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Accessibilism without consciousness

2023; Wiley; Volume: 106; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/phpr.12994

1933-1592

Daniel Greco,

Free Will and Agency

Declan Smithies’ The Epistemic Role of Consciousness (2019) defends an ambitious, unified, coherent package of views in epistemology and the philosophy of mind whose core commitment is that phenomenal consciousness is of central epistemological importance. My aim in this paper will be to prise apart elements of Smithies’ package. One of the main lines of argument he offers for his view is that only by adopting his phenomenal conception of evidence can we vindicate “accessibilism” about justification—the idea that facts about what we're justified in believing and disbelieving are always in principle accessible to us. While most contemporary epistemologists reject accessibilism, I think Smithies has shown that the costs of rejecting it are high. But, contra both Smithies and his main targets, I think accessibilism can be defended without the phenomenal conception of evidence, and more generally without giving consciousness the central epistemological role that Smithies does. The structure of this paper will be as follows. In §1, I'll offer a summary of how Smithies’ view manages to vindicate accessibilism, along with a brief discussion of why one might want to do so. In §2, I'll argue that the structure of Smithies’ vindication can be adopted by a contextualist foundationalist, who agrees with Smithies about the foundationalist structure of epistemic justification but doesn't give any distinctive epistemological role to facts about phenomenal consciousness as such. In §3, I'll go on offense and argue that Smithies’ response to the problem of the speckled hen threatens to overgeneralize, making it unclear even by Smithies’ lights why phenomenal consciousness is distinctively well-suited to occupy the foundational role he gives it. According to Smithies’ version of accessibilism, “You're always in a position to know whether or not you have epistemic justification to believe any given proposition at any given time.” (p. 225). To see how Smithies’ package of views manages to vindicate this thesis, it will help to first contrast it with other views that don't. Consider a traditional version of reliabilism, of the sort proposed and defended by Goldman (1979). According to this view, a belief is justified just in case it was caused by a process that tends to produce true beliefs. My belief that there's a red apple in front of me—a belief I formed by using vision in the usual way—is justified, because it was produced by a process that tends to produce true beliefs. My belief that this year the Knicks will finally turn things around this year and make it to the NBA finals for the first time since my childhood—a belief that is mainly the product of wishful thinking—is not justified, because it was produced by a process that tends to produce false beliefs. Asking whether reliabilism supports accessibilism isn't entirely straightforward. Reliabilism is most directly a view about doxastic justification, while Smithies characterizes accessibilism in terms of propositional justification.1 But there are natural ways of understanding propositional justification in reliabilist terms. In the process of offering a reliabilist characterization of defeat, Goldman makes use of the idea of a process being “available” to a subject. This same notion can be used to characterize propositional justification—someone has justification to believe a proposition P just in case there is a reliable belief-forming process available to her such that, if she made use of that process, she'd end up believing P. While of course there's plenty of room for asking just how this would work, it seems clear enough that such a view will not vindicate accessibilism or anything like it. Suppose, as in BonJour (2000)’s famous example, Norman finds himself inclined to suspect that the president is in New York. In fact, this suspicion is produced by a highly reliable faculty of clairvoyance, and if Norman were to go ahead and believe that the president is in New York, that belief would be justified (by reliabilist lights). So, Norman has epistemic justification to believe that the president is in New York. But he lacks epistemic justification to believe that he has epistemic justification to believe that the president is in New York. Why? Because there is no reliable process available to him that would produce the belief that he has epistemic justification to believe that the president is in New York.2 Why not? We can stipulate that his clairvoyance doesn't extend to questions about which of his beliefs were formed reliable ways. If he were to believe that he had justification to believe that the president was in New York, that would be a sheer guess, rather than the upshot of some reliable self-monitoring faculty. For Smithies, the fundamental problem for reliabilism is that the facts that determine what you have justification to believe—facts about which belief-forming processes available to you are reliable—are facts to which you have no privileged access. Like Norman, you might be unable to distinguish your reliable faculties (like clairvoyance) from your unreliable ones (olfaction, let's say). So if we're going to vindicate accessibilism, we'd better not think facts like those can be what determines what you have justification to believe. But what could do the trick here? As Smithies sees things, to vindicate accessibilism, the facts that determine what you have justification to believe must be facts that—unlike facts about the reliability of your belief-forming processes—you're