently be a systematic error in output, our immediate conclusion would be that the device has been wrongly calibrated. And if we find that we cannot recalibrate it appropriately, then we must conclude, by modus tollens, that we never had a genuine representing device to begin with. In short, there can be no difference here between genuinely representing and representing genuinely (i.e. accurately). Now, it may be felt that the same ought to be the case with minds, and it is perhaps this intuition which
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so strongly motivates the Quine-Davidson thesis that massive, irresoluble disagreement is inconsistent with the very conditions of interpretation. Yet, as we have argued extensively in Chapter 3, interpretation is a highly complex matter; and it should not be assimilated to calibration. The thesis that rational opinion must inevitably converge is just an unsustainable dogma. The relationship between world and belief is not much like that between an object and its photograph, or between ambient air temperature and the height of a column of mercury. Martian cameras and thermometers cannot differ all that much from terrestrial ones, since there is just not enough of a causally interesting gap between input and output for geometrical underdetermination, as we call it, to make much of a difference. Not so with their owners. There also remains our original unease, namely that our model leaves everything too ‘far apart’. Not only are aliens distant from ourselves, but both of us are very far removed from reality. We develop our beliefsystems according to principles that derive from what goes on within ourselves, not on what goes on ‘out there’, and so we are left with the residual fear that what is ‘out there’ is beyond our cognitive grasp. We cannot dismiss this fear as wholly the product of a confused attempt to acquire a God’s eye view of matters. On the contrary, it is the direct consequence of how we ourselves formulate our cognitive doctrine. The way forward here is to realize that, oddly enough, everything is actually meant to be ‘far apart’. Our chief philosophical task is not to bring mind and world together somehow, as so many suppose, but rather to cure ourselves of the illusion that this is something which needs to be done. After all, the reason why mind and world are at risk of disharmony derives from the very nature of empirical cognition itself, as we have already observed. This is exactly what motivates and justifies our ecological model of knowledge. Philosophical argument may lead us to conclude that the mind–world relationship presented by this model is not strong enough to sustain genuine cognition; but this conclusion is plainly false. The connection between mind and world offered here may be somewhat hazardous, but that is simply what empirical cognition is. It is also what representation is. It could hardly be otherwise. Of course, we may still wish to be God, and to ‘see’ the world through some kind of direct intellectual intuition, one which logically guarantees a genuine isomorphism between mind and world, a kind of pure representationas-exact-resemblance. Perhaps this wish will never completely go away, even when we can clearly see it for what it is. Nevertheless, the sight of finite creatures, such as ourselves and the Martians, all complaining that we are unaware of what is really going on around us, and simply because
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we are linked to our environment only in the limited, biological way that is actually demanded by the belief-system that we are desperately trying to justify, is comical. So what can we do to cure ourselves of this illusion? In a sense, we know exactly what to do. We should replace all our beliefs and assertions, which originally satisfied the UUP, with reduced versions that satisfy only a restricted version. We thus take ourselves to be speaking only on behalf of creatures cognitively similar to ourselves, as opposed to all logically possible intelligent and sentient creatures. We have argued that failure to restrict the force of our judgements in this way is exactly what leads to sceptical trouble, and that introducing the restriction is exactly what the descent from Mount Olympus consists in. The locality of our perspective is brought into play not by modifying the content of our judgements, a manœuvre which can only distort what we are trying to say, but rather their force. This suggestion is very unusual, of course, and yet we can now see that it is quite obviously right. If our judgements depend for their legitimacy on certain contingent background conditions – and they do – then only creatures subject to similar conditions should be required to agree with them. We should not, like Zeus, try to legislate for all. What else could we possibly conclude? Yet it is one thing to say what we need to do, quite another to say exactly how we are supposed to do it. The problem is twofold. First, the idea is deeply unfamiliar to us, and these modified judgements are of a type that are not yet in current use. And secondly, even if we did get clear about what these alternatives are like, force, unlike sense, is not under our voluntary control. I can alter the meaning of what I say easily enough (I just need to say something different), but how do I alter the force of what I say? Perhaps if I became more explicitly aware that the commitments expressed by what I think and say have this multidimensional structure of force and sense, each of which has levels of strength that can vary independently of each other, then I can train myself in an appropriate way. Nevertheless, it is unclear to what extent basic instincts can be altered by philosophical reflection. The problem lies deep, for the phenomenology of our sensory experience itself lacks any appropriately perspectival ‘feeling’. Our representations, both credal and perceptual, are infused with mentality – intentionality, categorial structure, semantic content and so on – as may be expected, since they are mental states. The world, however, is not so infused and does not appear to be – even when viewed through those same mind-infused representations. When I look at the tree in the quad, for example, it appears to be just there, right in front of my mind. It
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does not, pace Berkeley, appear to be in my mind; nor, pace Kant, does it appear to exhibit any categorial structure isomorphic to the logical form of judgements. Rather, the tree appears to have only ordinary botanical properties, and not any of the semantic-cum-intentional features characteristic of mind and language. However, when I consciously examine the perceptual experience of the tree, I am (usually) conscious only of the tree, and not of the fact of my experiencing the tree, still less of the fact that it is a person with a specific, contingent cognitive constitution interacting with the tree. These contingencies form an essential element in what is going on, and yet I cannot bring them into focus and see how they relate to everything else. In consequence, I do not know how to reduce my beliefs and assertions in the way that epistemology demands of me, since the level to which they should be reduced is constituted precisely by these contingencies. I cannot even intuit the difference between any one such level and any other in any very direct or convincing manner. I am aware of these desiderata in an abstract, intellectual sort of way, of course, but the basic phenomenology still remains unchanged. But perhaps this is to be too pessimistic. Art teachers can alter our visual phenomenology, both in teaching us how to paint and in teaching us how to appreciate art. Some visual art can be understood as leading us to shift our perspective in a slightly uncanny way: we no longer merely see something; rather, we ‘see ourselves seeing it’. Alteration of this kind can be quite profound, even though it may not be exactly what we are looking for; and the important general point is that it shows that phenomenology can sometimes be altered by appropriate teaching. Perhaps, we need not forever be stuck with a bad way of seeing things. Be this as it may, we can still be satisfied, at a more theoretical level, that we have reached the right conclusion. Mind and world have not become dislocated, but rather are very much in touch with each other. This is not because the mind somehow ‘reaches out’ into the world – it manifestly does no such thing – nor vice versa, but because we are connected to our environment in an entirely ordinary and familiar, naturalistic sort of way. These connections derive merely through contingent causal processes, and nothing else. The trick is to realize, when we look at the world, that this really is all that is happening, and all that we ever wanted to be happening.
