The ethics of belief: Off the wrong track

Midwest Studies in Philosophy

Volumn 23, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 267-285

  Adler, Jonathan E ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33645144015     PISSN: 03636550     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1475-4975.00014     Document Type: Article

References (37)

1. See Myles F. Burnyeat, "Can the Skeptic Live His Skepticism?" in Myles Burnyeat, ed., The Skeptical Tradition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983): 132.
2. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), bk. IV, chap. XVII, sec. 24, p. 688.
3. Clifford's ringing motto is often quoted: "it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." W. K. Clifford, "The Ethics of Belief," reprinted in L. P. Pojman, ed., The Theory of Knowledge (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1993): 505.
4. See also Brand Blanshard, Reason and Belief (London: Allen and Unwin, 1974), 401.
5. Alvin Plantinga, "Reason and Belief in God," in Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff, eds., Faith and Rationality (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983): 30.
6. Richard E. Nisbett and Timothy DeCamp Wilson, "Telling More than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes," Psychological Review, 84 (1977): 231-59.
7. For comprehensive discussion and references see Roy Sorensen, Blindspots (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), chap. 1.
8. For defense (of the iteration and conjunction principles) and some qualifications, see Sydney Shoemaker, "Moore's Paradox and Self-Knowledge," Philosophical Studies, 77 (1995): 211-28. Chapter 8 of my Belief's Ethics offers a more direct explanation, one without the iteration condition.
9. Contrast our analysis with those who conclude that the belief that p and that one does not believe that p violates some further principle, e.g., Jaakko Hintikka, Knowledge and Belief (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962): 64-78.
10. Peter Unger, Ignorance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981): 260-65.
11. See also Robert B. Brandom, Making It Explicit (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994): Part One, chap. 4, sec. I-II;
12. and J. L. Austin, "Other Minds," in his Philosophical Papers, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970): 76-116.
13. For a forceful defense of a strong form of the connection see Timothy Williamson, "Knowing and Asserting," Philosophical Review, 105 (1996): 489-523.
14. A slight variation on Grice's maxim of Quality. Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989): 27.
15. See Fred Dretske, "Conclusive Reasons," Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 49 (1971): 1-22;
16. and Robert Fogelin, Pyrrhonian Reflections on Knowledge and Justification (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), chaps. 1, 4, and 5.
17. Edmund L. Gettier, "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" in M. D. Roth and L. Galis, eds., Knowing (New York: Random House, 1970): 35-38.
18. David Hume, "Of Miracles," in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. E. Steinberg (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1977): 73 (emphasis added).
19. Peter F. Strawson, Introduction to Logical Theory (London: Methuen, 1952): 257.
20. William James, "The Will to Believe," in A. Castelli, ed., Essays on Pragmatism (New York: Harner, 1951): 88-109.
21. See Alston, "Christian Experience and Christian Belief."
22. See also his "The Deontological Conception of Epistemic Justification" in his Epistemic Justification: 115-52;
23. and Plantinga, "Reason and Belief in God."
24. B. A. O. Williams, "Deciding to Believe," in his Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973): 136-51.
25. In Plantinga, "Reason and Belief in God," 39.
26. Plantinga devotes exactly one sentence to arguing that evidentialism implies foundationalism. His argument simply assumes that evidence or reasons have to be explicitly represented and specific to each belief, rather than general or summary knowledge of the reliability of various sources of belief. He defends neither (implausible) assumption. In later works ("Coherentism and the Evidentialist Objection to Belief in God," in Robert Audi and William J. Wainwright, eds., Rationality, Religious Belief and Moral Commitment [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986]: 109-38), Plantinga considers the possibility of evidentialism's resting on foundationalism's competitor coherentism. He even considers the evidentialist criticism to be that of a "noetic defect" (111-12). But the incoherence he looks to, and does not find, depends upon accepting a view (a further belief) incompatible with a nonevidentialist one (127-28).
27. See also the discussion of related points by Nicholas Wolterstorff, John Locke and the Ethics of Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996): 67-69.
28. The argument suggested, which requires extensive development, is hinted at in my "Conservatism and Tacit Confirmation," Mind, 99 (1990): 559-70.
29. The worry I allude to is carefully developed in William P. Alston's "Epistemic Circularity," in his Epistemic Justification: 319-49. However, for mitigating remarks, see, for example, sec. VIII.
30. For the broader perspective within which I locate this approach to the regress problem, see Wilfrid Sellars, "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind," in his Science, Perception and Reality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963): 127-96.
31. Richard Swinburne, Faith and Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 4.
32. Jeff Jordan, "Pragmatic Arguments and Belief," American Philosophical Quarterly, 33 (1996): 409.
33. In an article to which I am indebted, Richard Feldman and Earl Conee ("Evidentialism," Philosophical Studies, 48 [1985]: 15-34) seem moved by such a practical "ought" and our finitary predicament to offer an emasculated version of evidentialism, denuded of prescriptive force. See 17-18; however see too 19. See, further, the discussion below of the fourth doctrine.
34. But see Richard Foley, The Theory of Epistemic Rationality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).
35. Graham Priest, "What Is So Bad about Contradictions?" Journal of Philosophy, 95 (1998): 420.
36. Thus, it is a fateful misstep to reason, as does Paul Helm (Belief Policies [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994]: 16-17): "If the idea that all bees die in the winter is incredible, this means not that such an idea cannot be believed, but that it ought not to be. It cannot mean the first, because some people do believe it. They believe it, but they ought not to."
37. Plato, Apology in Five Dialogues, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1981), 26e.