Proper Functionalism as Internalist Evidentialism
I'm cross-posting this from my personal blog because it follows up on this post where I don't think I expressed the idea as clearly as I do here.
The thesis of this post is as follows:
(T) The "internalism/externalism" distinction is not as substantive as most think.
The argument for (T) will involve three premises, one of which I'll defend and the other two I'll assume, though I might make brief comments on their behalf.
Premise 1: If Conee-Feldman mentalist evidentialism is internalist and Plantinga can subscribe to the theory, then (T).
Premise 2: Conee-Feldman mentalist evidentialism is internalist.
Premise 3: Plantinga can subscribe to the theory.
Now Bergmann argues against P2, but I'll save a full defense of that for another day. It is clearly not externalist in a core sense intended by core externalists like Goldman and Plantinga, and it is "internalist" in a sufficiently close way to a sufficiently clear conception founded in discussions of mental and semantic content. At any rate the denial of P2 could probably easily support (T) anyway.
What I want to defend here is P3. First a working definition of evidentialism in the Chisholm-Conee-Feldman tradition.
(EJ) Doxastic attitude D toward proposition p is epistemically justified for S at t if and only if having D toward p fits the evidence S has at t.
Aside: Conee and Feldman like to think of evidentialism as a supervenience thesis, which has the advantage of avoiding the vagueness in evidence "fitting" but I'm going to stick with the core notion here both because I find the notion of supevenience unilluminating in general and uninformative in the present context. Supervenience theses are not so informative unless I know what it is in virtue of which the supervenience relation holds and, in the case of evidentialism, it has to do with evidence "fitting". I accept the difficulties with the notion of evidential fit: that's a research project, but the notion is sufficiently clear to proceed.
Now to mentalist internalism:
S The justificatory status of a person’s doxastic attitudes strongly supervenes on the person’s occurrent and dispositional mental states, events, and conditions.
I'm OK with supervenience here because given a phenomenal theory of evidence together with (EJ) we have an explanation of why the supervenience relation holds.
Now let's return to evidential fit. Note that even for a paradigm access internalist like Chisholm, there's more that goes into the justification than mental states. For Chisholm, the other part of the equation is epistemic principles. You take phenomenal input, run it through some algorithmic type thingy and it tells you the epistemic status of certain beliefs for you. That epistemic principles play a role in calculating justificational status in no way makes Chisholm's access internalism externalist. That would just be an abuse of established language. But then it shouldn't disqualify mentalism either.
Now there's the thing to note at this point: a Chisholm-Conee-Feldman internalist evidentialism can vary with respect to what you hold fixed to pair up doxastic states and epistemic status. For supervenience to hold the role would have to be played by some kind of necessary truth, but as I said I think the core version of evidentialism isn't the supervenience thesis but rather the "fit thesis" expressed in EJ. But then it's not essential to internalist evidentialism that the status-makers be necessary truths. They could be, for example, design plans. Enter Plantinga. If we take out the epistemic-principle-based epistemic status module and replace it with a design-plan-based module, we still have a theory which satisfies (EJ), it's just that status is now fixed by presumably contingent design plans rather than necessary epistemic principles.
This completes the argument for Premise 3 and thus for (T). The upshot, to repeat, is that I have interpreted Plantinga's proper functionalism into a theory of evidential fit, playing the same role in an EJ theory as epistemic principles do in Chisholm's. Thus, a plantingian proper functionalism can be inserted right into an internalist evidentialist theory of justification. And if that's true, then the way we've been thinking about internalism and externalism is not so helpful.
The thesis of this post is as follows:
(T) The "internalism/externalism" distinction is not as substantive as most think.
The argument for (T) will involve three premises, one of which I'll defend and the other two I'll assume, though I might make brief comments on their behalf.
Premise 1: If Conee-Feldman mentalist evidentialism is internalist and Plantinga can subscribe to the theory, then (T).
Premise 2: Conee-Feldman mentalist evidentialism is internalist.
Premise 3: Plantinga can subscribe to the theory.
Now Bergmann argues against P2, but I'll save a full defense of that for another day. It is clearly not externalist in a core sense intended by core externalists like Goldman and Plantinga, and it is "internalist" in a sufficiently close way to a sufficiently clear conception founded in discussions of mental and semantic content. At any rate the denial of P2 could probably easily support (T) anyway.
What I want to defend here is P3. First a working definition of evidentialism in the Chisholm-Conee-Feldman tradition.
(EJ) Doxastic attitude D toward proposition p is epistemically justified for S at t if and only if having D toward p fits the evidence S has at t.
Aside: Conee and Feldman like to think of evidentialism as a supervenience thesis, which has the advantage of avoiding the vagueness in evidence "fitting" but I'm going to stick with the core notion here both because I find the notion of supevenience unilluminating in general and uninformative in the present context. Supervenience theses are not so informative unless I know what it is in virtue of which the supervenience relation holds and, in the case of evidentialism, it has to do with evidence "fitting". I accept the difficulties with the notion of evidential fit: that's a research project, but the notion is sufficiently clear to proceed.
Now to mentalist internalism:
S The justificatory status of a person’s doxastic attitudes strongly supervenes on the person’s occurrent and dispositional mental states, events, and conditions.
