Forthcoming in Philosophical
Papers, 2008. All rights Reserved.
Expanding Epistemology: A Responsibilist Approach
Guy Axtell
Introduction.
If the recent but
quickly-growing body of literature on epistemological axiology can serve as an
indication, there are changes brewing in the conception of epistemology and its
central tasks. By a literature on epistemological axiology, I mean not just the
value problem and its impetus to newfound interest in the nature and sources of
epistemic value, or the ‘value-driven’ approach to epistemology that has lately
been proposed. I mean as well a rising debate between epistemic value monists,
dualists, and pluralists, which addresses still more basic philosophical
questions. In periods in any field of research where a long-standing paradigm
or dominant mode of practice is being questioned and alternatives explored, it
is no longer only theories that are on the table for serious debate. At such
times theories, methods and aims are likely to be viewed as more closely
interconnected, the prime example being that problems originally posed to
particular theories are viewed more and more as calling for re-evaluation of methodological
and axiological assumptions animating that
field of study.
Such is the
description I would start with of our present state of affairs in the field of
epistemology. Our position I see as significantly different than at any time
during the four-decade period often referred to as the post-Gettier era, which
saw lively debate over theories (foundationalism vs. coherentism; internalism
vs. externalism), but a comparatively strong consensus, relative to today, over
methodological and axiological assumptions. The new externalist theories functioned
at the start of this era to expand epistemology in important ways. They reminded
philosophers that it is always by favor of nature’s grace and not just by one’s
own good works that one knows something; that there are thence a plethora of
ways in which true beliefs might be epistemized; and that knowledge-attributions
and discursive entitlements need to be considered in social perspective. Externalism
also put to work the potent resources of modal thinking in epistemology. In
order to fly these modal kites, however, certain other assumptions were held
steady as inviolable, such as a semantic notion of truth and a veritist
axiology that drew from it. Especially when epistemology came to be treated as
the theory of propositional knowledge and the focus was either on giving a
theory of justification or on immunizing a proposed analysis of propositional knowing
from the kind of epistemic luck involved in Gettier cases, concerns about epistemic
goods other than knowledge and true belief were largely pushed aside, or even
treated as conceptual confusions.[1]
In this paper I treat
newfound interest in epistemological axiology as a clear example of
non-allegiance to long-standing assumptions about methods and aims. I look for
expansions of epistemology that are continuous with the analytic tradition, but
that axiologically re-cast what is still of value the coherentism/foundationalism
and internalism/externalism debates. The
expansions I envision would share some of experimental philosophy’s criticisms
of the analytic tradition’s a prioristic
tendencies and ‘armchair’ methods, without succumbing to what Michael Williams
(this volume) refers to as ‘radical reliabilism.’ My challenge to readers of
this paper is to think seriously both about the present need for an expansion in
the field of epistemology, and about what particular directions that expansion should take.
I divide the paper
simply into two Parts. Part 1 addresses why a significantly broader conception
of epistemology’s central tasks is today called for. Here I provide an overview
of three converging arguments to that effect, arguments each of which constitutes
an ‘internal’ critique of the analytic tradition and the place of the project
of analysis of knowledge within it. Each of the arguments to be examined concludes
that the ‘received view’s’ insular conception of epistemology’s central tasks inhibits
philosophers from accomplishing certain of their
own intended purposes. While there are many other authors who offer
arguments that might also be construed as internal critiques of the project of
analysis, these three carry especial force. Moreover, I think their arguments
provide impetus to just the right kind
of expansion in our field. As a primary instance of this, all three arguments affect,
in Jonathan Kvanvig’s words, a “loosening of the shackles fastened on
epistemology by skepticism.” Part 2 revisits each of our three focal authors, trying
to deepen the inter-connections between them, and augmenting their own explicit
suggestions for new research projects in epistemology with some of my own. The
suggestions for new epistemological futures that I make in Part 2 needn’t be
taken as ones that my focal authors would necessarily be on board with. But I will
try to show how they are floated by the kind of “responsibilist” approach that
I favor.
Part 1. Motivating an expansion of epistemology’s
central tasks
The argument that I
want to highlight from my first focal author, Duncan Pritchard, explicitly
targets the ill-effects of a kind of “philosophical platitude.” He terms it the
epistemic luck platitude: undiscriminating
adherence to the thesis that knowing is incompatible with luck. By
analogy, we might think of the arguments made by the other two authors as
similarly intended to unburden us of other
platitudinously held commitments. Jonathan Kvanvig, my second author, could
then be taken to target the platitude that ‘analysis of knowledge is analysis
enough,’—to target, that is, the trite assumption of the centrality of
knowledge in relation to other epistemic aims within our overall cognitive
economy. My third author, Michael Williams, might be seen targeting platitudinously-held
assumption that, in the debate over radical scepticism, the real or imagined
sceptic has the right to issue ‘blind’ and ‘indefinitely iterable’ challenges to
the epistemic entitlement of any would-be knower.
Let me
provide a brief but somewhat more formal description of the specific argument to
be highlighted from each of these three authors:
1.1 The
“anti-luck” argument. Pritchard’s anti-luck argument leads to abandoning
any project that presupposes uncritical adherence to the epistemic luck
platitude; less strongly, this
argument leads to rejecting as self-undermining any project that takes knowing (or
other epistemic standing) as incompatible with luck without first carefully distinguishing
between the various specific kinds of luck that claim may be taken to cover.
1.2 The
“epistemic value” argument. Kvanvig’s epistemic value argument leads to
abandoning veritism and other forms of epistemic value monism; less strongly, this
argument leads to rejecting as
self-undermining any project that aims to provide an account for the nature of a positive epistemic standing
(such as knowing or theoretical understanding) without coordinating concerns in
regards to the value of that epistemic
standing.
1.3 The “epistemic compatibility” argument. Williams’ epistemic
compatibility argument leads to abandoning assumptions that have made it appear
impossible to preserve the integral contribution of agent responsibility to
agent reliability; less strongly, this argument leads to renouncing a genre of
epistemology tied to a “prior grounding” model of justification (and its
assumption of a fundamental epistemic claimant-challenger asymmetry), in favor
of a new one that throws its lot in with a “default and challenge” model.
1.1.
In his book Epistemic
Luck (2005), Duncan Pritchard agrees
with epistemologists who regard the elimination of epistemic luck as being a
fundamental adequacy condition on their theory. Still, he argues that the
received view of the project of analysis adheres to an over-generalized and
merely platitudinous version of the claim that knowing excludes luckily true
belief.
