Believing Against the Evidence

A spanner in the works: that's how evidentialists will see this new book by Miriam Schleifer McCormick. Believing Against the Evidence: Agency and the Ethics of Belief takes an antievidentialist line according to which some nonevidentially based beliefs are permissible. The standard evidentialist angle is that practical reasons are never reasons for belief: the norms governing belief are exclusively evidential. So following the evidence is always required. McCormick gets behind the opposing, pragmatist view, which denies this. It's pretty tame pragmatism, however, since straying from the evidence is usually wrong, we're assured. Still, if McCormick is right, then it's lights out for evidentialism. Her arguments are sharp, focused, and insightful. The writing is clear, unpretentious, and engaging. I'm not buying the theory, but after reading this stuff, I'm less confident of my own evidentialist commitments. That's a sign of good philosophy. And that's what you're going to find here.The book has two well-coordinated parts. In the first, McCormick argues that epistemic value is inseparable from moral or prudential value: the same norms apply to belief and action. In the second, she argues that doxastic agency is basically identical to moral agency: both sorts of control involve taking responsibility—for the mechanisms that produce belief, in the one case, and behavior, in the other. Overall, then, the aim is to unify domains that evidentialists want to keep apart.Without getting lost in details, let's look at a couple of arguments. Many evidentialists maintain that the epistemic “ought” is fully distinct from the moral or prudential “ought.” There are purely epistemic reasons for belief, and those reasons don't depend on there being any connection between knowledge and practical utility. Some argue that knowledge has noninstrumental value: it is partly constitutive of human flourishing, for instance, just insofar as knowing displays intellectual virtue. Bad move, says McCormick: “If a world existed where true beliefs and knowledge ceased to be at all helpful in achieving one's goals they would cease to have value. . . . If we lived in a world where true beliefs had no benefits, then, in my view, a proposition being true would not count at all in favor of its being believed” (45). There is no plausible story to tell about the connection between knowledge and flourishing that doesn't hinge on the practical benefits of knowing.That's a decent thought, and cold water for evidentialists. But I wonder if it's just expressing a commitment to the pragmatic conception of epistemic normativity rather than providing any reason to accept it. How does McCormick's assertion differ from the following? “If we lived in a world where true beliefs had no benefits, then a proposition being true would have no practical value.” That doesn't say anything. So it doesn't support pragmatism. An equally empty claim could be made about moral value: in a world where doing good deeds conferred no benefits on the agent performing them, doing good deeds would have no practical value for the agent. But that doesn't imply—or doesn't obviously imply—that a deed's being good would not count, from a moral point of view, in favor of its being performed. And what about aesthetic value? Does beauty have no value if it serves no purpose? I think I can imagine beauty possessing value even in a world where people were incapable of deriving any pleasure from aesthetic contemplation. It seems to me that the aesthetic domain of value is detachable from the prudential. And it seems that the epistemic is too. Or it seems that way to me.So who is right—the pragmatist or the evidentialist? I'm not really sure, and that's probably significant. At a minimum, McCormick deserves some credit for shaking the evidentialist intuition that epistemic value is entirely its own thing.Here's another interesting idea. McCormick notes that normative defenses of evidentialism assume that evidentially based beliefs help us attain truth and knowledge, and that truth and knowledge contribute to individual and collective flourishing. “But if the value of truth and knowledge is merely instrumental, then if a belief helps us flourish without being evidentially based, it can be permissible to hold that belief” (52). So it is sometimes permissible to violate evidential norms when the evidence is neutral and the relevant beliefs “enrich our lives and help us thrive” (53) and that sort of thing.Such beliefs may be seen as “adaptive”—having been “evolutionally favored because they contribute to the propagation of the species” (54). The evolutionary picture thus supports “the idea that the purpose, aim, or goal of belief is more complex and varied than truth” (54). McCormick cites cases of “positive illusions” as licensing occasional evidential transgressions: plane crash survivors in the mountains would do better to believe, against the evidence, that they will survive; ignoring the evidence of doctors who tell you that you're doomed can actually be good. In heavy circumstances like these, believers are excused for taking evidential liberties, and when the evidence is neutral, “there is nothing pernicious about believing in a way that contributes to your well-being” (55). Nothing? Apparently so, for we “do not do well as believers if we strictly and universally adhere to evidentialist rules” (55).Isn't it more accurate to say, rather, that we do not do well as humans (or agents, or organisms, or whatever) when we strictly and universally adhere to evidentialist rules? Consider an analogy: There are norms governing healthy eating (I think). One of these norms says that you should avoid eating foods containing high concentrations of refined sugar. So when you eat a piece of cake, you're not doing what you ought to do by the norms of healthy eating: you're not doing well as an eater. But maybe you're doing well as a human. Surely we make exceptions on someone's birthday, or when they're feeling depressed, or want to mark a success. It's not true to say that there is nothing wrong with eating birthday cake. There is something wrong with it. It's not nutritious. But from a broader perspective, we do regard occasional cake eating as permissible. Same deal here: we sometimes do regard believing in the absence of evidence as, say, morally or prudentially acceptable. But there's still something wrong with believing that way. It's suboptimal from an epistemic point of view ( just as eating cake is suboptimal from a nutritional point of view).Looks like we've got another clash of intuitions. One thing going for the evidentialist perspective is that it keeps distinct considerations distinct by grounding them in distinct values. And no one is denying that there are epistemic as well as moral and prudential considerations. So why collapse the corresponding values or requirements? Parsimony is only a virtue when it comes to entities, not when it comes to concepts or distinctions.One more thing—a suggestion regarding taxonomy: McCormick self-identifies as a pragmatist. She allows “that some non-evidentially based beliefs are permissible and that doxastic norms are not wholly evidential” (1). That's pragmatism plain and simple. At the same time, she proposes “moderate evidentialism” as an alternative name for her view, since she holds that “evidential norms are most often the ones to follow” (6). I don't like this. The evidentialist-pragmatist dichotomy is in one respect analogous to the traditional empiricist-rationalist distinction. Empiricism is the all-or-nothing option. If you allow even one innate concept, or one bit of innate knowledge, then you're out of the club. And if you recognize any nonevidential reasons for belief, then your days as an evidentialist are over. Evidentialism doesn't come in degrees. This is a terminological point, of course, but getting clear on the labels is probably a good idea.I've tried to indicate where we can push back against the pragmatism. But my objections are rough and ready. The truth is, this is a great book. It's full of ideas to rattle evidentialists and it's utterly sensitive to their reasoning. McCormick doesn't mess around either: She cuts it close to the score with a classic philosophical performance—no strutting, or roaring at the gallery. Feldman, Steup, and other top bananas should take these arguments seriously and try to find ways to respond

Agency (philosophy) · Analytic philosophy · Contemporary philosophy · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · General interest · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Philosophy

• Value beyond truth-value

  Open Access•Miriam Schleifer McCormick•Synthese•2021

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