I'm OK with supervenience here because given a phenomenal theory of evidence together with (EJ) we have an explanation of why the supervenience relation holds.
Now let's return to evidential fit. Note that even for a paradigm access internalist like Chisholm, there's more that goes into the justification than mental states. For Chisholm, the other part of the equation is epistemic principles. You take phenomenal input, run it through some algorithmic type thingy and it tells you the epistemic status of certain beliefs for you. That epistemic principles play a role in calculating justificational status in no way makes Chisholm's access internalism externalist. That would just be an abuse of established language. But then it shouldn't disqualify mentalism either.
Now there's the thing to note at this point: a Chisholm-Conee-Feldman internalist evidentialism can vary with respect to what you hold fixed to pair up doxastic states and epistemic status. For supervenience to hold the role would have to be played by some kind of necessary truth, but as I said I think the core version of evidentialism isn't the supervenience thesis but rather the "fit thesis" expressed in EJ. But then it's not essential to internalist evidentialism that the status-makers be necessary truths. They could be, for example, design plans. Enter Plantinga. If we take out the epistemic-principle-based epistemic status module and replace it with a design-plan-based module, we still have a theory which satisfies (EJ), it's just that status is now fixed by presumably contingent design plans rather than necessary epistemic principles.
This completes the argument for Premise 3 and thus for (T). The upshot, to repeat, is that I have interpreted Plantinga's proper functionalism into a theory of evidential fit, playing the same role in an EJ theory as epistemic principles do in Chisholm's. Thus, a plantingian proper functionalism can be inserted right into an internalist evidentialist theory of justification. And if that's true, then the way we've been thinking about internalism and externalism is not so helpful.
posted by Trent_Dougherty at
3:06 PM
3 Comment(s):
Herewith the clarifications:
1. Nothing I say, I think, entails acceptance of the falsity of the evidentialist supervenience thesis. After all, I think proper-functionalism is false. I'm even inclined to think that in some sense it is necessarily and even conceptually false. However, there is another sense in which it is epistemically possible and logically or conceptually possible. I think a lot of concepts are run together in current thinking on modality. I suppose it's kind of like natural kind terms. In some sense, water could have failed to be H20, and in some sense it's "necessarily" H20. So I think the evidentialst supervenience thesis is not only true but necessarily true in the same sense that water is necessarily H20, but its also true that we can can conceive of it as being false, we can conceive of justification the way a proper-functionalist could think of it. I think the sense of "possible" in which a propper-functionalist mentalist evidentialism is possible is sufficiently interesting.
2. You are right that my main concern is that proper-functionalism is compatible with EJ. What I didn't repeat from the previous post was all the stuff about "holding X fixed" so, yes, mentalism will also be downgraded to a more intuitive "core" notion as follows:
(M-) Holding considerations of fit fixed all that goes into justification is the mental states of the individual.
I think that says all that really needs to go into mentalism. I should not have lazily pasted in the supervenience definition in. I fully intend to scale it back to its "core" notion in the same way. Thanks for catching this.
Please let me know if I've failed to address any issues you raised.
By
Trent_Dougherty, at 1/30/2007 12:52 AM
Jason, thanks again for the helpful comments.
I. Semantics
A. "Conee-Feldman"
I think that what I've identified as the core of mentalist evidentialism is the core of *Conee-Feldman* evidentialism. The supervenience theses were, historically, added on. In "Evidentialism" in particular it seems to me clearly a compromise to cover problems pertaining to "fit" even though they say something like it's "how we prefer to think about it". I think the preference is relative to the problems of saying what "fit" is. So I really do think the core notion is *their* core notion.
B. "Internalism"
It's not so much that I really want to call properfunctional view "internalist" as that I want to show that the substantive applicability of the term makes the distinction suspect or at least useless and unhelpful. On the flip side, the fact that considerations of fit are external to the agent even for *access* internalists like Chisholm shows the same thing. It seems to me that any decent theory of justification is going to have to treat what's going on in the head *and* how those things are related and so treat both internal and external factors.
What I'm committed to is a phenomenal theory of evidence. So I think the most relevant applications of "internalist" and "externalist" here have to do with theories of mental states themselves. I think narrow content is all that can constitute evidence where as others think that world-involving wide content matters. I'm an "internalist" here and those guys are the "externalsits". So I think the terms apply to a theory of evidence quite nicely as opposed to their misleading application in theories of justification.
C. "Externalism"
I think I just disagree with Rich and Earl that contingency should be a sufficient condition for externalism. On the face of it, there's no conceptual connection between the necessary/contingent concepts and the internal/external concepts. I think this just points to the necessity of drawing finer distinctions. In fact, I think a distinction between the "necessitarians" and the "non-necessitarians" is an interesting and relevant opposition in a way that "internalist" vs. "externalist" is not.
By
Trent_Dougherty, at 1/30/2007 1:37 PM
I really like this statement.."think that says all that really needs to go into mentalism. I should not have lazily pasted in the supervenience definition in. I fully intend to scale it back to its "core" notion in the same way."
By
xl pharmacy, at 11/15/2011 11:40 AM
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