Reply to Solomon Laurence Bonjour Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 50, No. 4. (Jun., 1990), pp. 779-782. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8205%28199006%2950%3A4%3C779%3ARTS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-8 Philosophy and Phenomenological Research is currently published by International Phenomenological Society.
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Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. L, No. 4 , June 1990
Reply to Solomon LAURENCE B O N J O U R
University of Washington
Solomon raises two objections to the metajustificatory argument for a coherence theory of empirical justification that is offered in the final chapter of The Structure of Empirical Knowledge (SEK).' I will discuss each of these and then comment briefly on the epistemological moral that she draws from her discussion.
The first objection appeals to the familiar idea that theories are underdetermined by evidence. Solomon argues that there will always be many possible alternative and incompatible systems of belief which satisfy all of the coherentist justificatory constraints to which the metajustificatory argument appeals, i.e. which are equally coherent, satisfy the observation requirement, and remain stable over time. Since these different systems cannot all be likely to be true in the realist sense of truth invoked by the argument, the argument must fail. I think that Solomon is right that some degree of underdetermination is unavoidable, that different systems of belief that are logically incompatible with each other may be equally justified. But how a serious a problem this poses for the metajustificatory argument will depend on how radical the underdetermination is, i.e. on how far such alternative systems of belief diverge from each other. If the divergence is small enough, if the different alternatives are in effect close variations on a common theme, then it will still be possible to say, invoking a familiar notion from discussions in the philosophy of science, that a system that satisfies the justificatory constraints is likely to be at least approximately true - and this seems to me enough to save the basic thrust of the argument. The intelligibility of the concept of approximate truth has sometimes been challenged, but I think that we can do well enough for present purposes by saying that a belief is approximately true if a vaguer, less specific Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985.
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version of it would be literally, true. The application of this concept is clearest where it is numerical values that are in question: the claim that a certain value is 2.2 would be approximately true if the vaguer claim that the value is between say 2.195and 2.205 is true simpliciter. There is obviously work to be done in making clearer how it would apply to other sorts of claims and especially in extending it to whole systems of beliefs, but I see no reason to think that something along these lines cannot be done. Indeed, it seems clear that anyone who wants to offer a positive but still plausible alethic assessment of commonsense or scientific belief will be unable to avoid invoking some such concept of approximate truth. If on the other hand the indeterminacy is of the more radical sort envisaged by Quine and others, so that the differing systems cannot be viewed as approximations of one another without draining that notion of any interesting content, then the metajustificatory argument collapses -taking with it as far as I can see any other epistemological views that are realist and non-skeptical. Is there any reason to think that this dire possibility is in fact realized? Though this was surely not made as clear as it might have been in SEK, it is the arguments for this more radical sort of underdetermination which the responses to underdetermination that Solomon considers were intended to answer. And though there is no doubt much more to be said on that issue, nothing in her present paper seems even intended to show that they are not adequate to that end.
The main problem in attempting to respond to Solomon's second objection is that her account here seems to me to miss more or less completely the central idea of that part of the metajustificatory argument, so that an adequate response would have to give a relatively full restatement something that I have no space for here. Thus I must be content to give a very brief and inadequate indication of the main thrust of the argument and then point out some of the ways that Solomon misconstrues it. The core of the argument against a skeptical hypothesis of the evil demon variety involves two points. First, an unqualified evil demon hypothesis in effect has too much explanatory capacity: because it could explain any pattern of spontaneous beliefs at all, it ghes no reason to expect the specific pattern of coherence-conducive spontaneous beliefs that we actually find, and thus its probability is not enhanced by the occurrence of that pattern. Second, if further stipulations are added with respect to the demon's motives, etc., so as to avoid this problem, the overall likelihood of the resulting ("elaborated") hypothesis is not increased because those further stipulations are just as unlikely in relation to the bare existence of a demon as was the occurrence of coherence-conducive
spontaneous beliefs in relation to an unspecified demon. The only difference is that the original probabilistic conflict between the evidence and the hypothesis has now been converted into an internal conflict within the hypothesis itself. (All this is elaborated and defended by analogy with the simple and elaborated chance hypotheses.) Perhaps the most important issue in relation to this argument is whether exactly the same problem does not also arise for the correspondence hypothesis (i.e., the view that the coherence and stability of a belief system is to be explained by its correspondence with external reality), and it is in the context of the discussion of this issue that the passages discussed by Solomon arise. I argue that the hypothesis that my coherence-conducive cognitively spontaneous beliefs are ultimately caused by an external world, as contrasted with an elaborated demon hypothesis, need not simply stipulate as a kind of brute fact that the world operates so as to produce this result, but can instead explain on the basis of more general features of such a world how this might come to pass, thus significantly lessening the internal probabilistic conflict of the elaborated correspondence hypothesis as compared to the elaborated demon hypothesis. Thus I neither make nor need to make the claim "that external world hypotheses all predict regularity of spontaneous belief" (Solomon, p. I I), and I agree of course that such a claim would be clearly false. More importantly in relation to Solomon's discussion, nothing in my discussion seems to me to support the idea that I am invoking the general principle "that 'external' causes are less likely than causes which seem more connected to the effects" (Solomon, p. I 2) to which she devotes most of her discussion. I agree, of course that there would be no adequate way to defend such a principle, assuming that one could even understand what exactly it meant. The passage quoted by Solomon is, in the overall context of the argument, an attempt to show that the response on behalf of the correspondence hypothesis just discussed cannot be extended to the elaborated demon hypothesis as well. In this specific context, it is claimed, the externality of the "stipulated demonology," as contrasted with the analogous feature of the correspondence hypothesis, significantly affects the degree of internal probabilistic conflict pertaining to the two hypotheses. There may, of course, be problems with all of this, but Solomon's discussion, by failing to focus on the specific way that the idea of externality functions in the argument, does nothing to bring them out. Thus the "two considerations" that Solomon discusses can be adequately understood and assessed only in the context of the single argument of which they are a part. This argument may or may not succeed, but my main quarrel with Solomon is that it never really gets discussed.
Ill Solomon's conclusion is that the project of giving a metajustification for a coherence theory of empirical knowledge is doomed to failure. She argues further that no other epistemological account that accepts the same four general constraints that motivate the discussion in SEK (such as an internalist version of foundationalism) is likely to do any better, so that the only way out is to give up one or more of the constraints, which means "beginning an epistemological theory anew.'' One possibility here is abandoning the third of the four constraints, the requirement of epistemic responsibility, which would open the door to externalist accounts of justification. But since I have already made clear in a number of places why such accounts seem to me unacceptable. I will not consider them further here.' My general response to solomon's suggestion is that giving up any of the four constraints seems to me tantamount to accepting the skeptical conclusion that whatever justification we may have for our beliefs gives us no reason at all to think that the world really is the way that those beliefs depict it to be. I find it very hard to believe that this is the case, but perhaps ever harder to see how any view that accepts such a result can count as a theory of knowledge.
The most recent of these discussions is contained in my contribution to John W. Bender (ed.), The Current State of the Coherence Theory (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989). Cf. pp. 276-80.
