Abstract
Many stored beliefs, like beliefs in one’s personal data or beliefs in one’s area of expertise, intuitively amount to knowledge, and so are justified. This uncontroversial datum arguably tells against evidentialism, the position according to which a belief is justified if it fits the available evidence: stored beliefs are normally not sustained by one’s available evidence. Conee and Feldman have tried to meet this potential objection by relaxing the notion of available evidence. According to their proposal, stored beliefs are dispositionally justified, because they are justified by the evidence one has the disposition to retrieve; such evidence, as a consequence, is to be characterize as available, though in a derivative sense. Goldman has criticized this proposal, by offering a counterexample to the claim that a disposition to generate a piece of evidence may qualify as a justifier. In this paper I critically examine two possible replies to Goldman’s example stemming from Conee and Feldman, and finally propose my own, based on a distinction, inspired by Audi, between dispositional evidence and the disposition to have evidence. Though this proposal differs from Conee and Feldman’s one, I will conclude that it fits pretty well their intuitions.
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Notes
Conee and Feldman (2001) propose the following principle to specify the internalist approach to justification: «M. If any two possible individuals are mentally alike, then they are justificationally alike, e.g., the same beliefs are justified for them to the same extent» (2001, p. 235).
I am indebted to an anonymous referee for the suggestion that Conee and Feldman could elude Goldman’s counterexample by using (D-j*) to characterize D-justification.
Although he doesn’t seem to worry much about it, Feldman arguably recognizes the problem. In Feldman 1988 we read that “there may be some things that I do not know now, but if I were to think of them I would then come to believe them, and come to have evidence for them, for the first time” (p. 99). Feldman is here suggesting that the counterfactual characterization of epistemic terms presented above may run into troubles whenever one’s epistemic situation disposes one to form for the first time a belief in a proposition, and to entertain for the first time evidence which supports such belief. For in that situation it is true that the subject “would know [that proposition] occurrently if he thought of it”, yet in no available sense it is true of the subject that she does already know it. As I read this passage, Feldman explains the latter intuition by noticing that in the cases under discussion a person would fail two meet two necessary conditions for knowledge, because she wouldn’t believe a proposition, and she would fail to possess evidence bearing on that proposition. So, a fortiori, Feldman is arguably committed to denying that evidence one has not yet considered “for the first time”, as the deliverance of Alex's possible calculation, is evidence in light of which one is in some sense justified.
It is reasonable to suppose that we actually form just a very small part of the beliefs that are justified in the light of the informational states we are in. As Audi has remarked, «there seems to be a natural economy of nature—perhaps explainable on an evolutionary basis—that prevents our minds being cluttered with the innumerable beliefs we would have if we formed one for each fact we can see to be the case» (Audi 1998, p. 22).
It is questionable that belief storage is always the storage of an O-belief as in the case at issue. If you distinguish between simple seeing—that kind of seeing reported by “Sam sees the tree in the garden”—and propositional seeing—that kind of seeing reported by “Sam sees that there is a tree in the garden”, you’re likely to think that the latter kind of seeing involves forming the belief in the proposition specified by the that-clause in the statement attributing to Sam the perceptual state. In this case a belief has been formed, but it is questionable that it needs to be occurently entertained. R. Audi, for one, suggests that the belief can be directly turned into stored belief and, therefore, that it needs not be O-belief. See Audi (1994, pp. 420–421).
It is arguable that also the satisfaction of (ii) just provides a necessary condition for the dispositional possession of a body of evidence. Given average mathematical skills, Tom’s belief that 650 × 362 equals 235,300 is psychologically accessible, though it does not count as evidence Tom possesses.
References
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Conee, E., & Feldman, R. (1985). Evidentialism. Philosophical Studies, 48, 15–34 (Reprinted in E. Conee & R. Feldman 2004, with a Forward, 83–107).
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Acknowledgments
I am very grateful to many persons for valuable discussions and important comments on previous versions of this paper. In particular I would like to thank Luca Moretti, Johannes Brandl, Wolfgang Huemer, Gerhard Schurz, and the people from the 2006 Meeting of the Canadian Society for Epistemology. A special thank to Richard Feldman. Finally I am indebted to an anonymous referee for their insightful criticisms.
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Piazza, T. Evidentialism and the problem of stored beliefs. Philos Stud 145, 311–324 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9233-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9233-1