8.4 Conclusion What, then, are the overall features of our position? It is not without paradox. It owes much to Kant’s TI, and yet leaves us with just one world,
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a world that is uncompromisingly naturalistic and mind-independent. It is very strongly relativist in so far as it legitimizes alternative beliefsystems that are not merely different from, but logically incompatible with our own, and yet it also retains a strong distinction between what people actually think and what they ought to think. It undermines the traditional notion of aiming at truth, and yet it yields a strong defence of the desirability of thinking and saying only what is true. It is also not without casualties, most notably the orthodox concept of knowledge, which is argued to be seriously incoherent. Yet despite its oddities, unfamiliarities and revisionisms, it does leave us with a position that is very close to common sense. The world is more or less as we ordinarily take it to be, and we ourselves are entirely a part of it. We cannot rule out the possibility of intelligent creatures radically different from ourselves, but that possibility should make no difference to us in ordinary circumstances – though the nature and direction of some of our long-term research programmes will need to be rethought. We ought to struggle to represent the world ever more accurately; and, once it is properly understood what it involves, that task is eminently achievable. Ordinary ways of talking can be preserved in most ordinary contexts. At a slightly more abstract level, we may congratulate ourselves that the horrors of radical scepticism have been dealt with once and for all, and without having to pretend that there was never a problem there in the first place. With such outcomes, we should certainly be willing to tolerate a little revisionism.
Notes Introduction 1. See §1.4 for an explanation of these terms. 2. For definitions of the terms ‘grue’ and ‘bleen’, see §2.2.
1
Truth and the norms of assertion
1. This chapter is an expansion of Unwin 2003. 2. Angle brackets indicate propositional content. Thus, ‘
’ should be read as ‘the proposition that p’. 3. See Blackburn and Simmons (eds) 1999 for a useful survey of opinion here. 4. For two important recent studies of this, see Williams 2002 and Lynch 2004b. 5. Horwich 1998, Chapter 8. 6. Though Horwich (1991) himself argues against this. See also §4.1. 7. Bratman 1991, p. 9. 8. At least as far as individual instances of ‘p’ are concerned, the problem of how to generalize is, perhaps, trickier. See pp. 13–16. 9. Wright 1992, pp. 12–32. Wright uses quotation marks rather than angle brackets, but his assumption that truth-bearers are sentences rather than propositions is not important here. 10. Williams 2002, p. 286. The question of whether there is a single norm of truth, however, remains unanswered. 11. To suppose this much surely does not commit us to a seriously controversial sort of moral particularism. 12. Lynch 2004b, pp. 107–16. Lynch formulates (what we call) TN and TN’ slightly differently (see note 13). 13. I owe this formulation to Michael Butler. Lynch also uses a biconditional, but talks of what it is ‘good to believe, other things being equal’. See also the symposium on Lynch 2004b between Lynch (2005), David (2005) and McGrath (2005). 14. This is because ‘O(Bp → p)’ is almost equivalent to ‘PBp → p’, rather as ‘∀x Fx → p’ is equivalent to ‘∃xFx → p’, though deontic logic has additional complications into which we need not enter (‘O’ = ‘It is obligatory that’, ‘P’ = ‘It is permitted that’, ‘B’ = ‘We believe that’). We prefer a reading that gives the deontic operator large scope with respect to the conditional, since it ties in better with the distinction between intensional and extensional versions of TN that we shall introduce in §1.4. Such a reading will not sustain a biconditional, however. 15. Wedgwood 2002, p. 267. Many others have written on this issue as well, for example, Shah 2003. 16. See Unwin 1996a, for a more detailed examination of these problems. 227
228 Notes 17. Velleman 2000, p. 245. We discuss Velleman’s influential analysis in more detail in §4.2. 18. Velleman (2000, pp. 247–50) usefully exposes many of the errors here. 19. At least, according to one sense of ‘aiming’. See §1.4 for further elucidation. 20. van Fraassen 1980. 21. Ellis (1996) argues for this explicitly. See also Putnam 1981, Putnam 1994 and Wright 2000. 22. Wittgenstein 1969, §1. 23. In fact, we shall argue in §4.3 that our commitments have a third dimension of strength as well, namely degree (as understood in subjective theories of probability). 24. Indeed, it may look as though our whole position is incoherent in much the same way in which, for example, Strawson (1966, p. 12 et passim) argues that transcendental idealism is incoherent: that is to say, it could only make sense when seen from a position that the theory itself rules out as unattainable. A standard objection to relativism runs along similar lines (on this, see §7.3). 25. Further elaboration is needed to make the distinction accurate. In particular, the ‘should’ in ETN needs to represent permission, whereas in ITN it needs to represent obligation, an oddity that arises from the original scope ambiguity in TN that we noted in §1.1. However, these complications do not affect the point at issue. Our argument ensures that Martians are not even permitted to assert (what we see is) the truth if that conflicts with their optimal theory of the world. We say more about the ambiguities involved in the idea of aiming in §8.2. 26. Though probabilistic constraints may complicate the matter here, especially if we adopt a subjectivist or Bayesian theory of probability. We shall return to this point in §4.3.
2
Scepticism – and how not to avoid it
1. We follow the terminology in Stern 2000. 2. See, for example, Annas and Barnes (eds) 1985, p. 23. 3. ‘That honey is sweet, I do not affirm; that it appears so I allow’ (Timon, frag. 74 Diels = D.L. 9.105). 4. Hankinson 1998, p. 279. 5. Sextus Empiricus 1949, 1, 203. 6. See Barnes 1982, p. 1. 7. The word ‘therapeutic’ is well placed: the ancient sceptics were mostly doctors by profession. 8. Though, see Walker 1999, pp. 13–29. 9. Hume 1978, I, 3, 12. 10. See, for example, Hume 1975, p. 128. For further comparisons between Hume and the Pyrrhonists, see Burnyeat 1980, pp. 20–53. 11. Ayer 1972, p. 67. 12. Strawson 1952, pp. 261–2. 13. Ibid., p. 249. 14. Ibid., p. 262. 15. BonJour, 1992, p. 393.
Notes 229 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.
22. 23.
24. 25. 26.
27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.
35. 36. 37.