This is
our first argument supporting an expansion of epistemology’s central tasks: the
high cost of assent to what Pritchard describes as the epistemic luck platitude. Pritchard insists that discriminating the
kind or kinds of epistemic luck at play in radical sceptic arguments is
requisite to developing a more philosophically satisfying diagnosis and
response to scepticism. We need better taxonomies and theories of epistemic
luck, he argues, but we need a change of direction, too, or rather a
substantial broadening of our
anti-luck interests. Externalist luck has been the over-whelming focus in
epistemology in recent decades, starting with discussion of the structure of Gettier
cases. But if, given only what the agent is able to know by reflection
alone, it is lucky that her belief is true, then a kind of epistemic luck
has interceded that is it neither that of Gettier cases (veritic externalist luck), nor fake barn cases (environmental externalist luck), yet is a kind that could be thought to
inhibit our ability to responsibly discount sceptical alternatives to our
belief. Pritchard calls this reflective
luck, and traces its role to radical (or Cartesian) scepticism. It is the
anti-luck concern with reflective luck
that most directly stokes the passions of the sceptic, yet this isn’t
well-acknowledged in a literature that focuses around the Gettier problem.
Addressing
the latter problem and others (e.g. fake barn cases) that turn on externalist
luck remains an important concern of epistemologists into the future, Pritchard
maintains, since the intuition is strong that luck of a kind that can intervene
‘betwixt belief and fact’ will preclude an agent from knowing, even though her
belief may be true and personally justified.[2]
But fallibilists about knowledge will be wary of the assumption that progress
in epistemology demands its complete exclusion. Moreover, what is at minimum
right about the demand for the exclusion of luck is captured in the intuition
that if one knows then it ought not to be the case that one could easily have
been wrong. A level of “safety” must characterize the process through which a
target belief is acquired, and such a demand goes together with an externalist
or truth-linked account of our capacity for knowing. But what else might be a
relevant concern? We rarely show awareness of the specific kinds of epistemic
luck our favorite thought-experiments turn upon, and when we do pay attention
to this it becomes clear that not all anti-luck demands are equally valid, and
that their validity depends upon the particular epistemic standing—for instance
justification, knowledge or understanding—one is concerned with. So repudiating our robust or undiscerning epistemic luck platitude is still
consistent with describing oneself, as Pritchard does, as an “anti-luck”
epistemologist.
The
upshot of the anti-luck argument is that without first redressing the post-Gettier
era’s tunnel-vision on veritic luck, the
project of analysis simply cannot serve the anti-sceptical tasks it has widely been
expected to serve. But to admit the need for a more comprehensive approach to epistemic
luck and its bearing on our epistemic aims, severally, would already constitute
a very significant expansion of epistemology. While their bearing on our
capacity for knowledge and other valued epistemic standings may turn out to
vary, both forms of epistemic luck, the veritic and the non-veritic, Pritchard
concludes, “need to be responded to in any adequate epistemological theory”
(2005). This conclusion and its import for epistemologists is one we will
discuss further when we return to Pritchard in the second part of the paper.
1.2.
Jonathan Kvanvig’s book The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding (2003) and
more recent papers can be used to illustrate another and substantially
overlapping set of challenges to the prevailing conception of epistemology’s
central tasks. Given that we seem right to value knowledge more highly than
mere true belief, there being no very obvious explanation of this leads to the value problem. Epistemologists have been focusing myopically upon the “nature of
knowledge” question without giving due consideration to the “value of
knowledge” question which is its natural complement. According to Kvanvig, accounting
for the nature and the value of knowledge should be taken as something like
“twin desiderata on a theory of knowledge.” But he also insists that when we first
do so, we encounter a paradox of sorts. For what we find by looking at the
literature is “a repeated pattern in which progress with respect to one
desideratum is balanced by greater weakness with respect to the other” (117).
If this problem were endemic to it, then these twin desiderata might become a ‘Scylla
and Charibdis’ that sink the project of analysis. Showing why this shouldn’t be
the case is one challenge he proposes as meeting the need for a significant
expansion of epistemology.
This
aspect of Kvanvig’s epistemic value
argument has been influential enough to spur examination of the structure
of the value problem, of which extant approaches are best-suited to deal with
it, and of what further changes in epistemology might be driven by it. As he
concludes, “questions about the value of knowledge and other epistemic aims are
important in their own right and can help evaluate the adequacy of proposals
concerning the nature of knowledge or other epistemic aims” (2008).
The other
and stronger way in which we described Kvanvig’s epistemic value argument highlights
his rejection both of the analytic tradition’s platitudinous adherence to
epistemic value monism, and of its subsequent focus on propositional knowledge
as its focal concept. These two aspects of Kvanvig’s epistemic value argument,
“the slogan that truth is the epistemic goal” and the ensuing focus on
propositional knowing (or “knowing that”), are clearly connected as can be seen
in the recent exchange between Kvanvig and Marian David (2005). There David’s monist
(or veritist) stance leads him explicitly to adopt a conception of epistemology
as the analysis of knowledge. Kvanvig, to the contrary, argues both that epistemic
value monism is “too narrow a view of the variety of epistemic values and goods,”
and by extension that platitudinous allegiance to epistemology as the analysis
of knowledge is too narrow a view of the epistemological project.
For the
pluralist, “epistemic goals include knowledge, understanding, wisdom,
rationality, justification, sense-making, and empirically adequate theories….[T]he
class of epistemic goods is manifold, as wide as the class of cognitive
successes” (2005, 287). A pluralist axiology suggests the need to rethink many further
assumptions about epistemology’s central tasks and to readdress the issue of
the nature of epistemic normativity. Can an instrumentalist conception of
epistemic normativity survive apart from the support it receives from taking
truth, semantically conceived, as the single telos or ‘core’ aim of the life of the intellect? We can look more
closely at this question when we return to Kvanvig’s argument in Part 2 of the
paper. But to summarize, Kvanvig urges an expansion of epistemology through study
the nature and sources of epistemic value (295). If the epistemic value
argument functions as he intends, it “present[s] a theoretical foundation for
greater diversity of interest in epistemology” (2003, 188), showing, among
other things, that “epistemological
inquiry deserves at least some enlargement in the direction of concepts other
than knowledge” (xvi). The prescription flowing out of this second and stronger
aspect of the epistemic value argument, as we’ll see more fully when we return
to Kvanvig’s work in Part 2, is for a “value driven” epistemological axiology,
or for what Pritchard calls a “value-theoretic epistemology.”
