27:15–29:15
"I don't believe in analytic accounts of justification either, I just completely reject them. I think what philosophers tend to be talking about is nonsense; I don't need justification for beliefs. I build a system on pragmatic grounds; I act based on what I expect to yield consequences that are conducive to my goals. I don't need any sort of extraneous permission. So I can give a pragmatic account of justification . . . but I'm talking about something that probably functionally and very much so philosophically is quite different from their accounts of justification. . . . It looks to me like a lot of analytic philosophers want some sort of permission to hold a view. I don't need reality's permission to hold a view. Let's say I'm a complete instrumentalist about my beliefs and I just go around believing things that are useful to me, and someone comes along and says, 'Yeah, but that belief isn't justified.' Okay. Well, what happens if I ignore it? Nothing. If you act like a pragmatist and ignore non-pragmatic conceptions of justification, there are no consequences to this. There's none! There aren't consequences. So I don't care, because I care about the consequences of my actions. So these non-pragmatic conceptions of justification are practically irrelevant and I don't care about them. Someone could say, 'Ah, but they're true!', okay well your truths don't matter to me. And if someone says 'Yeah but it doesn't matter if it doesn't matter because our quest is to figure out what's true', great, you're operating on a non-pragmatic conception of truth. I reject that as well, so I don't care about that either. . . . I don't believe in correspondence theory . . . So the whole thing is this system that they're operating within where I reject the whole system."
Continuing (29:38–30:29):
"But for philosophers that take non-pragmatic approaches, I'm not obligated to abide by their metaphilosophy anymore than they're obligated to abide by mine. What you won't see me doing, at least I don't think so, is going around insisting that if you're not a pragmatist, like you're doing it wrong and you could only do things correctly if you're doing them the way I do. Now, there may be a sense in which I think that that's true, again pragmatically true—I mean it's almost trivially pragmatically true—but I try to be self-aware enough to realize when people are approaching philosophy from a different metaphilosophical perspective and be mindful of that fact and pivot to a discussion about metaphilosophy when it becomes appropriate. But a lot of people that work within conventional mainstream metaphilosophies, they don't see it as metaphilosophy, they're just doing philosophy and if you're not doing what they're doing, you're doing it wrong, you're not doing it at all."
I'm on board with the consequentialist aspects of what Lance is saying. And maybe a hard consequentialist position like the one I take leads to a pragmatic theory of truth and justification. I'm aware of Shamik Dasgupta's defense of a pragmatic theory of truth in this paper "Undoing the Truth Fetish." I have yet to analyze his arguments in that paper. So I don't know where I will land on the issue of truth and justification ultimately (or would land given enough time, research, thought, etc.).
Where I am at the moment though is that saying "My beliefs aren't justified and I don't care" is exactly as crazy as it sounds. I'm sure Lance can appreciate how it sounds to say "I don't need justification for my beliefs." It sounds, well, crazy. Saying "I
don't need justification for beliefs" sounds like saying "I cannot be
wrong" or "I don't need reasons to think that something is true to be
convinced that it is true or is probably true." Again, that sounds
crazy. But if I learned more about Lance’s views then maybe what he's saying wouldn't sound crazy at all.
It seems to me that at the heart of justification is this worry of arbitrariness: Imagine philosophers saying "I believe in a..."
Philosopher 1: "...Correspondence theory of truth."
Philosopher 2: "...Pragmatic theory of truth."
Philosopher 3: "...Deflationary theory of truth."
Philosopher 4: "...Primitive theory of truth."
Philosopher 5: "...Semantic theory of truth."
Philosopher 6: "...Coherence theory of truth."
Philosopher 7: "...Performative theory of truth."
Philosopher 9: "...Pluralist theory of truth."
My goal is to believe what’s true about truth. Given that goal, which view of these should I take? Or should I take none of them?
Here’s an idea: I will assign a number 1–9 to these views and use a random number generator to select a view randomly and I will believe whichever view is selected. You might complain that such a view would not be justified, but I don’t care. My beliefs can be totally arbitrary and that’s fine by me.
Not only would it be crazy to do this, it would be impossible. I can’t believe a philosophical view unless it makes sense to me. The "making sense" part is why reasons are needed. Reasons explain someone’s belief in x rather than y. Again, reasons are answers to 'why' questions, which makes them a kind of explanation. (So in cases where internal explanations aren't needed, like in non-propositional beliefs, reasons aren't needed. But those beliefs still have explanations, say in evolutionary terms.)
I think the problem of evil shows that a perfect being does not exist. Imagine if my true answer to someone asking why I think that is "I don’t care." That would be a bad answer. It would be so bad in fact that it would call into question whether I really believe what I claimed to believe, because, really, it’s not possible to have the answer "I don’t care" if I have reasons to believe my claim; the reasons are the answer! That's why, and how, I believe.
Being a bit tongue-in-cheek, imagine I said: I am converting to Nazism. Why? Well, haven't you heard? Justification is not needed! I don't need an answer.
This would just be nonsense, because this is not how belief works. You can't convert to an intellectual position (like a philosophical or political position) without having an answer to the question of why you are convinced that that position is better than alternatives. (I’m not talking about social conversion, but doxastic conversion.) Whether the answer is justifying depends on whether the answer is any good. Does Lance think the answers moral realists give to challenges to moral realism are any good? I would guess not. So doesn't he accept the notion of good answers?
P.S. Before the above discussion, Lance talks about and denies the reality of intuitions, or as Huemer defines calls them, "intellectual seemings."
Curiously, within the quote at top Lance uses the phrase "it looks to me", which looks to me like an intuition marker. So it seems to me that an intuition is a seeming ("intellectual seeming" is redundant), which is something you are inclined to believe, agree with, or act as if you believe, but if asked why you believe that thing you wouldn't be able to articulate a clear answer, at least not without doing some serious work first.
In this episode, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVFuRH--n2o, roughly around the 1h:30m mark, Alex Malpass says that intuitions are unreliable and count very little, with seemings acting as something of a practical tool for moving on from intractable problems of skepticism. I'm inclined to agree with that, though I think Huemer would accuse Malpass of self-defeat because Malpass is relying on his seemings when downplaying seemings.
In any case, if intuitions are beliefs you believe but can't quite articulate why, then they are in a sense unjustified beliefs (using a reasons-based sense of justification). But if you hold the belief only very lightly, then you're not making the mistake of believing in a way that's disproportionate to the evidence or reasons to believe.
It can be worth holding onto beliefs you can't articulate reasons for because 1) you can't help but hold the belief, even if only very lightly, and 2) there may be reasons within the vicinity that do justify that belief, reasons that explain why it was that the belief seemed true to you to begin with.
So with intuitions there's this idea of subconscious belief or subconscious understanding involved; to have an intuition is to be subconsciously aware of certain reasons to believe something, but those reasons are not explicit in your mind. (Haven't you had the experience of reading a philosopher who articulates something you already agreed with, but couldn't articulate?)
Back in school sometimes I would answer a math question intuitively. If you were to ask me "Why is that your answer?", I would have said "I don't know, but it feels right", and often I would get math questions right when operating by this feeling. Similarly we hear of "intuition-based" chess players who don't calculate captures or board-states but instead play moves that feel strong and avoid moves that feel weak. It's possible to be subconsciously attuned to a truth without being able to consciously explain it, which is why intuitions are worth exploring to bring out the understanding (or misunderstanding) that was lying underneath.
But I'd agree with Malpass (or what I take he'd agree with) that until that exploration has been done, and the reasons for the belief are uncovered, the intuition by itself is not worth anything other than as a jumping off point.