See also §4.3. See, for example, Walker 1999. Goodman 1983. Blackburn 1974, pp. 68ff. For a comprehensive survey of responses to Goodman’s paradox, see Stalker (ed.) 1994. This has been disputed, of course, and some, such as Sober (2002), have argued in detail that simplicity as a guide to hypotheses can be given a much more direct justification. However, such arguments make essential use of Bayesian probabilistic reasoning, and we shall show, in §4.3, that this is only acceptable within a set of basic cognitive assumptions. Although such reasoning still achieves much that is valuable, it cannot be used to show our objective superiority over grue-users, or that what we find simple is more ‘world-directed’, in any useful sense, than what they find simple. See, in particular, Quine 1960 and Duhem 1954. van Fraassen 1980. More detailed examination of the move from underdetermination to scepticism can be found in Yalçin 1992, Brueckner 1994, Cohen 1998 and Vogel 2004. See, for example, Lipton 1991. See Ladyman 2000 for more on this contrast. Non-total theories are less obviously underdetermined by data in any relevant way, if only because other non-total theories can be invoked to provide important constraints. On this, see Okasha 2002. See, for example, Newton-Smith 1981, pp. 19–39. Kant 1996, A51/B56. Putnam 1994. See also Wright 2000. Quine 1960, p. 5. For his views about the apparently relativist implications of UTD, see Quine 1975, 1984. Quine 1981, p. 40. See, for example, Quine 1974, p. 2, and Quine 1995. Quine 1981, pp. 29–30. Quine attributes this suggestion to Davidson. Quine’s claim that two logically incompatible sentences can both be true is itself an indication of how strange it is to suppose that it is sentences, rather than the propositions that they express, which are true or false. Common sense, following Aquinas, says that if two items (sentences, propositions or whatever) are both true, then they cannot really be logically incompatible, however it may seem. ‘Imagination and the Self’, in Williams 1973, pp. 26–45. Foster 1982, pp. 183ff. Though science fiction has suggested otherwise. The film, The Matrix, does not really count, since there are empirical discrepancies involved. The religion (‘The Truth’) expounded by Banks (2004, pp. 247–9) is more relevant here. For a more sober philosophical defence of a related position, see Bostrom 2003, where it is argued impressively that it is highly probable that we really are living in a computer simulation. However, the belief-system suggested here is surely too parasitic on our ordinary one for it to count as a fundamental divergence of the kind that interests us.
230 Notes 38. As is well pointed out by Rosenberg (2002, pp. 55–6). He goes on to develop a robust defence of Moore’s anti-scepticism. 39. Davidson 1984a, p. 11. 40. For a trenchant critique of Davidson, see Quine 1981, pp. 38–42. 41. See Lau 2004, for example, for a very useful account, including a survey of the recent literature. 42. Putnam 1975, p. 227. Putnam does not explicitly mention Locke here, though he is historically the obvious target. For a partial defence of Locke against Putnam, see Unwin 1996b. 43. Putnam 1981, pp. 1–81. 44. Though it is interesting to note that he did believe in extra-terrestrial intelligence, and, indeed, for a time supposed that the inhabitants of the outer planets were more intelligent than ourselves. See Kant 1996, A828/B853; and also Lamb 2001, p. 9. 45. Stroud 1968. See also Stern 2000 and Stern (ed.) 1999. 46. See, for example, Walker 1978, pp. 122–35. 47. For further development of this point, see Strawson 1985, pp. 14–21. 48. See, for example, Papineau 1987, pp. 11–12.
3
Cognitive contingency
1. See, for example, Hollis and Lukes (eds) 1982, Krausz (ed.) 1989 and Swoyer 2003. 2. Whorf 1956. 3. See, for example, Dawkins 1991, pp. 77–109. 4. Locke 1975, III, vi, 36. 5. Foucault 1970, p. xv. The original source is Borges 1993. 6. This is the final sentence of his Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity, the precursor of Wiggins 1980, now out of print. However, Wiggins’s ‘conceptualism’ is nowhere near as radical as mine. 7. This is argued for by Wiggins (1980, pp. 129–46), though he does not allow that there could be substances as eccentric as ‘Q-straydogs’. For a critique of Wiggins, and further development of the position defended here, see Unwin 1984. 8. Davidson 1984a, pp. 193–8. 9. Rorty 1979, p. 78. See also Papineau 1987, pp. 18–22. Davidson later softened his views on this (see §3.4). 10. On Lewis’s model, each set of possible worlds X is identified with the proposition that the actual world belongs to X. (For our purposes, it is unnecessary that they actually be identified: it is sufficient that, for each X, such an associated proposition exists.) This is controversial in so far as it may not be possible to specify the contents of X within our language. We make Platonist assumptions about sets in supposing that such an X may exist anyway, and also in deriving the theorem, due to Cantor, that the set of all subsets of an infinite set is non-denumerable, that is ‘too large’ to be mapped one-to-one into the set of natural numbers. Condition (b) follows because the set of all finite sentences constructible from a finite vocabulary (e.g. English) is denumerable, and so must form a proper subset of any non-denumerable set.
