Epistemic Standards

Schoenfield agrees with White that a body of evidence cannot support both P and not-P at the same time. However, her reasoning here is that the evidence does not support any proposition simpliciter; rather it can only support some proposition or other relative to some epistemic standard, provided that the standard is consistent with the principles of rationality. By epistemic standard, she means the following:

“[We] can just think of a set of standards as a function from bodies of evidence to doxastic states which the agent takes to be truth- conducive. Roughly, this means that the agent has high confidence that forming opinions using her standards will result in her having high confidence in truths and low confidence in falsehoods.” (Schoenfield 2014: 199)

We might think of epistemic standards as consisting of sets of epistemic norms. These norms may be something like “Believe that P if it seems to you that P and you have no defeaters for P” or they may say that “If you have experimental evidence with N samples showing result R, form attitude A towards P”. Schoenfield’s claim is that relative to a given standard, the evidence supports P, not-P or neither P nor not-P. It cannot support both. Schoenfield thus agrees with White that evidential support is unidirectional. She just denies that it is non- contingent. Rather, in her view, the evidential support relation holds relative to the agent’s epistemic standards, provided that the standards do not violate what she calls the principles of rationality.

For Schoenfield, the principles of rationality are substantive rational requirements on epistemic standards. Schoenfield (ibid) says little about the principles of rationality, but we may nevertheless fill in some of the gaps. We might think of these principles as general constraints on doxastic attitudes that said attitudes must conform to, if they are to count as being rational. For instance, if we think that doxastic attitudes are best represented in terms of credences, we might think that the principles of rationality would include a chance-credence principle similar to that of Lewis’s Principal Principle (1986). According to the Principal Principle, an agent’s credence in a proposition P must match her belief in the objective chance that P is true. In addition, we might also think that certain consistency and completeness constraints

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apply. Hence an agent’s credences in P and not-P respectively must add to 1. Likewise, an agent’s credence in the disjunction of two propositions, P or Q, must equal the sum of her credences in P and Q respectively minus her credence in their conjunction, P and Q. Or, for more coarse grained attitudes, the principles of rationality might say that an agent must not believe both P and not-P at the same time. Perhaps more strongly, the principles might require that if and only if an agent believes that P she must disbelieve not-P. With regards to induction, it might say that given a sufficiently large sample size it is permissible to generalise and believe that all Gs are Fs.

The exact content of these principles need not concern us for now, except to note that these principles constrain which epistemic standards agents may permissibly accept25. Any epistemic standard which recommends doxastic attitudes that violate these constraints is not one that could be permissibly adopted. However, while these principles are substantive constraints, they are, according to Schoenfield, nevertheless very general and therefore not so strong as to fix one standard as uniquely appropriate for everyone (ibid: 202). For instance, the principles of rationality might say that testimonial evidence is important without specifying exactly how important it is. Accordingly epistemic standards which instruct agents to ignore all testimony or contrariwise to completely trust all testimony regardless of how implausible the claim, could be ruled out as violating these principles of rationality. However, if Schoenfield is correct, the principles of rationality are not so specific as to specify exactly how much we should weight testimonial evidence in a given situation. Different epistemic standards would prescribe different ways of weighting testimonial evidence in an agent’s deliberations. There may be many standards which abide by the broad constraints delimited by the principles of rationality and any doxastic attitude formed on the basis of such a standard is, on Schoenfield’s picture, rational.

To further illustrate, suppose an agent, Sally’s, epistemic standard includes an anti- inductive norm, according to which, she should be less confident that P will obtain in situation S, the more often she observes that P in similar situations. By complying with this norm, she becomes less confident that the sun will rise in the east the next day the more she observes that it has risen in the east in the past. Similarly, she becomes more confident that the next raven she sees will not be black the more black ravens she sees. She also becomes more confident that anti-induction will

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deliver a true verdict the more often it fails to deliver a true verdict in the past. Presumably, the principles of rationality include a principle which says something like “induction is a reliable way to form beliefs”. If so, then, on any plausible account of the principles of rationality, said principles would rule out any epistemic standard which included an anti-inductive norm. The mere fact that Sally accepts such a standard is insufficient to render the beliefs she forms on the basis of that standard rational. The proviso that epistemic standards not violate the principles of rationality places limits on what would be an acceptable standard for any given agent. Within those limits, facts about what the evidence supports are relative to the agent’s epistemic standards. It is therefore possible, on Schoenfield’s account for there to be multiple permissible epistemic standards.

