Expanding Epistemology: A Responsibilist Approach

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 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. Since veritism is an axiology intended to aid in the rational reconstruction of propositional knowing, it begins with a fundamental cleavage between “knowing how” and “knowing that.” 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 aims and their relationship to normative appraisals of agents and their beliefs 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 an expansion of epistemology that axiologically re-casts what is still of value the internalism/externalism debates. The expansion I envision would share some of the 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 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 called for. Here I provide an overview of three converging arguments to this 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 supplementing 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 are not intended to be ones that my focal authors would necessarily adopt. But I will try to show how they fit into the kind of “responsibilist” approach in epistemology 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, but only by analogy, we might say that the arguments made by the other two authors are also intended to unburden us of other deleterious platitudes, ones that force us to re-examine meta-epistemological assumptions that animate our conceptions of the epistemological enterprise. Jonathan Kvanvig, my second author, could then be taken to target adherence to the platitude that ‘analysis of knowledge is analysis enough,’—to target, that is, the assumption of the centrality of propositional knowledge in relation to other epistemic aims within our overall cognitive economy. My third author, Michael Williams, might be seen targeting platitudinous adherence to the idea that, in the debate over radical scepticism, the real or imagined sceptic has the right to issue ‘blind 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 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 discriminating amongst 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 understanding something) 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, 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 luck (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. There is a strong intuition that knowledge is incompatible with luck in the sense that if one knows then it ought not to be the case that one could easily have been wrong. This is the demand that a level of “safety” characterizes the processs that a target belief is acquired, and goes together with an externalist or truth-linked account of our capacity for knowing. But 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. Repudiating the epistemic luck platitude is still consistent with describing oneself, as Pritchard does, as an “anti-luck” epistemologist: safety and other candidate conditions on knowing are conceived explicitly as responding to anti-luck concerns. But 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 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 tracing its role to Cartesian and contemporary neo-Pyrrhonian scepticism. It is the anti-luck concern with reflective luck that more directly stokes the passions of the sceptic, yet this isn’t well-acknowledged in the literature.

Addressing the Gettier problem 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 to admit the need to examine the different kinds of luck and their potential bearing on our epistemic aims, severally, would already constitute a very significant expansion of epistemology. The upshot of the anti-luck argument is that if we are to respond adequately to scepticism, we need to reform our epistemic practices by taking more comprehensive approach to epistemic luck; we need especially to broaden our concerns beyond just those externalist kinds operating in Gettier-style, lottery and fake-barn cases and their ilk. 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. Pritchard’s anti-luck argument concludes that both basic forms of epistemic luck, the veritic and the non-veritic, “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 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 first version or aspect of Kvanvig’s epistemic value argument has been influential enough to spur examination of the structure of the value problem, of what extant approaches are best-suited to deal with it, and of whatever 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 adherence to epistemic value monism, and of its subsequent focus on propositional knowledge as its focal concept. These two aspects of the argument are clearly connected, as can be seen in the recent exchange between Kvanvig and Marian David (2005), where the latter’s epistemic value monism leads him explicitly to adopt a conception of epistemology as the analysis of knowledge. Kvanvig, to the contrary, concludes both that epistemic value monism is “too narrow a view of the variety of epistemic values and goods,” and by extension that 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. For instance, 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 our 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 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—that is to say, for a reductive analysis of knowledge free from serious counter-example.

Williams makes it clear that the PG Model in not something just evident among internalists but also among externalists, for whom the inconsistency becomes costly. This seems supported by what John Greco writes about the often inconsistent ways that externalists treat the question of how to understand defeating evidence to one’s belief; here implicitly and illicitly the externalist will often ‘go internalist,’ as Greco (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 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. The latter occurs 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 contemporary neo-Pyrrhonians charge. 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 issue that today needs to be addressed by epistemologists concerned to improve the adequacy of philosophical responses to radical 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 externalist 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. Neither approach looks viable when we view conditions on knowing as bearing on anti-luck concerns. 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).

There may have been a vague sense shared by those involved in the internalism/externalism debate that each side might in fact be worried primarily about different kinds of epistemic luck, and that the sceptic typically wants not to deny us all knowledge, but if we take knowledge simpliciter as a term leaving room for the common-sense distinction between reflective and non-reflective knowing, then to deny us the latter—knowledge of distinctively valuable sorts, and sorts that reflect higher cognitive achievement. But if so, these points have rarely been made explicit. I do not mean to say, however, that responsibilists are particularly interested in the kind of luck that Pritchard calls reflective luck and sees as a key motivation for scepticism. To the contrary as will be argued in section 3, a responsibilist approach might make it easier to identify what is misguided in the sceptic’s blanket demand for its exclusion.