Notes 231 11. Rorty 1989, pp. 3–22. 12. ‘Philosophy as Science, as Metaphor, and as Politics’, in Rorty 1991, pp. 9–26 at 11–12. 13. As is depicted, for example, in the classic children’s book Animal Lore and Disorder (Riddell 1952), where the pages are horizontally cut in two, thus enabling readers to construct pictures of hybrid animals with appropriately mixed names (such as ‘torgaroo’ and ‘rhinotoise’) written vertically down the page. It may be suspected that our set-theoretic constructions, alas, are not much more sophisticated than this. 14. See, for example, Davidson 1984b, pp. 125–39, and Papineau 1987, pp. 14–39. 15. Quine 1960, 1970. 16. He later adopts a more moderate view: ‘minimizing disagreement or maximizing agreement, is a confused ideal. The aim of interpretation is not agreement but understanding. My point has always been that understanding can be secured only by interpreting in a way that makes for the right sort of agreement’ (Davidson 1984c, p. xvii). I am grateful to both Palgrave referees for drawing my attention to this. 17. Papineau 1987, pp. 32–3. 18. Ibid., p. 36. The term ‘humanitarian strategy’ comes from Grandy 1973. 19. Except, perhaps, in a derivative, counterfactual sense (e.g. this is how we would maximize truth if we were to imagine ourselves to be aliens). 20. Davidson 1980, p. 231. 21. See also our discussion at the end of Chapter 7. 22. See, for example, Collingwood 1983, ‘Epilegomena’. 23. For example, A.D. Smith (2002, pp. 94–121) provides a recent and very powerful critique of the assumption that perception per se requires the exercise of concepts. 24. This is not quite the same as saying that these perceptions have no intentional objects. See Smith 2002, pp. 230–67. 25. See, in particular, Wittgenstein 1972, §§138–243. 26. The idea goes back at least as far as the Cyrenaics. See also Locke 1975, II, xxxii, 15. For contemporary treatments, see, for example, Hardin 1988, pp. 134–54, Dennett 1992, pp. 389–98, and Nida-Rümelin 1996. 27. For example, Dilman 1973, pp. 209–73. 28. Of course, it might be that it is their memories, not their perceptions, that have been altered, as Dennett suggests. But we are not forced to suppose this. For example, if the manipulation is only of the eyes, or of what our best neurophysiological theories tell us is the purely sensory (as opposed to the memory) parts of the brain, then we still have good, though (of course) defeasible, empirical evidence in favour of qualia reversal as opposed to memory adjustment. This is sufficient. Indeed, it has been argued (for example, in Nida-Rümelin 1996) that certain people might really have red– green inverted qualia (‘pseudo-normal vision’), though the empirical evidence is complex, and its significance controversial. 29. There are, of course, alternative solutions, for example, those which make use of dispositional or response-dependent theories of various kinds. However, such theories all involve the manipulation of semantic content, and ignore
232 Notes the fundamental simplicity of colour language. Our view recognizes that the aliens’ claim that X is green really does contradict our claim that X is red – and in a straightforward, immediate sort of way, just as it appears to do. Despite this, our view also recognizes that all parties are claiming exactly what they ought to be claiming – that is to say, everyone is still ‘getting things right’ in an appropriate sense. This, surely, is exactly what we want. 30. Another line of objection is that systematic falsehood undermines intrinsic functional qualities of belief, notably world-to-mind ‘direction of fit’. We shall return to this issue in §5.2. 31. Strawson 1959, pp. 103–5.
4
Belief and acceptance
1. Indeed, even within QM itself, with its notorious principle of the wave– particle duality of light, considerable contextualization is arguably still required; and this largely motivates the ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’, which insists that QM should not be understood as yielding a model of reality, that is, does not aim at truth at all. 2. See, for example, van Fraassen 1980, p. 12. 3. See also Psillos 1999, pp. 200f. 4. Horwich 1991, p. 4. 5. Horwich (1991, pp. 10–13) agrees that arguments of this kind would indeed be relevant if they were sound – but he argues that they are not. 6. Cohen 1992, p. 92. 7. Ibid., p. 89. 8. Ibid., p. 5. 9. On this point, see Clarke 1994, pp. 149–50. 10. For an opposing view, see Clarke 1994, p. 150. 11. Though Cohen (1992, pp. 73–9) does not agree with this. Indeed, he insists that belief and acceptance, as he construes them, exhaust the genus altogether. However, the sheer diversity of opinion concerning the concept of acceptance and its relation to that of belief suggests that matters are more complicated than this. Moreover, we need to remember that significantly different problems are understood in the literature to underlie ‘the’ distinction here. To see this, simply compare the writings of, inter alia, Bratman, Clarke, Cohen, Maher, Percival, Stalnaker and van Fraassen. We could, of course, infer from this diversity that most of these authors are just getting things wrong, but it would surely be more reasonable to conclude that we have many different concepts here. 12. James 1956, pp. 4–5. 13. Williams 1973, pp. 136–51. It is here, I think, that the phrase ‘belief aims at truth’ first appeared. 14. Williams 1973, p. 148. 15. See, for example, Montmarquet 1986, Humberstone 1992, M.T. Walker 1996, 2001, and Noordhof 2001. 16. Anscombe 1963, §32.
Notes 233 17. Aristotle 2002, Book I. The position argued for is that what is good for man (and the difference between a good man and a bad one) must depend on man’s function (ergon). 18. Noordhof 2001, p. 249. His own view is that we are just psychologically unable to believe what we see to be false. However, although that may be true of what is right in front of us, relatively few of our beliefs are of this type. We shall return to this point in Chapter 6. 19. I am grateful to a Palgrave referee for pointing out this line of objection. 20. Velleman 2000, p. 253. 21. Ibid. He develops the point further at pp. 184–8. See also Wedgwood 2002. 22. E.g. Noordhof (2001). Bennett (1990) suggests that Williams also relies on this to some extent. 23. Hume 1978, pp. 1, 4, 7, 11. 24. We have already mentioned, of course, that genuine belief can eventually come about as a result of voluntary manipulation, albeit of a devious kind, and much has been written by psychologists and political theorists (among others) on this matter. Pascal’s wager is a standard example discussed in this context. See, for example, Elster 1983 for an influential account of how the will can undermine ordinary rationality. 25. For a proof of this theorem, and a more thorough account of subjective theories, see Gillies 2000, pp. 53–64. 26. Cohen 1992, pp. 108–16. 27. Bayes’ theorem states that p(HE) = p(EH).p(H)/p(E). Given that p(HE) is typically defined as p(H & E)/p(E) (where p(E) = 0), the result is immediate. More advanced theorems are discussed in this context by Glymour (1996) following Savage (1972, p. 49). See also Joyce 2003 and Howson and Urbach 1994 for good accounts of what it is to follow Bayesian rules. 28. Of course, many other problems are involved as well, but most of them are independent of our main concerns. We are not required to decide here whether or not to be Bayesians.
5 Belief and knowledge 1. Williamson 2000, p. 207. 2. Ibid., p. 190. 3. It may well be that not all knowledge is of this form. For example, Ernest Sosa argues for a two-tier system, and distinguishes between animal knowledge (cognitio) and reflective knowledge (scientia). Nevertheless, an account which just ignores the latter is plainly inadequate. See Greco (ed.) 2004 for a good discussion of these issues. 4. See Geach 1965. Cameron (1997) investigates the significance of the problem in this area. 5. See, for example, Craig 1990, p. 45. 6. For a useful overview, see Steup 2001. See also DeRose and Warfield (eds) 1999, Williamson 2000, pp. 147–63, and Greco (ed.) 2004. 7. See, for example, Papineau 1987, pp. 63–89, for a qualified version of this idea.
