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Believing For a Reason

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Abstract

This paper explains what it is to believe something for a reason. My thesis is that you believe something for a reason just in case the reason non-deviantly causes your belief. In the course of arguing for my thesis, I present a new argument that reasons are causes, and offer an informative account of causal non-deviance.

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Notes

  1. Swain 1985, pp. 73–74 (see also Swain 1981, pp. 81–82) motivates the view by appealing to the fact that it helps explain the role that non-belief states (esp. perceptual experiences) play in acquiring perceptual knowledge. But this doesn’t distinguish the causal theory from its competition. Its competitors could easily explain the relevance of perceptual experiences by pointing out that they typically provide an adequate basis of perceptual beliefs. In other words, even non-causal theorists can agree that perceptual beliefs are based on perceptual experiences, and thereby accommodate the commonsense view that they feature centrally in the acquisition of perceptual knowledge. Audi 1983, 1986 perhaps comes closest to offering something like an argument for the causal theory, but one is challenged to say just how the argument supposedly goes.

  2. Later you might wonder how well this comports with my claim that causes are difference-makers. If an event is causally overdetermined, then does any one of the overdetermining causes really make a difference? I fail to have clear intuitions about cases of overdetermination, though I recognize that some will answer ‘no’. The issues involved in sorting this out are legion and I cannot responsibly address them in this paper. Schaffer 2003 ably defends a view of overdetermination helpful to my cause; see also Loeb 1974, pp. esp. 527–528. Thanks to John Greco for discussion on this point.

  3. It’s possible that we ought to think of basing as a matter of degree, so that the more central a reason is to the causation of a belief, the more the belief is based on a reason. Or perhaps we ought to think of basing as involving a threshold, so that a reason must make some minimal causal contribution to a belief in order for the latter to be based on the former at all. I set these potential complications aside in the main text.

  4. As will become clear later in my discussion of Swain’s theory, making a difference in the relevant sense requires more than mere counterfactual dependence. In a trivial sense, everything makes a difference to everything else. For any two things, x and y, x’s presence makes at least the following difference to y: y is such that it co-exists with x, and thus y is such that it would have been different—insofar as it would have lacked relational properties that it actually has—had x not existed. Similar remarks apply to every one of x’s properties. We immediately recognize this relation as irrelevant (which is why this point is relegated to a footnote), though it’s difficult to say precisely why. Suffice it to say that if you believe something for a reason, the reason certainly makes more than just this trivial difference. The discussion in the main text can thus be read as attempting to characterize the margin of difference-making beyond the trivial.

  5. Counterfactual theorists of causation will disagree that causation is a fundamental difference-making relation. I acknowledge this disagreement, but will not pursue it here. Thanks to Josh Schechter for discussion here.

  6. Korcz 1997, 2002 calls them “doxastic theories,” and Kvanvig 1992, Chap. 2 calls them “subjective theories.” Proponents of this view, or close variants, include Foley 1987, Korcz 2000, Kvanvig 2003, Lehrer 1990, Pappas 1979a, and Tolliver 1981. Some theorists might say that the evidential belief is necessary to establish a basing relation, but so long as they grant that causation is also necessary to establish a basing relation, then their theory poses no challenge to NC.

  7. As an anonymous referee suggested.

  8. Notice how many of the items on Stocker’s list of conditions tend to afflict job market candidates, like Martin. Many of us can no doubt sympathize from personal experience. Those lucky enough to have avoided the fate can simply peruse the posts and comment threads on the weblog The Philosophy Smoker, and its ancestor, the now defunct Philosophy Job Market Blog.

  9. Swain (1979, pp. 30, 35–37; 1981, p. 91) sometimes seems to suggest that pseudo-overdetermination counts as a causal relation. If so, then the counterfactual theory cannot threaten NC. But as Swain (1981, Chap. 2 and p. 86) himself recognizes, it’s implausible that pseudo-overdetermination is a genuine causal relation. We best interpret him as rejecting NC.

  10. I suppress the causal-sustainment disjunct for ease of exposition. Swain defines the relation generally, but we focus here specifically on beliefs and reasons.

  11. But what if his performance earlier in the series contributed to the Yankees’ poor performance on this night, you ask? I stipulate that no such thing has happened. Pedro hasn’t pitched yet in the series due to an illness, from which he finally recovers just before the start of game seven. Likewise for any other way you suggest Pedro might have had an effect on the game’s outcome.

  12. Note to baseball fans: this example was crafted before Pedro signed with the Mets, and even before the Sox played the Yankees in the 2004 postseason, back when this all seemed like just another fanciful philosophical thought experiment!