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 agents 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 as crucial to the support of epistemic compatibilism. 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 ancient zetetikos is the seeker who “proceeds by inquiry.” 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 efforts and strategies. Yet 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. 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). 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 possess and epistemic norms they “accept” at that reconstructed moment, and whatever truth or falsity these have. 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 Feldman, appraisals of epistemic responsibility must factor in the zetetic activities of the agent in appropriately acquiring, weighing, and updating evidence for what they believe.

Responsibilists can clearly find advantage in Pritchard’s anti-luck argument, but might do so without conceding to a dismissive treatment of the non-veritic kinds of luck (apart from reflective luck) that Pritchard’s taxonomy identifies. I would argue that treating evidential and doxastic luck as benign functions to impede Pritchard’s intended “final value” (or “value-of-achievements”) response to the Meno problem. Responsibilists want us to get clear on the sense or senses of luck capable of undermining attributions of creditable success, but this cannot be done without a significant expansion of epistemology to study, as Wayne Riggs proposes, “the conceptual connections among a family of concepts that include credit, responsibility, attribution, and luck” (2007a), or again to study, as Jason Baehr proposes, the proper role of the reflective or “character” virtues in epistemology.[5] From this perspective, the responsibilist asks why, though meeting the reliabilist’s every desideratum for being objectively truth-conducive, the reflective virtues so rarely deemed to connect directly with their 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 are is to ask after the right kinds of process type and actions-in-inquiry; to ask what the bearers of epistemic value are is to ask after the right value type. I want to retain these two ‘master intuitions’ (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 process token yields justification. 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 each of the epistemic standings we hold to be 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 useful and even ‘central’ concepts in epistemology only if they contribute to a successful theory of knowing?’ Responsibilists do not typically think that all concepts with a claim to importance are always to be understood in terms of truth, semantically conceived. They are concerned that the received view’s conception of epistemology truncates the concept of epistemic virtues. A focus on synchronic evidential rationality cannot capture the role of the reflective virtues, which readily extend beyond belief acquisition to belief maintenance, revision, and transmission as other essential functions of our overall cognitive economy. A project of reductive analysis of propositional knowing cannot capture the role of the reflective virtues either, since virtue-relevant goals include not just knowing and believing truly, but also higher epistemic achievements such as theoretical understanding. Because of 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.” These are proposed by some internalists (Foley), and taken seriously by some externalists as well (Pritchard 2006, 55). One could call, as Richard Foley most prominently does, 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 of both projects.’[6] Even forms of virtue epistemology Baehr terms “moderate” and not just those he terms “radical” take issue with the “conservative” form 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). I agree with Baehr’s statement, yet I have explained elsewhere why I also think the Two Project Proposal Foley makes in responding to Ernest Sosa’s distinction between ‘animal’ and ‘reflective’ knowing isn’t, on closer inspection, very attractive (Axtell 2007a). While it does secure a kind of co-existence and compatibility between ‘externalist’ and ‘internalist’ research programs after a period of prolonged antagonism, the radical separation strategy Foley recommends strikes me as having steep hidden costs with respect to our ability to side-step scepticism. I will later argue that a more robust epistemic compatibilism made possible by convergences between virtue theory, credit theory, and the inferentialists’ 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 positive epistemic standings such as “knowing” and “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 Kvanvig’s “epistemic value” argument serves also to explain how this devolved and led into an unsustainably narrow conception of epistemology’s central tasks.

Kvanvig’s call for greater diversity of interests has given rise, as we mentioned, to a growing literature on epistemological axiology. Different kinds of knowing may be valuable to us in different and philosophically interesting ways. Are there, additionally, epistemic standings of greater value than knowledge, and which should occupy a more central place in epistemology? Kvanvig argues 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). Now Kvanvig’s and Pritchard’s accounts 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 demanding such a revisionist stance, Elgin, Riggs, and Zagzebski, and others have each made arguments to this same effect: if epistemology follows the trail of epistemic value, then “understanding” should be accorded a more central place.

