Patrick Bondy | Wichita State University (original) (raw)

Papers by Patrick Bondy

Routledge, 2020

This is the Editor's introduction to Well-Founded Belief: New Essays on the Epistemic Basing Rela... more This is the Editor's introduction to Well-Founded Belief: New Essays on the Epistemic Basing Relation (Forthcoming, Routledge 2020)

If a subject has a true belief, and she has good evidence for it, and there’s no evidence against... more If a subject has a true belief, and she has good evidence for it, and there’s no evidence against it, why should it matter if she doesn’t believe on the basis of the good available evidence? After all, properly based beliefs are no likelier to be true than their corresponding improperly based beliefs, as long as the subject possesses the same good evidence in both cases. And yet it clearly does matter. The aim of this paper is to explain why, and in the process delineate a species of epistemic luck that has hitherto gone unnoticed—what we call propositional epistemic luck—but which we claim is crucial to accounting for the importance of proper basing. As we will see, in order to understand why this type of epistemic luck is malignant, we also need to reflect on the relationship between epistemic luck and epistemic risk.

Getting off the Wheel

Metaphilosophy, 2015

Descartes' demon is a deceiver: the demon makes things appear to you other than as they really ar... more Descartes' demon is a deceiver: the demon makes things appear to you other than as they really are. However, as Descartes famously pointed out in the Second Meditation, not all knowledge is imperilled by this kind of deception. You still know you are a thinking thing. Perhaps, though, there is a more virulent demon in epistemic hell, one from which none of our knowledge is safe. Jonathan Schaffer (2010) thinks so. The " Debasing Demon " he imagines threatens knowledge not via the truth condition on knowledge, but via the basing condition. This demon can cause any belief to seem like it's held on a good basis, when it's really held on a bad basis. Several recent critics (Brueckner (2011), Conee (2015), Ballantyne & Evans (2013)) grant Schaffer the possibility of such a debasing demon, and argue that the skeptical conclusion doesn't follow. By contrast, we argue that on any plausible account of the epistemic basing relation, the " debasing demon " is impossible. Our argument for why this is so gestures, more generally, to the importance of avoiding common traps by embracing mistaken assumptions about what it takes for a belief to be based on a reason.

Informal Logic

Argumentation theorists are beginning to recognize that ad hominem arguments are often legitimate... more Argumentation theorists are beginning to recognize that ad hominem arguments are often legitimate. Virtue argumentation theorists argue that a character trait approach to argument appraisal can explain why ad hominems are legitimate, when they are legitimate. But I argue that we do not need to appeal to virtue argumentation theory to explain the legitimacy of ad hominem arguments; a more straightforward evidentialist approach to argument appraisal is also committed to their legitimacy. I also argue that virtue argumentation theory faces some important problems, and that whereas the virtue-theoretic approach in epistemology is (arguably) well-motivated, that motivation does not carry over to virtue argumentation theory.

Dialogue

The following claims are independently plausible but jointly inconsistent: (1) epistemic deontolo... more The following claims are independently plausible but jointly inconsistent: (1) epistemic deontologism is correct (i.e., there are some beliefs we ought to have, and some beliefs we ought not to have); (2) we have no voluntary control over our beliefs; (3) S’s lack of control over whether she φs implies that S has no obligation to φ or to not φ (i.e., ought-implies-can). The point of this paper is to argue that there are active and passive aspects of belief, which can come apart, and to argue that deontological epistemic evaluations apply to the active aspect of belief.

Pacific Philosophical Quarterly

I argue for two related causal-counterfactual approaches to the basing relation here. The analyse... more I argue for two related causal-counterfactual approaches to the basing relation here. The analyses incoporate versions of John Turri's cognitive-manifestation condition, to overcome causal deviance problems, and Marshall Swain's pseudo-overdetermination condition, to handle gypsy-lawyer cases. Swain's pseudo-overdetermination condition has been widely, but I think mistakenly, rejected. I defend the a revised version of the condition against several objections.

