DOES REFORMED EPISTEMOLOGY ESCAPE CARTESIAN …



DOES REFORMED EPISTEMOLOGY ESCAPE CARTESIAN SKEPTICISM?

The past fifty years have witnessed the emergence, and now the flourishing, of externalist theories of knowledge: first naturalistic ones and, more recently, theistic ones. Reformed epistemology, and especially that version of it developed by Alvin Plantinga, is currently one of the most visible theories of the latter sort.

The motivations for externalism in epistemology are, of course, various. Perhaps the oldest, clearly visible in Reid's response to Hume, is the desire to elude the snares set by the skeptic. Why demand that the knowing subject have access to all of those factors that determine the truth, or probable truth, of a belief? Why should that be a necessary condition for a belief's having positive epistemic status, or even for knowledge?

A more recent, but related motivation is the desire to construct a theory of knowledge that is proof against Gettier counterexamples. Here again, externalism seems hopeful as a rescue maneuver, as the mischances that generate such cases are characteristically beyond the subject's ken. A reliable belief-generating process would be one either immune or by and large immune to such vicissitudes. Nevertheless (and in tension with the goal of eliminating Gettier cases), most externalist epistemologies are fallibilist with respect to knowledge: S may know that P even when P is produced by a belief-forming mechanism that is fallible, provided it is sufficiently reliable.

Both of these goals are clearly evident among the aims of Plantinga's proper-function externalism. It would be fair, I think, to say that Plantinga regards achievement of them as criteria for the success of a theory of knowledge, and he has devoted considerable attention to trying to show that his epistemology meets them. I have argued elsewhere that Plantinga has so far failed to answer the Gettier problem;[1] here my purpose is to investigate whether his epistemology succeeds in escaping Cartesian skepticism, specifically, skepticism with regard to sense perception. Does Plantinga have an adequate response to the Evil-Demon Argument (as concerns the senses)? Can someone who accepts Plantinga's epistemology (and his metaphysics), and who is aware of and understands the Evil-Demon Argument (EDA), have perceptual knowledge? Although proper-function epistemology is designed to provide an escape from skepticism, it turns out not to be a straightforward matter whether it succeeds. If it does not, then a large measure of the motivation for it disappears.

According to proper-function epistemology, a subject S has warrant - indeed, warrant sufficient for knowledge with respect to a proposition P - if the cognitive faculties operative in the generation of the belief that P are 1) well-designed in a way that is successfully aimed at truth, 2) functioning properly in a congenial environment (i.e., the sort of environment for which they were designed),[2] and 3) the belief is accompanied by a certain kind of doxastic experience. This experience must produce a firmness of conviction concerning P that is commensurate with the reliability of the judgment, i.e., is a good measure of the objective probability, given the circumstances, that P is true. The objective probability must, for warrant to be at the level required for knowledge, fall between some value r (>> .5) and 1.

Plantinga distinguishes between properly basic beliefs, beliefs non-inferentially generated by reliable cognitive mechanisms, and inferential beliefs, which must acquire their warrant, at least in part, in virtue of being inferred from properly basic ones. Inference is understood to be a conscious process, "downstream from experience,"[3] that is the output of the cognitive faculty of reason. Skepticism with respect to perceptual beliefs is held at bay because, although we may have very little knowledge, or none, of the mechanisms producing such beliefs (and although attempts to establish the truthfulness of perceptual experience will, as the skeptic insists, be viciously circular), nevertheless, ordinary perceptual beliefs will be properly basic, so long as they are in fact produced by reliable faculties operating in a congenial environment, and are accompanied by an appropriate degree of confidence that they are true.

Now the initial warrant for both basic and inferential beliefs can be defeated. The warrant S has for a basic belief B can be defeated in two ways: either by some external factor that undermines or degrades the reliability of S’s belief-producing mechanisms, or by evidence that S acquires, that counts against B’s being true. Defeaters of the second kind are rationality defeaters, and they can defeat either by rebutting or by undercutting a belief B. B is rebutted by evidence that it is false; it is undercut by considerations that show that the evidence for it is bad.

Defeaters of the first kind are the stock in trade of Gettier cases.[4] Defeaters of the first kind arise when the prima facie warrant of a properly basic belief is neutralized by circumstances that, though unknown to S, destroy reliability. Thus, my belief that this is a lovely barn might be defeated by there being lots of paper-maché barn facades in the vicinity of which I am unaware.

Finally, the warrant for an inferential belief may be defeated, either because the warrant for one of the properly basic beliefs from which it is inferred is, or because (for nondeductive inferences) additional basic beliefs destroy the original justification. Plantinga calls this last kind of defeater an internal rationality defeater.[5] For ease of discussion, I propose also to call reasons which defeat a properly basic belief, internal defeaters. The EDA, then, is a kind of whole-sale internal, undercutting defeater for perceptual beliefs and inferential beliefs based upon them.

