Nietzsche on Aristotle and Truth

(NB: The introductory philosophy course I'll be the TA for next spring will involve reading Thus Spake Zarathustra, so in preparation I've been reviewing my notes on Nietzsche. -Dan)

For whom truth exists. - … How if this effect – the effect of consolation – were precisely what truths are incapable of? – Would this then constitute an objection to truths? What have they in common with the inner states of suffering, stunted, sick human beings that they must necessarily be of use to them?...[T]ruth, as a whole and interconnectedly, exists only for souls which are at once powerful and harmless, and full of joyfulness and peace (as was the soul of Aristotle), just as it will no doubt be only such souls as these that will be capable of seeking it: for no matter how proud they may be of their intellect and its freedom, the others are seeking cures for themselves – they are not seeking truth. (Daybreak 424, trans. R.J. Hollingdale)

In this passage, Nietzsche holds up Aristotle as an example of the kind of person who is truly capable of seeking truth. This may initially strike the reader as odd, since Aristotle seems to be a systematizer of the kind that Nietzsche rails against elsewhere. But I think what Nietzsche finds admirable in Aristotle is the pursuit of truth, not for the sake of utility (however defined), but for its own sake. He speaks of the error of seeking truth for the sake of consolation, and he seems to mean both consolation in a physical sense (hence the example of the non-medicinal plant), and consolation in a more emotional sense (cf. Sextus Empiricus’ description in Outlines of Pyrrhonism I.26 of the person who is troubled by philosophical problems and seeks to resolve them satisfactorily in order to obtain some kind of contentment). But the ideal seeker after truth, according to Nietzsche, will seek truth not out of weakness or a need to be cured of bodily or mental illnesses, but out of a desire for the truth itself, apart from any benefit it may happen to bring. I think that this is why Nietzsche describes such an ideal seeker as being “powerful and harmless, and full of joyfulness and peace”.

It seems to me that the danger Nietzsche is pointing out in seeking after truth for the sake of the consolation that we think it will bring is that if we find that consolation is not in fact the result of obtaining truth, we will cease to seek after truth, and try to find consolation in some other way. If we value truth only instrumentally, then we will cease to seek after truth if we find that truth is hard or painful, or even if it is irrelevant to our need for consolation. It is only the person whom Nietzsche describes as “healthy” that can genuinely value truth.

Adler and Reid

Jonathan Alder, in Belief's Own Ethics, argues for the truth of the "subjective principle of sufficient reason":

When one attends to any of one's beliefs, one must regard it as believed for sufficient or adequate reasons. [1]

I'll not get into the full development of Adler's evidentialist ethics of belief (which is interesting). Instead, I'll just note that this is a pretty stringent requirement. The evidentialists I have the privilege of working with at the University of Rochester don't affirm this principle, for example, Earl Conee argued against it in his review of the book. I don't know where I stand on it. There are days that I think it's true, other days that I think it's not.

So, it was surprising when combing through Reid's conception of evidence in preparation for a seminar, that I ran across the following:

We give the name of evidence to whatever is a ground of belief. To believe without evidence is a weakness which every man is concerned to avoid, and which every man wishes to avoid. Nor is it in a man's power to believe anything longer than he thinks he has evidence. [2]

Some externalists, Plantinga not the least among them, have taken aid and comfort from Reid. It's not surprising that Plantinga finds much to like in Reid, his proper functionalism sounds at home among Reid's frequent references to "original constitution" and to being "fitted by nature" to believe in various ways. But in the above quote, it's interesting that Reid sounds like a strident evidentialist.

'Evidence' may be equivocal here, though. I'm still feeling out what Reid means by evidence. He does sometimes sound as though evidence is all mental (only a few paragraphs later, in fact). But in the Inquiry into the Human Mind Reid seems to say that some appearances are non-mental (though it's hard to find them in the physical world), and appearances seem likely to count as evidence. But at any rate, it's interesting to find an externalist muse saying something that sounds stridently evidentialist.

[1] Jonathan Adler, Belief's Own Ethics, (MIT: 2002), 26.

[2] Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, II.20.

Evidentialism and Memory

John Greco, in his forthcoming "Evidentialism about Knowledge" makes the following complaint, which seems a typical one for non-evidentialists to offer.

