Why suppose that any of the bases on which we regularly and
unquestionably form beliefs are reliable? Why suppose that sense perception, in
particular, is a reliable source of information of the physical environment? These are
questions that William Alston raises in his recent books Perceiving God (1991) and The
Reliability of Sense Perception (1993). He argues that there is no way to show that
any of our basic sources of belief is reliable without falling into epistemic circularity.
There is no way to show that such a source is reliable without relying at some point or
another on premises that are themselves derived from that source. So we cannot have any
non-circular reasons for supposing that the sources on which we base our beliefs are
reliable.
Alston thinks, however, that there is a way of evaluating the
reliability of our sources of belief that is independent of the beliefs based on those
sources and that does not therefore fall into circularity. I will argue that Alston's
attempt to find such an external support for our sources of beliefs fails. I will also
consider Ernest Sosa's (1994, 1995) most recent attempt to deal with the problem and argue
that if it is understood as a related attempt to find an external standpoint from which to
evaluate our sources of belief, it fails, too. I will conclude that there is no
alternative to a purely internal approach in which we evaluate our sources of beliefs in
terms of the beliefs that derive from the very same sources and thus to embracing
epistemic circularity. Finally, I will suggest that this internal approach amounts to
acknowledging stability in the belief system as an important epistemic end. It is only by
pursuing such stability that we can pursue truth.
Let's follow Alston (1993, pp. 12-15) and take sense perception
as our example. If we want to show that sense perception is reliable, the simplest and
most fundamental way is to use a track record argument. We collect a suitable sample of
beliefs that are based on sense perception and take the proportion of truths in the sample
as an estimation of the reliability of that source of belief. We infer inductively from
the truth or falsity of particular perceptual beliefs to the conclusion that sense
perception is reliable. But how are we to determine whether particular perceptual beliefs
are true? It seems to be the only way to form further perceptual beliefs. So the premises
of the track record argument for the reliability of sense perception are themselves based
on sense perception. The kind of circularity involved in this argument is not logical
circularity because the conclusion that sense perception is reliable is not used as one of
the premises. Circularity it is nevertheless because we cannot take ourselves to be
justified in accepting the premises unless we assume that sense perception is reliable.
Since this kind of circularity involves a commitment to the conclusion as a presupposition
of our taking ourselves to be justified in accepting the premises, Alston calls it
epistemic circularity.
Alston (1993, p. 126) argues also that any attempt to show a source to
be reliable by relying on deliverances of some other source does not help. If that other
source is in turn shown to be reliable by relying on the first source, we have still a
circle that is wider but not less objectionable. And if we think that the reliability of
the other source can be taken for granted and does not need any showing, we are vulnerable
to a charge of undue partiality. It seems clear that any attempt to show that any of our
basic sources of belief is reliable faces this dilemma: it falls either into epistemic
circularity or into undue partiality.
However, Alston argued in his earlier paper "Epistemic
Circularity" (1989) that epistemic circularity does not prevent our using such an
argument to show that sense perception is reliable or to justify the claim that it is.
Neither does it prevent our being justified in believing or even knowing that sense
perception is reliable. Assuming that reliabilism is the correct account of justification
and that sense perception (and inductive reasoning and memory) is in fact reliable, we are
quite justified in accepting the premises and we can use the argument to show that sense
perception is reliable. In other words, if sense perception is reliable, then we can show
that it is. Now, he finds the iffy nature of this conclusion quite intolerable. It is true
that epistemic circularity does not prevent us from showing that sense perception is
reliable if sense perception is in fact reliable. But the same conditional holds for any
other source of belief, however outrageous. If crystal-ball gazing is in fact reliable, we
can use a track record argument to show that it is. So epistemically circular arguments do
not serve to discriminate between reliable and unreliable sources.
Alston's new pessimism seems to derive from his interest in finding
some kind of external support for the reliability of our sources of belief, a support that
is independent of the outputs of those sources (1991, p. 149, 174; 1993, pp. 122-124,
139). It is clear that epistemically circular arguments fail to give such an independent
support. All that they possibly support from this external point of view are hypothetical
conclusions: if a given belief source is reliable, we are justified in believing that it
is. If we are not allowed to endorse the premises of the argument because they are
themselves based on the source the reliability of which is under scrutiny, these
hypothetical conclusions seem to be all we can get. (Actually, to get even these
hypothetical conclusions, we have to rely on some sources of belief. So it is doubtful
that we can even reach such conclusions if we want to evaluate our sources of belief from
a point view that is totally independent of those sources and their outputs. I will,
however, go along with Alston for the sake of argument and assume that we are entitled to
these conditionals.)