Suppose, now, that Plantinga encounters the EDA. What sorts of defenses can he mount against it? What he needs, evidently, is a defeater defeater, something which restores warrant to his perceptual beliefs by destroying the force of the skeptic's reasoning. The natural place to look is to reason itself: perhaps reason can supply an internal defeater defeater, an argument that shows the EDA to be self-defeating or unsound in some other way. But Plantinga himself does not have such an argument on offer, and the history of this kind of response to the skeptic does not give much scope for optimism.[6] Indeed, Plantinga thinks that there can in principle be no successful reasoned defense against global skepticism. And as I said, it is just this situation that makes externalist approaches to epistemology so attractive. But the attraction will last only so long as it appears that externalism can offer a genuine way out. As we shall shortly see, it is not clear that proper-function externalism can do so.

We should note in passing that the EDA begins by challenging the claim to know that there are such things as dressing-gowns and fireplaces. But it quickly moves - as does Descartes' response - to contested territory of a more properly philosophical nature, viz., to the question how we can know that our perceptual and other cognitive faculties are trustworthy. It is this that lies at the heart of the skeptical challenge; and it is this that epistemology has traditionally understood skepticism to require us to face.

In what other quarters might a defeater for the EDA be found? My perceptual-belief-producing faculties might be in excellent shape, operating in an environment for which they are perfectly well-suited; but once I encounter and understand the EDA, how am I rationally to discount the fact that, having no rebuttal, I have no way of knowing all of this, and hence no reason to think it even moderately probable that my perceptual beliefs are true? If there is no way to neutralize the force of the EDA as an undercutting defeater, then surely, if my doxastic-experience-generating faculty is under these circumstances operating up to snuff with respect to any perceptual belief P, it will, in response to the dictates of reason, undermine my confidence in the truth of P. And surely, I can't just "walk away" from the EDA's implications for my supposed knowledge of P - or can I?

Before we consider that question, it will be helpful to take note of two points. The first is that those whose cognitive faculties are in good working order, and who are in normal surroundings, know (say externalists) about their surroundings if they are fortunate enough not to have encountered (and been shaken by) the EDA (or other skeptical arguments). They, the philosophically naive, are, ironically, in a better epistemic condition than we who have met and been impressed by the skeptic. Knowing less is knowing more.

The second point concerns Plantinga's own main argument against metaphysical naturalism in Warrant and Proper Function.[7] Metaphysical naturalism – the view that there are no supernatural beings – is closely allied with epistemological naturalism, understood as proposing an externalist, reliabilist theory of knowledge of the Goldman variety. Plantinga argues that the only account the metaphysical naturalist can provide for the existence of organisms such as we is a Darwinian one, and he proceeds to argue that the probability, relative to the Darwinian story, that nature will have selected reliable cognitive mechanisms, is either low or (at least) unknowable. But then, if the naturalist believes his mental faculties to be the product of the Darwinian mechanisms of random variation and natural selection, he ought to have no confidence in the reliability of those faculties (and hence, moreover, none in the Darwinian theory whose warrant depends on them). Darwinism, therefore, supplies its own undercutting defeater.

The Christian theist, by way of contrast, is in better shape: she can be confident that a Christian God will have designed her cognitive faculties in such a manner that, functioning as designed, they will be successfully aimed at truth (including true theistic beliefs).

What's a poor naturalist to do? Plantinga’s argument is an internal defeater for the naturalist's perceptual (and hence, scientific) beliefs - and perhaps much else. Unless the naturalist can find a rebutter, he is in the same sort of difficulty as that caused by the EDA. Perhaps, given the EDA, this is just overkill. The naturalist's externalist epistemology is designed to fend off evil-demon skepticism. Can it also protect the naturalist against Plantinga’s challenge? And on the other hand, if the EDA supplies a genuine internal defeater, does it not defeat the naturalist and the Christian theist equally - provided they are equally aware of, and impressed by, the argument?

Consider an externalist naturalist who remains constitutionally unimpressed by the EDA. Such a philosopher - Quine, let us say - might nevertheless find Plantinga's anti-naturalist argument disturbing, in the absence of a good rebuttal. This, moreover, could destroy confidence in his cognitive abilities, removing warrant even if his (God-given?) cognitive faculties are in excellent order. Plantinga clearly thinks Quine's confidence should be undermined. He implies that even a quite unsophisticated theist studying elementary logic will know more logic than Quine under the following condition, namely, that Quine's confidence in his logical ability comes to be undermined by an encounter with Plantinga's argument, with the result that one of the conditions for warrant - at least warrant sufficient for knowledge - is not met; Quine's logical beliefs are no longer attended by the requisite degree of certainty.

