Evidentially embedded epistemic entitlement
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Evidentially embedded epistemic entitlement David Henderson1
· Terence Horgan2
Received: 3 November 2017 / Accepted: 19 September 2018 © Springer Nature B.V. 2018
Abstract Some hold that beliefs arising out of certain sources such as perceptual experience (or testimony, or memory) enjoy a kind of entitlement—as one is entitled to believe what is thereby presented as true, at least unless further evidence undermines that entitlement. This is commonly understood to require that default epistemic entitlement is a nonevidential kind of epistemic warrant. Our project here is to challenge this common, non-evidential, conception of epistemic entitlement. We will argue that although there are indeed basic beliefs with default entitlement status, typically the kind of default entitlement they possess is primarily a matter of the evidential support that accrues to them, both synchronically and diachronically, from wider mental states beyond the specific sensory-perceptual experiences (or memory experiences, or testimonial experiences, etc.) that spawn them. We will call this status evidentially embedded epistemic entitlement—as distinct from entitlement as commonly understood in the literature, which we will call evidentially insular. Epistemic entitlement normally is characterized in the manner set forth in the first paragraph above, viz., as a form of default epistemic warrant that a given belief possesses independently of any other beliefs. We suggest that not all evidential support is managed at the level of belief. Thus, leaves room for the possibility of an epistemically embedded kind of entitlement. Here we develop the needed conception of entitlement drawing on Henderson and Horgan’s ideas of a kind of “iceberg epistemology.” Keywords Epistemology entitlement · Perception · Iceberg epistemology · Warrant · Justification
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David Henderson [email protected]
1
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA
2
University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
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Synthese
1 Entitlement A popular view in epistemology is that some kinds of beliefs, often called “basic” beliefs, have by default a distinctive positive epistemic status called entitlement. An entitled belief is one that has each of the following two features. First, in terminology made popular by Burge (1993, 1997, 2003), the belief is epistemically warranted; i.e., it qualifies as knowledge provided that it is both true and not Gettierized. Second, it is warranted independently of any other beliefs that one has or does not have—and thus, in particular, it is warranted independently of one’s possession or non-possession of a higher-order belief about the reliability of the belief-forming process that spawned it. Entitlement is treated as a default status because it is regarded as defeasible on the basis of other beliefs one might possess—for instance, the belief that the red-looking object one now sees is really a white object illuminated by red light. Perceptual beliefs are the most common candidate for having default-entitlement status, but other candid
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