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Truthy psychologism about evidence
Veli Mitova
� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014
Abstract What sorts of things can be evidence for belief? Five answers have been
defended in the recent literature on the ontology of evidence: propositions, facts,
psychological states, factive psychological states, all of the above. Each of the first
three views privileges a single role that the evidence plays in our doxastic lives, at
the cost of occluding other important roles. The fifth view, pluralism, is a natural
response to such dubious favouritism. If we want to be monists about evidence and
accommodate all roles for the concept, we need to think of evidence as proposi-
tional, psychological and factive. Our only present option along these lines is the
fourth view, which holds that evidence consists of all and only known propositions.
But the view comes with some fairly radical commitments. This paper proposes a
more modest view—‘truthy psychologism’. According to this view, evidence is also
propositional, psychological and factive; but we don’t need the stronger claim that
only knowledge can fill this role; true beliefs are enough. I first argue for truthy
psychologism by appeal to some standard metaethical considerations. I then show
that the view can accommodate all of the roles epistemologists have envisaged for
the concept of evidence. Truthy psychologism thus gives us everything we want
from the evidence, without forcing us to go either pluralist or radical.
Keywords Ontology of evidence � Reasons for belief � Normative and motivating
reasons � Psychologism versus anti-psychologism
What sorts of things can be evidence for belief? Five answers have been defended in
the recent literature:
V. Mitova (&)
Institute for Philosophy, Vienna University, Universitatsstraße 7, 1010 Vienna, Austria
e-mail: [email protected]
123
Philos Stud
DOI 10.1007/s11098-014-0339-3
Propositionalism: propositions (Dougherty 2011; Neta 2008),
Factualism: facts (Dancy 2002),
Psychologism: psychological states (Conee and Feldman 2004, 2008; Turri
2009),
Factive-state psychologism: factive psychological states (Williamson 2000),
Pluralism: all of the above (Kelly 2008; Rysiew 2011).1
The arguments for each of the first three views are typically anchored in different
roles philosophers have envisaged for the concept of evidence. Thus, for instance,
some propositionalists appeal to the fact that the evidence for a belief stands in
logical and probabilistic relations to the believed proposition; such relations obtain
only amongst propositions, they say; so only propositions can be evidence.
Factualists, on the other hand, typically focus on the idea that the evidence is a
reason for belief; a reason is something that speaks in favour of the belief; since
beliefs represent how things are, the thinking goes, only facts can favour belief.
Finally, psychologists emphasise the fact that the evidence is something to which
we appeal in order to make sense of why someone believes a particular proposition;
since the belief to be explained is a psychological item, further psychological items
seem in the best position to make sense of the belief.
Whatever one might think of the merits of these rationales, it is obvious that the
roles to which they appeal are central roles evidence plays in both our doxastic lives
and epistemic theorising. It is equally obvious that each rationale privileges one of
the three roles at the cost of occluding the others. What is not so obvious is why we
need to go along with such favouritism. All three roles for evidence seem equally
real and important. So, an account of evidence would be the better for reflecting all
three. This is the thought that kindles pluralism. We needn’t privilege any one role,
the pluralist says; but since it is unlikely that a single thing can play all of these
roles, all of the above things fall under the extension of ‘evidence’.
But what if we could develop a monist account of evidence which accommodates
all of these roles? Such an account would render pluralism superfluous, insofar as
the main motivation for pluralism is the inability of any one thing to play all of these
roles. Factive-state psychologism can be seen as such an account. Williamson
(2000), for example, argues that one’s evidence consists in all and only the
propositions one knows. Although he motivates the view primarily by appeal to the
first role for evidence, the view clearly honours all three, since evidence here is
propositional, psychological, and factive.2
In this paper I argue for a more modest, but more readily defensible, view—
‘truthy psychologism’.3 The view, like Williamson’s, insists that evidence is
propositional, psychological, and factive. But, unlike his view, it holds that we do
1 The only label which is mine here is ’factive-state psychologism’. Thanks to an anonymous referee for
making me take seriously pluralism as a theoretical option.2 Arguably, Littlejohn (2012) is another—and equally radical—factive-state psychologist. According to
him, one’s evidence consists of one’s justified beliefs, where justification entails truth.3 ‘Truthy’ comes from Littlejohn’s ‘truthers’ who think that only true propositions are evidence
(Littlejohn 2013).