Even if some cases of knowledge seem to fit the evidentialist model well, it is a stretch to extend the position to other cases, such as cases involving memory knowledge. What is my evidence, for example, that I ate eggs for breakfast, or that my car is parked in the driveway? There might be some vague phenomenology involved in remembering these things. My memory beliefs might be accompanied by a characteristic sort of feeling--a kind of confidence, or perhaps a kind of attraction. But it is a stretch to think that these states are evidence--to think that these states "support" my memory beliefs, or that my beliefs are evidentially based on such states. (pp. 5-6)

I get a bit irked about this, because the answer seems so obvious as to make the evidentialist suspect that the externalist is just being obtuse. I have three comments, first an argument that there is some sort of evidence on which memorial beliefs are based, then one strategy for explaining the nature of this evidence, and then an alternate strategy.

1. Earl Conee argues in "Seeing the Truth" that seeing the truth of obviously true propositions like

P Every golden trumpet is a trumpet

is, contra Alvin Plantinga's account in Warrant and Proper Function is not merely a matter of believing a proposition in a certain way. Seeing the truth, is, Conee thinks, a separate matter from believing what one sees to be true. Consider P - there will be, I think, if you attend to the experience of coming to believe P to be true, a separate experience apart from believing P, which believing P follows. This may be described as a "seeming that P" or "seeing that P", a kind of mental experience such that one bases a belief on it. One reason for thinking that this is a separate experience is that it is imaginable that it occur without believing P. Suppose you had good reason to think that you were liable to deception about P, perhaps you'd been assured that you'd been given a drug that would make things seem obvious in just this way and despite how seemingly true P is, you refrain from belief. Further, you could imagine simply experiencing it, but before forming the belief, stubbing your toe and being distracted by the intense pain. So, at least for me, I agree with Conee, there is a separate experience of seeing the truth of obvious propositions.

Likewise, I think that there is just this sort of experience with memory. I wonder what I had for breakfast, and it seems strongly to me that I had a clif bar and I believe that I had a clif bar. I can imagine this experience being separated from belief too. I might get distracted - stubbing my toe might do it. I might have a defeater. Suppose I also remember that as a favor to a friend today, I participated in a psychological experiment and was given a false memory that I ate a baloney sandwich for lunch. I am aware of this deception, but it still seems to me that I remember eating a baloney sandwich for lunch. It seems conceivable that I might have an experience as of seeming to remember having a baloney sandwich, but not also believe that I did, because I know that my memory to that effect is false. So, just as in the case of seeing the truth of an obvious proposition, there is an event prior to belief and separable from belief that seems (to me at least) to be a ground for my so believing.

Thus, there is some reason to think that evidence exists that may justify my memorial beliefs. The burden then, for the anti-evidentialist is to show that there are cases in which one genuinely remembers and should be justified in believing, but in fact, one has no evidence or insufficient evidence. I am inclined to think that such cases will not exist - the problem of forgotten evidence seems to me to be a non-starter too, but is a problem for another blogging.

2. So, supposing that there is evidence, what strategies are available for the evidentialist? I think that one obvious case is "seeming evidentialism" or "phenomenal conservatism". Michael Huemer has defended the view that seemings that P may play a role in justifying P. I find this view plausible, though it (of course) has its detractors. If seemings are evidence, the evidence mentioned above (separable from one's memorial belief) may be a seeming of this sort, and if so, then that seeming counts as evidence for belief in the remembered proposition. The following is true in cases of remembering that P: it seems to me (often quite strongly) that P is true (or was true). So, if seemings are evidence, then seemings with a particular character or phenomenology may provide the evidence in memory.

3. Suppose one's not a fan of seemings. Other accounts seem available to the evidentialist. Suppose that P seems to be true in that way in which memories present themselves to us. If justification involves some proposition being the best explanation of our evidence, then it may well be the case that, given our background information, the best explanation of our memorial experiences are that the events we seem to recollect in fact did occur. The idea would be similar to the use of best explanation in justifying our perceptual beliefs. In fact, the situation is exactly parallel, just the class of propositions justified by these experiences are different. In one situation they are present-tense propositions about the external world, in the other, they are propositions what was the case - or at least about times earlier than the present (if one likes things put into B-theoretic terminology).

It's possible that one thinks that neither of the two ways I've offered are sufficient for justifying memorial beliefs. I think that it's plausible that either may work (they may not even exclude one another), or even that some other way might work (e.g. a Chisholmian approach where more finely grained epistemic principles govern justification of beliefs on certain sorts of experiences). But if these are controversially true, they warrant discussion rather than quick dismissal by anti-evidentialists (as do similar approaches for reductive strategies for justifying the acceptance of testimony).

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.