Epistemology within a General Theory of Rationality
The history of epistemology in large part can be read as an attempt to come to grips with two questions, what is it to have justified beliefs, and what is it to have knowledge? Parts 1 and 2 have been concerned with the latter question, but a complete epistemology needs also to address the former as well as the relationship between the two.
Chapter 9 provides some of the groundwork. Once the assumption that justified belief is a necessary condition of knowledge is abandoned, the Gettier game can no longer be played, and the way is cleared for a reorientation of epistemology. This chapter and the following one sketch this reorientation.
But first, a brief review of some relevant history. Throughout much of modern epistemology, the working assumption has been that there is a necessary connection between justified belief on the one hand and true belief and knowledge on the other. A traditional view is that justified beliefs are ones arrived at using an appropriate methodology, where an appropriate methodology guarantees truth.
Descartes, for example, argued that if one restricted oneself to believing only that which is impossible to doubt, one would be assured of not falling into error. Locke’s position was only slightly less optimistic. He maintained that one’s degree of confidence in a proposition ought be proportionate to the strength of one’s evidence, in which case the propositions in which one had a high degree of confidence would be mostly true.
Neither Descartes nor Locke, however, could keep justified belief securely linked with true belief and knowledge without invoking God as the guarantor. Descartes insisted that God would not permit us to be deceived about that which we cannot doubt, while Locke claimed that if we use our perceptual faculties and faculty of reason properly, our general reliability is assured, since God created these faculties.
Contemporary epistemologists are not as inclined to deploy theological assumptions to solve epistemological problems, but they too have been reluctant to abandon the assumption that justification and knowledge are necessarily connected. So, semantic stipulation has replaced theology as a way of ensuring the link. Knowledge is said by definition to involve justified belief.
On this view, the direction of the link is reversed from that sought by Descartes and Locke. Having justified beliefs does not guarantee true belief or knowledge. The idea, rather, is that because knowledge is to be defined as justified true belief, knowing P entails that the belief P is justified.
I have been arguing, however, that it is a mistake to stipulate in advance that there has to be a necessary tie between justified belief and knowledge. The theories of justified belief and knowledge have very different initial foci, and as such the working presupposition should be that the theories are distinct. Separate and equal, as it were. Moreover, as discussed in chapter 9, the separation brings benefits to both parties.
It frees the theory of knowledge from the dilemma of either having to insist on an overly intellectual conception of knowledge, according to which one is able to provide an intellectual defense of whatever one knows, or straining to introduce a nontraditional notion of justified belief because the definition of knowledge is thought to require this.
It simultaneously frees the theory of justified belief from servitude to the theory of knowledge, a servitude that makes it difficult for the theory of justified belief to be relevant to our everyday assessments of each other’s opinions, which tend to focus on whether one has been appropriately thorough and careful in formulating one’s one opinions as opposed to whether one has satisfied the prerequisites of knowledge. If the properties that make a belief justified are stipulated to be ones that turn a true belief into a good candidate for knowledge, the theory of justified belief has no choice but to be concerned with the latter.
There are other benefits. The concept of justified belief ought to be closely linked with that of rational belief, which in turn ought to be strongly tied to our ways of understanding the rationality of actions, decisions, strategies, plans, etc. But if justified belief is joined to knowledge, then so too will rational belief, and the more closely rational belief is coupled with the prerequisites of knowledge, the more estranged it becomes from our ways of understanding the rationality of other phenomena. The result is that questions about the rationality of beliefs get treated as if they were somehow fundamentally different from questions about the rationality of actions, decisions, and the like.
These outcomes are as common as they are regrettable. Regrettable because it ought to be possible to develop an approach to justified and rational belief that comfortably places them within a general theory of rationality, thus connecting them not only with the concept of rational actions, plans, and strategies but also with our everyday assessments of each other’s opinions.