Epistemically circular arguments have been receiving quite a bit of attention in the literature f... more Epistemically circular arguments have been receiving quite a bit of attention in the literature for the past decade or so. Often the goal is to determine whether reliabilists (or other foundationalists) are committed to the legitimacy of epistemically circular arguments. It is often assumed that epistemic circularity is objectionable, though sometimes reliabilists accept that their position entails the legitimacy of some epistemically circular arguments, and then go on to affirm that such arguments really are good ones. My goal in this paper is to argue against the legitimacy of epistemically circular arguments. My strategy is to give an argument against the legitimacy of epistemically circular arguments, which rests on a principle of basis-relative safety, and then to argue that reliabilists do not have the resources to resist the argument. I argue that even if the premises of an epistemically circular argument enjoy reliabilist justification, the argument does not transmit that justification to its conclusion. The main goal of my argument is to show that epistemic circularity is always a bad thing, but it also has the positive consequence that reliabilists are freed from an awkward commitment to the legitimacy of some intuitively bad arguments.

It has been claimed that there is a lottery paradox for justification and an analogous paradox fo... more It has been claimed that there is a lottery paradox for justification and an analogous paradox for knowledge, and that these two paradoxes should have a common solution. I argue that there is in fact no lottery paradox for knowledge, since that version of the paradox has a demonstrably false premise. The solution to the justification paradox is to deny closure of justification under conjunction. I present a principle which allows us to deny closure of justification under conjunction in certain kinds of cases, but which still allows that belief in a conjunction on the basis of justified belief in its conjuncts can often be justified.

Philosophia, 2013

The purpose of this paper is to raise a new objection to externalist process reliabilism about ep... more The purpose of this paper is to raise a new objection to externalist process reliabilism about epistemic justification. The objection is that epistemic justification is intensional—it does not permit the substitution of co-referring expressions—and reliabilism cannot accommodate that.

Informal Logic, 2010

The aim of this paper is to adapt Miranda Fricker’s concept of testimonial injustice to cases of ... more The aim of this paper is to adapt Miranda Fricker’s concept of testimonial injustice to cases of what I call “argumentative injustice”: those cases where an arguer’s social identity brings listeners to place too much or little credibility in an argument. My recommendation is to adopt a stance of “metadistrust”  we ought to distrust our inclinations to trust or distrust members of stereotyped groups.

Informal Logic, 2010

The aim of this paper is to defend the claim that arguments are truth-directed, and to discuss th... more The aim of this paper is to defend the claim that arguments are truth-directed, and to discuss the role that truth plays in the evaluation of arguments that are truth-directed. It concludes that the proper place of truth is in the metatheory in terms of which a theory of evaluation is to be worked out, rather than in the theory of evaluation itself as a constraint on premise adequacy.

Drafts by Patrick Bondy

The Cartesian demon, the New Evil Demon, and the Debasing Demon are all discussed here, from the ... more The Cartesian demon, the New Evil Demon, and the Debasing Demon are all discussed here, from the perspective of internalism about justification.

Paternalistic interferences in people's behaviour occupy something of an unstable place in the wa... more Paternalistic interferences in people's behaviour occupy something of an unstable place in the way we think about our obligations to each other. On the one hand, when we see that someone is clearly behaving in a way that is contrary to his own well-being or best interests, it sometimes seems permissible to take steps to promote his well-being by limiting his options. For example, when we suspect that a friend is possibly suicidal, we might quietly remove dangerous objects or substances from the vicinity, in order to protect our friend from himself. On the other hand, when a person is doing nothing that harms anyone else, who are we to interfere with the way she lives her life? It seems like an impermissible violation of people's autonomy to interfere with their actions and decision-making processes without their consent. So it is understandable that the ethical status of paternalistic interventions is controversial. Frustratingly, however, what constitutes paternalistic behaviour is itself not settled in the literature. Without a clear agreed-upon definition of the kind of behaviour we're talking about, arguments about epistemic and non-epistemic paternalism run the risk of simply talking past each other. There isn't space in this chapter to fully address the definition of paternalism in general, but I will offer what I take to be an interesting set of sufficient conditions for some behaviour to count as paternalistic, largely following Bullock (2015). Interesting sufficient conditions are more important to have in hand than necessary conditions for the purpose of this chapter, because my goal here is to show that we can sometimes have normative reasons-good reasons, reasons of the kind which really justify actions-to engage in epistemic paternalistic behaviour. To make the case for that claim, first we'll need to have in hand a set of conditions that are sufficient for behaviour to count as paternalistic, and an understanding of the kinds of epistemic goods in light of which paternalistic interventions might be made. In Section 1, I turn to those two tasks. Section 2 then articulates plausible principles regarding the normativity of our epistemic reasons at the intrapersonal level, and regarding the normative reasons we might have for promoting epistemic goods in others. Together the elements in the following sections constitute (I hope) a plausible and well-motived story about the nature and normativity of epistemic paternalist behaviour.