1.3. Michael Williams, my third focal author, argues in Unnatural Doubts (1991) and Problems of Knowledge (2001) that improving
our philosophical responses to radical skepticism first requires improving the “theoretical
diagnosis” we give of the sceptic’s motivations. Pritchard and Kvanvig I think
would easily agree; but in holding that we should identify and scrutinize the
sceptic’s own philosophical assumptions, Williams wants more than that we drop platitudinous
acceptance of skepticism as a purely
logical problem. He strikes me as challenging numerous other widely-presupposed
views about the project of analysis and the role that a reductive analysis of
knowing is widely held to play in responding to radical scepticism. Most
importantly, Williams says that in conceiving our relationship to a radical
sceptical interlocutor, we must let drop our adherence to a genre of philosophy
shaped by a “Prior Grounding Model” (PG Model) of justification.
A good
diagnosis of radical scepticism should not lead to a highly concessive
response, yet a response to scepticism is bound
to be highly concessive when it allows, as the PG Model does, a grossly
asymmetrical view of our justificational responsibilities and epistemic
entitlements. Williams characterizes this model as composed
of four inter-related theses of an internalist and evidentialist orientation.[3] As Williams and
Robert Brandom (2008) both argue, adoption of a Default and Challenge Model (DC
Model) constitutes a shift that levels
the playing field substantially between the philosopher and a radical sceptical
interlocutor, by making it apparent why challengers and
claimants more symmetrically share
these justificational responsibilities. On the DC Model, “No move in the game of giving and asking for reasons is
presuppositionless” (2001, 150). The sceptical interlocutor inherits no right
to unlimited demands for justification; rather, “questions of justification
arise in a definite justificational context, constituted by a complex and in
general largely tacit background of entitlements, some of which will be
default” (158).
The demand for prior grounding reveals many of the ways in which
internalist ideas underlie certain arguments for neo-Pyrrhonian as well as
Cartesian (or radical) scepticism; indeed tacit adoption of the PG Model helps
explain the appeal of the most serious
arguments for radical scepticism. In response to the demand for a “completely
general” understanding of the human capacity for knowledge, Williams argues
that if there are a plurality of ways in which epistemizing justification might
arise, then “the sceptic’s hyper-general questions may be deeply flawed” (2005, p. 214).
By
contrast with the internalism and tacit commitment to a PG Model that drives
that demand, one of the genuine insights of the externalist turn in
epistemology has been that there are a plurality
of kinds of justification that may serve to ‘epistemize’ true belief. If an
externalist response to scepticism is to carry force, it should be able to use
this plurality of kinds of epistemizing justification to its advantage. Yet tacit
adherence to the PG Model in most extent forms of
externalism undermines its ability to do so, by making this plurality impossible
to square with the demand for a minimal set of necessary and sufficient
conditions on knowing free from serious counter-example —that is to say, for a reductive analysis of knowledge.
Williams makes it clear that the PG Model is presupposed not only among
mentalist and access internalists, but also among externalists, in their doubtful
manner of answering certain kinds of questions. That this may weaken externalist
responses to scepticism is also pointed out by John Greco, when he describes the
inconsistencies of externalists who “go internalist” in treating the question
of how to understand defeating evidence to
one’s belief (2004).[4] So
for Williams, trying explicitly to effect an externalist turn in epistemology
while tacitly holding onto a PG Model creates no small degree of havoc; the
cost of platitudinous commitment to the PG Model is only failure to see how it “both
generates the threat of skepticism and constrains our responses to that threat”
(2001, 188).
Adherence to the Prior Grounding platitude constitutes a profound
dialectical mis-step for anti-sceptical philosophy. Williams’ epistemic
compatibility argument indicates that anti-sceptical philosophers are better-served
to reconcile than to bifurcate between their explanatory interests in epistemic
reliability and epistemic responsibility. Bifurcation occurs regularly in the
genre of epistemology his critique targets, and it leads to just the kind of
inconsistency between the treatment of supporting and defeating evidence just
mentioned. The PG model cannot perform this marriage operation between first
and third-personal interests in agent-appraisal. The expansion of epistemology
that Williams looks for occurs when detachment
from it allows us to see justification “as exhibiting a Default and Challenge
structure, where constraints on the reasonableness of challenges and the
appropriateness of justifications are contextually variable along several
dimensions” (245). This isn’t just ‘changing the topic,’ as sceptics
contend. As I’ll later want to argue, the support that epistemic compatibilism
is able to provide for substituting the PG with the DC Model, is the main issue that today needs to be
considered by epistemologists concerned to improve the adequacy of
philosophical responses to scepticism.
Part 2. New directions in epistemology
In this second Part
of the paper, lets go back over each of the three internal critiques of the
project of analysis we described, looking more closely at how they
inter-relate, and trying to draw out more specific suggestions for fruitful new
directions in epistemology.