A first step toward such an approach is to conceive rationality as goal oriented. Whether the question concerns the rationality of an action, belief, decision, intention, plan, or strategy, what is at issue is the effective pursuit of goals.
Success is not a prerequisite, however. What is rational can turn out badly. After all, some situations are such that no one could have been reasonably expected to foresee that what appeared to be the best option would lead to unwelcome consequences.
Considerations such as these suggest a template for rationality: an action A (decision, plan, intention, strategy, belief, etc.) is rational for an individual S if it is rational for S to believe that A would acceptably satisfy her goals.
An obvious drawback of this formulation is that it makes reference to rational belief, thus leaving us within the circle of notions we wish to understand. I will return to this issue in a moment, but note first that different kinds of goals can be taken into account in assessing the rationality of an action, decision, plan, or whatever. If it is rational for S to believe that doing A would effectively promote her economic goals, then A is rational for her in an economic sense. On the other hand, not all goals are economic. Some are self-interested but not economic (for example, ones concerning power, prestige, and the like), while still others are not self-interested at all (for example, ones concerning the welfare of family and friends). But then, even if A is rational for S in an economic sense, it need not be rational for her in a more general self-interested sense nor rational for her all things considered, since it might not be rational for her to believe that A would do an acceptably good job in promoting the full range of her goals, noneconomic as well as economic and non-self-interested as well as self-interested.
These observations point to a refinement of the template: an action A (decision, plan, intention, strategy, etc.) is rational in sense X for S if it is rational for S to believe that A will do an acceptably good job of satisfying her goals of type X.
Being clear about what goals and hence what kind of rationality are at issue is of particular importance for epistemology, because although there is nothing in principle wrong with evaluating beliefs in terms of how well they promote a variety of goals, epistemologists have traditionally been interested in a specific kind of rational belief, one that corresponds to the goal of now having beliefs that are accurate and comprehensive.
To understand the significance of the qualifier “now,” imagine that S’s prospects for having accurate and comprehensive beliefs in a year’s time would be enhanced by believing something P for which she now lacks adequate evidence. For example, let P be a more favorable assessment of her intellectual talents than her evidence warrants, but suppose it is clear to her that if she were to believe P, she would become intellectually more confident, which would make her a more dedicated inquirer, which in turn would enhance her long-term prospects of having an accurate and comprehensive belief system. Despite these long-term intellectual benefits, there is an important sense of rational belief, indeed the very sense that traditionally has been of the most interest to epistemologists, in which it is not rational for her to believe P. A way of marking this distinction is to say that it is not epistemically rational for her to believe P, where this epistemic sense is understood in terms of the goal of now having accurate and comprehensive beliefs.
This goal has two aspects: comprehensiveness and accuracy. If the goal were only accuracy, the right strategy would be to believe very little (only that which is utterly certain, for example), whereas if the goal were only comprehensiveness, the right strategy would be to believe a great deal (whatever is more probable than not, for example). As the goal is stated, however, it is necessary to balance the risks of believing falsehoods against the benefits of believing truths.
There are delicate questions about how best to achieve this balance,1 but it is not necessary to dwell on these questions, since the point of immediate relevance is that epistemologists have traditionally occupied themselves with this particular type of rational belief. Nor is it necessary to choose among competing accounts. Although foundationalists, coherentists, and others have different views about how best to explicate epistemically rational belief, what matters for purposes here is something they all have in common.
Namely, they all try to explicate the concept of epistemically rational belief without reference to any other concept of rationality. Foundationalists, for instance, understand epistemic rationality in terms of basic beliefs and a set of deductive and probabilistic relations by which other beliefs are supported by those that are basic. Moreover, they would view it as a defect if they had to make use of some notion of rationality (or a related notion, such as reasonability) in characterizing basicality or these support relations. Coherentists, on the other hand, explicate epistemic rationality in terms of a set of deductive and probabilistic relations among beliefs and such properties as simplicity and conservativeness, but they too would regard it as a flaw if their explication smuggled in a reference to a concept of rationality or a related concept. The same is true of other accounts of epistemically rational beliefs.
