The pragmatics of belief (original) (raw)

On Pragmatic Encroachment in Epistemology

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2007

We argue, contrary to epistemological orthodoxy, that knowledge is not purely epistemic—that knowledge is not simply a matter of truth-related factors (evidence, reliability, etc.). We do this by arguing for a pragmatic condition on knowledge, KA: if a subject knows that p, then she is rational to act as if p. KA, together with fallibilism, entails that knowledge is not purely epistemic. We support KA by appealing to the role of knowledge-citations in defending and criticizing actions, and by giving a principled argument for KA, based on the inference rule KB: if a subject knows that A is the best thing she can do, she is rational to do A. In the second half of the paper, we consider and reject the two most promising objections to our case for KA, one based on the Gricean notion of conversational implicature and the other based on a contextualist maneuver.

A Permissivist Ethics of Belief : What Pragmatism May Learn from Common Sense

European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, 2017

We generally consider that we should not believe on the basis of insufficient evidence. Yet there are many beliefs which are deprived of adequate epistemic evidence. In such cases, James recommends the “subjective method” which allows us to hold beliefs for practical reasons. This pragmatist move is rejected by evidentialists who think that beliefs must be grounded on adequate epistemic evidence. My contention is that Reid’s approach to irresistible beliefs we do not hold for epistemic reasons offers a persuasive means to escape the contemporary stalemate between evidentialism and pragmatism. Are we rational in holding beliefs for which we don’t possess sufficient epistemic evidence? Reid and James subscribe to a permissivist ethics of belief, according to which we are allowed to hold a belief even if we cannot show its epistemic credentials. Yet I show that the abandonment of the stringent evidentialist requirement (which is tied to a form of internalism) does not necessarily commit one to a pure form of pragmatism (which offers practical reasons instead of epistemic ones). If Reid proposes arguments built on a pragmatist line, he does not reject the evidentialist demand per se, only its internalist form. Moreover, in his view, immediate beliefs are carried by a kind of instinctive epistemic trust. On the whole, pragmatism and common sense do not defend the same kind of epistemic permissivism.

The Pragmatics of Pragmatic Encroachment (penultimate)

Synthese, 2014

The goal of this paper is to defend Simple Modest Invariantism (SMI) about knowledge from the threat presented by pragmatic encroachment. Pragmatic encroachment is the view that practical circumstances are relevant in some way to the truth of knowledge ascription —and if this is true, it would entail the falsity of SMI. Drawing on Ross and Schroeder’s recent Reasoning Disposition account of belief, I argue that the Reasoning Disposition account, together with Grice’s Maxims, gives us an attractive pragmatic account of the connection between knowledge ascriptions and practical circumstances. This gives us the ability to explain away the data that is supposed to support pragmatic encroachment. Finally, I address three important objections to the view offered by giving a pragmatic account of when it is conversationally appropriate to cancel a conversational implicature, and discussing when sentences with true content can end up sounding false as well as cases where sentences with false content can end up sounding true.