Quine's claim to know logic will be undermined in two ways. First, he will have an undercutting defeater, delivered by reason functioning as best it can. Second, the having of this defeater will influence the doxastic experience that accompanies Quine's contemplation of his logical beliefs; if the faculty that produces his doxastic experiences is functioning as it should, recognition of the presence of a defeater will generate significantly weaker feelings of confidence; more properly, these feelings should be ones of decided uncertainty. So, ironically, Quine's knowledge of logic will be destroyed, but not that of the philosophically savvy theist, though she be a beginner in logic.[8]

Now let us return to the EDA, and the response to it that Plantinga is in fact prepared to offer. Here, as Plantinga has put it, salvation must be by grace, not by works.[9] What he means is that the destructive effects of the EDA cannot be overcome by our own efforts; that is, through the exercise of reason. Rather, they must be, and are, overcome through the graciously benevolent intervention of God. While not explicit about the details, Plantinga appears to be suggesting that, confronted with radical skepticism, we manage somehow to just dismiss the EDA and kindred arguments, in spite of recognizing their rational force.

How is it that we are able to do this? We are able to do it - so I presume Plantinga would reply - in virtue of the fact that God has graciously so designed our cognitive faculties. He has given us a faculty of reason powerful enough to understand many important things, and hence powerful enough to invent and understand the EDA. But He has so designed our cognitive constitution that reason is not, in certain cases, sovereign over doxastic experience. In particular, when reason declares the EDA unrefuted, the cognitive module that generates the doxastic experiences attending formation of perceptual beliefs does not respond as it ordinarily would (and should) when a perceptual belief is undermined by an undefeated internal defeater.

Ordinarily, reason's recognition of an undefeated defeater generates a suspension of belief, or at least diminution of confidence. That is because the presence of a defeater for a belief B reduces the epistemic likelihood that B is true. The doxastic-experience generating system, when it is functioning properly, is aimed at truth; hence, so long as epistemic probabilities are a guide to truth, a doxastic-experience generating system that tracks epistemic probability will be properly aimed at truth. Thus, insofar as reason is a faculty designed to determine epistemic probabilities, the proper exercise of its functions includes dictating the strengths of the doxastic experiences accompanying non-basic beliefs.

But, so Plantinga will say, reason goes awry when it encounters the EDA. It goes awry, not by failing to discover a refutation to the EDA (perhaps there is no refutation), but in trying - if it does try - to dictate the strength of our perceptual beliefs, via the doxastic-experience generating system. It goes awry - on Plantinga's account - because one who doubts his perceptual beliefs wholesale is one whose cognitive system is not successfully aimed at truth. Like Descartes, Plantinga believes that God designed our cognitive faculties to aim, and aim successfully, at truth. And the truth is, in large measure, what our ordinary perceptual beliefs capture. They are, therefore, deserving of credence.

Anticipating, no doubt, that human reason would sooner or later discover skepticism, God gave us a defense. That defense consists just of a natural inclination - in fact, a nearly irresistible natural inclination - to discount skeptical arguments, even in the face of failure to find any rational refutation. As we engage in our regular human activities, even we philosophers will just find ourselves confidently accepting sensory information. In effect, God has inserted a "disconnect switch" between the outputs of our reasoning faculty, and the input to the doxastic-experience generating module, a switch that is triggered by skeptical outputs, at least of the radical and general kind.[10]

Moreover, this is, from the point of view of our cognitive makeup, a good thing. It is true that it involves ignoring reason, something that ordinarily constitutes a serious malfunction of one's cognitive system, and therefore something that ordinarily destroys warrant. But here, we see (or at any rate, God sees) that the effect of reason is destructive. The goal of the cognitive system's design plan is to achieve true belief, and even if sometimes other goals may legitimately override that one from the perspective of human well-being,[11] radical skepticism clearly has no legitimate claim along these lines. So a human being's well-being, and in particular, her cognitive health, is best-served by a design that refuses the skeptic's ploy. That being so, it can be argued that dismissal of the EDA, unlike ordinary dismissals of the dictates of reason, does not undermine warrant.

A bit paradoxically, then, awareness of the EDA puts one in an epistemic environment in which a kind of systemic malfunction - specifically, the failure of reason to exercise its normal rights over belief - is the price to be paid in order that the total system remain aimed at truth, and so that it be capable of acquiring knowledge with respect to many matters of importance.

I have been constructing what I take to be a plausible spelling-out of Plantinga's defense against the EDA. I hope I have succeeded in capturing at least the spirit and essential form of the defense, even if Plantinga would disagree with respect to some detail or other. I want, then, to examine the adequacy of this response.

