Dogmatism and Ampliative Inference

The evidential role of experience in justifying beliefs has been at the center of debate in philosophy in recent years. One view is that experience, or seeming, can confer immediate (defeasible) justification on belief in virtue of its representational phenomenology. Call this view “representational dogmatism.” Another view is that experience confers immediate justification on belief in virtue of its relational phenomenology. Call this view “relational dogmatism.” The goal of this paper is to pit these two versions of dogmatism against each other in terms of their ability to account for ampliative, or non-deductive, inferential justification. I will argue that only the representational view can provide a plausible account of this type of justification.

PC Problems

This chapter provides grounds for thinking that PC is insufficient even as a theory of non-inferential justification. Two primary problems are raised for PC. First, PC needs an account of epistemic defeat. PC includes a “no-defeater” condition. However, it is shown that once one tries to get clear on the nature of defeat and how defeaters work within the framework of PC, it becomes apparent that one needs to appeal to something more than just the comparative strength of various seemings. Second, it is argued that PC falls prey to the problem of reflective awareness. If one reflects on one’s seemings, one’s justification deriving solely from them is destroyed. So, it seems that satisfying some condition other than PC is required for reflective agents to have stable non-inferential justification. It is also shown, however, that an unexpected consequence of the problem of reflective awareness is that PC is not really subject to bootstrapping problems.

Phenomenal Explanationism

This chapter incorporates a sophisticated version of PC (one that draws on the distinctions between kinds of appearances that explained in Chapter 3) into a broader explanationist framework to produce the view that is defended in this book: Phenomenal Explanationism (PE). Explanationism is an account of evidential support, i.e., of how and when evidence supports particular doxastic attitudes toward propositions. However, on its own, Explanationism does not say what evidence is or when one has a particular bit of information as evidence. This is true even when Explanationism is construed, as this chapter does, in terms of mentalist evidentialism. As a theory of evidential support, mentalist Explanationism leaves open which mental states constitute one’s evidence. Explanationism can thus be readily combined with different theories of evidence and evidence possession. If PC is understood as a theory of basic evidence, the sophisticated version of PC can be combined with Explanationism. This chapter introduces a specific version of Explanationism and describes how this variant of PC can be incorporated into it to produce PE. It also describes how PE accounts for both non-inferential and inferential justification (both deductive and inductive). Finally, it explores how PE overcomes the challenges to PC raised in Chapter 2.

Revisiting Reid on Religion

This paper answers two interpretive questions surrounding belief in God in Thomas Reid's philosophy, the status question and the detachability question. The former has to do with the type of justification Reid assigns to belief in God – immediate or mediate. The later question is whether anything philosophically significant depends on his belief in God. I argue that, for Reid, belief in God is immediately justified and integral to some parts of his system. Reid's response to skepticism about God is more complicated and more interesting than many of the contemporary philosophers who, citing Reid as inspiration, also hold that belief in God enjoys immediate justification. In Reid's hands the approach to belief in God does not compete with inferential justification, does not rely on a special faculty, and foregrounds the developmental character of his epistemology.

Undercutting Defeat

Although there is disagreement about the details, John Pollock’s framework for defeat is now part of the received wisdom in analytic epistemology. Recently, however, cracks have appeared in the consensus, particularly on the understanding of undercutting defeat. While not questioning the existence of undercutting defeat, Scott Sturgeon argues that undercutting defeat operates differently from rebutting. Unlike the latter, undercutting defeat, Sturgeon claims, occurs only in conjunction with certain higher-order contributions, i.e., with beliefs about the basis on which one does or would believe. Sturgeon concludes that Pollock misconceives undercutting defeat. I argue that in the case of defeat of inferential justification, undercutting defeat is a genuine phenomenon and takes roughly the shape Pollock suggests, not needing help from higher-order beliefs or justifications. However, I agree with Sturgeon that for noninferential justification the Pollockian account is in trouble. I try to explain why there should be this difference. This difference in defeaters has important implications for epistemology. In a final section, I use the defeat-related difference between inferential and noninferential justification to argue that there is less noninferential perceptual or testimonial justification than is commonly thought.

Inferential Justification

The ordinary distinction between being justified and being able to give a justification is described. Being able to give a justification requires metacognition; being justified doesn’t. Animals are sometimes justified in what they believe; sometimes they’re not. A definition for justification is given by analyzing a justification j of a proposition p in terms of j providing a truth-conducive reason for p. Two forms of justification are revealed along the lines of how propositions are justified, an inferential form and a representational form. Infinitism, the suggestion that infinite chains of justifiers—both deductive and truth-enhancing—are cogent, is then explored. It’s shown both that infinitary chains of justifications can’t function as additional forms of justification and that they can’t be used as provisional justifications either.

Synthetic Data

Demand for access to data, especially data collected using public funds, is ever growing. At the same time, concerns about the disclosure of the identities of and sensitive information about the respondents providing the data are making the data collectors limit the access to data. Synthetic data sets, generated to emulate certain key information found in the actual data and provide the ability to draw valid statistical inferences, are an attractive framework to afford widespread access to data for analysis while mitigating privacy and confidentiality concerns. The goal of this article is to provide a review of various approaches for generating and analyzing synthetic data sets, inferential justification, limitations of the approaches, and directions for future research. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Statistics, Volume 8 is March 8, 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Inferential seemings and the problem of reflective awareness

Phenomenal conservatism (PC) is the internalist view that non-inferential justification rests on appearances. PC’s advocates have recently argued that seemings are also required to explain inferential justification. The most developed view to this effect is Michael Huemer ’s theory of inferential seemings (ToIS). Luca Moretti has recently shown that PC is affected by the problem of reflective awareness, which makes PC open to sceptical challenges. In this paper I argue that ToIS is afflicted by a version of the same problem and it is thus hostage to inferential scepticism. I also suggest a possible response on behalf of ToIS’s advocates.

Reforming reformed epistemology: a new take on the sensus divinitatis

Alvin Plantinga theorizes the existence of a sensus divinitatis – a special cognitive faulty or mechanism dedicated to the production and non-inferential justification of theistic belief. Following Chris Tucker, we offer an evidentialist-friendly model of the sensus divinitatis whereon it produces theistic seemings that non-inferentially justify theistic belief. We suggest that the sensus divinitatis produces these seemings by tacitly grasping support relations between the content of ordinary experiences (in conjunction with our background evidence) and propositions about God. Our model offers advantages such as eliminating the need for a sui generis religious faculty, harmonizing the sensus divinitatis with prominent theories in the cognitive science of religion, and providing a superior account of natural revelation.