Universität zu Köln

Constantin, Jan ORCID: 0000-0001-5384-9209 (2020). Replacement and reasoning: a reliabilist account of epistemic defeat. Synthese, 197 (8). S. 3437 - 3458. DORDRECHT: SPRINGER. ISSN 1573-0964

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Abstract

In this paper, I present a solution to the problem that the need to accommodate the phenomenon of epistemic defeat poses for reliabilism. Defeaters are supposed to remove justification for previously justified beliefs. According to standard process reliabilism, the justification of a belief depends on the reliability of a process that is already completed when a defeater for that belief is obtained. It is hard to see, then, how a defeater can affect reliabilist justification, if that justification, from the perspective of the defeater, lies wholly in the past. What is more, undercutting defeaters plausibly defeat by generating incompatibilities with higher-order propositions (Sturgeon in Philos Stud 169(1):105-118,2014; Melis in Philos Stud 170(3):433-442,2014). This is hard to integrate with reliabilism which explicitly denies higher-order conditions for justification. I argue that both of these phenomena can be accommodated by it via what I call the Replacement Principle: when a defeater is obtained, it generates either a logical incompatibility (in cases of rebutting defeat) or a doxastic incompatibility (in cases of undercutting defeat). The resulting tension is registered and initiates a reasoning process that compares the epistemic support for the defeater with that for the defeated belief. This process may replace the original reliable formation process as a doxastic base for the defeated belief. If the defeater is not given its due weight in the reasoning process, that process was unreliable and if the defeated belief is retained as a result, it will be unjustified. This is intuitively the right result. Since reasoning is reliable, only if it is rational, the account manages to capture the intuition that disregarding a defeater would be irrational without having to make rationality a condition for justification. Replacement is not only plausible on causal pictures of doxastic basing, but also required in order to allow for the possibility of belief reevaluation in general and is therefore not an ad hoc addition to reliabilism, but rather part of its inherent explanatory resources.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID ORCID Put Code Constantin, Jan UNSPECIFIED orcid.org/0000-0001-5384-9209 UNSPECIFIED
URN:	urn:nbn:de:hbz:38-324955
DOI:	10.1007/s11229-018-01895-y
Journal or Publication Title:	Synthese
Volume:	197
Number:	8
Page Range:	S. 3437 - 3458
Date:	2020
Publisher:	SPRINGER
Place of Publication:	DORDRECHT
ISSN:	1573-0964
Language:	English
Faculty:	Unspecified
Divisions:	Unspecified
Subjects:	no entry
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Keywords Language History & Philosophy Of Science; Philosophy Multiple languages
URI:	http://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/id/eprint/32495