2.1. We earlier identified a central theme in
Pritchard’s book Epistemic Luck as
the philosophical costs of uncritical adherence to the epistemic luck platitude. Pritchard’s rebuke of the platitude indicates
a need to avoid pre-occupation with veritic
luck (in the Gettier problem and its offshoots). Now responsibilists might readily
agree that the anti-luck argument exposes an undue narrowness of professional
interest in the externalist kind or kinds of epistemic luck. Luck’s
intervention into the veritic gap—the
gap ‘betwixt belief and fact’—is not
the only area of anti-luck concern, and on closer inspection is shown not as
relevant to our best diagnoses of radical scepticism as once thought. It has been
a mistake to judge the adequacy of our response to scepticism on the actual or
even the possible complete exclusion of veritic
luck in our analysis of knowing, a mistake engendered by a dubious
understanding of Gettier’s challenge. In one ill-founded reading, Gettier’s
challenge is to secure a “fourth condition” on knowledge to prevent
re-gettierization, while essentially holding
in place the older internalist-evidentialist understanding of the third (or
personal justification/achievement) condition; on another, the search for such
an externalist principle leads epistemologists to deny the need for personal
justification altogether, and to opt for radical
reliabilism. But even if readers think radical sceptical arguments deserve to be
the central concern in epistemology as they have been in recent decades, Pritchard
still argues that viewing the problem of radical scepticism through the left lens
of anti-luck concerns and the right lens of epistemic value concerns, serves to
highlight for us a quite different
challenge (2008b).[5]
One key difference
between myself and Pritchard is that I see exposing the narrowness of interest
in externalist luck as being corrected by interest in evidential epistemic luck as the kind most directly concerned with
the quality of the agent’s efforts in inquiry—her zetetic efforts in pursuit of virtue-relevant goals. While we are
both neo-Moorean in our responses to scepticism, I see epistemic compatibilism
as crucial to the support of this response, and direct concern with the quality
of the agent’s efforts at inquiry as crucial to the support of epistemic
compatibilism. The ancient zététicós
was the seeker who “proceeds by inquiry.” Zetetic is a Greek term that indicates direct concern with the quality of an agent’s motives and efforts
in pursuit of intellectual ends. The very notions of evidential and doxastic epistemic
luck may be unthinkable apart from assessment of the quality of the agent’s zetetic activity: her active,
inquiry-directed strategies and activities. Evidential
epistemic luck intercedes when “it is lucky that the agent acquires the
evidence that she has in favor of her belief”; doxastic (and possibly circumstantial)
luck intercedes when “it is lucky that the agent believes the proposition”
(2005). Pritchard treats both of these as “benign” kinds of luck as far as
knowledge and understanding go, and sets them aside early in his book. But what
can it mean to call the issues raised by kinds of luck, so defined, as epistemically
‘innocuous’ and ‘insignificant’? (2005, 137). If we agree with John Greco that
in respect to epistemic responsibility, “etiology matters,” then epistemic
responsibility as it pertains to knowing is not captured by synchronic
epistemic rationality: that time-slice assessment of an agent performance
purely ‘by their own lights,’—that is, by evidence they presently possess and epistemic
norms they presently accept at that reconstructed moment, whatever their
validity. By contrast with this ideal of pure epistemic rationality keyed to
deontic duties with regard to things the agent can assess by her own lights, as
we find it in internalists such as R. Feldman, appraisals of epistemic
responsibility I hold must factor in the quality of the zetetic activities of the agent in appropriately seeking, acquiring,
weighing, and updating evidence for what they believe.
Responsibilists can
clearly find advantage in Pritchard’s anti-luck argument, but might resist his dismissive
treatment of the non-veritic kinds of luck (apart from reflective luck). I would further argue that dismissing evidential and doxastic luck as “benign” functions to impede Pritchard’s intended
“final value” (or ‘value-of-achievements’) response to the Meno problem. Credit
theories require that we get clear on the sense or senses of luck capable of
undermining attributions of creditable success to agents over a range of
virtue-relevant aims. But this suggests the need for a significant expansion of
epistemology to elucidate, as Wayne Riggs proposes, “the conceptual connections
among a family of concepts that include credit, responsibility, attribution,
and luck” (2007a); or again as another responsibilist, Jason Baehr, proposes, “the
proper role of the ‘character’ (or reflective) virtues in epistemology.”[6]
The acquired intellectual virtues are habits and dispositions that meet the
reliabilist criterion of promoting true beliefs and minimizing false ones. Why,
then, they ask, are issues of epistemic creditability in respect to the agent’s
acquired habits and dispositions so rarely deemed to connect directly with the
reliabilists’ preferred epistemological projects? (Baehr, 2006; Dalmiya, 2002).
Since theoretical understanding
turns out to be a distinctively valuable epistemic standing on Pritchard’s
approach as well as on Kvanvig’s, we find in both of their arguments the clear implication
of a need to study both it and all other epistemic standings that are bearers of value. So on responsibilist
accounts, in my way of putting it, the etiology issue and the axiology issue both
matter, philosophically: To ask, ‘What the bearers
of epistemic reliability?’ is to ask after the right kinds of process type
and actions-in-inquiry; to ask, ‘What the bearers
of epistemic value?’ is to ask after
the right value type for the kinds of agent appraisal we are undertaking. I
want to retain these concerns with the bearers of reliability and of value as two
‘master intuitions’ that need to be accommodated (compare Pritchard 2008c). But
seeking to uphold the first plunges us into the generality problem, where the difficulty is describing at the right
level of generality the type of process or actions-in-inquiry whose reliability
determines whether a token of a process type produces a safe belief. And
seeking to uphold the second pulls us into the value problem, where the difficulty is to identify the kind or
kinds of value associated with the epistemic standings we hold valuable. On the
approach taken by virtue epistemologies, we want to identify the right kinds of
process with those that derive from the agent’s stable abilities and
competences; and on the approach taken by credit theorists, we want to identify
the right kind of value with what Pritchard terms final value, the kind attaching to cognitive achievements qua achievements.
On these matters,
those I call virtue reliabilists and responsibilists largely agree. But virtue
responsibilists go on to ask, ‘Why should we treat the intellectual virtues as epistemically
important or central concepts only if they contribute to a successful theory of
propositional knowing, or again, if they are concepts that can be conceived in
terms of truth, semantically conceived?’ Responsibilists think that the
intellectual virtues and their role in the intellectual life are
“epistemologically interesting in their
own right” (Baehr), and are furthermore concerned that the received view’s conception
of epistemology truncates the concept of epistemic virtues. Neither the
internalist’s focus on synchronic
evidential rationality nor the externalist’s focus on what Sosa calls the
“aptness” of belief can adequately capture the role of the reflective virtues,
which readily extend beyond belief acquisition to its maintenance, transmission,
and change as other essential functions of our overall cognitive economy. The
reduction of epistemology to the theory of knowledge—a shared assumption of veritisms of both the left and the
right—also functions to inhibit our conception of the role of the reflective
virtues in the intellectual life, since firstly we seek interesting truths, and secondly our virtue-relevant goals include
not just knowing and believing truly, but also higher or more distinctively
human epistemic achievements such as theoretical understanding.
Due to concerns such
as these, it has sometimes been suggested that a responsibilist research
program into the reflective virtues can only take shape after being relocated outside of analysis of knowledge proper.
Following this line of reasoning, we come to attempts to expand epistemology
through one or another version of a “Two-Project Proposal.” One could call for
a “trial separation between the theory of knowledge and the theory of justified
belief” or something similar, while at the same time insisting upon a
conception of epistemology broad enough to acknowledge the importance or
‘centrality’ of both projects.’[7]
This kind of proposal is typically made by internalists (Foley, 2004), and sometimes
taken seriously by sympathetic externalists as well (see Pritchard 2006, 55);
moreover it is often cast in terms of a pessimism regarding our ability to
contain our different anti-luck concerns in a single view.