For Well-Founded Belief: New Essays on the Epistemic Basing Relation (eds., Bondy, P. and Carter, J.A.), Routledge.

In Lehrer’s case of the superstitious lawyer, a lawyer possesses conclusive evidence for his clie... more In Lehrer’s case of the superstitious lawyer, a lawyer possesses conclusive evidence for his client’s innocence, and he appreciates that the evidence is conclusive, but the evidence is causally inert with respect to his belief in his client’s innocence. This case has divided epistemologists ever since Lehrer originally proposed it in his argument against causal analyses of knowledge. Some have taken the claim that the lawyer bases his belief on the evidence as a data point for our theories to accommodate, while others have denied that the lawyer has knowledge, or that he bases his belief on the evidence.
In this paper, we move the dialectic forward by way of arguing that the superstitious lawyer genuinely infers his client’s innocence from the evidence. To show that the lawyer’s inference is genuine, we argue in defense of a version of a doxastic construal of the ‘taking’ condition on inference. We also provide a pared-down superstitious lawyer-style case, which displays the key features of the original case without including its complicated and distracting features. But interestingly, although we argue that the lawyer’s belief is based on his good evidence, and is also plausibly doxastically justified, we do not argue that the lawyer knows that his client is innocent.

What are reasons made of? And, whatever reasons are made of, how is reason-stuff carved up into v... more What are reasons made of? And, whatever reasons are made of, how is reason-stuff carved up into various different kinds? Those are my questions here. I want to know about the ontology of reasons: what kinds of things, or properties, or relations (or whatever) are reasons? And I want to know about the typology of reasons: how are reasons themselves divided up into various kinds? I am particularly interested in the category of epistemic reasons: I want to know what constitutes epistemic reasons, and how they are distinguished from other sorts of reasons. I am sympathetic towards a kind of evidentialist theory about epistemically justified beliefs, according to which epistemic reasons always consist of evidence, and evidence always constitutes epistemic reasons. But even if evidentialism is correct, that doesn't yet tell us what epistemic reasons are; it just links the question of the ontology of epistemic reasons to the question of the ontology of evidence. If we can settle on an answer to either of those questions, then we will also have our answer to the other. 1 Why do I think the category of epistemic reasons is so interesting? For one thing, it seems to me that epistemic reasons are fundamental, in the sense that for any subject S and action φ, if S does not possess epistemic reasons bearing on the appropriateness of φ-ing, then S cannot possess normative reasons for or against φ-ing. Epistemic reasons are enablers of all other reasons. For another thing, epistemic reasons are a kind of reasons, and so if we can settle the question of the ontology of epistemic reasons, that will also point the way to an answer to the question of the ontology of reasons in general. If epistemic reasons always consist of evidence, as I believe, or even if they are only sometimes evidential, and if we can answer the question of the ontology of evidence, then that will point us to an answer to the question of the ontology of reasons in general. And of course, the reverse will also be true: if we can answer the question of the ontology of reasons in general, then that will also point us to an answer to the question of the ontology of epistemic reasons, and of evidence. So some of the arguments I consider below address the ontology of reasons in general, while others address the ontology of evidential reasons.