always in a position to know. This suggests that vindicating accessibilism is a tall order; it looks like the truth of accessibilism would require the existence of some class of facts that we're always in a position to know, and which could serve as the basis for facts about what we have justification to believe.3 This is exactly what Smithies thinks facts about phenomenal consciousness can do. Unlike facts about which of our belief-forming processes are reliable, according to Smithies we are always in a position to know, via introspection, which phenomenally conscious states we're in.4 Moreover, given the facts about which phenomenally conscious states we're in, we are always in a position to determine what facts about epistemic justification follow from them, since the facts about which bodies of introspective evidence—which phenomenally conscious states—provide epistemic justification for which beliefs are themselves a priori truths that everybody is always in a position to know.5 Why is this an attractive feature of his view? Why should we want to vindicate accessibilism? This is a big question that I can't do justice to here. But in chapters 7–9 of his book, Smithies does an excellent job of making the case. One line of argument concerns various “Moore-paradoxical” phenomena.6 It seems somehow incoherent or irrational to think or say things like: “It's raining, but my evidence doesn't support the belief that it's raining.” Smithies surveys a wide variety of Moorean monsters, and shows how accessibilism can offer a relatively straightforward explanation of their monstrosity—if accessibilism is true, then you'll never be in a position to justifiably believe both halves of such conjunctions. Of course, similar explanations have been given by philosophers like Williamson (2000, chapter 11), who staunchly reject accessibilism. The central difference between Smithies and writers like Williamson concerns the range of conjunctions they'll regard as Moore-paradoxical, and thus demanding a similar treatment. Smithies regards, “P but it's an open question whether I have justification to believe that P,” as demanding a similar treatment to, “P but I don't know that P.” (p. 306) If accessibilism is true, then whenever someone has justification to believe P, in the relevant sense it is not an open question whether they have justification to believe that P; rather, if they have justification to believe that P, then they also have justification to believe that they have justification to believe that P. By contrast, writers in the Williamsonian tradition give them quite different treatments, with, “P but I don't know that P,” directly violating the knowledge norm of assertion, and, “P but it's an open question whether I have justification to believe that P,” as, at worst, violating some derivative norm, and at best violating no norm at all.7 Smithies also offers a more theoretical argument for accessibilism. Its core is the idea that “we use the concept of justification in epistemic evaluation because of its connection with the practice of critical reflection.” (p. 256) In particular, a justified belief should be able to withstand a process of ideal critical reflection. But if accessibilism is false, then even when practicing critical reflection ideally, we can be wrong about what we have justification to believe. In such cases critical reflection will lead to our abandoning justified beliefs or adopting unjustified ones. The link between epistemic justification on the one hand and critical reflection on the other will be severed, and it will be unclear what the point of the concept of justification is in the first place. In the next section I'll try to show how we can have something like accessibilism without adopting Smithies’ brand of classical foundationalism. We are always in a position to know what our basic evidence is, and We are always in a position to know what support our basic evidence gives to any arbitrary hypothesis. The substantive reason why (1) is true, according to Smithies, is that our basic evidence consists in facts about what phenomenally conscious states we're in. And the substantive reason why (2) is true is that facts about which hypotheses are supported by which bodies of basic evidence are a priori truths, in principle knowable by anyone reflecting properly. But it's possible to agree with Smithies on (1) and (2) as structural claims about evidence, while giving very different substantive explanations of them. I'll sketch such a view here, drawing on some of my previously published work.8 The basic idea is that which facts are apt to constitute basic evidence is context-sensitive. In any context in which we raise questions about someone's epistemic justification, we'll count them as entitled to take certain claims for granted; we'll take them to be in a position to know these claims even if they don't have any (non-trivial) evidence for them. Think of these claims as their basic evidence. Moreover, we'll take them to be justified in believing further claims only to the extent that those further claims are supported by their basic evidence. Lastly, we'll only take someone's basic evidence to support some further claim if we think properly conducted reflection on their basic evidence would lead them to see the further claim as plausible in light of their basic evidence; inscrutable support is no support at all. But there won't be a single class of facts—such as facts about their phenomenally conscious states—that we count people as entitled to take for granted in all contexts, nor will there be a unified explanation of support relations (e.g., as a priori truths of reason.) In most contexts, we'll treat people as entitled to