Connected with this, Baehr
writes that “moderate” forms of virtue epistemology take issue with
“conservative” forms by insisting that there are “substantive theoretical
issues and questions pertaining to intellectual virtue that can be addressed in
relative isolation from traditional epistemology” (2008b). While I agree with the
point as here stated, I have elsewhere argued that the Two Project Proposal
Foley makes isn’t, on closer inspection, an attractive option for
responsibilists to pursue (Axtell 2007a). While it does appear to secure a kind
of co-existence and compatibility between ‘externalist’ and ‘internalist’
research programs after a period of prolonged antagonism, the Two Projects Proposal
is as Williams (this volume) puts it, “a bifurcating strategy” best avoided due
to its steep hidden costs with respect to our ability to side-step scepticism. I
will later argue that a more robust
epistemic compatibilism—a compatibilism made possible by convergences between
virtue theory, credit theory, and the Default and Challenge Model—is the real ‘road
to Larissa.’
2.2. In Section Two we drew attention to Kvanvig’s proposal that the desiderata of
competing accounts of a positive epistemic standing such as propositional “knowing”
or theoretical “understanding” should include their ability to address together
both the nature and the value of that standing. This proposal he
explicitly makes in order to present “a theoretical foundation for
greater diversity of interest in epistemology.” The post-Gettier era focused on
providing a reductive analysis of propositional knowing primarily out a concern
to respond to radical scepticism. What we have called his epistemic value argument explains how this era’s focus devolved,
leading into an unsustainably narrow conception of epistemology’s central tasks.
Kvanvig’s
argument issues into his call for greater diversity of interests, and this as
we mentioned has provoked a growing literature on epistemological axiology. Are
some kinds of knowledge more distinctively valuable than other kinds? Are there
epistemic standings of greater value than propositional knowing, and if so, should
they thereby occupy a more central place in our studies? One of Kvanvig’s primary theses is that “understanding” has a
special kind of value that other epistemic states such as knowledge, simpliciter, do not; this fact, he
holds, threatens the rationale for the focus on knowledge that the history of
epistemology displays (2008a; 2008b). Kvanvig’s and Pritchard’s epistemologies
are both explicitly “revisionist” of the intuitions that drive the Meno
Problem, since knowledge ‘simpliciter’ turns
out not to have a value always
greater than that of its component parts. But even without endorsing such a revisionist
stance,
The epistemic value argument also leads to questioning
whether analytic epistemologists’ concern should remain focused on the framing
of a ‘minimal set’ of conditions on propositional knowing, or extend to higher,
distinctively human epistemic standings irrespective to their connections to
the project of analysis. But the expansion of epistemology proposed on the
basis of the epistemic value argument typically runs considerably deeper than
this. Kvanvig is also a critic of the epistemic value monism that stands as a key
shared assumption in the staled debates between internalists and externalists. Epistemic
value monism is the thesis that all other epistemic values derive their status as epistemic values from the value of
truth as the fundamental and non-derivative epistemic good. This has been the
predominant account of our epistemological axiology throughout the post-Gettier
era, and is perhaps best exemplified in what Alvin Goldman terms veritism.[8]
Its wide-spread influence is evident by the fact that commitment to an
instrumentalist conception of epistemic normativity (or epistemic rationality) is
prevalent not only among reliabilists like Goldman, but also among ardent internalists
like Conee and Feldman (2004) who agree with the reliabilists on little else. Advocates
of epistemic value pluralism reject this shared veritist axiology, insisting
that in addition to true belief and knowledge there are further, relatively independent,
basic epistemic values such as understanding, wisdom, rationality, justification,
and empirically-adequate theories (Kvanvig, 2005). To the extent that Conee,
Feldman and Goldman continue to base commitment to instrumentalism on
assumption of epistemic value monism, then the consensus that has held during
the post-Gettier era in favor of the adequacy of an instrumentalist account of
epistemic normativity will also be challenged by the epistemic value argument.
A turn
from epistemic value monism to pluralism potentially has the deeper effect of
rendering epistemological axiology a continuous
concern: study of the nature and sources of epistemic value across all of our positive epistemic standings becomes
a more central and continuous endeavor. Similar points are made among
responsibilists in Baehr’s (2007) “value pluralism conception” of the value
problem, in Hookway’s call for a shift from the “doxastic paradigm” to
“epistemology-as-inquiry,” and more generally in Riggs’ call for a “value turn”
in epistemology. As Riggs puts the proposal that has been behind much recent
interest among responsibilists in a pluralist axiology, we should “put the need
to find the bearers of epistemic value at the fore of…epistemological
theorizing” (2007).[9]
Many forms
of both internalism and externalism ignore the social dimension of knowledge
(Williams 2001, 36).
While Fricker is critical of veritist axiology, she is
equally critical of neo-Aristotelian virtue epistemologies like Zagzebski’s, which
draw upon an epistemological analogue of an Ideal Observer Theory to anchor the
normative concepts of epistemology. What Zagzebski calls “exemplarist Ideal
Agent theory” is a radical form of responsibilism in which the exemplarist
approach is held to be “as useful in epistemology as in moral theory” (133). I describe
this as phronomic virtue
responsibilism in order to capture the primacy it accords to the judgments of ideal
agents as exemplars of full virtue. However, Zagzebski’s phronomic virtue responsibilism is, on my view, given to an
exaggerated conception of what epistemically responsible believing consists in,
and is subsequently unable to take proper advantage of the genuine insights of externalism.