234 Notes 8. Reliabilist theories emphasize the importance of these connections, though in a way that typically involves truth-conduciveness. However, what Sosa calls ‘animal knowledge’ (cognitio) could also reasonably be attributed to (non-human) animals placed in an A2 environment. We noted in §3.5 that non-conceptual content can be ‘wrong’, even if not strictly ‘false’, and yet such animals can still make basic discriminations that will satisfy many counterfactual tests. This suggests that cognitio can be given a more general analysis that does not include veridicality in any sense, propositional or otherwise. On the importance of non-propositional knowledge, see also McGinn 1999 and Kornblith 2002. 9. It might be wondered whether ‘A knows that p’ even entails ‘WA p’, since the latter seems to concern an investigative limit that may be very far away. It depends on how the notion of ideality is to be construed. Wright’s (1992, pp. 44–70) notion of ‘superassertibility’ (which makes essential use of the idea of undefeasibility by any further evidence) is appropriate here, though it needs, of course, to be relativized. Pace Wright, such a notion cannot be treated as a truth-predicate, as the following argument shows. That it might nevertheless constitute a relativized truth-predicate, in some sense or other, is an idea that we shall explore further in §7.1. 10. More generally, ‘WA WA p ↔ p’ should be logically valid, for any A. 11. ‘Bp’ here means ‘A believes that p’. This theorem is significant since it shows that Moore’s paradox of infallibility does not wholly arise from a confusion between logical and pragmatic impossibility (on this, see Hintikka 1962, pp. 4–71). It should not be used to explain the fact that belief aims at truth, however, for the result remains plausible even if ‘Bp’ is read instead as ‘A accepts that p’, or even as ‘A imagines that p’. 12. See also Unwin [forthcoming] for further discussion of how the difference between psychological and parenthetical uses of ‘believe’ relates to rigid and indexical uses of ‘I’. 13. It can also be understood as a ‘God’s eye view’, a ‘view from nowhere’ or a ‘neutral perspective’ (i.e. a sort of ‘perspectiveless perspective’). The identification of God with the transcendental ego may sound perverse, but if God is understood as the ultimate non-partisan or ideal observer, then we can see how the assimilation comes about. See also Unwin [forthcoming].
6
Pragmatism and the value of truth 1. Or, indeed, anywhere else – as far as I know. 2. See, for example, Rorty’s reply to Dennett and Bilgrami, in Brandom 2001, pp. 106–7. 3. Rorty 1998, p. 19. 4. Rorty 2002. 5. Hume 1978, p. 415. 6. Velleman 2000, pp. 256–71. 7. Cohen 1992, pp. 49–53. 8. On this, see Bilgrami 2001, p. 260. 9. Velleman 2000, p. 280.
Notes 235
7 Relativism and the limits of conversability 1. For useful surveys of opinion on this matter, see Swoyer 2003 and Krausz (ed.) 1989. 2. This is contrary to the view defended in Unwin 1987, where the idea that truth could be understood as a property of speech-acts was developed more fully. 3. Williams 2002, p. 5 et passim. 4. Such people are not themselves relativists, of course, but that does not affect the point. 5. For further development of this idea, see Unwin 1985. 6. ‘The Chief Mourner of Marne’, in Chesterton 1981, p. 583. 7. For further development of this point, see Unwin 1996c. 8. Though some residual conflict may be desirable, as we noted in §6.3. 9. Alternatively, we may apply the term only to cases where we appear, at first sight, to have incompatibility, but, upon re-examination, turn out to have incomparability. This could only yield a very weak and anodyne sort of relativism, however. 10. Though Lynch (2001) attempts this in some considerable detail. 11. Quine 1975, pp. 327–8. See also Boghossian 2001. 12. Though it too can mean several things.
8 Mind, world and realism 1. I shall use the terms ‘anti-realism’ and ‘anti-realist’ simply as the antonyms of ‘realism’ and ‘realist’. 2. Papineau (ed. 1996, pp. 2–6) is very helpful on this issue. 3. For an alternative view, see Langton 1998. Although she argues that the unknowability of things in themselves proves the need for epistemic humility rather than idealism, which is similar to our own view, we differ from Langton in two ways. First, we disagree that only relational properties are knowable. Even though all empirical knowledge is ultimately receptive, as long as non-relational properties provide the best explanation of our perceptual experience, then that, as far as we are concerned, ensures that we know that they are instantiated (given our qualifications about what is meant by knowledge). Secondly, we insist that the ways in which objects appear to be spatiotemporally distributed (or even whether there appear to be any such objects at all) is also partly a product of our particular mentality. Although Langton argues (pp. 210–18) that her interpretation is consistent with Kant’s thesis that space and time are ideal, they remain so only in a rather weak sense, arguably considerably weaker than the sense expounded in the Transcendental Aesthetic. After all, it is not enough that space and time be ideal entities. All spatiotemporal properties (including geometrical relations between objects’ components) must also be ideal for Kant, which ensures that virtually all empirical properties, relational or otherwise, become idealized. 4. Moreover, they must be seriously different. Putnam (1989, p. 74) considers two articulations of a given world: on one view, it consists of just three
236 Notes
5.
6. 7. 8.
9. 10.
11.
12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.
objects x1 , x2 , x3 ; one the other, it consists of seven, namely x1 , x2 , x3 , x1 + x2 , x2 + x3 , x3 + x1 , x1 + x2 + x3 , where ‘+’ denotes the mereological sum. Differences of opinion over whether such summed objects really exist are just not important enough to fragment reality in any relevant sense, and Putnam is just wrong if he thinks that all such differences must be of this character. For a development of the idea that Goodman-style plural worlds can be understood as supervenient on a single physicalist basis (and hence not plural in the strong sense that concerns us), see Post 1987. Putnam 1981, pp. 49–50 (original emphasis). John McDowell (1994) develops a view along these lines. Misak 2004, pp. 127–8. She refers to Tarski’s theory of truth rather than to ES, but the point is the same. Hookway (2002, pp. 44–107) argues along similar lines. It is evidently meant to be true; and it would be very odd to regard it as a contingent truth of some kind (in which possible worlds would it be false?). Likewise, we do not need a pragmatist theory of truth to explain why our inquiries are worth pursuing in the first place; nor could it provide one without an obvious circularity. On the conception of inquiry without truth, and how it relates to Peirce’s approach to knowledge, see Rosenberg 2002, pp. 202–48. On the question of underdetermination and convergence, see also Magnus 2005. Moreover, since the ETN norm is actually too strong, even though we only need a minimalist conception of truth in order to formulate it, this argues further, and surely decisively, against the claim that truth cannot be both normative, in a suitably effective sense, and also minimalist. This point may be used against Lynch (2004b) as well as Peirceans and internal realists. See, for example, Walker 1989. Likewise, it is often said, in discussions of utilitarianism, that the best way to acquire happiness is precisely not to aim at it directly. Though our point about the secondary use of ‘true’ to indicate full assertoric force when said emphatically complicates the picture somewhat. See Nagel 1986. See Williams 1985, pp. 132–55. Wright 1992, p. 92. Ibid., pp. 92–3.