Alston (1993, pp. 124-140) finds the needed external evaluation in
practical considerations. Even though we cannot show without circularity that sense
perception is reliable, we can show, in his view, that it is rational to go on forming
beliefs on the basis of sense perception and other customary sources of belief and that it
is rational to assume that these sources are reliable. Or to use his term "doxastic
practice" instead of "source of belief", Alston tries to show that it is
rational to engage in doxastic practices that are firmly established, psychologically and
socially, and to take them to be reliable. The sort of rationality in question is not
epistemic, however. It is not rationality that is necessarily related to truth-conducive
or reliable source. It is practical rationality. The argument is that it is practically
rational to form beliefs on the basis of sense perception and other customary sources of
beliefs because these ways of forming beliefs are firmly established. What other
alternative do we have, he asks. We cannot stop forming beliefs altogether. And there
seems to be no reason to change those ways of forming beliefs that are already firmly
established.
Now, can this argument escape the afore mentioned dilemma. Alston
(1991, p. 176) admits that we have to make use of the "standard package" of
sense perception, introspection, memory, rational intuition and reasoning to determine the
social establishment of doxastic practices. So is not the practical-rationality argument
from social establishment vulnerable to the same sort of circularity that the reliability
argument suffered from? It must be admitted that it is not. We need not assume the
conclusion to take ourselves to be justified in accepting the premises. We can use our
doxastic practices to reach the conclusion that these same practices are firmly
established without needing to assume that they are firmly established. What we do have to
assume is that these practices are reliable. Because this is not, however, the conclusion
of Alston's argument, there is no circularity. Still, it is difficult to see how it can
offer the desired external evaluation of our sources of beliefs or doxastic practices. Let
us look at the crucial steps of the argument:
(1) Premises based on the "standard package" of doxastic
practices.
(2) The "standard package" of doxastic practices is firmly
established.
(3) It is practically rational to assume that the "standard
package" of doxastic practices is reliable.
We cannot take ourselves to be justified in accepting the premises in
(1) unless we assume that the "standard package" is reliable. There is no
epistemic circularity because the conclusion is not that the "standard package"
is reliable but that it is practically rational to assume that the "standard
package" is reliable. So we need not assume the conclusion to be able take ourselves
to be justified in accepting the premises.
The problem is that if we take this to be an external evaluation of our
sources of belief, all we get are hypothetical conclusions, quite similar to those that an
epistemically circular reliability argument can give us. Namely, if sense perception (and
the other sources in the standard package) is reliable, then it is practically rational
for us to assume that sense perception is reliable. How is this better than the conclusion
that if sense perception is reliable, then we are (epistemically) justified in believing
that sense perception is reliable. Alston's shift to practical rationality offers thus no
advantage compared to the arguments that are plainly circular.
So Alston's practical rationality argument does not give the required
external evaluation of our sources of belief. Ernest Sosa (1994, pp. 282-285) seems to
agree with Alston that epistemically circular arguments fail to distinguish reliable
sources of belief from unreliable ones. The lesson that he draws is different, however. He
argues that even though epistemically circular arguments do not distinguish reliable
sources from unreliable ones, they distinguish, like any other arguments, coherent
doxastic attitudes from incoherent ones. Suppose that you are given an argument that you
accept correctly as valid. Your system of beliefs would be incoherent if you now believed
the premises and denied the conclusion of the argument. Many other combinations of
attitudes are instead open for you. You may, for example, believe both the premises and
the conclusion, but you may also deny one of the premises and believe the conclusion or
deny both the premises and the conclusion. So what any valid argument ever does is to
raise some combinations of attitudes above others in respect of coherence.
So once we have an epistemically circular argument for the reliability
of a belief source with premises which we already believe, we can imbed our belief in the
conclusion within a more comprehensively coherent system of beliefs and become thus
justified in accepting the conclusion. What this requires, of course, is that the
coherence theory of justification is true. If the coherence theory of justification is
true, epistemically circular arguments for the reliability of belief sources contribute to
our being justified in believing in their reliability. Circularity is no problem for a
coherentist.
Sosa's coherentism is qualified, however, and for familiar reasons.
Because there can be several incompatible systems of beliefs which are equally coherent
and some of which are clearly mad, it would be a mistake to take coherence to exhaust all
epistemic value. According to Sosa's (1995, p. 231) proposal,
coherence-seeking inferential reason, like retentive memory, is
of epistemic value when combined with externally apt faculties like perception and memory,
because when so combined it, like retentive memory, gives us a more comprehensive grasp of
the truth than we would have in its absence.
So coherence have epistemic value only if coherence-seeking reason is
combined with externally apt, i.e. reliable, faculties and is itself reliable. For Sosa,
reliability is thus a more fundamental epistemic value than coherence. Coherence has value
only if it is reliable.
Does Sosa's solution improve the one given by Alston? If we interpret
Sosa as searching for a similar external evaluation of our sources of belief, an
evaluation that is independent of the beliefs derived from those sources, the results do
not essentially diverge from those that Alston is able to give. The final evaluation is
bound to be hypothetical. Sosa's conclusion is then that we are (internally) justified in
taking our sources of belief to be reliable, but that this justification has epistemic
value only if those sources are in fact reliable. So Sosa can at most conclude that if our
sources of belief are in fact reliable, then our justification for taking them to be
reliable has epistemic value. This does not seem to be, any more than Alston's suggestion,
an improvement on the original reliabilist conclusion: if our sources of belief are
reliable, then we are justified (in the reliabilist sense) in believing that they are
reliable.