Routledge, 2020

This is the Editor's introduction to Well-Founded Belief: New Essays on the Epistemic Basing Rela... more This is the Editor's introduction to Well-Founded Belief: New Essays on the Epistemic Basing Relation (Forthcoming, Routledge 2020)

If a subject has a true belief, and she has good evidence for it, and there’s no evidence against... more If a subject has a true belief, and she has good evidence for it, and there’s no evidence against it, why should it matter if she doesn’t believe on the basis of the good available evidence? After all, properly based beliefs are no likelier to be true than their corresponding improperly based beliefs, as long as the subject possesses the same good evidence in both cases. And yet it clearly does matter. The aim of this paper is to explain why, and in the process delineate a species of epistemic luck that has hitherto gone unnoticed—what we call propositional epistemic luck—but which we claim is crucial to accounting for the importance of proper basing. As we will see, in order to understand why this type of epistemic luck is malignant, we also need to reflect on the relationship between epistemic luck and epistemic risk.

Getting off the Wheel

Metaphilosophy, 2015

Descartes' demon is a deceiver: the demon makes things appear to you other than as they really ar... more Descartes' demon is a deceiver: the demon makes things appear to you other than as they really are. However, as Descartes famously pointed out in the Second Meditation, not all knowledge is imperilled by this kind of deception. You still know you are a thinking thing. Perhaps, though, there is a more virulent demon in epistemic hell, one from which none of our knowledge is safe. Jonathan Schaffer (2010) thinks so. The " Debasing Demon " he imagines threatens knowledge not via the truth condition on knowledge, but via the basing condition. This demon can cause any belief to seem like it's held on a good basis, when it's really held on a bad basis. Several recent critics (Brueckner (2011), Conee (2015), Ballantyne & Evans (2013)) grant Schaffer the possibility of such a debasing demon, and argue that the skeptical conclusion doesn't follow. By contrast, we argue that on any plausible account of the epistemic basing relation, the " debasing demon " is impossible. Our argument for why this is so gestures, more generally, to the importance of avoiding common traps by embracing mistaken assumptions about what it takes for a belief to be based on a reason.

Informal Logic

Argumentation theorists are beginning to recognize that ad hominem arguments are often legitimate... more Argumentation theorists are beginning to recognize that ad hominem arguments are often legitimate. Virtue argumentation theorists argue that a character trait approach to argument appraisal can explain why ad hominems are legitimate, when they are legitimate. But I argue that we do not need to appeal to virtue argumentation theory to explain the legitimacy of ad hominem arguments; a more straightforward evidentialist approach to argument appraisal is also committed to their legitimacy. I also argue that virtue argumentation theory faces some important problems, and that whereas the virtue-theoretic approach in epistemology is (arguably) well-motivated, that motivation does not carry over to virtue argumentation theory.

Dialogue

The following claims are independently plausible but jointly inconsistent: (1) epistemic deontolo... more The following claims are independently plausible but jointly inconsistent: (1) epistemic deontologism is correct (i.e., there are some beliefs we ought to have, and some beliefs we ought not to have); (2) we have no voluntary control over our beliefs; (3) S’s lack of control over whether she φs implies that S has no obligation to φ or to not φ (i.e., ought-implies-can). The point of this paper is to argue that there are active and passive aspects of belief, which can come apart, and to argue that deontological epistemic evaluations apply to the active aspect of belief.

Pacific Philosophical Quarterly

I argue for two related causal-counterfactual approaches to the basing relation here. The analyse... more I argue for two related causal-counterfactual approaches to the basing relation here. The analyses incoporate versions of John Turri's cognitive-manifestation condition, to overcome causal deviance problems, and Marshall Swain's pseudo-overdetermination condition, to handle gypsy-lawyer cases. Swain's pseudo-overdetermination condition has been widely, but I think mistakenly, rejected. I defend the a revised version of the condition against several objections.