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Index
A*, see accept* A**, see accept** A***, see accept*** abduction, see Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) ABP, see autonomy of belief principle (ABP) accept*, 111–12, 115, 125–6 accept**, 125, 137 accept***, 137 acceptance pragmatic, see pragmatic, acceptance versus belief, definition of, 10, 108–37 alien, definitions of, 4, 74–8, 105–6 see also Type 3 alien; grue-user; Martian alienity, principle of, 93 amplified theory of the world (ATW), 97, 150 animal knowledge (cognitio), 233, 234 Annas, Julia, 228, 237 anomalousness of the mental, principle of the, 95 Anscombe, G.E.M., 119, 237 anti-realism, see realism apangelia, 39–40 Aquinas, St Thomas, 229 Aristotle, 78, 90, 120, 237 Arnauld, Antoine, 146 Arnold, Matthew, 220 assertion, 8–37, 39–42, 164, 176, 178–80, 185, 188, 191, 192, 217, 224–5, 238 attitude-reduction, 29, 97, 100, 103, 153, 201–2 see also universality principle (UP), restricted (RUP) ATW, see amplified theory of the world (ATW)
Austin, J.L., 32, 55, 142, 237 autonomy of belief principle (ABP), 170–7, 182 Ayer, A.J., 43, 237 Banks, Iain M., 229, 237 Barnes, Jonathan, 237, 241 Barrett, Robert, 237, 241 basic theory of the world (BTW), 96, 150 Bayesian theory of probability, 130, 135, 229, 233, 238, 239 Bennett, Jonathan, 118, 121, 233, 237 Bergström, Lars, 237 Berkeley, George, 203–6, 211, 225 Berlin, Isaiah, 183 Bilgrami, Akeel, 234, 237 Bird, Alexander, ix Blackburn, Simon, ix, 48, 227, 229, 237 bleen, 4, 48, 82–3, 88, 227 see also grue Boghossian, Paul, 235, 237 BonJour, Laurence, 45, 228, 237 Borges, Jorge Luis, 79, 81, 230, 237 Bostrom, Nick, 229, 237 brain-in-a-vat, 60–1, 67, 100, 159 Brandom, Robert B., 234, 237 Bratman, Michael E., 10, 36, 109, 227, 232, 237 BTW, see basic theory of the world (BTW) Burnyeat, M.F., 228, 237, 241 Butler, Michael, 227 Cameron, J.R., 142–3, 237 Cantor, Georg, 230 Cartesian Circle, 146 Cartesian skepticism, see Descartes, René; epistemic scepticism; malin génie CE, see constructive empiricism (CE) 244
Index 245 charity, principle of, 59, 66, 92–3, 104 Chesterton, G.K., 191, 192, 237 Clark, P., 240 Clarke, D.S., 232, 237 cognitio, see animal knowledge (cognitio) cognitive contingency, 26–8, 30, 74–107, 136, 154, 197, 214, 221 Cohen, L. Jonathan, 36, 114–17, 131–2, 175–7, 232, 233, 234, 238 Cohen, Stewart, 229, 238 coherence theory of justification, 166, 199, 216–17, 242 coherence theory of truth, 9, 74, 216–17 Collingwood, R.G., 231, 238 conceptual scheme, 85–91, 99, 185, 238 constructive empiricism (CE), 21–3, 51, 54, 110, 114, 203–4, 217–19, 239 see also van Fraassen, Bas C. content-externalism, 57, 63–8, 70, 134, 141–2, 145, 212 context-dependence/independence, 5, 10–11, 109–14, 124, 127–8, 130, 136–7, 141–2, 148, 160–1, 163, 173, 181–2 conversability, 6, 163–4, 183, 194–7 Copernicus, Nicolas, 114 Craig, E.J., 233, 238 Cyrenaics, 231 Dancy, Jonathan, 237, 238 David, Marian, 227, 238 Davidson, Donald, 4, 62, 85–8, 92, 95–6, 104, 135, 223, 229, 230, 231, 237, 238, 241 Dawkins, Richard, 230, 238 de Finetti, Bruno, 131 deflationism, 8–9, 12–16, 20, 210 see also equivalence schema (ES) degrees of belief, 5, 130–6 Dennett, Daniel, 231, 234, 238 DeRose, Keith, 233, 238 Descartes, René, 38, 63, 146, 150, 238 desire, 119, 166–77 Dewey, John, 55, 163 Diels, H., 228, 238
˙ Dilman, Ilham, 231, 238 direction of fit, 17, 35, 117, 119, 124, 151, 232 Dodd, Julian, ix, 13 Duhem, Pierre, 51, 53, 76, 229, 238 Dummett, Michael, 187, 238 Duncan-Jones, Austin, 142, 238 Dutch book, 131 E = K, 140–2 ecological model, 5, 106, 138, 144–56, 159, 161, 188, 222, 223 EDF, see extensional, direction of fit (EDF) Ellis, Brian, 23, 24, 204, 205, 228, 238 Elster, John, 233, 238 empirical adequacy, 21, 23, 29, 35, 50, 51–2, 110–11, 113–16, 126, 146–7, 177, 216, 218 empirical equivalence, 22, 23, 26, 51–3, 58–60, 113, 139, 145, 173, 199 empirically equivalent world, 23, 33, 35, 145 epistemic scepticism, 38, 71, 138 equivalence schema (ES), 8–9, 12–15, 20, 23, 24, 25, 27, 186, 188, 210–14, 218, 236 ergon, 120, 233 ES, see equivalence schema (ES) essence, 63, 78–81, 83, 159–60, 199 ETN, see extensional, truth norm evidence, 10, 24–5, 27, 34, 38, 40, 45, 51–2, 56–7, 62, 64, 67–8, 133–5, 140–2, 164, 192 extensional aim, 3, 31–7, 113, 125, 147–8, 162, 169, 174, 215–16 belief, 38, 139 direction of fit (EDF), 151 truth norm (ITN), 31–7, 109, 113, 215, 227, 228, 236 externalist, see content-externalism Fogelin, Robert J., 143, 238 Foster, John, 60, 229, 238 Foucault, Michel, 79, 230, 238 Frege, Gottlob, 20, 143, 204
