Lance Bush on justification, truth, and intuitions

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tEPgTNV4Mc

 

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 8: "...Constructivist 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.

Knowledge is justified true belief – blameless beliefs vs justified beliefs

Dad puts on the coffee. Mom puts laundry in the dryer. By coincidence, the timing is such that the dryer beeps to let us know it's done at the same time the coffee machine would normally beep to let us know that the coffee is done. But this time, the coffee machine fails to make a sound to signify that coffee is ready – the machine has worn down. By coincidence again, the laundry machine beep and the coffee machine beep sound very similar. So dad, sitting in his living room chair, hearing the laundry machine go off, understandably concludes that the coffee is done. And he's right – it is done. But if you were to ask dad, "Why do you think the coffee is done?", he would say "Because I heard the deal go off." But that's not true. What he heard was the laundry machine. So he gives a false reason for his belief. False reasons (answers to why questions) can never be good reasons to believe. Sure, it's understandable that dad would conclude what he did. But it's not, as it turns out, reasonable. Understandable belief and justified belief are not the same.

In the classic example of the broken clock, when you ask the person, "Why did you believe the time is 1 p.m.?", their answer is "Because the clock said 1 p.m." But that's not true. The clock doesn't say that the time today is 1 p.m. It says that the time yesterday was 1 p.m. at the moment the clock stopped working. Typically, clocks tell you the time of the day, which is why it's understandable to conclude that the clock is speaking of today. But when clocks stop working, they tell you the time of whatever day they stopped working. (See Bogardus & Perrin, "Knowledge is Believing Something Because It’s True". The clock reads 1 p.m. because the time was 1 p.m., not because it is 1 p.m.)

There are false understandable beliefs, which we can call false blameless beliefs, or understandably false beliefs or blamelessly false beliefs or innocently false beliefs, something to that effect. But being blameless in your believing doesn't make you justified in your believing. Humans may have been, at one point or another, blameless in their beliefs in gods, aether, miasma, phlogiston, geocentrism, or what have you, but these beliefs were never justified. Having an understandable or blameless belief is to have a justified belief in the internalist sense, which is why you can have internally "justified" false beliefs. But internalism is false when it comes to the kind of justification needed for knowledge.

We can think of the two kinds of justification (internalism vs externalism) as answers to different questions: is this person's reason for believing a good (i.e. true) reason? If yes, then their belief is justified (external). Is this person's believing an indication that there is something wrong with them, such as being intellectually vicious or stupid? If not, then their belief is justified (internal). So the two senses of justification are compatible.

Luck dissolves knowledge because luck dissolves justification. Justification cannot be arbitrary, and lucky beliefs are only true arbitrarily. What we want is to have the least arbitrary possible beliefs.

To illustrate this you can think of Christian denominations. Why be Episcopalian when you could be Methodist? Why be Roman Catholic when you could be Anglican? From the outside looking in, it can seem painfully arbitrary as to which denomination you should join. We know intuitively that arbitrariness destroys justification, which destroys any chance of you having arrived at the truth in any secured way. There is no reason to think that one denomination is true above the others. What you're saying, essentially, is either that you 1) Have yet to see any arguments for any denomination, in which case it would be arbitrary for you to pick one over the others; or 2) You have seen arguments on behalf of various denominations but you don't think any of them are any good. Good arguments supply good reasons, and good reasons form the exact chain or link you are looking for to remove arbitrariness. This is a link between truth and your belief. This is exactly what justification is meant to be: the link between what's true and what you believe, the link that explains how you came to believe in the truth rather than a falsehood. (And this is why psychoanalysis is essential to explaining opposing beliefs. You can't explain opposing beliefs in terms of their truth, so instead you explain them in terms of their psychological appeal or something like that. Note that explaining opposing beliefs in terms of psychology need not be belittling; wrong beliefs can, again, be blameless and not reflect poorly on the believer in any meaningful way. The point is the simple fact that you cannot explain opposing beliefs in terms of their truth [unless you're prepared to accept a dialetheia in that situation].)

For those folks with strong internalist intuitions, eliminating arbitrariness requires knowing that you know. After all, if you don't know that there is such a link between the truth and your belief, how can you know whether your belief is arbitrary or not, and, therefore, whether your belief is justified or not?

But there are reasons to think that you can eliminate arbitrariness without being aware of the elimination. This is a standard objection to internalism: animal knowledge. The lion knows the outline of his territory. How does the lion know this? Because the truth of the lion's (non-propositional) belief explains the lion's belief. The lion has a properly functioning brain which gives the lion access to highly reliable faculties of perception and memory. The connection between the truth and the lion's belief is non-arbitrary because it is mediated by a properly functioning brain capable of allowing the lion to grasp, understand, and remember its environment.

