Abstract
Epistemic reasons are meant to provide justification for beliefs. In this paper, I will be concerned with the requirements that have to be met if reasons are to discharge this function. It is widely recognized, however, that only possessed reasons can justify beliefs and actions. But what are the conditions that have to be satisfied in order for one to possess reasons? I shall begin by motivating a particular condition, namely, the ‘treating’ requirement that has been deemed to be necessary for possessing reasons. In Sect. 1, I explain and criticize some of the existing accounts of the treating requirement for reason-possession. In Sect. 2, I will suggest a dispositional account of reason-possession in which the treating condition features prominently. Section 3 will deal with the some of the consequences of this account for such issues as the structure of epistemic defeat, the immediacy of perceptual justification and logical knowledge.
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Notes
Broome (2007).
See, for example, Schroeder (2011) for an account in terms of ‘presentational mental states’ which include beliefs and experiences.
Parfit (2001, p.118).
Sylvan (2015).
Ibid.
I have said that we do not, for our current purposes, need to identify what sort of attitude the treating states involve. This raises the question of how to explain the dispositions they ground. So far, I have relied on our intuitions in cases where being in a treating state makes a difference to whether a subject possesses a particular reason. Shortly I shall present some methodological remarks that are meant to address this question. The idea is that an illuminating explanation of such dispositions need not involve a non-circular analysis of their nature. Rather, a more realistic model of philosophical analysis is one that involves the elucidations of concepts rather than their reductive dismantling. Thanks to anonymous referee of this journal for asking me to signpost this issue.
An anonymous referee correctly points out that, as it stands, (T) might have some puzzling implications in so far as it helps itself to the notion of ‘disposition to possess a reason’. The thought is that one can have a disposition to possess a reason as a reason to believe p without in fact yet possessing that reason as a reason to believe p. I agree. It is quite possible that there are weak-willed people who have strong reasons for holding a belief and yet fail to be motivated by them. So a weaker version of (T) that recognizes this fact would be more plausible. This is actually the motivation behind Sylvan’s appeal (2015) to the notion of “being attracted to treat R like an objective reason” in his account (C). The referee suggests ‘dispositional possession’ as a more accurate description of what (T) entails. However, while acknowledging this point, for ease of expression (too many occurrences of ‘disposition’ in one sentence), I am going to leave (T) as it is though admonishing the reader to bear this point in mind.
It is important to distinguish between the ground of a disposition and the disposition itself as when we say, for example, that salt’s disposition to dissolve is grounded in its molecular structure. Likewise, being in a treating state, with respect to a reason R and a proposition p, grounds the subject’s disposition to possess R as evidence or reason to believe that p. It is the treating state, not the disposition it grounds, that reflects the fact that the subject appreciates the force of his reason. So my account is not vulnerable to the objection that was raised against Sylvan’s proposal.
Since the manifestation of a disposition involves a process running from a stimulus to a response, it is always possible that the response comes about without that particular disposition being manifested (this is generally known as the problem of the deviant causal chains). Thus, a subject might be in two treating states with respect to a reason (R) and two distinct propositions p and q. When she is exposed to R, she comes, by (T), to possess R as evidence or reason. But which proposition R is reason for depends on which disposition it is that is manifested. She would possess R as reason for believing that p, rather than q, if her possession of R is the manifestation of the disposition that is grounded in the treating state involving R and p (rather than q).
Here I am indebted to an anonymous referee of this journal for both urging me to address the circularity issue as well as suggesting the distinction between metaphysical and conceptual circularity in order to clarify my position.
Elsewhere (Vahid 2016), I have argued for a dispositional account of how the two notions of propositional and doxastic justification are related to one another. I have shown how the extant theories describing the relationship between these two notions turn out to correspond closely to the way in which the theories about the semantic analysis of dispositional sentences have been introduced in the dispositions debate in metaphysics.
Strawson (1995, p. 16).
Schiffer (1972, p. 15).
Strawson (1992, p. 19).
Williamson (2000, p. 179).
Bengson (2015, p. 738).
Huemer (2001).
Pollock (1995, p. 41, my emphasis).
Sturgeon (2014, p. 117).
Martin (1994).
Lewis (1997).
Balcerak Jackson (2016).
Boghossian (2003).
Williamson (2003).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank an anonymous referee of this journal for extremely helpful comments. Thanks also to Ruth Chang, Robert Audi, Muhammad Legenhausen and Tim Williamson for valuable comments and feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Vahid, H. The dispositional architecture of epistemic reasons. Philos Stud 176, 1887–1904 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1102-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1102-y