The epistemic value argument questions whether analytic epistemologists’ concern should remain with the framing of a ‘minimal set’ of conditions on propositional knowing, or extend to higher, distinctively human epistemic standings. But the prescribed expansion of epistemology by those who develop the epistemic value argument typically runs considerably deeper than this. Those who make this argument criticize epistemic value monism as a 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.[7] But its wide-spread influence is evident by the fact that commitment to an instrumentalist conception of epistemic normativity is prevalent not only among reliabilists like Goldman, but also among internalists like Conee and Feldman (2004) with whose approach they otherwise sharply disagree. 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).

A turn from epistemic value monism to pluralism arguably renders epistemological axiology a continuous concern: study of the nature and sources of epistemic value across all of our positive epistemic standings is thought of as 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 calls 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 in a pluralist axiology, we should “put the need to find the bearers of epistemic value at the fore of…epistemological theorizing” (2007).[8]

Many form of both internalism and externalism ignore the social dimension of knowledge (Williams 2001, 36). Lorraine Code's responsibilism remains connected with feminist and with social epistemology in her recent work on "the power of ignorance" in shaping epistemic practices that result in exploitation and oppression. Miranda Fricker, Christopher Hookway, and Linda Zagzebski each also develop versions of responsibilism that demand a more social epistemological account of our epistemic practices. Zagzebski’s stated reasons for seeking a virtue epistemology include not only the impasse between internalist and externalist accounts of epistemic justification, and a neglect of understanding and wisdom as other epistemic ends worthy of study, but also a lack of direct concern with the practical ends of theoretical reasoning, and a certain blindness towards social dimensions of epistemic practice. Miranda Fricker's recent book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, elaborates further convergences between virtue theory and social epistemology. Fricker’s book studies the ethical and political aspects of our epistemic conduct, and works to support these as proper and central concerns for epistemologists. Social identity and relations of power impact our collective epistemic practices, and especially the assessments we make of testifiers and their testimony. I agree with Fricker’s call for “a truly social epistemology,” and think that such a proposal naturally finds support in the responsibilist approach within virtue theory.

Still, while Fricker is critical of veritism, 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 neo-Aristotelian form of virtue responsibilism, a form 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 central role it gives to ideal agents as exemplars of full virtue. However, 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 form embracing a certain fully ethical conception of virtue and applying it uniformly to epistemology.[9]

What I term inquiry-focused or zetetic virtue responsibilism also provides a counterpoint to Zagzebski’s approach. Zagzebski insists as fervently on an “internal” connection between ethical and epistemic norms as others like Feldman do on a kind of purely epistemic appraisal untouched by practical and ethical norms. 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 active efforts in particular contexts of inquiry.[10] 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” (101).[11] But developing the model of “epistemology as theory of inquiry,” zetetic virtue responsibilists such as Hookway, Olson and myself 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 veritist accounts acknowledge little relationship between knowing and acting, Hookway rejects any radical dichotomy between the ‘theoretical’ and the ‘practical,’ and instead re-instates 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 the 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 subject to problems Fricker (and Olson, 2006) find in Zagzebski’s neo-Aristotelian or phronomic virtue responsibilism. That this form of responsibilism sits better with Brandom’s and Williams’ inferentialism seems apparent enough. What I want to argue is that this approach makes it far easier to acknowledge what Williams calls “ought-to-be rules” as genuine rules of criticism, and actions that are in conformity with them as conferring a degree of final value upon the agent.

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. 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 ‘automatic’ because highly habitual or even dispositional? Here the advantages of zetetic over neo-Aristotelian or phronomic virtue responsibilism due to its more restrained account of epistemic responsibility become more 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. I argue that Williams’ distinction between these two types of rules offers direct support for the credit theorist’s final value response to the Meno problem. 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 typical role in epistemic appraisal as negative, entering in response to a specific challenge to an attribution of creditable success. Always having a reflective epistemic ‘perspective’ on our epistemic reliability 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,’ as Sosa puts it, in our distinctive mode of human 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 behavior which is virtuous, and which is 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 with 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. But whether it is the faculty or the reflective virtues that are the more salient factors explaining the agent’s success is something that depends upon whether the one kind of rule or the other is applicable in a particular case. 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’ can be glossed causally or in terms of good reasons in light of which the agent deliberates: it does not of itself specify whether conformity is expected to be with the one set of rules or the other. The only way not to conflate between these expectations is to be sure that we explicitly take the ‘because of’ relationship thinly and flexibly from the start. Restrictions of attributions of achievement or final value just to what conforms with ought-to-do rules—rules in imperatival form—turns out to be but another way of ‘thickening’ one’s account of justification and 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. What is of chief importance isn’t the degree of credit or how that might relate to what factors are most salient in rational reconstructive explanations (Greco), but that the value, in whatever degree it comes, be of the right kind. Even apparently ‘automatic’ zetetic activities and “habitual” epistemic responsibility, as I will argue more fully in the final section, still merit the agent a degree of that distinctive kind of value—final value—that attaches to cognitive achievements of all kinds.