take a wide range of claims about their environment for granted. And in others, even claims about their own mental states may not be uncritically accepted—see the discussion of “speckled hen” cases in the next section. In this sense, the picture is merely “formally foundationalist;”9 unlike traditional versions of foundationalism, there's nothing substantively in common, across contexts, that all beliefs apt to serve as epistemic foundations share. For Smithies, accessibilism is true because we're always in a position to know those facts that determine what we have justification to believe. The contextualist explanation is essentially the same, with some ‘‘relative to a context" thrown in. We're always in a position to know—relative to a given context—those facts that determine what we have justification to believe—relative to that same context. While this may seem like a very watered-down version of accessibilism, it can be motivated by the same sorts of arguments Smithies’ offers. In particular, the contextualist can agree with Smithies about Moore-paradoxicality and reflection, albeit with some “relative to a context” thrown in. Like Smithies, she can agree that there is no context relative to which someone could be justified in believing both halves of Moorean conjunctions like, “P and it's an open question whether I have justification to believe that P.” Similarly, she can agree that justified beliefs are stable under (context-bound) critical reflection. The comparative merits of Smithies’ robust version of accessibilism on the one hand and the watered-down contextualist version I've just sketched turn on a wide range of questions that are beyond the scope of this paper.10 In the next section, however, I'll raise an objection to a response Smithies offers to the familiar problem of the “speckled hen.” As I understand the dialectic, my objection targets the idea that phenomenal consciousness has a distinctive epistemic role to play, but without touching Smithies’ arguments for accessibilism. If it is successful, then it amounts to a reason to favor the sort of contextualist accessibilism I've just sketched over Smithies’ more traditional variety. As a rough heuristic, you're in an epistemic position to know that P just in case you would know that P if your doxastic response to your epistemic position were sufficiently rational…The crucial point…is that you don't always respond to your evidence in a sufficiently rational way. As a result, there can be discrepancies between what you're in an epistemic position to know and what you're in a doxastic position to know. There is no guarantee that you always have the rational doxastic capacities to convert your epistemic position to knowledge. (p. 349) With this distinction in hand, he argues that phenomenal states are epistemically luminous, but not doxastically luminous; we're always in an epistemic position to know what phenomenal states we're in, but we're not always in a doxastic position to know what phenomenal states we're in. My objection is as follows. Smithies’ response, if successful, could be used just as well by somebody with a radically different substantive conception of evidence. As a result, it threatens to undermine the idea that phenomenal consciousness plays the distinctive epistemic role he claims for it. To see how this problem arises, imagine an epistemologist with a much more capacious conception of evidence than Smithies. According to this epistemologist, it's not just facts about a subject's phenomenally conscious mental states, but facts about all her internal states that constitute her evidence. So, if someone has appendicitis, this fact is part of her basic evidence. “That's absurd,” you might object. If someone is going to justifiably believe they have appendicitis, they need some non-trivial evidence for that—it's not something they get to know for free!’’ But now our epistemologist offers a Smithies-style response. “I grant,” she'll say, “that creatures like us are never in a doxastic position to know we have appendicitis without doing further investigation. I don't have the necessary doxastic capacities for converting my epistemic position—my inflamed appendix—into a doxastically justified belief that my appendix is inflamed. But an ideally rational agent, upon having an inflamed appendix, would be able to recognize this inflammation and would know she had appendicitis. So, we are in an epistemic position to know we have appendicitis, whenever we do.” According to such an epistemologist, appendicitis is a luminous condition. This is hard to swallow. There's nothing irrational, it's tempting to respond, about lacking the “doxastic capacities” required for detecting one's inflamed appendix. If Smithies were to offer such a reply, however, he'd be playing with fire; his treatment of the speckled hen problem invites a very similar one. There's nothing irrational about lacking the kind of fine-tuned self-monitoring capacity necessary to recognize that there are exactly 48 speckles in one's visual field. And if that's right, then we should be unsatisfied with Smithies’ attempt to preserve the luminosity of phenomenal consciousness by appeal to the distinction between doxastic and epistemic positions. Smithies offers a unified package of accessibilism and a phenomenal conception of evidence. In this response I've argued that (1) accessibilism doesn't require a phenomenal conception of evidence, and (2) Smithies’ reply to one of the main challenges to that conception of evidence—the problem of the speckled hen—is unsuccessful. My hope is that, taken together, these considerations motivate taking seriously the sort of non-phenomenalist, contextualist accessibilism sketched in §2.