As Fricker rightly objects,
If credit accounts are to work for knowledge-in-general, it is essential that a certain 'moralism' is avoided. The moralism I have in mind is that of forcing all kinds of credit into a moral mould, namely that of credit one incurs from having a good ‘motive’ (and which consequently renders praise and blame responses appropriate). I think Zagzebski's view is vulnerable to this charge of moralism, and the problem stems directly from embracing a certain fully ethical conception of virtue and applying it uniformly to epistemology.[10]
What I term inquiry-focused or zetetic
virtue responsibilism provides another counterpoint to Zagzebski’s view. Phronomic virtue responsibilism insists
as fervently on an “internal” connection between ethical and epistemic norms as
others internalists like Feldman do on a kind of purely epistemic appraisal untouched
by practical and ethical norms. Both extremes are to be avoided. Inquiry-focused
responsibilism, as an alternative to both, is more Deweyan than Aristotelian,
in the sense that it locates the role of the reflective virtues in relation to an
agent’s zetetic activities within particular
contexts of inquiry.[11]
Perhaps all forms of responsibilism concern, as Christopher Hookway puts it, “how it is possible to be good at inquiry rather than, more simply, what it
is to have justified beliefs or knowledge” (2006, 101).[12]
But developing the model of “epistemology as theory of inquiry,” zetetic virtue responsibilists such as Hookway
think that, “The target of epistemic evaluations lies in our ability to carry
out inquiries, to reason effectively and solve problems” (98). On the account
of Dewey and other pragmatists, even theoretical inquiry is a practice, an
activity. While a veritist axiology sharply divides knowing and acting, proponents
of zetetic responsibilism or
epistemology-as-inquiry reject any radical dichotomy between the ‘theoretical’
and the ‘practical,’ and instead re-instate the ‘primacy of practice’: “[S]ince
reasoning is a goal-directed activity, the norms that govern reasoning will
include norms of practical reason: we
are evaluating strategies for solving problems, the effectiveness of agents at
putting their strategies into effect, and so on” (Hookway 100).
So utilizing my new taxonomic distinction between phronomic and zetetic forms
of virtue responsibilism, I note that
both have the potential to support a closer integration of social epistemology
with projects deemed central in the field, but that zetetic or “inquiry-focused” responsibilism isn’t given to those
problems Fricker (and Olson, 2006) identifies in Zagzebski’s neo-Aristotelian or
phronomic virtue responsibilism. Zetetic responsibilism seems to me better
able to account for the genuine insights of reliabilism and to provide support
for social epistemology. It has a further advantage if it makes it easier to acknowledge
what Williams calls “ought-to-be rules” as genuine
rules of criticism, and the agent’s zetetic
activities in conformity with them as conferring epistemic credit or value
on the agent even when not followed self-consciously or “deliberately.”
Credit, like achievement, is clearly something that comes in degrees; this
should not be obscured by the point that credit theorists associate achievements
with a specific kind of value: final value in Pritchard’s technical
vocabulary. Understanding and reflective knowing are valuable because
achievements are valuable, and successes that cannot be explained as due to the
agent’s creditable exercise of a cognitive ability of any kind cannot plausibly
be thought of as achievements. But how does this relate to actions that are near
‘automatic’ because highly habitual or even dispositional? Here the advantages
of zetetic over neo-Aristotelian or phronomic responsibilism, due to its
more restrained account of epistemic responsibility, become readily apparent. Our reliability-knowledge
typically requires conformity with ought-to-be rules, and not necessarily also
with more demanding “ought-to-do” rules, the latter being rules that are imperatival
in form (Williams, this volume). For an agent to accrue
epistemic credit for acting virtuously, it mustn’t be thought necessary that she be aware of
all the situational cues to which she responds, or even that she be consciously
aware of her epistemic aims.
Habitual actions are
actions repeated so frequently that they are performed with little or no conscious
attention or deliberation. This may be so with respect to our reliability
knowledge as well while we operate under default entitlements, and why Williams
describes its role in epistemic appraisal as primarily “negative,” entering typically
in response to a specific challenge to an attribution of creditable success. Always
having a reflective ‘perspective’ on our epistemic reliability (Sosa) seems too
strenuous a demand. What matters, philosophically, is that agents are sensitive
to the limits of their reliability in different epistemic situations, and to a
“relevant” range of possible defeaters to default entitlements. To the extent
that agents indeed are in fact sensitive
in some degree, reflective reason remains a ‘silent partner’ in our distinctively
human mode of knowing. This is so even when the target belief may appear to be
an instance of merely ‘brute externalist knowledge’ (Pritchard) or ‘animal knowledge’
(Sosa) that results from an innate faculty
virtue like keen eyesight. Habitual actions are easy to construe as ‘mere
acts,’ obscuring the distinction between habitual behaviors which are virtuous,
and which are not. Agents are still the authors of their habitual actions, and
these actions are explained not as one would compulsions or bodily processes,
but as conforming or failing to conform to genuine rules of criticism.
In order that some
degree of credit for achievement accrues
to the agent for cognitive success with respect to virtue-relevant goals, the
virtues need only figure among salient factors in explanation of the agent’s
success. Achievements are creditable successes, and these in turn are successes
through ability. A belief’s being true ‘because of’ virtue is the way the issue
is typically framed in virtue epistemologies, but we should be wary that this language
also carries an ambiguity: the ‘because of’ relationship will vary with the
agent’s context. Credit attribution will, when one speaks of success, in some
contexts presuppose a causal explanation, and in others an explanation matching
the epistemologist’s interest in conformity with particular norms, standards,
or ‘rules.’ The only way not to
conflate between these is to be sure that we explicitly take the notion of success being ‘because of’ virtue as a flexible
notion from the start. The undue restriction of attributions of achievement or
final value just to what conforms with the more demanding ought-to-do rules—rules
in imperatival form—, in particular, turns out to be but another way of making
an inflated demand on epistemic responsibility.
When success with
respect to true belief or any other epistemic aim is attributable to one’s
abilities, or to performance with respect to a competence, innate or acquired,
it is a cognitive achievement and a bearer
of value in the sense required for a final
value response to the Meno Problem (Kvanvig; Pritchard). Williams’ use of
Sellars’ distinction between these two types of rules may be thought to support
the credit theorist’s final value
response to the Meno problem. For what is of chief importance isn’t the
degree of credit or how that might relate to what factor is singularly most
salient in rational reconstructive explanations (Lackey), but that the value,
in whatever degree it comes, be of the right kind. And this is what is carried when Williams points out that
both kinds of rules in question are genuine rules of criticism. So habitual and even apparently ‘automatic’ zetetic activities, as I will argue
more fully in the final section, can be seen to merit the agent a degree of that
distinctive kind of value—final value—that
attaches to cognitive achievements as achievements.
