Abstract
Robust metanormative realists think that there are irreducibly normative, metaphysically heavy normative facts. One might wonder how we could be epistemically justified in believing that such facts exist. In this paper, I offer an answer to this question: one’s belief in the existence of robustly real normative facts is epistemically justified because so believing is indispensable to being a successful inquirer for creatures like us. The argument builds on Enoch's (2007, 2011) deliberative indispensability argument for Robust Realism but avoids relying on an overly pragmatic account of the sources of basic epistemic justification. Instead, I suggest that the sources of basic epistemic justification are those belief-forming methods which are indispensable for zetetically indispensable projects, that is, projects which are constitutive of being a successful inquirer for embodied, agential creatures like ourselves.
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Notes
See Arpaly and Schroeder (2012, Sect. 1) for an account of deliberation as a complex mental action.
Throughout, I make a distinction between ethical and epistemic (normative) facts. Ethical facts should be understood broadly as referring to the normative and evaluative facts that govern our practical lives.
I take ‘zetetic’ here from Friedman (2020). I see this essay as contributing to the burgeoning literature on zetetic epistemology (Friedman, forthcoming).
That said, the indispensability argument I offer faces a number of other issues that have been raised for Enoch’s deliberative indispensability argument, such as in Faraci (2012), Lenman (2014), and Cline (2016). I couldn’t possibly respond to all objections to an indispensability argument for Robust Realism in this space; my focus is on offering an indispensability argument with a plausible account of epistemic justification at its core. Still, I will clarify Enoch’s indispensability argument in an attempt to build the strongest indispensability argument I can in this space, and in doing so, I will respond to some objections other than that of M&P.
I adopt this presentation of Enoch’s deliberative indispensability argument from McPherson and Plunkett (2015, pp. 108–109), with adjustments made in light of Footnote 6.
One can see Worsnip’s (2016) challenge to Enoch’s deliberative indispensability argument as a challenge to (P3). Worsnip’s objection relies on his particular reading of instrumental indispensability, and I contend that the best understanding of instrumental indispensability is somewhat weaker than Worsnip suggests. Instrumental indispensability does not (or at least should not) require, as Worsnip assumes, that one must employ an instrumentally indispensable belief-forming method if one is to have “any chance” of succeeding in the relevant project. Rather, it requires that giving up the beliefs outputted by the method would substantially undermine the reasons one had to engage in the project. Substantially undermining the reasons to engage in a project is not equivalent to making it impossible to engage in the project. People are capable of doing what they have little reason to do. Thus, in the case of practical deliberation, the relevant claim is not that one has no chance at engaging in practical deliberation without one’s commitments in practical deliberation, but that one substantially rationally undermines the project in failing to take seriously (by believing in) what one crucially presupposes exists in practically deliberating. This seems to be the best understanding of instrumental indispensability for an indispensability argument for Robust Realism.
As Friedman (2020, Footnote 11) notes, this much is common ground in the debate over the aim of inquiry. There is disagreement about what relationship to the truth one is aiming at (e.g., whether it is knowledge or whether something weaker will do).
Zetetic Vindication should thus be seen as a schematic vindication. Its exact extension will depend on how one more exactly understands sufficient meeting of the aim of truth. One important constraint on a fully spelled-out account of being a successful inquirer is that whether something has the property of being a successful inquirer cannot depend on facts about epistemic justification. The projects that convey basic epistemic justification through instrumental indispensability on Zetetic Vindication are therefore not those that are essential to being a successful seeker of, e.g., knowledge or justified true belief. Thus, even if the aim of inquiry is, say, knowledge of the truth (see Footnote 10), inquirers will be judged as successful or unsuccessful inquirers for the purposes of fixing the sources of epistemic justification only in reference to their—to put it roughly—accuracy. The reason for this restriction is to avoid circularity; indeed, since this grounding story for the sources of basic epistemic justification depends on what it is to be a successful inquirer, what it is to be a successful inquirer should not depend on facts about epistemic justification.
I don't have space to attend to M&P's three purported counterexamples to Pragmatic Vindication (see their Section 5.3.2). I'll just say briefly that once you fully appreciate the centrality of practical deliberation to success in our epistemic lives, the purported counterexamples should not look like genuine counterexamples to Zetetic Vindication.
As another example, one might imagine a human who is able to relegate any practical deliberation in any inquiry to someone else. Thanks to Dan Friedman and Adam Zweber for inspiring these examples.
With these two qualifications on the sense in which practical deliberation is constitutive of being a successful inquirer for us, I am largely in agreement with the reflections of Arpaly and Schroeder (2012) on the somewhat limited value of deliberation more generally. Indeed, the value of practical deliberation to inquiry is intermittent and contingent. Still, as Arpaly and Schroeder admit, (practical) deliberation is nonetheless crucial (to inquiry) for creatures like us.
As those cited in Footnote 9 discuss at length, the relationship between norms on inquiry and epistemic norms is a matter of substantial debate. This might make us wonder whether Zetetic Vindication can really capture epistemic justification, as opposed to some form of justification associated with the (potentially distinct) set of norms of inquiry. I do not think one needs to side with those that see norms of inquiry as properly epistemic norms to think that Zetetic Vindication can capture epistemic justification. Insofar as Zetetic Vindication is grounding the positive status of the method in some truth-tracking feature of it—and the right sort of truth-tracking feature—it is the idea behind Truth-Directedness that this positive status is, at least partly for this reason, an epistemic one. And I argue that Zetetic Vindication is grounding positive status in the right sort of truth-tracking feature in Sect. 4.