Epistemically circular arguments have been receiving quite a bit of attention in the literature f... more Epistemically circular arguments have been receiving quite a bit of attention in the literature for the past decade or so. Often the goal is to determine whether reliabilists (or other foundationalists) are committed to the legitimacy of epistemically circular arguments. It is often assumed that epistemic circularity is objectionable, though sometimes reliabilists accept that their position entails the legitimacy of some epistemically circular arguments, and then go on to affirm that such arguments really are good ones. My goal in this paper is to argue against the legitimacy of epistemically circular arguments. My strategy is to give an argument against the legitimacy of epistemically circular arguments, which rests on a principle of basis-relative safety, and then to argue that reliabilists do not have the resources to resist the argument. I argue that even if the premises of an epistemically circular argument enjoy reliabilist justification, the argument does not transmit that justification to its conclusion. The main goal of my argument is to show that epistemic circularity is always a bad thing, but it also has the positive consequence that reliabilists are freed from an awkward commitment to the legitimacy of some intuitively bad arguments.

It has been claimed that there is a lottery paradox for justification and an analogous paradox fo... more It has been claimed that there is a lottery paradox for justification and an analogous paradox for knowledge, and that these two paradoxes should have a common solution. I argue that there is in fact no lottery paradox for knowledge, since that version of the paradox has a demonstrably false premise. The solution to the justification paradox is to deny closure of justification under conjunction. I present a principle which allows us to deny closure of justification under conjunction in certain kinds of cases, but which still allows that belief in a conjunction on the basis of justified belief in its conjuncts can often be justified.

Philosophia, 2013

The purpose of this paper is to raise a new objection to externalist process reliabilism about ep... more The purpose of this paper is to raise a new objection to externalist process reliabilism about epistemic justification. The objection is that epistemic justification is intensional—it does not permit the substitution of co-referring expressions—and reliabilism cannot accommodate that.

Informal Logic, 2010

The aim of this paper is to adapt Miranda Fricker’s concept of testimonial injustice to cases of ... more The aim of this paper is to adapt Miranda Fricker’s concept of testimonial injustice to cases of what I call “argumentative injustice”: those cases where an arguer’s social identity brings listeners to place too much or little credibility in an argument. My recommendation is to adopt a stance of “metadistrust”  we ought to distrust our inclinations to trust or distrust members of stereotyped groups.

Informal Logic, 2010

The aim of this paper is to defend the claim that arguments are truth-directed, and to discuss th... more The aim of this paper is to defend the claim that arguments are truth-directed, and to discuss the role that truth plays in the evaluation of arguments that are truth-directed. It concludes that the proper place of truth is in the metatheory in terms of which a theory of evaluation is to be worked out, rather than in the theory of evaluation itself as a constraint on premise adequacy.

The Cartesian demon, the New Evil Demon, and the Debasing Demon are all discussed here, from the ... more The Cartesian demon, the New Evil Demon, and the Debasing Demon are all discussed here, from the perspective of internalism about justification.

Paternalistic interferences in people's behaviour occupy something of an unstable place in the wa... more Paternalistic interferences in people's behaviour occupy something of an unstable place in the way we think about our obligations to each other. On the one hand, when we see that someone is clearly behaving in a way that is contrary to his own well-being or best interests, it sometimes seems permissible to take steps to promote his well-being by limiting his options. For example, when we suspect that a friend is possibly suicidal, we might quietly remove dangerous objects or substances from the vicinity, in order to protect our friend from himself. On the other hand, when a person is doing nothing that harms anyone else, who are we to interfere with the way she lives her life? It seems like an impermissible violation of people's autonomy to interfere with their actions and decision-making processes without their consent. So it is understandable that the ethical status of paternalistic interventions is controversial. Frustratingly, however, what constitutes paternalistic behaviour is itself not settled in the literature. Without a clear agreed-upon definition of the kind of behaviour we're talking about, arguments about epistemic and non-epistemic paternalism run the risk of simply talking past each other. There isn't space in this chapter to fully address the definition of paternalism in general, but I will offer what I take to be an interesting set of sufficient conditions for some behaviour to count as paternalistic, largely following Bullock (2015). Interesting sufficient conditions are more important to have in hand than necessary conditions for the purpose of this chapter, because my goal here is to show that we can sometimes have normative reasons-good reasons, reasons of the kind which really justify actions-to engage in epistemic paternalistic behaviour. To make the case for that claim, first we'll need to have in hand a set of conditions that are sufficient for behaviour to count as paternalistic, and an understanding of the kinds of epistemic goods in light of which paternalistic interventions might be made. In Section 1, I turn to those two tasks. Section 2 then articulates plausible principles regarding the normativity of our epistemic reasons at the intrapersonal level, and regarding the normative reasons we might have for promoting epistemic goods in others. Together the elements in the following sections constitute (I hope) a plausible and well-motived story about the nature and normativity of epistemic paternalist behaviour.