  13. It didn’t have to turn out this way; this counterfactual isn’t necessarily true. But it is true in the present case.

  14. My defense of the fourth point in the argument is incomplete in at least one respect. Causation is not the only difference-making relation. Consider mereological relationships. Molecules arranged in a certain way make it the case that there is a desk here and that it has certain features, but not by causing it to be here or have those features. Perhaps we can make sense of mereological relationships among beliefs: maybe your belief that P and your belief that Q are parts of your belief that P and Q. I doubt this strategy holds out much hope. But maybe an enterprising opponent can make something of it.

  15. Some epistemologists tout “gypsy-lawyer” cases as counterexamples to NC (e.g. Lehrer 1971; Harman 1973, pp. 31–32; Lehrer 1990, pp. 169–71, Korcz 2000; Kvanvig 2003). They’re called “gypsy-lawyer” cases after Lehrer’s original, which featured a “gypsy-lawyer.” But these cases have failed to impress causal theorists. For example, Goldman (1979, p. 352, n. 8) says, “I find this example unconvincing.” Pollock (1986, p. 81, n. 9) says, “I do not find [Lehrer’s] counterexample persuasive.” Swain (1981, p. 91) says, “I see no ground for claiming that the gypsy lawyer has knowledge.” I agree with Goldman, Pollock and Swain: it has always seemed clearly false to me that the lawyer knows. But I’ve yet to find a plausible way to argue for this claim without simply begging the question. (Thanks to an anonymous referee for some very insightful remarks in connection with this).

  16. We could just as easily have stated CA in terms of proximate causation. I leave it open whether we want to do this.

  17. For other important applications of the manifestation relation, see Turri forthcoming a and b.

  18. It is instructive to compare this to Kantian conceptions of intentional action. According to Korsgaard (1997, p. 221), intentional action occurs “only when [the agent’s] action is the expression of her own mental activity” (emphasis added). Also compare Hempel’s views (1962, Sect. 3.2; 1963a, pp. 291–293; 1963b, Sect. 4) on action explanation, dispositions, and “habit patterns.” It favors my theory that it is complemented by a promising analogous theory of acting for a reason.

  19. When evaluating cases, we are entitled to assume that things are normal unless otherwise specified. If Al or Joe is disposed to trust in such strange connections, then that would have to be made explicitly part of the case. The examples are due to Plantinga (1993a, p. 69, n. 8) and Pollock and Cruz (1999, pp. 35–36). They do not explicitly include them. If we do add those details to the cases, then it becomes quite plausible that the subject’s belief is indeed based on the reason in question.

  20. As an anonymous referee suspected.

  21. It’s important to note that this fits into a perfectly general pattern. For an outcome to manifest a disposition, it isn’t enough that the disposition manifest itself somewhere or other in the outcome’s causal ancestry. A couple non-epistemological examples might help. Suppose Griffey’s athleticism manifests itself in a spectacular catch, which causes me to get excited about my own prospects for fielding greatness, which causes me to train and practice, which in turn causes me to make a spectacular catch of my own 1 day. The manifestation of Griffey’s athleticism caused me to make my catch, but my catch doesn’t manifest Griffey’s athleticism. Or suppose my musical ability manifests itself in a rousing performance of Mozart’s Alla Turca, which causes me to want to excel at dancing too, which causes me to exercise and train, which causes me to 1 day perform a lovely pirouette. The manifestation of my musical ability caused me to perform a pirouette, but the pirouette doesn’t manifest my musical ability. Elsewhere I show how Gettier cases display the same structure (Turri forthcoming b).

  22. Compare Goldman (1979, p. 346), Alston (1995, sections IV–VI), and Alston (2005, Chap. 6, esp. sections iii–v). Wedgwood (2006) proposes a similar solution to the causal deviance problem for reasoning. Elsewhere I deploy the same basic idea to help infinitists about epistemic justification respond to a potentially serious objection (Turri 2009).

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Acknowledgments

In writing this paper, I have accumulated too many debts to be confident that I recall them all. With apologies to those I may have forgotten, I thank Jason Baehr, Ali Eslami, Ben Fiedor, John Greco, Stephen Grimm, Allan Hazlett, Adam Leite, Sharifa Mohamed, Michael Pace, Jim Pryor, Bruce Russell, Mark Schroeder, Ernest Sosa, Jerry Steinhofer, Angelo Turri, and three anonymous referees for Erkenntnis.

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Turri, J. Believing For a Reason. Erkenn 74, 383–397 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-011-9271-5

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