246 Index Galileo Galilei, 114, 115 Geach, P.T., 143, 233, 238 general theory of relativity (GTR), 110, 115 geometrical underdetermination, 57–63, 99, 103, 140, 145, 223 see also underdetermination (UTD) Gettier, Edmund, 138, 143, 146, 154, 238 Gibson, Roger, 237 Gillies, Donald, 233, 238 Glymour, Clark, 135, 233, 238 God, 26, 37, 128, 129, 146, 147, 219, 234 see also God’s eye view God’s eye view, 26, 34, 36, 152, 155, 157, 159, 211, 219, 223, 234 see also God Goodman, Nelson, 48, 51, 78, 207, 229, 236, 239 Goodman’s paradox, see Goodman, Nelson; grue Grandy, R., 231, 239 Greco, John, 233, 239 grue, 4, 34, 48–50, 66, 78, 82–4, 88, 100, 160, 227 see also grue-user grue-user, 26–7, 36, 42, 48–50, 52, 61, 69, 74, 78, 82–4, 91, 130, 134–6, 145, 190, 229 see also grue; Martian; Type 3 alien GTR, see general theory of relativity (GTR) Hankinson, R.J., 39, 228, 239 Hardin, C.L., 231, 239 Heal, Jane, 13, 239 Hegel, G.W.F., 71 Heidegger, Martin, 90 Hempel, Carl G., 51 Hintikka, Jaakko, 234, 239 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The, 91 Hollis, Martin, 230, 239 Holton, Richard, ix Hookway, Christopher, 236, 239 Hopi Indians, 75, 85 Horwich, Paul, 9–10, 14, 111, 113, 227, 232, 239
Howson, C., 233, 239 humanity, principle of, 93, 231 Humberstone, I.L., 232, 239 Hume, David, 31, 42–5, 47, 50, 62, 65, 72, 128–30, 161, 167, 169–70, 203, 205, 228, 233, 234, 239 Hylas, 41 IBE, see Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) IBP, see inertness of belief principle (IBP) IDF, see intensional, direction of fit (IDF) incommensurability, 75, 81, 88, 91, 201–2, 207 induction, 3, 42–50, 51–2, 71, 129–30, 133, 135, 139, 156, 160 new riddle of, see Goodman, Nelson; grue pragmatic solution to the problem of, 45–7, 71, 129–30, 139, 162 theoretical, see Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) inertness of belief principle (IBP), 169–70 Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE), 52, 218 intensional aim, 3, 31–7, 109, 113, 137, 147–9, 162, 163, 169, 173–4, 177, 215–17 belief, 31 direction of fit (IDF), 151 truth norm (ITN), 31–7, 113, 215, 227, 228 internal realism, see realism, internal Inuit, 88 ITN, see intensional, truth norm (ITN) James, William, 117, 119, 129, 163, 232, 239 Joyce, James, 233, 239 justificatory scepticism, 38–9, 71, 138 Kant, Immanuel, 6, 42, 54–5, 68–71, 82, 98, 156–9, 168, 183, 203, 205–10, 221, 225, 229, 230, 235, 239
Index 247 Keuzenkamp, H., 241 knowledge, 5, 9, 35, 38–9, 42, 51, 54, 57, 64, 68, 70–1, 106, 138–61, 188, 205, 208, 222–3, 226, 233–4, 235 Kornblith, Hilary, 234, 239 Krausz, Michael, 230, 235, 239, 241 Kripke, Saul, 47 Kuhn, Thomas, 69, 74–5, 85, 86, 88, 207, 239 Ladyman, James, 229, 239 Lamb, David, 230, 239 Langton, Rae, 235, 239 Lau, Joe, 230, 240 Lewis, David, 89–90, 230 Linnæan model, 79 Lipton, Peter, 229, 240 Locke, John, 63, 78–9, 136, 230, 231, 240 Lukes, Steven, 230, 239 Lynch, Michael P., 14–15, 19, 34, 182, 227, 235, 236, 240 McAller, M., 241 McDowell, John, 236, 240 McGinn, Colin, 234, 240 Magnus, P.D., 236, 240 malignant demon, see malin génie malin génie, 38, 61 Mark, St, 178, 182 Martian, 6, 26–36, 39, 42, 55, 69–70, 74, 79, 133, 145–6, 150, 152, 159, 190, 206, 208, 215, 219, 221, 223, 228 see also grue-user; Type 3 alien mathematical attitude, 90 Matrix, The, 159, 229 MCT, see mind contribution thesis (MCT) metaphor, 90 metaphysical realism/anti-realism, see realism, metaphysical methodological realism/anti-realism, see realism, methodological mind contribution thesis (MCT), 205, 207–10, 221 minimalism about truth, see deflationism
Misak, Cheryl, 213, 236, 240 Montmarquet, James, 232, 240 Moore, G.E., 47, 61, 230, 234 Nagel, Thomas, 29–30, 236, 240 Newton, Isaac, 53, 75, 78, 90 Newton-Smith, W.H., 229, 240 Nida-Rümelin, Martine, 231, 240 non-conceptual content, 99 Noordhof, Paul, 120, 232, 233, 240 Okasha, Samir, 229, 240 Olympian standpoint, 26, 36, 152, 217–25 see also God’s eye view Orwellian nightmare, 178, 182 Papineau, David, 92–3, 230, 231, 233, 235, 240 paradox of infallibility, 47, 234 Pascal’s wager, 117, 129, 233 pathos, 40 Paul, St, 157 Peirce, C.S., 24, 152, 163, 199, 213–14, 236, 240 Percival, Philip, 232, 240 Philonous, 41 Plato, 78, 89, 168, 170, 171, 183, 230 Plutonian, 181–2 post-alethic world, 176, 182 Post, John F., 236, 240 post-metaphysical world, 165, 182 postmodernism, 7, 186, 189–91, 201 practical reason, 5, 169, 171–3, 184 pragmatic acceptance, 71, 124, 127, 130, 148, 162–84, 217 consideration, 22, 26–7, 29, 49, 59–60, 94, 113–14, 128, 135, 139–40, 147, 160, 162–84, 218 contradiction, 71, 143, 152–4, 188, 234 justification of induction, see induction, pragmatic solution to the problem of pragmatism, 5, 24–5, 36, 162–84 pragmatist theory of truth, 9, 163, 213–15, 236