For Well-Founded Belief: New Essays on the Epistemic Basing Relation (eds., Bondy, P. and Carter, J.A.), Routledge.

In Lehrer’s case of the superstitious lawyer, a lawyer possesses conclusive evidence for his clie... more In Lehrer’s case of the superstitious lawyer, a lawyer possesses conclusive evidence for his client’s innocence, and he appreciates that the evidence is conclusive, but the evidence is causally inert with respect to his belief in his client’s innocence. This case has divided epistemologists ever since Lehrer originally proposed it in his argument against causal analyses of knowledge. Some have taken the claim that the lawyer bases his belief on the evidence as a data point for our theories to accommodate, while others have denied that the lawyer has knowledge, or that he bases his belief on the evidence.
In this paper, we move the dialectic forward by way of arguing that the superstitious lawyer genuinely infers his client’s innocence from the evidence. To show that the lawyer’s inference is genuine, we argue in defense of a version of a doxastic construal of the ‘taking’ condition on inference. We also provide a pared-down superstitious lawyer-style case, which displays the key features of the original case without including its complicated and distracting features. But interestingly, although we argue that the lawyer’s belief is based on his good evidence, and is also plausibly doxastically justified, we do not argue that the lawyer knows that his client is innocent.

What are reasons made of? And, whatever reasons are made of, how is reason-stuff carved up into v... more What are reasons made of? And, whatever reasons are made of, how is reason-stuff carved up into various different kinds? Those are my questions here. I want to know about the ontology of reasons: what kinds of things, or properties, or relations (or whatever) are reasons? And I want to know about the typology of reasons: how are reasons themselves divided up into various kinds? I am particularly interested in the category of epistemic reasons: I want to know what constitutes epistemic reasons, and how they are distinguished from other sorts of reasons. I am sympathetic towards a kind of evidentialist theory about epistemically justified beliefs, according to which epistemic reasons always consist of evidence, and evidence always constitutes epistemic reasons. But even if evidentialism is correct, that doesn't yet tell us what epistemic reasons are; it just links the question of the ontology of epistemic reasons to the question of the ontology of evidence. If we can settle on an answer to either of those questions, then we will also have our answer to the other. 1 Why do I think the category of epistemic reasons is so interesting? For one thing, it seems to me that epistemic reasons are fundamental, in the sense that for any subject S and action φ, if S does not possess epistemic reasons bearing on the appropriateness of φ-ing, then S cannot possess normative reasons for or against φ-ing. Epistemic reasons are enablers of all other reasons. For another thing, epistemic reasons are a kind of reasons, and so if we can settle the question of the ontology of epistemic reasons, that will also point the way to an answer to the question of the ontology of reasons in general. If epistemic reasons always consist of evidence, as I believe, or even if they are only sometimes evidential, and if we can answer the question of the ontology of evidence, then that will point us to an answer to the question of the ontology of reasons in general. And of course, the reverse will also be true: if we can answer the question of the ontology of reasons in general, then that will also point us to an answer to the question of the ontology of epistemic reasons, and of evidence. So some of the arguments I consider below address the ontology of reasons in general, while others address the ontology of evidential reasons.