Reasons First

Abstract

Mark Schroeder’s latest book delves deeper into the topic of normativity and reasons, while moving his focus from ethics to epistemology. His central aims are, first, to argue that theorizing in normative epistemology profits from comparison with other normative domains (his “Core Hypothesis” [9]); and second, to defend a picture of epistemic normativity that puts reasons first: they can be used to explain and analyze all other epistemic normative phenomena.Part 1 of the book provides a compelling account of normative reasons as competitors (which compete in determining, for instance, what one ought to do or believe) that are act-oriented rather than outcome-oriented, and can be acted on (my reasons to φ can be the reasons for which I φ). Schroeder assumes that there are both objective reasons, which bear on the correctness of belief, and subjective reasons, which determine its rationality or justification.Part 2 aims to solve the problem of unjustified belief for Reasons First epistemology. On this view, normative standings such as justification/rationality and knowledge bottom out in epistemic reasons. Yet it seems that only justified belief or knowledge can provide a subject S with reasons, so that we cannot take reasons as fundamental. So, apparently, perceptual experience—given that it itself is neither knowledge nor justified—cannot provide us with reasons or evidence. But this cannot be right, since perceptual experience is undoubtedly a privileged source of evidence concerning our surroundings. According to Schroeder, to allow for perceptual justification, we need a world-implicating conception of perceptual evidence, as endorsed by disjunctivism, which takes evidence to entail truths about the external world. At the same time, and contrary to disjunctivism, we must conceive of such evidence as nonfactive—it does not have to be true (or consist in a relation to a truth) and so is available not only in the good case of veridical perception but also in illusion or hallucination. Whether S’s belief is rational cannot hinge on minimal differences, as implied by disjunctivism. Schroeder illustrates this with a pair of cases C1 and C2 that are identical except that in C1, S undergoes a veridical perception, and in C2, she undergoes an indistinguishable illusion. (Say, in C1, S is looking at a red ball, but in C2, she is facing a white ball that appears red due to red lighting.) But, importantly, this illusion is a one-time occurrence—S has an otherwise flawless perceptual track record in C1 and C2. In both cases, S’s belief is equally rational, or so Schroeder argues.Schroeder thus rejects disjunctivism. Instead, he endorses the apparent factive attitude view: basic perceptual reasons are—nonfactive—subjective reasons, such as the proposition that I see that the ball is red. But since they entail worldly facts (such as: the ball is red), they are nonetheless world-implicating. For me to possess the reason, it has to appear to me that I see that the ball is red.In part 3, Schroeder addresses the problem of sufficiency—the worry that the balance of epistemic reasons by itself cannot properly determine whether a belief is justified or knowledge. For it is unclear by how much S’s evidence that p has to outweigh her evidence that not-p so as to render her belief that p justified or knowledge. It might appear that solving this problem forces us to abandon Reasons First epistemology since it presupposes the concept of rationality: what is needed is enough evidence to make belief rational. The related problem of near ties is that evidence that p that is at least as good as evidence that not-p does not always rationalize belief that p; in cases of (near) ties between evidence pro and con, withholding belief is rational instead. By contrast, in the practical case, reasons to φ that are at least as strong as reasons not to φ insure that φ-ing is rational. How might this difference be explained? A further puzzle discussed by Schroeder is raised by cases that have motivated philosophers to defend pragmatic encroachment. For instance, in Jason Stanley’s (2005) famous bank cases, in the high-stakes scenario, the believer plausibly needs more evidence in order to form a justified belief or to know than in the corresponding low-stakes scenario.Schroeder uses these and other puzzles to argue that there must be nonevidential epistemic reasons against believing that enter into the balance of reasons; the overall balance then determines which attitude is epistemically justified, thereby preserving Reasons First epistemology. Nonevidential reasons against belief include, among others, facts about the future availability of evidence or about the costs of error—that is, the costs of having or acting on false belief. Such reasons are ubiquitous and so can explain why in cases of near ties, the overall balance of reasons, which includes nonevidential reasons against belief in addition to the (nearly) balanced evidential reasons, does not rationalize belief that p. Regarding the problem of sufficiency: taking on board nonevidential reasons, the balance of epistemic reasons can all by itself determine the epistemic standing of belief.True to his core hypothesis, Schroeder uses comparisons with reasons for other attitudes, such as admiration, to argue that some nonevidential reasons against belief are right-kind reasons, which affect a belief’s epistemic standing. Right-kind reasons are considerations to which belief must be sensitive in order to successfully play its role in our cognitive economies—the role of providing us with considerations to rely on in reasoning by default, or as a matter of policy. Beliefs do so by simplifying reasoning and decision-making, as compared to credences, since they allow us to ignore remote error possibilities. According to Schroeder’s Pragmatic Intellectualism, facts about the (practical or moral) costs of error are then right-kind reasons against belief because they are considerations to whose truth belief must be sensitive to play its cognitive role well. The costs of error explain why otherwise sufficient