However, this may not be the right interpretation of Sosa's intentions.
In another passage of the same paper (1995, p. 233), he puts the matter a little
differently:
What is so desirable, epistemically, about broad coherence? Here
again we might appeal to the truth-conduciveness of such coherence, even if, as we well
know, a mind might be broadly coherent in a world where such broad coherence was not
truth-conducive. We can still regard such broad coherence as intellectually
valuable and admirable so long as we do not regard our world as such a
world. But then, of course, we don't, do we?
Here, Sosa appeals to his view that intellectual virtues are to be
identified in relation to our actual world. Whether a faculty, like coherence-seeking
reason, is a virtue depends on its reliability in our actual environment. So the victim of
the cartesian demon would be as virtuous and justified in what she believes as we are
because her faculties would be reliable in our world. And, of course, we do not take our
world to be such a demon world. We take it to be a world in which perception, memory and
inferential reason are reliable. So we take also ourselves to be justified in believing
that these sources of belief are reliable, and we take such justification to be
intellectually or epistemically valuable. This suggests strongly that Sosa does not look
for an external evaluation of our sources of belief. All we can do is to try to evaluate
them internally in terms of what we believe about the actual world and ourselves, in terms
of the beliefs that are themselves produced by the faculties the reliability of which is
under scrutiny.
To sum up, either we evaluate the reliability of our sources of beliefs
in terms of our actual beliefs that are themselves derived from those sources, or we try
to evaluate it independently of these beliefs and look for some kind of external support
for it. In the former case, we embrace epistemic circularity. In the latter case, the most
we can get as a conclusion are conditionals, such as "If sense perception is reliable
then we are justified in taking it to be reliable", "If sense perception is
reliable then it is practically rational for us to take it to be reliable" and
"If sense perception is reliable then our justification for taking it to be reliable
has epistemic value".
The epicycles via practical rationality and coherence theory suggested
by Alston and Sosa do not thus help us to get very far. Indeed, it is not easy to see the
advantage of them compared to crude and simple reliabilism. So why not just admit that
there is no external support to be found for the reliability of our sources of belief. All
we can do is to evaluate them internally in terms of what we already believe about the
world and ourselves. This is the option that Alston (1993, pp. 122-124) calls
bite-the-bullet approach that he takes to be characteristic of "naturalized
epistemology" of Willard Van Quine (1969) and Alvin Goldman (1986). According to it,
there is no first philosophy, no external vantage point outside of science or our own
system of beliefs from which science or our beliefs could be evaluated. The only thing we
can do is to evaluate our science or belief system from within. To use Otto Neurath's
famous metaphor, as both Quine and Goldman do, we can rebuild our doxastic ship only at
sea while floating on it.
If we decide to bite the bullet and evaluate our sources of belief in
terms of our actual beliefs that are themselves derived from those sources, we embrace
epistemic circularity. Whether we see this as a problem depends on what we expect of such
an evaluation. Of course, we do not get any external support for the reliability of our
belief sources. Neither is there any guarantee that the evaluation will be correct, that
the sources that we judge to be reliable really are reliable. If our sources of belief
were not in fact reliable, we would not, of course, be able to evaluate their reliability
in a reliable way. However, if we are initially confident in our beliefs about ourselves
and the world, nothing prevents our becoming confident about the reliability of their
sources by arguments that uses those same beliefs as premises. Or if we already are
confident of their reliability, these epistemically circular arguments may either increase
or decrease that confidence. What we get, if all goes well, is a firm and stable system of
beliefs that includes, to use Sosa's term, an "epistemic" perspective to our
sources of belief and their reliability. This system is stable because by the
"epistemic" perspective it includes we are able to resolve conflicts that may
arise when we form new beliefs and thereby to preserve its stability.
If we take this kind of firm and stable system of belief as an
important end in epistemology, we are not vulnerable to any vicious circularity.
Epistemically circular arguments, on the contrary, help to create and maintain such a
system. Still, it may be thought that this is an overly modest aim. We want more of our
beliefs. We want that they are true rather than false. But, of course, we are not denying
this by acknowledging stability as an important end. On the contrary, our desire for truth
motivates the whole project of finding reliable sources of belief. The point is that a
firm and stable system of beliefs is all we are guaranteed to get if our pursuit of truth
is to be successful by our own lights. And these are the only lights there are. (See
Bennett, 1990, on how these aims are related in Descartes.) It does not really matter
whether we are reliabilists, coherentists or evidentialists. We are very much in the same
boat. All we can do in our pursuit of truth is to see that our own beliefs satisfy our
standards of justification, whatever they are. And this is a state in which our beliefs,
both epistemic and non-epistemic, are in reflective equilibrium, to use John Rawls term.
This is not to say that we must fail in our pursuit of truth. It is just to say that there
is no guarantee that the beliefs in equilibrium are true or even justified. This does not
depend on us, it depends on the world.
So we may conclude that we need not fear epistemic circularity. So far
as we realize that we can pursue truth only by pursuing stability, circularity is a
friend, not an enemy.
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