Viewing Alternative Standards as also Rationally Permissible

To recap, Schoenfield attempts to explain how an agent, Sally, could claim that her own epistemic standard was the most truth-conducive, but was just as rational as other epistemic standards. Her argument consists of two claims. The first is that the principles of rationality are general and do not fix one particular epistemic standard as the best. I have just addressed this first claim (4.1.1 - 4.1.3). Schoenfield’s second claim is that Sally can simultaneously accept both that S1 is the most truth- conducive standard and also that Susan can rationally believe that S2 is. I shall argue that this is not possible.

I shall be arguing that there are two possible perspectives from which Sally can evaluate Susan’s beliefs and epistemic standards. However, from neither perspective can Sally both endorse permissivism and the claim that her own standard is the most truth-conducive. Sally endorsing both claims involves a level confusion between these two perspectives. To see why, we need to clarify what, on Schoenfield’s account, Sally believes about Susan. Sally who uses standard S1 would have the following beliefs about Susan who uses S2:

A. Susan’s inferences on the basis of S2 are rational B. S2 is not maximally truth-conducive

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C. It is rational for Susan to believe that S2 is maximally truth-conducive

D. It would not be rational for Sally to believe that S2 is maximally truth- conducive

Claim A follows from the assumption that Sally accepts permissivism. To accept permissivism just is to accept that someone who uses some other epistemic standard can be rational. B follows from Sally’s belief that her own standard S1 is the most truth-conducive. If S2 was maximally truth-conducive, S1 would not be the most truth-conducive because it is at best just as truth-conducive as S2. Sally needs to believe C because denying C would introduce an untenable asymmetry between hers and Susan’s situations. From Sally’s own point of view, her inferences on the basis of S1 are rational either because S1 is actually the most truth-conducive or at least because she rationally believes that S1 is the most truth-conducive. If Sally were to reject C, then from her perspective, neither is S2 maximally truth-conducive nor is it rational for Susan to believe so. If S2 is not maximally truth-conducive and if it is not rational for Susan to believe that it is, it is unclear why Susan’s inferences on the basis of S2 are rational. Sally would have to think that the explanation for why Susan’s inferences on the basis of S2 are rational is very different from the explanation for why her own inferences on the basis of S1 are rational. However, such a belief cannot be sustained. One difficulty involves accounting for why the considerations that trump truth-conduciveness for Susan do not do so for Sally. Even if Sally can provide such an account, she cannot also account for the intuition that reasoning on the basis of S2 when she is in a position to know that S1 is more truth-conducive is a serious mistake in reasoning. Given that this asymmetry about the explanation for why Sally’s and Susan’s inferences on the basis of their own standards are rational is untenable, Sally has to accept C. Sally needs to assert D in order for her to avoid the Arbitrariness Objection. If it would be rational for Sally to believe that S2 was maximally truth-conducive, why would she object to popping a pill that would change her epistemic standards to S2? If she cannot object to popping a pill, her reasoning must be arbitrary.

Sally, therefore, seems to have good reasons for A-D. However, it seems inconsistent for Sally to believe A-D. To see why, consider C and D: On the surface, C and D seem consistent with each other. This would be because for Schoenfield, the truth-conduciveness of any given epistemic standard can only be evaluated relative to that standard (Schoenfield 2014: 202). That means that Sally believes C because she believes C*:

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C*: It is rational relative to S2 to believe that S2 is maximally truth- conducive

And similarly, she believes D only because she believes D*:

D*: It is not rational relative to S1 to believe that S2 is maximally truth-conducive.

Given that Sally can only reason on the basis of S1, there’s no reason for her to believe that C* implies C. As far as she is concerned, Susan is using the wrong standards. As Simpson (2017) notes, since she can only make epistemic evaluations from the standpoint of her own standards, the fact that other standards are acceptable from the standpoint of those standards does not matter if, by her own lights, they are not maximally truth-conducive. If Sally were to try to assert the validity of other standards on the grounds of them being acceptable so long as one accepted those standards, she would be rejecting the idea that epistemic evaluations can only be made on the basis of one’s own standards.