Is a response of this kind intrinsically satisfactory? And, does it preserve the presumed advantages, with respect to disarming skepticism, of externalism over internalism? It seems, in the first place, that Plantinga can accommodate his reaction to skepticism to the general framework of his proper-functionalist analysis of knowledge. What is essential here is that warrant accrues to a belief so long as it is produced by mechanisms which, taken as a whole, are well-designed and successfully aimed at truth, given a suitable environment. The account would fail, of course, if it were a necessary condition for a belief to be warranted that every part of the cognitive processes that produced it were operating in the normal fashion specified by its design plan. But Plantinga is prepared to allow that malfunctions or abdications in one portion of a system might be compensated for by "malfunctions" in another, with the result that the system as a whole is functioning well, and warrant is preserved.[12] So Plantinga’s response to Cartesian skepticism amounts to claiming that our over-all design plan handles the difficulty inasmuch as God has so constituted us that, although reason is capable of generating skeptical doubts, these are effectively squelched by other features of our psychic makeup, with the happy result that we believe, correctly, the propositions reliably prompted by our perceptual faculties.

An initial reaction to Plantinga’s response to skepticism is that, if the goal of our cognitive mechanisms is true belief, and if God has seen fit to achieve this aim by subverting reason, if need be, when a person is confronted by skeptical doubts, then surely God would subvert reason in other cases in which it led to false beliefs. It is, after all, common enough that a person finds herself in epistemic circumstances in which the rational thing to believe is something false. Even if rationality is a tool well-designed to lead us to truth, it is hardly foolproof. So, why doesn't God simply step in under these circumstances, and ensure true belief by means of some mechanism that overrides reason?

A natural response to this difficulty has two parts. First, even though true belief is intrinsically a good thing, it is not the only good thing, and constant intervention by God to save us from false belief might in certain ways be harmful. If we suspected it, we might simply abandon the hard work of reasoning, and the virtue of intellectual responsibility that it fosters.[13]

Perhaps the occasional error into which we fall when following reason is a fair price to pay for intellectual independence.

Second, the harm of believing falsely is the more limited, the more limited the belief, and the harm produced by divine intervention is the greater, the more frequently God would have to rescue us from false beliefs. But the rescue from radical skepticism can be a singular affair, a once-for-all special dispensation that preserves us from a far-reaching, distinctively destructive cognitive defect.

Imagine a creature whose normal cognitive capacities suffer from severe malfunctioning. To remedy the situation, God reprograms it to override its misbehaving cognitive systems and settle for true beliefs and no false ones. One might think of such a creature as a true believer by fiat. But surely the epistemic condition of the creature is not a desirable one. Its design plan has gone awry, and the "fix," while ensuring true belief (and let us add, that firmness of conviction sufficient for knowledge), leaves our creature lacking a certain kind of understanding: it lacks the understanding that elements of its belief structure stand in certain logical and inductive relationships, ones which, in a normal individual, organize that structure in fundamentally significant ways.

Such a creature would, by Plantinga's criteria, still possess warranted beliefs. Nevertheless, it would be misbegotten in another sense, a sense we might describe by saying that it lacks much of importance with respect to how well it embodies the virtues of reason.

We may consider the issues raised by this case more generally by introducing the notion of a preempting defeater. A preempting defeater is one that is triggered under certain conditions in such a way as to override the operation of our internal belief-generating mechanisms (those accessible to consciousness). It does so in a way that is independent of the will.

From an internalist perspective, preemptive defeat, considered in isolation, will look like an epistemic vice. But from God's perspective, perhaps this is the best way to neutralize the EDA. Still, we ought to greet with skepticism the idea that endowment with a preemptive defeater is a satisfactory response to the EDA. One question we ought to ask is whether this is the only - or the best - recourse God has available. But we also ought to investigate more generally how operation of preemptive defeaters affects warrant. Here, perhaps, intuitions will vary, but intuition applied to illustrative cases is perhaps the only test we have.

Consider Jill, a skilled mathematician, who thoroughly understands the requirements of proof for mathematical theorems. Oddly enough, she also is an idiot savant, capable of infallibly generating fifty-digit prime numbers. Jill has no way of independently checking whether these numbers are indeed prime (they are too large even for computers to test), hence she has no inductive evidence of the reliability of her powers.[14] Nevertheless, she can't help believing the numbers are prime: once she leaves her study, her doubts just evaporate. Should we say that Jill knows her numbers are prime? Or does she just "know" them to be prime in the metaphorical sense in which a mechanical prime-number generator "knows" this?