248 Index Price, Huw, 24–5, 27, 28, 33, 164, 192, 195–7, 240 private language argument, 103 probability, 5, 45, 130–6 Psillos, Stathis, 232, 240 Putnam, Hilary, 23, 36, 55, 63, 67, 203–5, 211–13, 228, 229, 230, 235, 236, 241 Pyrrhonist, 38–43, 72 QM, see quantum mechanics qualia, 101–3, 231 quantum mechanics, 110, 115, 232 Quine, W.V., 3, 22, 26, 51–9, 76, 82, 92, 104, 135, 157, 165–6, 223, 229, 230, 231, 235, 241 Rachwał, Tadeusz, 242 radical interpretation, 59, 91–8, 101, 104 see also conceptual scheme Ramsey, F.P., 131 Ramsey-de Finetti theorem, 131 Reagan, Ronald, 179–80 realism, 6, 12, 36, 51, 54, 66, 78, 133, 164, 187, 203–26, 235 internal, 22–4, 204–5, 211–17, 236 metaphysical, 55, 204, 205–17 methodological, 114, 204, 217–19 reflective knowledge, 141 Reichenbach, Hans, 53 relativism, 6, 49, 58, 74–5, 97, 152, 185–202, 203, 226, 228, 229, 235 representation, 6, 35, 150, 164, 168, 177, 206, 210–11, 213, 217–25 restricted universality principle, see universality principle (UP), restricted (RUP) restriction level, 135, 137, 202 Riddell, James, 231, 241 Rorty, Richard, 5, 25, 90, 162–9, 182, 195–7, 201, 230, 231, 234, 241 Rosenberg, Jay F., 142–4, 230, 236, 241 RUP, see universality principle (UP), restricted (RUP) Sapir, Edward, 75 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, 75
Savage, L., 233, 241 scepticism, 2, 3–5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 21–6, 33, 36, 38–73, 74, 81, 100, 108, 113, 116, 127–30, 133, 138, 140–2, 146, 148, 151–5, 158–62, 190, 199–200, 203, 207, 214, 224, 226, 228, 229, 230 see also epistemic scepticism; justificatory scepticism scheme–content distinction, 62, 86 Schofield, Malcolm, 237, 241 scientia, see reflective knowledge self-deception, 6, 18, 128, 178–9 Sextus Empiricus, 39, 228, 241 Shah, Nishi, 227, 241 Shakespeare, William, 90 Simmons, Keith, 227, 237 simplicity, 22, 26, 49, 60, 94, 113, 127, 139–40, 174, 229 Sławek, Tadeusz, 242 Smith, A.D., 231, 241 Sober, Elliott, 229, 241 Sosa, Ernest, 233, 234 special theory of relativity (STR), 110, 115 Stalker, Douglas, 229, 241 Stalnaker, Robert C., 232, 241 Star Trek, 91 Stern-Gillet, Suzanne, 242 Stern, Robert, 45, 71, 228, 230, 242 Steup, Matthias, 233, 242 Stevenson, Leslie, ix, 242 STR, see special theory of relativity (STR) Strawson, P.F., 44–5, 106, 228, 230, 232, 242 strong sceptic, 41 Stroud, Barry, 70, 156, 230, 242 super-adult, 30 superassertibility, 234 supervenience, 62, 88, 134, 236 Swoyer, Chris, 230, 235, 242 Tarski, Alfred, 236 theoretical induction, see Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) theory versus observation, 54–5, 126–7 Thiel, Udo, 242
Index 249 TI, see transcendental, idealism (TI) Timon, 228 TN, see truth norm (TN) TN , 11–12, 14, 21, 227 TN , 16 tolerance, 6, 191–7 transcendental, 33, 173, 213 aesthetic, 235 arguments, 68–73, 85, 138, 156–60, 174, 196, 199 ego, 153–4, 188, 234 idealism (TI), 70, 205–11, 213, 215, 225, 228 psychology, 157 truth norm (TN), 9, 11–17, 19, 21–31, 111, 113, 119–20, 123, 125–6, 164, 214–15, 227, 228 see also extensional, truth norm (ITN); intensional, truth norm (ITN); TN ; TN Type 3 alien, 106, 136, 202, 222 see also grue-user; Martian Ullian, J.S., 165, 241 underdetermination (UTD), 3, 22–4, 30, 42, 50–62, 63, 76, 99–100, 103, 113, 114, 126, 134, 140, 217, 221, 223, 229, 236 see also geometrical underdetermination universality principle (UP), 25, 27, 33, 133, 137, 164, 192, 194 restricted (RUP), 26–7, 36, 109, 133, 137, 148, 194, 199–200, 214, 224 unrestricted (UUP), 26–8, 31, 33, 36, 133, 135, 156, 189, 215, 224 unrestricted universality principle, see universality principle (UP), unrestricted (UUP) Unwin, Nicholas, 227, 230, 234, 235, 242 UP, see universality principle (UP) Urbach, P., 233, 239 Urmson, J.O., 154, 242
UTD, see underdetermination (UTD) UUP, see universality principle, unrestricted (UUP) van Fraassen, Bas C., 21–2, 29, 51, 53, 54, 110–11, 113–16, 126, 203–4, 217–19, 228, 229, 232, 242 see also constructive empiricism (CE) Vázquez, Lilia Graciela, 237 Velleman, J. David, 18–19, 122, 175, 179–80, 228, 233, 234, 242 verification principle, 52–3, 86, 89, 106, 187 Vogel, Jonathan, 229, 242 Voltaire, 193 voluntariness, 3, 5, 109, 117–30, 131–2, 136–7, 172, 175–6, 181, 233 Walker, M.T., 232, 242 Walker, Ralph C.S., ix, 228, 230, 236, 242 Warfield, Ted A., 233, 238 warranted assertibility, 12–13, 28, 36, 187–8 weak sceptic, 41 Wedgwood, Ralph, 16, 227, 233, 242 Whitehouse, Roger, 242 Whorf, Benjamin Lee, 75, 243 Wiggins, David, 80, 230, 243 Williams, Bernard, 13, 60, 117–18, 120–1, 165, 168, 181, 183, 189, 227, 229, 232, 233, 243 Williamson, Timothy, 139–42, 144, 148, 149, 233, 235, 236, 243 wishful thinking, 6, 123 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 28, 72, 100–3, 228, 231, 243 Wright, Crispin, 12–15, 220–1, 227, 229, 234, 236, 243 Yalçin, Ümit D., 229, 243 Young, P., 240 Zalta, Edward N., 239, 240, 242 Zellner, A., 241