V. Mitova
123
not need the radical claim that only factive mental state types—such as
knowledge—count as evidence. According to truthy psychologism, veridical tokens
of mental states—such as true beliefs—are enough.
I defend here the factive and psychological bits of truthy psychologism. I first set
the scene (§1). I then argue for what I call ‘The Beast of Two Burdens Thesis’: a
reason must be able to be both a good reason and a motive (§2). In §3, I show that
taking this thesis seriously means that one needs to adopt either thoroughgoing anti-
psychologism or thoroughgoing psychologism about reasons. In §4, I review some
of the less agreeable costs of thoroughgoing anti-psychologism. In §5, I provide a
positive argument for thoroughgoing psychologism. In §§6 and 7, I develop a
positive argument for truthy psychologism: I first argue that evidence is factive (§6);
I then show that truthy psychologism accommodates all of the roles that
epistemologists have expected the concept of evidence to play (§7).
Thus, truthy psychologism provides a viable alternative to existing views on the
ontology of evidence: it does justice to the anti-psychologist’s intuition that the
evidence connects us appropriately to the world, without getting bogged down with
his less salutary commitments; and it allows us to accommodate all the roles
canvassed for evidence, without going either pluralist or radical.
1 Setting it up
1.1 The dialectic
If we are to be monists about evidence, how do we adjudicate amongst
propositionalism, factualism, psychologism, and factive-state psychologism?
Unhappily, the dialectic here is far from clear. One might ask at least three
questions about the ontology of evidence, each of which polarises the positions’
allegiances differently.
If we start with the question of whether evidence consists of psychological items,
factualism and propositionalism end up in the same camp—anti-psychologism
(since facts and propositions are not psychological items). But if we ask whether
evidence is propositional, the troops get re-deployed: factualism and proposition-
alism end up in opposing camps (since facts, on the most common view, are not
propositions4), while psychologists can flit between camps depending on whether
they think of the relevant psychological items as propositional states (Williamson
2000, Littlejohn 2012), or as perceptual experiences (Conee and Feldman 2004,
2008; Dougherty and Rysiew 2014). Finally, if we ask whether evidence is factive,
the factualist and factive-state psychologist are clearly on one side, the psychologist
on the opposite, while the propositionalist can switch sides depending on whether he
thinks that only true propositions count as evidence (Littlejohn 2013).
4 But see Littlejohn (2012, p. 95) and Williamson (2000, p. 43), who assume that facts are (true)
propositions.
Truthy psychologism about evidence
123
1.2 Why be modest?
One natural way to approach this fairly muddled dialectic is to look for an arbiter
from outside of the debate on the ontology of evidence. I go to metaethics for such
an arbiter. I appeal to some fairly standard arguments there to get us to the view that
only psychological states can be evidence (§§2–5). The factivity of evidence then
naturally falls out of this kind of defence of psychologism (§6).
This strategy will have two limitations. First, it won’t get us all the way to the
claim that only factive mental-state types—e.g., knowledge—count as evidence.
Although truthy psychologism is compatible with this stronger view, the argument I
develop here will only establish that veridical tokens of (not necessarily factive)
mental states—e.g., true beliefs or veridical perceptual experiences—count as
evidence.
Second, although truthy psychologism is committed to the propositional nature of
evidence, the argument here will not get us that far. Doing justice to the increasingly
sophisticated debate between propositionalists and friends of non-doxastic evidence
would take a paper of its own, and a very different (and long) one at that. At a
minimum, it would have to address the question of how propositional doxastic
evidence is to stop the justification regress that many argue only non-doxastic
evidence can stop (Conee and Feldman 2008, §3.1, Huemer 2001, pp. 175–178).