This point is of fundamental importance for the general theory of rationality because it provides the theory with an escape route from circularity. In particular, the template of rationality can be expressed using the concept of epistemically rational belief: an action A (decision, plan, intention, etc.) is rational in sense X for S just in case it is epistemically rational for S to believe that A will do an acceptably good job of satisfying goals of kind X.
Because the concept of epistemically rational belief is explicated without making use of any other notion of rationality or a close cognate, the template is now theoretically respectable. It makes no noneliminable reference to a concept of rationality. Epistemically rational belief functions as a theoretical anchor for other concepts of rationality.2
In this template, “X” can refer to all of S’s goals or only a subset of them. There is, accordingly, a risk of confusion if one does not specify the kind of goal and hence the kind of rationality at issue in assessing an action, decision, plan, or strategy. The same possibilities for confusion arise when the issue is the rationality of beliefs. Although, as mentioned above, epistemologists have traditionally been interested in assessing beliefs in terms of the specific intellectual goal of now having accurate and comprehensive beliefs, the template implies that in principle there is nothing wrong with assessing beliefs in terms of how well they promote other goals, including the total constellation of S’s goals (practical as well as intellectual, and long term as well as immediate).
In everyday contexts, however, we rarely do so, at least not explicitly. The question is, why not? The two observations made in chapter 10 provide the answer. First, in deliberations about what to believe about a claim, it is usually ineffectual to cite considerations that do not purport to be related to its truth, since they are not the kind of reasons that consciously persuade us to believe. Second, it is ordinarily redundant to focus on non-truth-related reasons for belief, because what it is rational for us to believe when all of our goals are taken into account is usually identical with what it is epistemically rational for us to believe. This is so because in all but a few unusual situations, the beliefs that are likely to do the best overall job of promoting the total constellation of our goals are those that are comprehensive and accurate, since only by having such beliefs are we likely to be able to fashion effective strategies for achieving our goals.
Although practical considerations typically do not consciously and directly enter into our everyday assessments of each other’s beliefs or into our own deliberations about what to believe, they do, as was also pointed out in chapter 10, deeply influence what it is rational for us to believe. They do so by determining the direction and extent of our inquiries. None of us are purely intellectual beings. We all have a wide variety of ends, and these ends determine which inquiries it is reasonable to undertake and how much time and energy to devote to them.
Our everyday assessments of each other’s beliefs take into account this reality by being “reason saturated.” They are concerned, for example, with whether someone has been reasonably thorough in gathering evidence and then reasonably careful in deliberating about it, where the standards of reasonability at work here are realistic ones. They reflect the fact that we all have nonintellectual interests, goals, and needs, which constrain the amount of time and effort it is appropriate to devote to investigating an issue. Only a concept that is sensitive to these questions of resource allocation is capable of capturing the spirit of these everyday evaluations.
Justified belief, I maintain, is just such a concept, but as I understand it, the concept is closely associated with responsible believing as opposed to what is required to turn true belief into knowledge. In particular, making use of the general template of rationality, S justifiably believes P if it is epistemically rational for her to believe that her procedures with respect to P have been acceptable given all her goals and given also the limitations on her time and capacities.
Justified belief, so understood, is able to do justice to the fact that there are many matters about which it is not especially important to have accurate and comprehensive beliefs, and hence it is not appropriate to spend much time and effort gathering information and thinking about them. The core intuition here is that having justified beliefs requires one to be a responsible believer, but being responsible does not necessarily require one to go to extraordinary lengths in trying to discover the truth about an issue. More exactly, it does not require this unless the issue itself is extraordinarily important, in which case extraordinary diligence is precisely what is called for.
The standards of justified belief thus vary with the importance of the issue, with high importance translating into demanding standards and low importance into less demanding ones. In other words, just what one would expect.3