This makes clear how Schoenfield avoids the Evidence Pointing Problem. To draw on the analogy of the dial, Schoenfield is not claiming that the dial can simultaneously indicate both P and not-P. Instead there would be different dials; some would only point to P while others would point to only not-P. Each dial would represent an epistemic standard. Given each person’s epistemic standards, only one doxastic attitude towards a given proposition is justified on the evidence. However, given that people can permissibly hold different epistemic standards, they can still rationally disagree about a proposition, even if they have the same evidence.

As we can see, Schoenfield’s account of permissivism is consistent with intrapersonal uniqueness. We can further see the appeal of Schoenfield’s account by noting how it addresses White’s Arbitrariness objection.

The crux of White’s Arbitrariness Objection is that it would be arbitrary to form beliefs by randomly taking a pill. Schoenfield does not deny this. Her disagreement with White is about whether permissivists ought to think that forming a belief by reasoning on the basis of the evidence is better than randomly taking a pill. White believes that permissivists ought to think that reasoning on the basis of the evidence is no better than taking a pill, because by the agent’s own lights, she is just as likely to reach the truth as to believe a falsehood if she reasons from her evidence. However, on Schoenfield’s account, according to the agent’s own epistemic standards, reasoning on the basis of the evidence will be more likely to reach the truth, whereas randomly taking a pill is as likely to yield a true belief as a false one (ibid: 201).

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The Evidence Pointing Problem and the Arbitrariness Objection are two powerful arguments for uniqueness. Schoenfield's account of permissivism provides a framework through which various epistemologies could address these arguments. Schoenfield deliberately says little about epistemic standards. This is so as to accommodate different accounts by which people’s epistemic standards could differ. She provides some examples:

“Some people think of them as rules of the form “Given E, believe p!” Others think of them as beliefs about the correct way to form other beliefs. If you are a Bayesian, you can think of an agent’s standards as her prior and conditional probability functions. (ibid: 199)”

Thus, for instance, when confronted with the Evidence Pointing Problem, the subjective Bayesian could say that given the priors she has, the evidence points to one conclusion, but that does not mean that people cannot have different priors. Similarly, when confronting the Arbitrariness Objection, the Bayesian could say that given her priors, there is only one way in which she can update her credences, given the evidence. That means that taking a random belief inducing pill would not necessarily result in the doxastic attitude she ought to have given her priors. We can see, therefore, that the subjective Bayesian endorses intrapersonal uniqueness, even if she does not endorse interpersonal uniqueness. Similarly, any permissive epistemology which can offer up a Schoenfield-style response26 to White’s arguments must be consistent with intrapersonal uniqueness. Permissivism can be successful only if there is some plausible account of how people may permissibly accept different epistemic standards.

If I can show that no such account is plausible, then I would be able to demonstrate that if we accept intrapersonal uniqueness, we have good reason to accept interpersonal uniqueness. However, if permissivists can reject intrapersonal uniqueness, then they could rightfully reject interpersonal uniqueness, and arguing that intrapersonal uniqueness entails interpersonal uniqueness would be pointless. Therefore, before I show why interpersonal permissiveness is not consistent with intrapersonal uniqueness, I shall explore two objections to intrapersonal

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Ballantyne and Coffman (2011: 12) specify that any epistemology according to which some other factor apart from the evidence is necessary to fix what attitude towards a proposition is rational given the evidence will be permissive. Here too, intrapersonal uniqueness is not denied. While Ballantyne and Coffman do not explicitly mention epistemic standards, given the vagueness of what Schoenfield means by epistemic standards, we can think of the additional factors that Ballantyne and Coffman refer to as those features of the situation which license different epistemic standards.

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uniqueness. The first objection is Meacham’s (2014) objection to the Arbitrariness Objection. The second involves two purported counterexamples to intrapersonal uniqueness; I shall then and argue that we can set aside cases like these.