Practical belief and philosophical theory

Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 1998

Practical Belief and Philosophical Theory in such a way that, other things being equal, the behaviour maximises the expected satisfaction of the agent's desires. Suppose that an agent believes that p. Under this account of belief, that means that the agent's behaviour is of a sort that would maximise the expected satisfaction of his or her desires, other things being equal, in a p-world. Believing that p means locating yourself in a p-world: being disposed to take the sorts of behavioural avenues to desire-satisfaction that are appropriate, other things being equal, in a p-world. Believing that p means that so far as your behavioural dispositions go, you treat the actual world as a p-world. For short, you act or behave as if p. This behavioural notion of belief can be made more sophisticated, and more attractive, in a number of ways. One nice line of improvement is introduced by Robert Stalnaker [39]. Instead of applying the approach to one belief after another-and having to stipulate in each case, as we just did, that other things are equal-we can use it to identify the content of an agent's total belief-state. We can say that taken as a whole, the content of the agent's beliefs is given by his or her behaviour and dispositions to behaviour. We can identify that content, without qualification, by the set of possible worlds in which the agent's behaviour maximises expected desire-satisfaction: that is the set of worlds in which the agent locates himself or herself, acting as if the actual world belonged to the set. When it comes to whether the person believes that p or that q, then, this version of the approach gives us a ready answer. The agent will believe that p if and only if it is true that p in that set of worlds: if and only if it is true that p in what we may describe as the agent's belief-worlds. The behavioural characterisation of belief needs to be qualified to take explicit account of the fact that beliefs come in degrees of confidence: I may locate myself in a certain set of worlds, while being more inclined to treat myself as situated in one subset rather than another. The characterisation also needs to be amended to cope with indexical belief; in believing that I am a philosopher, I do not just locate myself in those worlds where P.P. is a philosopher: I identify myself in those worlds with P.P. (Lewis [25, Essay 10]). Again, the account needs to be softened so that it is not too demanding for ordinary human beings: it should probably identify an agent's belief-worlds, for example, only on the basis of behaviour, actual or counterfactual, that is not bedevilled by failures like inattention or illogic or weakness of will; and in view of pervasive inconsistencies, it may have to allow that agents sometimes switch between different belief-systems, locating themselves at different times in different sets of belief-worlds (Stalnaker [39]). Finally, the characterisation almost certainly needs to be strengthened so as to require that the agent's behavioural dispositions are organised (Block [2], Jackson [20]), and perhaps also occasioned (Jackson and Pettit [23]), in a certain manner. Abstracting from the amendments necessary, however, the question with which I want to start is whether this behavioural account of belief would enable us to make sense of the project of philosophical articulation. Does it give us a conception of pre-philosophical beliefs under which their contents are familiar enough for articulation of content to be analytically faithful to our common understanding? And does it give us a conception under which those contents remain sufficiently unfamiliar for articulation, at the same time, to be substantively informative: to increase our prior understanding? The answer to that question, uncontroversially, is that this account fails to satisfy the first, familiarity constraint. The problem is that, strictly speaking (Stalnaker [39]), the behavioural account means that everyone believes all necessary truths and that everyone conception of belief. Far from representing a difficulty for the ethocentric approach, the desire to make sense of theory-theory provides yet another reason for endorsing that conception of philosophical articulation.

Pragmatic Encroachment: it's not just about Knowledge

There is pragmatic encroachment on some epistemic status just in case whether a proposition has that status for a subject depends not only on the subject’s epistemic position with respect to the proposition, but also on features of the subject’s nonepistemic, practical environment. Discussions of pragmatic encroachment usually focus on knowledge. Here we argue that, barring infallibilism, there is pragmatic encroachment on what is arguably a more fundamental epistemic status – the status a proposition has when it is warranted enough to be a reason one has for believing other things.

Belief and Credence: Why the Attitude-Type Matters

Philosophical Studies, 2019

In this paper, I argue that the relationship between belief and credence is a central question in epistemology. This is because the belief-credence relationship has significant implications for a number of current epistemological issues. I focus on five controversies: permissivism, disagreement, pragmatic encroachment, doxastic voluntarism, and the relationship between doxastic attitudes and prudential rationality. I argue that each debate is constrained in particular ways, depending on whether the relevant attitude is belief or credence. This means that (i) epistemologists should pay attention to whether they are framing questions in terms of belief or in terms of credence and (ii) the success or failure of a reductionist project in the belief-credence realm has significant implications for epistemology generally.

The Game of Belief (forthcoming at Philosophical Review, joint work with Barry Maguire)

Philosophical Review

It is plausible that there are epistemic reasons bearing on a distinctively epistemic standard of correctness for belief. It is also plausible that there are a range of practical reasons bearing on what to believe. These theses are often thought to be in tension with each other. Most significantly for our purposes, it is obscure how epistemic reasons and practical reasons might interact in the explanation of what one ought to believe. We draw an analogy with a similar distinction between types of reasons for actions in the context of activities. The analogy motivates a two-level account of the structure of normativity that explains the interaction of correctness-based and other reasons. This account relies upon a distinction between normative reasons and authoritatively normative reasons. Only the latter play the reasons role in explaining what state one ought to be in. All and only practical reasons are authoritative reasons. Hence, in one important sense, all reasons for belief are practical reasons. But this account also preserves the autonomy and importance of epistemic reasons. Given the importance of having true beliefs about the world, our epistemic standard typically plays a key role in many cases in explaining what we ought to believe. In addition to reconciling (versions of) evidentialism and pragmatism, this two-level account has implications for a range of important debates in normative theory, including the interaction of right and wrong reasons for actions and other attitudes, the significance of reasons in understanding normativity and authoritative normativity, the distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘substantive’ normativity, and whether there is a unified source of authoritative normativity.