It seems quite clear that we would not, and should not, have any confidence in Jill's number picks; her beliefs on these matters would seem oddly obsessive. Even Jill herself, to the extent that she is able to gain some rational distance from her doxastic condition, surely would - and should - classify her belief states as inexplicably compulsive. Confident though she may remain, it is unlikely that she would consider it appropriate for her prime number claims to be published in a journal of mathematics, for they seem to be just the sorts of claims requiring proof, and not knowable in a properly basic way.

Yet, according to Plantinga, Jill does know these numbers to be prime, so long as her design plan includes an idiot-savant capacity reliably to generate them that is functioning properly, etc. She retains this knowledge even in the face of the reflection that people don't generally discern large prime numbers except by calculation, that she has no independent way of testing her beliefs, and so on - so long as her confidence is not shaken by this defeater.

Perhaps Jill ought to distrust her prime-number beliefs, which are, we may assume, of no great significance to her, not essential for her flourishing as a human being or mathematician. But of course it doesn't follow that, in the absence of a refutation of the Cartesian skeptic, it would be the correct strategy for us to follow with respect to sense perception. For here, the cognitive (and perhaps also the practical) consequences of agnosticism are far more pervasive and pernicious - at least if our senses are reliable.

On the other hand, for precisely this reason, the question of reliability is a correspondingly more important one, and the required subversion of reason correspondingly more significant.

So, from the mere fact that this subversion of reason is a singular dispensation from God, unlike the multiple annihilations that would be required for God to rescue us from particular cases of rational false judgment, it does not follow that the former would be desirable but the latter not.

We can bring out the seriousness of this subversion of reason by recalling the nature of the problem posed by Cartesian skepticism. Although that skepticism was directed initially against such beliefs as that there are chairs and trees, it quickly emerges that Descartes' real concern is with whether our cognitive faculties are trustworthy, or whether they are at least able to avail themselves of sufficient resources to produce knowledge and avoid error. As an epistemologist, then, Descartes is really interested in the second-order question: how do I know that my faculties are reliable? This is the principle question skeptical doubts appear to render insoluble.

God can salvage our confidence by getting us to ignore the doubts. But this does not defeat Cartesian skepticism in any internalist sense; it walks away from it. It may (if there is no demon, we are not dreaming, etc.) protect us from epistemic harms consequent upon taking skepticism seriously, but it is also to abandon the traditional epistemological project.

To be sure, externalist epistemologies characteristically do abandon that project. Nevertheless, there is a way that Plantinga can address the Cartesian skeptical challenge squarely: just as my belief that I am sitting in front of a fire can be properly basic for me, why not the belief that my eyes, brain, etc. are working properly according to their design plan? Or, if that is not properly basic, perhaps it can be inferred from the knowledge I now supposedly have that I see myself to be sitting before a fire (or more precisely, from the knowledge that I know this).

But that is not how Plantinga reasons. In Warranted Christian Belief, Plantinga argues that if what he calls the Aquinas/Calvin model of Christian knowledge (including the knowledge that we are created in the image of God) is correct, then Christians have properly basic beliefs concerning the central claims of Christianity. He does not, however, undertake to argue that the A/C model is correct. In Warrant and Proper Function, commenting upon Descartes' response to demonic skepticism, Plantinga has this to say:

Of course [the theist] can't argue that in fact our beliefs are mostly true, from the premise that we've been created by God in his image. More precisely, he can't sensibly follow Descartes, who started from a condition of general doubt about whether our cognitive nature is reliable, and then used his theistic belief as a premise in an argument designed to resolve that doubt. ...Suppose, therefore, that you find yourself with the doubt that our cognitive faculties produce truth: you can't quell that doubt by producing an argument about God and his veracity, or indeed, any argument at all; for the argument, of course, will be under as much suspicion as its source. Here no argument will help you; here salvation will have to be by grace, not by works. But the theist has nothing impelling him in the direction of such skepticism in the first place; no element of his noetic system points in that direction....[15]

So the alleged asymmetry between the Darwinian naturalist and the theist is that Darwinism contains within itself the makings of an undercutting defeater, whereas theism (at least Christian theism) does not. Even if that were granted, though, we have here nothing by way of a response to Descartes' second-order doubt, his worry about the reliability of his cognitive faculties. The Darwinian's undercutting defeater is motivated by Darwinism itself; the theist's undercutting defeater is merely an epistemic possibility.[16] But it is not one the theist can argue away.

Salvation, Plantinga insists, is “by grace, not by works.” That means, we may safely suppose, that the theist doesn’t have to argue away the EDA. Probably it means more: namely that the theist does best not to attempt to refute the EPA, but rather to just ignore it. The ability to do this – the grace that saves the theist from first-order doubt about fires and dressing-gowns – presumably applies just as beneficially to second-order doubts about the reliability of his cognitive faculties.