evidence fails to justify belief in high-stakes scenarios: they are so high that they outweigh the subject’s evidence that p.In part 4, Schroeder details his Kantian account of knowledge. He analyzes knowledge as believing well, where the belief is a response to reasons that are jointly subjectively and objectively sufficient to outweigh all existing reasons against the belief, and thus sufficient to make it rational and correct. He motivates the account by analogy with right-reasons accounts of the moral worth of actions and by focusing on how reasons generally give rise not only to standards of correctness for a certain response, but—as something for which we can act—also to standards of acting well.I now turn to a critical comment on Schroeder’s argument against disjunctivism sketched above. He presents perceptual reasons in a propositional idiom—the idea being that we can attribute reasons by way of associated propositions without being committed to any particular ontology of reasons (41). For instance, the phrase “that S sees that the ball is red” can be used equally to characterize S’s mental state of seeing that the ball is red or the consideration that S sees that the ball is red, as her epistemic reason. My worry is that using a propositional idiom encourages a misconception of disjunctivism—namely, that it is committed to a hard line between veridical perception, on the one hand, and illusion and hallucination, on the other. Put differently, the propositional idiom encourages the thought that the only version of metaphysical disjunctivism available to the epistemological disjunctivist is a V v IH view. This misconception undergirds Schroeder’s argument against disjunctivism. Let me elaborate.We can identify the epistemological disjunctivist with Schroeder’s disjunctivist opponent in the book, who endorses the view that perception provides factive, world-implicating reasons. By contrast, metaphysical disjunctivism concerns the nature of perceptual experience. Crudely put, it states that veridical perception is a mental state of a fundamentally different nature than hallucination. Regarding the further perceptual state of illusion, it comes in two varieties, V v IH and VI v H (Byrne and Logue 2009: xi). V v IH says that veridical perception as the good case is fundamentally distinct from the bad case of illusion or hallucination; VI v H holds that the good case includes veridical perception and illusion, which share the same nature and differ fundamentally from the bad case of hallucination.If we characterize the reasons provided by perceptual experience propositionally, the truth of V v IH may seem obvious. Take my visual experience as of a red ball. An associated proposition is that the ball is red. For my experience to be veridical is for this proposition to be true, as in perception. In illusion and hallucination, the associated proposition turns out false—in illusion, for instance, the white ball looks red even though it is not; in hallucination, there is not even a ball that is visually presented. This suggests a metaphysical classification of illusion with hallucination as the bad case.If, however, we think of perceptual experience as fundamentally nonpropositional and instead directed at objects, it is natural to say—with VI v H—that perception and illusion both successfully acquaint us with objects. Accordingly, both my veridical and my illusory experience acquaint me with the ball in front of me. Illusion merely involves error with respect to how the object is presented—in the example, the white ball is misleadingly presented as red. This metaphysical picture of perceptual experience can be combined with the epistemological claim that the reasons provided by perception are the very objects with which we are acquainted (Brewer 2018). For the epistemological disjunctivist, this opens up the possibility that the subject’s epistemic rationality in the illusory and veridical cases may be on a par.Reconsider Schroeder’s argument that disjunctivism implausibly entails that a minimal one-time difference between good case C1 and bad case C2 makes for a major difference with respect to the subject’s rationality. According to VI v H, the minimally different case in which the subject undergoes an illusion instead of an indistinguishable veridical experience (64) is a good case. Perceptual illusion provides the same objectual reason as veridical perception. In the subject’s misleading circumstances and given her objectual reason, it is rational, at least in the sense of perfectly understandable, that she forms a false perceptual belief; her belief is justified, but not knowledge. (True, the disjunctivist is still committed to a major rational difference between veridical perception and hallucination. But it is much less plausible anyway that we can find a minimal one-time difference between veridical perception and hallucination, since much more has to go wrong for a subject to hallucinate.)Such a view would have to be elaborated in detail to judge its merits. Yet its in-principle availability suffices to show that disjunctivism is not automatically committed to implausible rational differences between minimally different good and bad cases. This, in turn, undermines one main motivation for adopting Schroeder’s apparent factive attitudes view. I suspect that his use of the propositional idiom partly explains why he fails to address the VI v H option that is available to his opponents.This criticism notwithstanding, Reasons First is a rich and rewarding read that paints a sweeping and convincing picture of epistemology as part of a broader normative landscape grounded in reasons. Especially intriguing is Schroeder’s account of how the balance of epistemic reasons, across a range of prima facie problematic cases, determines whether a belief is justified, and of how this balance of reasons can further be used to analyze the concept of knowledge. I expect Reasons First to greatly advance the debate about epistemic reasons in the coming years.I thank Giulia Martina and Simon Wimmer for helpful comments on an earlier version of this review.