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 numerous externalists as their way of retaining the importance of personal justification. 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” (2001, 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.[12] Williams’ distinctive version of epistemic compatibilism is developed in Problems of Knowledge (2001), as the claim that “We can preserve the link between knowledge and justification without accepting the Prior Grounding Requirement” (2001, 148). I want to argue that 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. Internalists have sometimes argued that responsibility, at least in the cases that most interest them, implies compliance with epistemic norms which must be accessible upon reflection for the agent. But this argument is difficult to maintain, as some self-described internalists now concede (Feldman, 281; Bonjour, 175-6). There seem to be no good arguments either from epistemic responsibility or from the notion of creditable success, to any sort of general (access or mentalist) internalist condition.

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 his distinction between ought-to-be and ought-to-do rules (this volume) 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 currently favored by a number of credit theorists (see 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 agent remains in a Default context, and her habitual zetetic activities may still be taken as purposive, and as rational in the sense of being done for a reason. Some authors find deep problems in credit theory, because 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 almost two ways of putting the same diagnostic point: Our reasonableness in refusing the PG Model is directly connected to our reasonableness in declining the sceptic’s demand for insulation from reflective epistemic luck. Both ways of putting the sceptic’s demand do bear upon epistemically desirable conditions, but they support the premises of underdetermination-based sceptical arguments only if justification and knowledge aren’t to be had without them. If, instead, we can accept Williams’ diagnosis and reasonably decline the Prior Grounding requirement and the right to ‘naked challenges,’ then if this is what gives rise to the demand for the blanket exclusion of reflective luck, we can reasonably decline that as well.

Thirdly, virtue epistemologies not only address the issues of epistemic value discussed earlier, but also support epistemic compatibilism. It is 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 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 no ‘guarantor’ of success, the epistemic responsibility of agents is 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. Since proponents of the DC Model, credit theories, and virtue epistemologies have each in various ways explicitly championed epistemic compatibilism, both the potential synergies and the potential tensions between what I want to characterize as the ‘three legs’ of the epistemic compatibility argument, could certainly stand to be more closely examined.

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.

In analysis of knowing I have argued elsewhere that a ‘thin’ or merely formal areteic condition is 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). [The inclusion of an areteic or ability/competence condition makes it a “virtue epistemology in the strict sense. But this does not preclude the need for an independent tucheic or anti veritic luck condition, and indeed I accept Pritchard’s argument that an independent anti-luck condition is also needed. The areteic condition on the present account properly captures the intuition about the importance of the cognitive abilities to knowing. But insistence on this condition being only formal or thinly-described (by contrast with an anti-luck condition that is thickly described by Sosa and Pritchard as a modal “safety” condition), allows for the variety of ways in which cognitive success might arise creditable to one’s intellectual competence or ability. The inadvertent thickening of our accounts of justification has often led to under-motivated debates and philosophical dead-ends. What Heather Battaly describes as “thin concept analysis” provides for a flexible set of conditions, 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. Moreover, with concepts like knowledge and justification which have multiple possibilities of application, we 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 of that epistemic standing. The demand for such thickly-stated sufficient conditions on knowing rightly appears on this model to arise from spurious generalization. Thickening the areteic (or any other achievement-related) condition can be a way of placing a general internalist condition on knowing, and assuming an inflated conception of our epistemic responsibility. Flexibility as the Taoists say is the companion of life, rigidity the companion of death. The proposal for “thin concept analysis” by virtue responsibilists like Battaly should 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 aspect parts 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. Certainly the agent’s success with respect to an epistemic aim being ‘because of’ her cognitive ability will need to be fleshed out in one or another way, a way that typically appeals to thick characterological features of the 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 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 virtue theorists a way to better realize the resources of characterological explanations, and as Kvanvig desired, to loosen the shackles fastened on epistemology by skepticism.

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 the help clear the path for such a program. A responsibilist approach, I have tried to show, highlights numerous new challenges, but also leaves us with an optimistic assessment of our epistemological future(s.)[13]

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Notes