But if there is no God, the undisputed disposition to invariably wave aside the EDA when we get to the practical business of life can just as easily be supposed to have evolved by Darwinian processes. Indeed, a Darwinian explanation is the more natural, if there is a way a benevolent God could have rescued us from the EDA without subverting our reason.

How, then, do matters stand? Externalist epistemologies are motivated by the apparent inability of internalism to rationally refute various skeptical arguments. Here we have considered two of these: the EDA, and Plantinga’s argument that metaphysical naturalism, coupled with the Darwinian account of evolution, generate an undercutting internal rationality defeater for the naturalist. Plantinga’s target here is naturalists who subscribe to an externalist epistemology.

Internal rationality defeaters, like Plantinga’s argument and the EPA, can be effective against externalism because even if a belief has prima facie externally derived warrant, it can still be defeated by encountering internal obstacles – sufficiently strong counterevidence. No externalist wants to deny that the possession of internally accessible reasons for or against a proposition are irrelevant to the all-things-considered warrant that proposition has for us.

The EPA is therefore one such line of reasoning that, for any epistemology, has potential to destroy the prima facie warrant for empirical beliefs – both first-order beliefs and higher-order ones about our cognitive faculties. I have examined the resources available to Plantinga’s epistemology for neutralizing the threat. I have not yet considered whether naturalistic externalist epistemologies might have comparable resources. But I have described an additional threat to naturalistic epistemologies, from Plantinga’s “Darwin” argument.

What can be gleaned from all this, I suggest, are the following lessons:

1) The EPA functions as a threat, in the form of an undercutting internal rationality defeater, for both Plantinga’s and naturalistic epistemologies.

2) Plantinga has certain resources for dealing with that threat, but these come at a price.

3) If that cost is acceptable to Plantinga, then it is worth inquiring whether the naturalists has available a parallel defense against the EPA, perhaps at similar cost.

4) It is further worth asking whether the naturalist has, as well, a defense against the “Darwin” argument that parallels Plantinga’s own theistic appeal to a benign and gracious God.

Let us now tackle these two questions, beginning briefly with naturalist/externalist resources for parrying the EDA. Naturalists emphasize the reliability, rather than the proper functioning, of our cognitive faculties. A person who is ignorant of the EDA will know that she has two hands, provided, roughly, that the relevant cognitive faculties are operating in such a way as to yield mostly true perceptual beliefs under relevantly similar circumstances. But what if she has before her mind the EDA? Will this not defeat her claim to knowledge? Resort to rather drastic measures seems necessary to thwart the threat presented by the EDA. Some externalists, for example, reject the closure principle, the principle that if S knows that p, and S knows that p entails q, then S knows that q. Rejection of this principle allows the externalist to accept:

1. I know that I have two hands.

2. If I know that I have two hands, then I know I am not the victim of an evil demon.

but to reject:

3. I know that I am not the victim of an evil demon.

So, the externalist can admit to having no refutation of the EDA, while insisting that she nevertheless does know that she has two hands.

The price is drastic. The closure principle certainly seems to be a self-evident truth; indeed, we implicitly invoke it whenever we use deduction in our knowledge-seeking efforts. Nor does there seem to be any principled way of quarantining those violations of the principle that protect the externalist against the EDA. There are other strategies open to the externalist.[17] I do not have time to survey them. But all seem to me quite implausible. It is, however, not easy to judge whether any one of them is less onerous than the strategy I have suggested on behalf of proper-function externalism. Perhaps all that can be said at this point is that the EDA remains a serious difficulty for every externalist view.

By way of considering, finally, whether the “Darwin” objection to naturalism can be defeated, let us consider a further objection to Plantinga’s response to the EDA, which involves legitimating the ascendancy of natural inclination over reason. The objection is that ceding the rule of reason opens the door to a kind of intellectual promiscuity. For on the face of it, the response supplies a strategy that can be deployed to support knowledge-claims on behalf of any belief toward which we are strongly inclined, even in the absence of good confirming reasons, or the presence of good disconfirming reasons.

Take any favored belief B, to which an individual, S, is stubbornly inclined to cling, even though good reasons for it are unavailable, and counterevidence is: say, the belief that God exists. An epistemologist who wishes to defend the epistemic propriety of this belief need only claim that S's conviction is the result of proper all-things-considered cognitive function; nor need the presence of rationally undefeated rationality-defeaters have any force against this, since his inclination to believe is a result of a providential cognitive-system design that overrides reason in this sort of case on behalf of truth. (Should others be inclined to deny or doubt B, that can be explained too: their cognitive systems are malfunctioning.)