2.3. We previously mentioned the
critique of the Prior Grounding Model of justification, a critique made by the
several accomplished heirs of Wilfred Sellars, including Michael Williams and
Robert Brandom (2001; 2008). Williams identifies this model as the prevalent
conception both among internalists and, perhaps more intriguingly, among many externalists
as their way of retaining the importance of personal justification or epistemic
responsibility. Our platitudinous commitment to a prior grounding paradigm of
philosophical reason must be exploded. “It is easy to miss the
fact that the practice of justifying is only activated by finding oneself in
the context of a properly motivated challenge” (2001, 150). Adopting the PG Model
turns out to be scepticism-inviting, but Williams wants to show us that it can
reasonably be set aside. We can maintain that knowing
is essentially connected with justification, but only if we detach ourselves
“not only from the classical demonstrative ideal and its infallibilist
descendants, but also from all conceptions of justification that insist on
respecting the Prior Grounding [Model]” (245). With the dialectical
shift from the PG Model to a Default and Challenge (or DC) Model, the problem
of infallibilism, closure, and even underdetermination-based arguments for radical
scepticism is more effectively side-stepped.
Williams
argues that the PG and DC Models “set different standards for epistemic
responsibility, hence for epistemic entitlement” (170). In other papers I have taken
this point and tried to develop a virtue epistemology that can contribute to
and take advantage of Williams’ and Brandom’s prescribed change of venue (2007a;
2008a). This shift is one that facilitates what Sven Bernecker (2006) aptly
describes as “epistemic compatibilism,” the thesis that kinds of epistemic
appraisal that drive internalism and externalism about justification can be part
of a single theory.[13] Williams’ distinctive
version of epistemic compatibilism is developed in Problems of Knowledge as the claim that “We can preserve the link
between knowledge and justification without accepting the Prior Grounding
Requirement” (2001, 148). From a responsibilist position, compatibilism
is both an advantageous and a plausible thesis, even though radical reliabilists
like Bernecker judge its prospects to be poor. The burden on the compatibilist
is not to argue in support some grand reconciliation of ‘internalism’ and
‘externalism’ as competing accounts of the very same thing, which of course
would be non-sensical; it is rather (and merely) to make sound philosophic
sense of the conceptual connections between our explanatory interests in agent responsibility
and in agent reliability, especially as they relate to cognitive success with
respect to various epistemic goods.[14]
I will
end with four specific suggestions for developing the philosophic import of Williams’
epistemic compatibility argument. Firstly,
I want to formalize my earlier claim that the distinction between ought-to-be
and ought-to-do rules is pertinent to the issues of epistemic value as
previously discussed, and can even be utilized directly in support of the
“final value response” to the value problem (as currently favored by a number
of credit theorists; see also Carter 2007). We earlier noted that appraisal of
an agent’s epistemic responsibility and reliability may in some cases focus on
behavior that is habitual and even near-automatic. But why should this be a
strike against crediting the agent who performs them? When no situational
features have prompted an agent to bring goals and strategies for pursuing them
to the level of conscious deliberation, an accredited agent remains in a
Default context, where her habitual zetetic
activities may still be taken as purposive, and as rational in the sense of
being done for a reason. Some authors allege deep problems in credit theory, however,
by arguing that knowing is sometimes less than an achievement. To apply Williams’ distinction against this objection, and in
support of a final value version of the credit theory, it needs to ward off worries
about purported “K-SANS’ cases—cases of knowing-without-achievement (Lackey
2007; Pritchard 2008b). Plausibly, one can argue as follows:
1. Final value accrues to the agent’s acts/actions whenever they are in
conformity with genuine rules of criticism.
2. Ought-to-be rules (and not just ought-to-do rules) are genuine rules
of criticism.
____________
3. Final value accrues to the agent’s acts/actions whenever they are in
conformity with ought-to-be rules (and not just ought-to-do rules).
4. Final value accrues to the agent’s
acts/actions whenever they are in conformity with ought-to-be rules (and not
just ought-to-do rules).
5. The agent’s acts/actions in K-SANS cases are
in conformity with ought-to-be rules.
____________
6. Final value accrues to the agent’s
acts/actions in K-SANS cases.
Secondly,
I want to allege that the connection between the sceptic’s anti-luck demands
and the prior grounding requirement is closer than has been recognized in the
literature. While Pritchard’s diagnosis locates the primary motivations for underdetermination-based
arguments for scepticism in concern over the pervasiveness of “reflective luck”
over our human epistemic condition, Williams locates these motivations in “spurious
generalizations” that give rise to a prior grounding conception of
justification. But these I see as two ways of putting almost the same
diagnostic point: Our reasonableness in refusing the PG Model is directly
connected to our ability to decline the sceptic’s demand for insulation from reflective epistemic luck. Both ways of
putting the sceptic’s demand bear upon epistemically desirable conditions, but they support the premises of (Cartesian
or other) underdetermination-based arguments for radical scepticism only if
justification and knowledge aren’t to be had without them. If we can instead accept
Williams’ diagnosis and reasonably decline the Prior Grounding requirement and
the right to ‘naked challenges,’ then since this
is what gives rise to the demand for the blanket exclusion of reflective luck,
we can reasonably decline that demand as well.
Thirdly,
virtue epistemologies not only address the issues of epistemic value discussed
earlier, but also support epistemic compatibilism. It is precisely for this
reason that they are described by Greco, Sosa, and Zagzebski (whatever their
other differences) as “mixed theories.” Williams’ key claim that we can preserve
conceptual ties between knowledge and personal justification without accepting
the Prior Grounding Requirement appears to mean several things. It means first to support some connections recognized
in the standard or JTB account of knowing and arguably reflected in the
intuition that knowing is generally more valuable than merely believing truly. As
previously said, it also means that discarding the PG in favor of the DC Model is
properly seen as a key upshot of the externalist turn in epistemology. This
allows us also to resist austere externalisms: those that Williams terms
“radical” and that Brandom describes as yielding to the ‘naturalistic temptation’: that is, “to
suppose that the concept of reliability of belief-forming processes can simply
replace the concept of having good reasons for belief” (2000, 373). Compatibilists
maintain that while on fallibilist premises it can be no ‘guarantor’ of
success, the epistemic responsibility of agents is nevertheless
conceptually connected with epistemic entitlements and evaluations. When
the ‘change of venue’ to the DC Model occurs, we find to our advantage that the
conceptual connections between our first and third-personal perspectives on
epistemic appraisal can be more easily supported and developed. The ‘What is
knowledge?’ question (related to the project of analysis) and the ‘What are we
doing?’ question (related to epistemic entitlements and implicatures) are more
easily separable as distinct concerns. Since proponents of credit
theories, virtue epistemologies, and the DC Model have each in various ways explicitly
championed epistemic compatibilism, the relationships between these three mutually-reinforcing
‘legs’ of the epistemic compatibility
argument need to be more closely studied.
