RESPONSIBLE BELIEVING

S. Joel Garver

CHAPTER ONE

The Problem of Epistemic Obligations

Section II

Many of the sorts of cases I have suggested are problematic since requirement, permission, and prohibition, virtue and vice, and other evaluative and prescriptive notions are closely tied to certain ideas concerning human agency, in particular, that we have at least some degree of control over those states of affairs or habits to which such evaluative notions are attached. This has been famously sloganized (by Kant) as "ought implies can." In contemporary philosophy, belief-formation and knowledge-acquisition are not generally thought to be the types of actions (if they are "actions" at all) over which we have any direct control, and thus, on a narrow reading of "ought implies can," beliefs are not the sorts of things we should go about blaming or praising people for.

Whether or not that is the case (and I think it certainly is not), such ascriptions of praise and blame are part of our linguistic behavior, commonly and pervasively, as well as of western religious, moral, and epistemological tradition. Assuming we are correct in making such ascriptions, how are we to account for this given the problems concerning volition? Thus I will be speaking of our primary topic in terms responsibility for belief and in terms of epistemic obligation or prescription.

A further and closely related problem--one which cannot be easily ignored--concerns the fact that the issues of praise and blame, requirement, permission, and prohibition, virtue and vice have been taken up by a number of notable epistemologists and incorporated into their analyses of what it is to be epistemically justified in holding a belief. For example, Ginet analyses epistemic justification in the following way:

This has been called a "deontological conception of justification." William Alston has provided a number of trenchant criticisms of conceiving of justification in these terms, criticism with which I must, in essence, concur (see his "The Deontological Conception of Epistemic Justification" in 1989b:115-152).

While Alston discusses at length the lack of direct control we have over belief (a control that a deontological notion of justification might assume), his final criticism amounts to this. Even given some degree of indirect influence over belief, epistemic justification requires truth-conducivity. Those beliefs, however, which are justified in a truth-conducive fashion (e.g., they are based on adequate grounds) do not necessarily coincide with those beliefs that are epistemically permitted or meet epistemic requirements (as that must be conceived using a deontological view of justification that assumes indirect influence over belief).

Even accepting Alston's conclusion, we can still go on to note that a deontological notion of justification does not exhaust the ways in which epistemic prescription intersects the problems of justification. In this respect, we should note the distinctions between, on one hand, a belief having justification or being in the state of justification and, on the other hand, a belief undergoing the process of being justified or, furthermore, a belief being reasonably taken to be justified. In discussing the process of justifying belief, I am referring to a process by which one rationally defends a belief as reasonably taken to be justified and how that process ought to be carried out by reasonable subjects.

In asking someone to justify a belief, we may simply be asking for the source or grounds of the particular belief in question. This constitutes a first line of defense. If we already take that source to be reliable and think the subject has engaged that source properly, then we are satisfied. If we are reasonable in assuming the source to be justification-conferring, the subject will have succeeded in justifying the belief to us.

We are not, however, always satisfied so easily. After all, such requests for justification are not generally occasioned by disputes about knowledge of objects in the external world (pencils, trash heaps, Kiwanis conventions, etc.), for few, if any, westerners seriously doubt knowledge of those sorts of things. They are, rather, occasioned by often intractable disputes concerning our knowledge of the morality or immorality of certain actions, the existence and nature of God, political positions, aesthetic judgments, pragmatic courses of action, philosophical doctrines, social theory, psychological disorders, emotional interactions, relationships, interpretations of texts, abuses of power, and the like. In such cases of dissatisfaction and dispute, we will often have to turn to a second line of defense--an attempt to show that it is practically rational to take a certain belief-forming practice to confer justification (and thus that the belief in question is reasonably taken to be prima facie justified).

We shall see later that there is no non-circular way to demonstrate actual justification (in terms of epistemic, not logical or vicious, circularity). Thus, all we want the subject to do in justifying a belief is to persuade us that it is reasonable or practically rational to suppose the source of the belief to be reliable and thus that it is prima facie justified. But circumstances in which it is appropriate to make such reasonable ascriptions of justification are not necessarily those in which the person in question actually is justified in the beliefs that are held. Therefore, justifying a belief will not quite amount to showing that the belief is actually justified.

Furthermore, then, the standards by which we often justify our beliefs to others (by showing what beliefs are reasonably taken to be justified) do not pick out a set of beliefs which necessarily coincide with those beliefs that actually possess justification. Still, it might very well be the case that those beliefs which we are practically rational to take as justified (and so meet the standards of rationality), in fact, also do coincide with those beliefs that meet general epistemic obligations.

For some indication that this might be a fruitful avenue of thought, consider the fact that blaming someone for a belief can be countered by arguing that it is reasonable to take the belief to be justified. Or consider that such blame can be supported by showing that the possible ways of rationally justifying the belief are faulty. This indicates to me that the claim that someone is blameworthy for a belief is very closely connected with the claim that the belief is unjustified (in the sense that it has not been justified to the one making the claim).

Also recall the areas in which the disputes under question often arise. These are areas that are most deeply and systematically attached to, produced, and influenced by what I have suggested are "issues of the heart." Quarrels in respect to practical ascriptions of justification are, therefore, deeply and systematically associated with "issues of the heart" and, consequently the prescriptive aspects of belief.

If I am correct in this assessment, then there may be a significant overlap, if not full coincidence, between which beliefs are justifiable and which meet epistemic standards. That would also mean that rational ascriptions of justification may track which beliefs are epistemically permissible. Furthermore, such a coincidence would elucidate what underlies the proclivity of many epistemologists for framing questions of justification in deontological terms (a confusion between justifying belief and a belief having justification), and yet it would elucidate this tendency without committing us to the deontological conception.