Of course, we are bound to wonder whether someone who employs this strategy is right about the crucial thing: are his cognitive processes, taken as a whole, in fact reliable with respect to the production of B? Perhaps our friend S does have warrant; but it certainly doesn't look that way; indeed, it likely doesn't look that way to S himself, given the defeaters. But of course, this question about warrant is not one that can be answered, at least not without the appearance of begging the question against the skeptic.[18] In this sense, I think we must allow that the skeptical challenge remains undefeated.

Still, perhaps this is exactly the upshot that Plantinga is willing to accept. We do know the things perception ordinarily leads us to believe, thanks be to God's providential design, even though sustaining this knowledge requires a firm intransigence when it comes to the demands made upon our intellects by the Evil Demon Argument.

This way with the EDA, it might occur to us, is not entirely new. It is anticipated by none other than Hume. Hume draws a more despairing conclusion. But a modern naturalist might be more sanguine. Indeed, many modern naturalists are more sanguine. Harboring externalist proclivities in epistemology, most of them are prepared, like Plantinga, to suppose that the "animal faith" in the deliverances of our senses upon which Hume remarks is a felicity conferred upon us by nature - specifically by evolution - because of its clear advantages to an organism in the struggle for survival.

Suppose, however, that such a naturalist encounters Plantinga's argument in Chapter 12 of Warrant and Proper Function. That argument purports to show that true perceptual beliefs do not confer a clear advantage in the competition for survival - or rather, not one that could not equally be achieved in several other ways. Hence, it is not particularly likely (or has a likelihood unknown by us) that our perceptual beliefs are for the most part true. This argument provides a defeater for the prima facie warrant possessed by the perceptual beliefs of the naturalist.

Now, a naturalist might sensibly try to counter this defeater by showing that Plantinga's argument is unsound - as, indeed, I believe it is.[19] But suppose Plantinga's argument is not unsound, or can't be shown to be. What recourse might there be? Remembering Hume (but disavowing his internalism), a naturalist can emulate Plantinga. Our "animal faith" in the general reliability of our senses is, he may say, providential. Of course, this providence has not been supplied by God; it is a grace conferred by Mother Nature. It is providential in that our senses in general are reliable - even though we know of no good argument to support our belief to that effect - and our animal faith destroys any attempt on reason's part to undermine this conviction and thus defeat the warrant conferred upon perceptual beliefs by their sterling pedigree.

So it matters not a whit whether the epistemic probabilities of Darwinian evolution coughing up cognizers with reliable or properly functioning cognitive faculties is low or inscrutable. We’ve been immunized against the EDA – both the Quinian naturalist and the Plantingain can equally help themselves to that datum – and that suffices to preserve warrant against the EDA, so long as that is part of the reliability/proper-function package, however it may have arisen.

To be sure, the naturalist pays a price by adopting this strategy. He must accept that, in this case at least, it is legitimate for Mother Nature to send Reason packing, for the sake of preserving in her rational animals doxastic systems that are both robust and truth-conveying. But that is no greater a demerit than the one Plantinga himself seems prepared to accept as the price of preserving warrant. It is not a price I think we should be willing to pay. Attending to Reason, wherever she may lead us, is too integral to our conception of what it is to have knowledge.

It is an indication of the strength of this conception that, if Reason were someday to discover a decisive refutation of the EDA (and similar skeptical arguments), we would joyfully abandon the Hume/Plantinga strategy. We should abandon externalism in epistemology as well: save for a fascination with cognitive science, the dialectical advantages claimed on behalf of naturalized epistemology are its supposed ability to provide a route of escape from skepticism, and its alleged ability to solve Gettier problems.[20]

By Plantinga's lights, God has bequeathed us the Evil Demon Argument by giving us the capacity for philosophy. He has provided a solution as well: a thick carpet of natural instinct, a hand to lift its corner, and a good strong intellectual broom. Perhaps that is the best God could do, both for us and for Himself.

Evan Fales

The University of Iowa

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[1] See Evan Fales, "Critical Discussion of Alvin Plantinga's Warranted Christian Belief," Nous 37 (2003), 353-370.

[2] At the risk of some confusion with non-teleological reliabilist epistemologies, I shall, for brevity, call cognitive faculties and processes that satisfy these two conditions reliable.

[3] If by 'downstream' Plantinga means causally downstream, then he seems to be ignoring the fact that there is good reason to believe that there are information-processing, or, if you will, quasi-inferential processes that take perceptual experience as input but of which we are not consciously aware. This, however, can be set aside for present purposes.

[4] Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 359.