The
final suggestion regards a more specific area where the synergies between the
DC Model and virtue epistemologies seem to me especially strong. This regards
the manner in which the DC Model seems to require distinguishing between contexts
in which “thick” and “thin” terms of epistemic appraisal are called for.
Virtue-theoretic concepts, I argue, provide the right kinds of conceptual
resource to service that need. So if the DC Model is to be more widely embraced,
epistemologists will need to think carefully about the thin/thick distinction
as it relates to the epistemic appraisal of agents. Both thick and thin
descriptions of intellectual character find an important role in the
explanations needed to discharge our obligations to a sceptical interlocutor. This
is not a proposal like those debated recently in ethics, for a move either “from”
thin to thick theory, or vice-versa. It is simply the claim that realizing the
resources of the DC Model will require that we find the proper role of both thickly and thinly-described character
traits in the logic of explanation.
The inadvertent ‘thickening’
of our accounts of justification has often led to under-motivated debate and miscommunication,
according to Heather Battaly. “A concept is maximally thick
when all of the necessary and sufficient conditions for its application are
fixed—when all of its boundaries are precise” (105) Given this definition, it
is clear that knowledge and justification are typically approached as maximally
thick concepts, and the project of analysis is typically conceived in this way.
What Heather Battaly describes as “thin concept analysis” by contrast argues
instead for a flexible set of
conditions on terms such as “justification” and “epistemic virtue,” and I argue
that on the DC Model this is all that is owed the radical sceptical
interlocutor unless and until a motivated challenge arises to an attribution made
about a particular agent in a particular case. Flexibility
as the Taoists say is the companion of life, rigidity the companion of death. A
‘thin’ or merely formal areteic
condition on knowledge, I want to argue, may also be all that the DC Model requires
to support the bearers of value, or
what Pritchard puts better as our “master intuition” regarding
knowledge-as-achievement (2008c).
If positive epistemic standings like “knows” and “is justified” are ones that have multiple
independent conditions of application, then philosophers should rightly decline
the demand for a thickly-stated yet ‘completely general’ analysis, an analysis
that would specify ahead of all challenges just what combinations are
necessary, or which are sufficient, for proper attribution. The demand for
reductive definition of knowledge in terms of maximally thick conditions isn’t
reasonable in the kind of situation where, as William Alston thinks, we are
working with a “family relations concept” with no fixed conditions at all. Nor
is it reasonable where, as Battaly alternatively thinks, the parties to the
dispute do agree to some fixed functions of justification, but what they share
is still only a “thin conception” of these functions. The demand for
thickly-stated sufficient conditions on knowing appears on her diagnosis to
arise from spurious generalization: the sceptic pines for a maximally thick
characterization of epistemic conditions, when the diagnosis instead reveals
that only a rather thin and formal one is reasonably demanded of human knowers
acting in their Default context. Thickening the areteic (or any other achievement-related) condition can be a way
of placing a general internalist condition on knowing, inadvertently or intentionally,
and assuming a potentially inflated conception of our epistemic responsibility.
By contrast, acknowledging the “combinatorial vagueness” of epistemic terms
best characterized as thin concepts merely anticipates that same plurality of
possible combinations for epistemizing justification that Williams and Brandom
both insist is one of the guiding insights of the externalist turn in
epistemology. The proposal for thin concept analysis might therefore accomplish
in less objectionable (because more “unified”) form what Sosa tries to
accomplish in a “two-tiered” model of justification that divides between more
minimal conditions on “animal knowledge” and more demanding conditions on
“reflective knowledge.”
This
proposal for thin concept analysis by virtue responsibilists like Battaly and
myself might also be thought of as supporting Williams’ attempts to show that, “The conception of
epistemic responsibility that emerges from adopting the default and challenge
model is considerably less demanding” than that associated with the PG
Model. In the Default
context it is just the plurality of possible sources of epistemizing
justification that we want to maintain. But when a defense commitment is engaged
about an attribution in a particular case, then our default analysis of knowing
based upon a thin conception of achievement-through-competence must give way to
agent-specific explanations. In a successful defense we would expect the
virtues, whether faculty or reflective, to be salient aspects of the best explanation
for the agent’s success. If an attribution of knowing is to be upheld, we generally
want to be able to appeal to the agent’s virtuous epistemic agency in order to
preserve what would be the normal attribution of credit had no motivated
challenge come to light. A particular agent’s success with respect to an
epistemic aim being ‘because of’ or ‘due to’ her cognitive ability will (in
cases at the high end of the spectrum) need to be fleshed out by appealing to thick
characterological features of that agent.
If
this is correct, then we have shown that virtue-theoretical explanations may
well be what are needed by proponents of the DC Model in order to meet the fuller
accounting of the anti-sceptical obligations we incur on each of its two
recognized contexts, Default and Challenge. Proponents of the DC Model need a
fuller account of epistemic responsibility, and can surely find a resource in
the flexibility of virtue-theoretic concepts that can be ‘bent’ towards either
the faculty or the reflective virtues (or ought-to-be
or ought-to-do rules) as called
for by the triggering of a Defense commitment in a particular, real-world agent
and case. My view is that the benefit of potential synergies works in both
directions: Adopting the DC Model has been seen in this paper as providing epistemologists
a way to better realize the resources of characterological explanations, and as
Kvanvig desired, a way to ‘loosen the shackles fastened on epistemology by
skepticism’ during the post-Gettier era.
These
are my present suggestions for expanding epistemology, developed as far as
space allows. Readers are, of course, welcome and invited to draw their own
conclusions about new projects and directions in epistemology. Responsibilism
as I have thought of it focuses on developing a research program into the
reflective intellectual virtues, and I have here used three overlapping
internal critiques of the analytic tradition in order to help clear the path
for such a program. A responsibilist approach, as it has here been described, is
continuous with the tradition of analytic epistemology, yet highlights numerous
new challenges. It also, I think, leaves us with an optimistic assessment of
our epistemological future(s.)[15]
Works Cited
Axtell,
G. 2008a. “Virtue-Theoretic Responses to Skepticism,” in J. Greco, (ed.)
Axtell, G. 2008b. “From Internalist Evidentialism to Virtue Responsibilism,” in T. Dougherty (ed.) Evidentialism and its Discontents.