Bergmann on Seeming Evidentialism and the Great Pumpkin Objection

I have the privilege of taking a seminar co-taught by Richard Feldman and Earl Conee on the forthcoming volume Evidentialism and its Discontents (I think this is still the title) edited by my friend Trent Dougherty. I'll post some of my half-baked cogitations as I read through these articles during the semester.

Earl Conee, in "First Things First" argues that a version of evidentialism, called "seeming evidentialism" (SE) offers intuitive responses to skepticism and allows one to get started on the epistemic project with minimal methodological commitments. Michael Bergmann in his forthcoming article "Evidentialism and the Great Pumpkin Objection" argues that Conee's response to what has, following Alvin Plantinga's use, been called "The Great Pumpkin Objection" (GPO), fails and further, that evidentialism seems little better off than externalist theories.

First, the GPO. Briefly, if one offers a solution to a skeptical problem such that it can be mimicked by a silly view or an otherwise epistemically objectionable view in a way that appears to make the view epistemically respectable, then one's solution to the skeptical problem fails (Bergmann terms such solutions "inadequate". Presumably the inadequacy is that as arguments against skepticism, they include a false premise, thereby being unsound, rather than some more innocuous form of inadequacy, like failure to convince skeptics.) Bergmann distinguishes between two kinds of arguments against a GPO: a) the target solution has not been successfully mimicked by the silly theory and b) the target solution has been successfully mimicked by the silly theory but still deny that this implies that the solution fails to be a good reply to skepticism.

Bergmann's argument is that while Conee offers an argument that SE is not successfully mimicked by some silly view, his defense of SE fails, there are silly views that are able to successfully defend themselves by mimicking SE. I may deal with Bergmann's argument here at a later time. I haven't made up my mind about the success of his argument.

After concluding that Conee's defense of SE against the GPO fails, Bergmann considers the possibility of SE attempting to reply to the GPO in the same way that externalist theories like proper-functionalism might. The idea, in the case of SE, would be that, despite the fact that there are silly theories that can mimic SE to defend themselves, there is the important difference that SE is true, that seemings-as-if-true are good reasons to believe propositions, whereas silly theories like counterinductive theories or conjecturalist theories don't (in worlds in which they actually give the result that those theories are true).

Bergmann's complaint is that this defense of SE is externalist, and that evidentialists are likely to be less happy about this. It's true that evidentialism does seem to be positively correlated with being an access internalist. However, it bears mentioning that Conee and Feldman have defended understanding the distinction between internalism and externalism as better construed between those who think that one's epistemic justification is a matter of the mental states one has. Bergmann may quibble about how "internalism" and "externalism" ought to be distinguished (as I recall, he does just this in his presentation of his dilemma for internalism). Conee and Feldman, in "Internalism Defended", define internalism as "mentalism", according to which

The justificatory status of a person's doxastic attitudes strongly supervenes on the person's occurrent and dispositional mental states, events, and conditions. (2004, 56)

In the rest of the article, they defend the view that what one is justified in believing only varies with the mental states that one has: that two persons, in any worlds you please, that are alike mentally, will be exactly alike in the degrees to which they are justified in the doxastic attitudes they hold. In fact, their argument for internalism in that article does not focus on what a person is able to access (as Bergmann seems to take internalism to focus on), but which mental states a person has. Consider the birdwatcher case: S1 and S2 are birdwatching with equally good vantage points and looks at a woodpecker that flies by. S1 is an expert birdwatcher and believes what he sees is a woodpecker. S2 is a novice and also believes what he sees is a woodpecker. Being an expert, S1 knows what a woodpecker looks like, while S2 lacks this information. What matters is the mental difference between S1 and S2 for the evaluation of how reasonable each is in believing as they do (and S1 is more reasonable than S2). No mention is made of whether or not S1 is capable of accessing all of the mental states that are evidence for him in his belief that he has seen a woodpecker.

Given that this is the view that they have defended, it would be good for Bergmann to acknowledge in his use of "internalism", that Conee need not be committed to the view that one must be able to easily mentally access any factor that bears on one's being justified.