Rejecting this allows Sally to accept C and D, but requires her to reject B. To see why, we need to examine why we couldn’t tell which standards are more truth- conducive independently of our epistemic standards. Consider a set of 20 propositions, 10 of which are true. Ideally, we would wish to have the highest confidence in the true propositions and the lowest confidence in the false ones. If any epistemic standard S could deliver this result, there would be no question, regardless of which other standard we initially accepted, as to whether S was the rational standard to accept. However, not only is it unlikely that there is any such standard, our evidence is rarely so complete or strong that they conclusively indicate the truth of every question we may happen to be interested in. As a result, sometimes, we may end up having a high confidence in a falsehood and a low confidence in a truth. Between two standards S1 and S2, if S1 delivers a higher confidence in more truths and a lower confidence in more falsehoods than S2, then there is no question as to which standard is better. However, not all standards can be ordered so neatly that there are no trade-offs to be made between them. Suppose that instead of S1 being superior to S2 along all dimensions, S2 delivers lower confidences in falsehoods at the cost of lower confidences in truths as well. Or alternatively, it delivered higher confidences in truths at the expense of higher confidences in falsehoods. There seems to be no way, apart from adopting some scoring system, of measuring which standard is more truth-conducive.

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However, there are many possible scoring systems. Some may of course deliver results that are obviously absurd35, but there may still be many scoring systems which provide different plausible ways of evaluating the overall truth-conduciveness of a standard. Each scoring system will select one standard or another as the one which is the most truth-conducive. The question of which standard is the most truth- conducive thus depends on which scoring system we have most reason to adopt. However, the reasons we have for choosing one scoring system over the other are that they do a better job of identifying which inferences are rational given the evidence. This means that which scoring system we adopt is going to depend on which epistemic standard we accept.

Once Sally steps outside of her own standard to assert that S2 is rational for Susan but not for Sally, she is not in a position to claim that S2 is not maximally truth- conducive. Suppose that S2, for instance, generates more moderate confidences and fewer extreme ones than S1 given the same propositions and bodies of evidence. In the absence of any commitment one way or the other about whether it is better to have more or less moderate attitudes, S2 is clearly not superior to S1. Sally cannot assert the less than maximal truth-conduciveness of S2 without staying within the perspective of S1. However, as I have argued earlier, from within the perspective of S1, she cannot regard Susan’s choice of S2 as anything but a mistake. Susan would be accepting S2 for what Sally regards as less than the best of reasons, namely on the basis of an imperfect scoring system. Outside of the perspective of S1, all Sally can say of S2 is that it makes a different set of trade-offs than S1, but is not obviously pareto inferior to it. She thus cannot say that S2 is not maximally truth-conducive. At most, she can say that it is differently truth-conducive without being more or less.

Once Sally denies that S1 is more truth-conducive than S2, she is vulnerable to the Arbitrariness Objection. If for her, S1 is not better than S2, she has no objection to changing epistemic standards by popping pills. However, forming beliefs by popping pills is arbitrary. Moreover, while Sally could defend accepting S1 on the basis that it matches the way she values acquiring truths and avoiding falsehoods while S2 does not, this precludes her from permissibly choosing S2. As I have mentioned earlier, I shall address this version of permissivism later in Chapter 6. Also, as I have mentioned earlier, if Sally believes that S1 is more truth-conducive than S2, she

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For instance, if the accuracy function is convex downwards (i.e. concave upwards), that can license believing both a proposition and its negation in a number of cases where the evidence is equivocal between the two.

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cannot believe that it is rational for Susan to reason on the basis of S2. That is, Sally must accept uniqueness.

To be clear, all I have shown so far is that in accepting an epistemic standard, agents must accept uniqueness. I have not shown that uniqueness is in fact true. The distinction I am driving at was made by Kopec and Titelbaum (2016: 191) and is between acknowledged permissive cases and unacknowledged permissive cases. The thought here is that all the work in the Arbitrariness Objection and in my extension of it relies on the agent believing that a given piece of evidence is permissive. However, if the evidence is permissive but no agent believes that it is, then it would supposedly be possible for multiple agents to rationally adopt different standards, each mistakenly but rationally thinking that their own standard is the best and that everyone else is irrational. Then the Arbitrariness Objection would not apply since each agent accepts uniqueness and insists that her own standards are the correct ones. My only reply to such a move is that such a self-effacing version of permissivism commits us to being error theorists about rationality. I shall develop this point in greater detail in the next section (4.2).

If the above arguments are correct, the only way for permissivists to both reject uniqueness and avoid the Arbitrariness Objection is to endorse intrapersonal uniqueness about standards but suppose that there is some other factor that fixes a different epistemic standard as uniquely appropriate for each agent. Before I proceed to discussing such accounts of permissivism, I shall argue, in the next section, that the Evidence Pointing Problem can also be extended against versions of permissivism which are consistent with intrapersonal permissivism about standards.