[5] My summary here of Plantinga's classification of types of defeaters is not entirely accurate. Plantinga's usage is a bit unclear, but, as I read him, every defeater is a warrant defeater. Among warrant defeaters, some defeat by intervening in the cognitive processes that lead a subject to believe that B, and others (like paper-maché barn-facades of which the subject is unaware) are environmental. Among the former, which Plantinga calls rationality defeaters, he distinguishes external and internal rationality defeaters. The former occur "upstream from experience;" they concern the malfunctioning of relevant cognitive modules. The latter are beliefs that the subject comes to acquire and to recognize as constituting reasons for giving up B. The EDA is, of course, a defeater of this last kind. It is, further, an undercutting defeater, one which removes the grounds for thinking perceptual beliefs to be true, while not providing reasons for thinking them to be false.

[6] Plantinga himself suggests that not even God could answer the Cartesian skeptic: once he calls into doubt His own cognitive faculties, then it will be circular for him to rely upon them to extricate Himself (Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, p. 125). To this, the proper Cartesian response is that for us - and by extension for God - certain judgments are indubitable and infallible; with respect to them, skepticism cannot gain a foothold. The Cartesian project is then to show how the epistemic credentials of other judgments, ones initially under the shadow cast by skepticism, can be rescued, given the fulcrum supplied by the indubitable propositions.

[7] See Alvin Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), Chapter 12.

[8] Here we have all the theological ingredients for a kind of Christian intellectual triumphalism.

[9] In a response to William Talbott, "Naturalism Undefeated," read at the "Nature of Nature" Conference held at Baylor University in April, 2000. See also Warrant and Proper Function, p. 237.

[10] Unfortunately, the disconnect switch, if there is one, seems often to malfunction: often, our confidence in a belief is not undermined when it ought to be. Reason tells us that a belief B is not strongly supported by the evidence, but the doxastic-experience generating system fails to pay heed.

[11] As, for example, when a true belief is so depressing or paralyzing as to undermine the general flourishing of a human life.

[12] That, at least, seems a reasonable inference to draw from Plantinga’s discussion in Chapter 2, Section C of Warrant and Proper Function. It is, in any case, imperative for Plantinga to allow that warrant can be uncompromised by canceling malfunctions, at least so long as this mode of operation is built into the design plan, and not accidental. Otherwise, his defense against the EDA straightforwardly fails. One could say that reason, confronted by the EDA, does not malfunction, inasmuch as it has been designed by God to truncate its normal operation when radical doubt looms. But clearly, it does malfunction in so doing, from the perspective of reason itself.

[13] Rationality would, in such a world, become merely a superfluous ornament, one that might as well be dispensed with entirely: for any true proposition P such that it is good that we believe it, a providential God would directly cause us to believe it. Such a world would not be desirable; in it we would be epistemic automata.

[14] To forestall an inductive argument from Jill’s success at picking smaller primes, imagine that her gift works only for numbers of fifty or more digits. (I understand that computers are now discovering Mersenne primes of more than four million digits, so my example is clearly out of date. But let’s suppose computers can’t do that yet; they have only managed to pick out primes of less than forty digits.)

[15] Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function, pp. 236-237.

[16] But perhaps the naturalist can avail himself of a strategy that parallels Plantinga’s theistic optimism concerning our cognitive faculties: see below.

[17] Perhaps the most promising of these rejects the EDA altogether as a defeater of either first-order or second-order empirical beliefs. G. E. Moore offered this response to skepticism; a more recent, sophisticated argument for the approach is given by Timothy Williamson in Knowledge and Its Limits (Oxford: 2000); see esp. Chapters 8 – 9. The essential maneuver is to claim that we do know a variety of empirical truths (e.g. that we have hands); it follows that skeptical scenarios, such as the evil demon hypothesis, are not epistemically possible. The trouble with this is that it clearly is possible for us to be mistaken about even such elementary empirical truths; and sometimes we are. Further, the logical and epistemic possibility of the evil demon hypothesis clearly appears to be a truth that, upon reflection, we can come to know a priori.

[18] Were S himself an epistemological sophisticate, he could make the argument just set forth in the amicus brief filed by the friendly epistemologist. And if the claims upon which that argument is based were challenged, he might claim to possess a firm conviction as to their truth - and could postulate the same mechanisms as providing warrant for his belief that those mechanisms are operative in him. But Plantinga himself does not seem prepared to move up levels in this way, perhaps because the maneuver seems to invite a nonterminating regress.

[19] See Evan Fales, "Plantinga's Case Against Naturalistic Epistemology," Philosophy of Science 63, (1996), 432-451.

[20] In Fales, “Review of Plantinga’s Warrant and Proper Function,” Mind 103 (1994), 391-395 and "Critical Discussion of Alvin Plantinga's Warranted Christian Belief," Ibid., I have argued that Plantinga's epistemology continues to succumb to Gettier counterexamples.

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