To be clear, I am skeptical that relying on normative intuitions is instrumentally indispensable to practical deliberation. As discussed in Sect. 2, we would have plenty of reason to continue to engage in the deliberate project without relying on any given one or even any given subclass of our normative intuitions. What might be instrumentally indispensable is to rely on at least some normative intuitions at least sometimes; but how could this fact entail that all of our particular normative intuitions are (prima facie) epistemically justified? So it seems to me that insofar as relying on normative intuitions is an epistemically respectable belief-forming method, the justification for this is not going to come from Zetetic Vindication or Pragmatic Vindication. Relying on one’s commitments (understood as essential presuppositions) in practical deliberation, on the other hand, is rightfully deemed a source of basic epistemic justification on both Zetetic Vindication and Pragmatic Vindication.
Thanks to two anonymous referees, Dan Friedman, and Kiran Luecke for helping me with this section.
I am thus understanding “govern” in Truth-Directedness to not require that the positive connection be between the source and the beliefs that the source directly outputs The positive connection can be between the source and the beliefs that the method governs more broadly in the sense that the method’s operation has some causal, rational, or constitutive explanatory connection to the beliefs. More on this soon.
I’ll operate with an intuitive and imprecise definition of reliability according to which a belief-forming method is reliable insofar as it tends to directly output true beliefs.
If one is not convinced that this connection to the truth is in some sense positive, one can interpret this example as showing us that we need further precisification of what counts as a “positive” connection.
There is a related worry that Zetetic Indispensability allows problematic trade-offs. For example, if one unknowingly uses an unreliable belief-forming method, then Zetetic Indispensability will deem one (prima facie) justified in doing so if, without the method, one’s inquiries more generally would be seriously undermined. Thus, belief-forming methods are to be “sacrificed” for the greater zetetic good on Zetetic Indispensability. I will set this issue aside because as Berker (2013) argues, the vast majority of contemporary epistemology is consequentialist in nature, and consequentialism generally is subject to trade-off objections.
In fact, Lutz (2021) argues against Truth-Directedness as a constraint on a vindication because he claims that a vindication that meets it will face the New Evil Demon Problem. However, Zetetic Vindication shows that this is false. It meets Truth-Directedness, and your radically deceived counterpart does have epistemically justified beliefs according to it. Indeed, a successful inquirer relevantly like the radically deceived—who would themselves not be radically deceived—would rely on certain projects in their inquiries; and according to Zetetic Vindication, the radically deceived individual can form prima facie epistemically justified beliefs by employing as basic the belief-forming methods that are instrumentally indispensable to engaging in those projects, even if the methods in fact output all or mostly false beliefs.
It would suffice for my purposes if meeting Truth-Directedness while respecting the Realibility Constrint were sufficient but not necessary for being a plausible vindication.
This leads to me to a final important point about the truth-directedness of Zetetic Vindication, which is that reliability matters not just for constraining what kind of positive connection can be appealed to in a plausible vindication. Reliability also works as a defeater of the default reasonableness of the sources of basic epistemic justification. This is a point that Enoch makes as well (Enoch, 2011, p. 66). If there were some positive reason to think that a particular belief-forming method that is instrumentally indispensable to some zetetically indispensable project were unreliable, then this might very well defeat the method’s default reasonableness and the prima facie epistemic justification for the beliefs that method outputs. Similarly to Enoch’s original indispensability argument, I am not trying to use Zetetic Vindication to argue that we have undefeated epistemic justification to believe in the existence of robustly real ethical facts, only prima facie epistemic justification for such a belief. It would be too ambitious to attempt here to show that this belief is not defeated by any further epistemological challenge, including reasons to think the belief in Robust Realism is outputted by an unreliable process. For discussion of five epistemological challenges facing Robust Realism, see Schechter (2023).
I won't say much about the issue of whether our commitment to robustly real ethical facts depends on whether we are within a context of inquiry. But if you look at this part of Enoch's indispensability argument (Enoch 2011, Sec. 3.9), the argument for our needing robustly real facts in particular appeals to what kind of fact is needed from the perspective of the deliberating agent. Thus, insofar as the essential presuppositions (and perhaps phenomenology) of deliberation do not change depending on the broader aim or purpose of the deliberation, which seems plausible, then a focus on inquiry embedded practical deliberation should not affect the plausibility of it being robustly real ethical facts, in particular, that we are committed to. Thanks to David Plunkett for pressing me on this.
While I will not pursue this line of argument, it seems that in coming to a conclusion about what a “best” means looks like, one is committed to ethical facts, in particular, to there being certain features of a potential means that one ought to care about in evaluating it, e.g., it being efficient, safe, environmentally friendly, and so forth.
Enoch’s discussion of why desires are not enough for practical deliberation is relevant here (see Enoch 2011, pp. 75–76).
I imagine that worries remain, worries that are inherited from Enoch’s original argument. For example, it is not clear that one is committed to a belief that there are normative facts in (inquiry embedded) practical deliberation, as opposed to something more like an acceptance (Bratman, 1992); and, as briefly discussed already, it is not clear that one is committed to a belief that there are normative facts as construed by Robust Realism in (inquiry embedded) practical deliberation (Footnote 26). These are important objections that I will have to set aside here but are worth further thought. As noted multiple times, the goal here is to present for further thought a new indispensability argument for Robust Realism with a plausible epistemic core.
See their Sect. 5.4.
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Acknowledgements
For helpful comments and discussion, thanks to Dan Friedman, Wes Holliday, Nadeem Hussain, Taylor Madigan, Tristam McPherson, David Plunkett, Adam Zweber, and two anonymous referees.
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Kelley, M. Zetetic indispensability and epistemic justification. Philos Stud 181, 671–688 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02107-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02107-9