Laurence BonJour says the following about the objection from animal belief against internalism (Epistemology, Second Edition, pgs. 206–7):

"I once owned a German shepherd dog named Emma. . . . She understood a wide range of commands, seemed to exhibit an excellent memory for people and places . . . and could be amazingly subtle and persistent in communicating her desires . . . Anyone who observed her very closely would, I think, have found it impossible to deny that Emma had conscious beliefs and desires, together with other conscious mental states such as excitement or fear. But did Emma have any reasons or justification for her beliefs? Did she have knowledge? . . . despite her intelligence, it is hard to believe that Emma engaged in very much or indeed any reasoning, and still harder to believe that she was capable of understanding complicated arguments. Indeed, it is doubtful whether Emma could have even understood the basic idea of having a reason for a belief, an understanding that seems to be required for her to have had fully explicit access to any reasons at all. Thus it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Emma had no justified beliefs and hence no knowledge, a result that is alleged . . . to be highly implausible. Surely, it is argued, Emma was justified in believing and . . . even . . . knew such things as that there was a squirrel on the other side of the quad . . . or that the person at the front door was her good friend Marc . . ."

That applies to perceptual, non-propositional beliefs (the kind animals have). What about metaphysical, propositional beliefs? Something similar applies. Knowledge of truths about meaning requires "perceptions" of meaning – faculties for understanding, logic, language, and truth. Just as a properly functioning brain eliminates arbitrariness in perception beliefs, so too does it eliminate arbitrariness in metaphysical beliefs. This is where reasons and arguments come into play. Reasons and arguments are part of that "perceptual" chain, analogous to how light and the function of the eye are part of the perceptual chain that gives rise to our true perception beliefs. 

And as Bogardus / Perrin say at the end of the paper cited above, you don't need to know that you have knowledge in order to have knowledge, because, as they say, knowing is believing because it's true; i.e., the truth of your belief plays a central role in explaining why you believe it.

So I see two options here: explanation-first and reason-first. 

Explanation-first justification says 1) knowing A is believing A because A is true, and 2) when you believe A because A is true you will have a true (and relevant) answer to the why question ("Why do you believe A?"), and that(those) true answer(s) constitute the good reason(s) for why you believe. Explanation-by-truth entails good reasons (for propositional beliefs).

(This assumes the item of knowledge is propositional; non-propositional beliefs don't have and don't need reasons [non-propositional beliefs do have explanations, which, like reasons, are answers to why questions; reasons are internal, agential / personal explanations])

Reason-first justification says that 1) knowledge is justified true belief, with justification entailing having a true answer to the why question, and 2) for the truth of that answer to play a central role in explaining why you cite it as your answer to the why question. Good reasons entail explanation-by-truth (for propositional beliefs). 

(BonJour also notes that internalism and externalism may be compatible, addressing separate issues: pgs. 215–16.)

Questions to ponder:

a) Are there non-propositional beliefs?

b) Do non-propositional beliefs have reasons? Can they?

c) Do animals have reasons for why they believe (if they have beliefs)? Or do animals have non-propositional beliefs, which do not require, and cannot have, reasons?

d) Justification is the link between the truth and your belief such that your belief is non-arbitrary. To truly eliminate arbitrariness, must you be aware of that link? That is, must you know that such a link has been established to eliminate arbitrariness? If yes, then what is this "knowing"? How can you know such a link has been established? And does this apply to all kinds of beliefs, or only propositional beliefs? After all, it doesn't seem like animals are aware of such links, and yet surely animals have knowledge of whether a predator is chasing them, what's good to eat, of which member of their tribe is their mother, etc.

e) Do propositional beliefs require internal justification (i.e., good reasons)? If yes, is it because they are propositional, and propositional beliefs, to be non-arbitrary, require a connection to the truth that only reasons can provide?

f) Or is internal justification purely related to the blameworthiness of someone's beliefs? (i.e. If one of your beliefs is not justified in the internalist sense, then does that mean that that belief says something bad about you as a truthseeker, by, for example, indicating a lack of intellectual virtue on your part?)

g) Does explanation-by-truth entail having good reasons for propositional beliefs? Or does having good reasons for one's propositional beliefs entail explanation-by-truth? (i.e. Are good answers good because they are true and because their truth explains why they are given as answers?) Or is justification just explanation-by-truth all the way down, or just having good reasons all the way down? Or none of the above?