This is an intricate epistemological issue which will not be settled by appeal to the
metaethical considerations I adduce here. So it is best left for another occasion.5
In light of these limitations, one might wonder why we should bother with such a
half-way position as truthy psychologism, given that we already have Williamson’s
(2000), which gets us all the way to both factive mental state types and propositions.
A proper answer to this question would require a full examination of Williamson’s
view, which is beyond the scope of this paper. But let me say three things in favour
of going for the more modest truthy psychologism.
First, although I have some sympathy for Williamson’s position, the fact of the
matter is that its keystone—his ‘knowledge-first epistemology’—has not met with
the sort of irenic reception calculated to ground securely his account of evidence
(e.g., Greenough and Pritchard 2009). This reception is understandable. Knowledge-
first epistemology comes with some fairly radical commitments: knowledge is not
analysable in terms of other concepts, it is purely a mental state, it is necessary for
justification, it is what belief aims at, it is the norm of assertion, and so on.
5 Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising the regress problem. As a quick demonstration that it would
take us too far afield, let me mention two solutions that are available to the truthy psychologist. One is to
insist that all evidence is doxastic and that the truth of a certain class of beliefs stops the regress. Another
option is to argue that there are non-doxastic forms of basic evidence which are nonetheless propositional
(e.g., Huemer’s (2007) ‘appearances’). Each of these strategies faces challenges. The first needs to
explain how we non-arbitrarily isolate the relevant class of beliefs without construing experiences as
more justificatorily basic. The second needs to defend direct realism about perception. Such realism may
threaten the Beast of Two Burdens Thesis, unless we block the move from realism to metaphysical
disjunctivism (e.g., McDowell 1986). Thanks to John Gibbons and Ram Neta for convincing me that
disjunctivism is a threat to the Beast of Two Burdens thesis.
V. Mitova
123
Second, Williamson muddies both the dialectical and metaphysical waters by
maintaining that evidence is identical to both true propositions (2000, pp. 193–194)
and knowledge (2000, p. 191). This has the unhappy effect of construing
propositions as mental states (since knowledge, recall, is a mental state). A strange
result in itself, but it gets even stranger in conjunction with Williamson’s claim that
facts are (true) propositions (2000, p. 43).
Finally, Williamson does not address standard, and as we will see pressing,
worries about conceiving of evidence and reasons for belief in psychological terms
in the first place.
These considerations are, of course, hardly decisive, and are certainly not offered
as such here. All that they are meant to suggest is that if we can find a more modest
view that accommodates all the roles that evidence is expected to play, it might be
wiser to settle for the modest view. Happily, there is such a view. The arguments I
offer here secure psychologism independently of the knowledge-first story, and tie
the factivity of evidence essentially to both psychologism and the notion of a good
reason.
1.3 The assumptions
As already mentioned, I will use considerable help from metaethics in what follows.
The thinking is that since the fight between psychologists and anti-psychologists has
been going on there for much longer than it has in epistemology, the terms of the
debate and costs of commitments are clearer there. For this to work I will need three
assumptions:
(1) The evidence for a belief can be a good reason for the belief.
(2) Therefore, much of what we can say about the ontology of good reasons
for belief we can say about the ontology of evidence.
(3) The relation in which a reason for a belief stands to the belief, is
analogous to the relation in which a reason for an action stands to the
action.
Not buying these assumptions is a deal-breaker, so let me explain why they are
fairly innocuous when heard in the right way.
The first assumption is extremely modest. Most people think not only that the
evidence can be a good reason for belief, but that it is the best reason there is.
Assumption (1) is entailed by this stronger claim.
Assumption (2) is, likewise, fairly unexciting. If the evidence can be identical
with a good reason, then the two had better be of the same ontological kind.
Assumption (3) may grate a bit: after all, our reasons for action are
traditionally assumed to be conative states, which make for pretty shabby reasons
for belief. But all I mean here is that both kinds of reasons stand in a relevantly
similar relation to the thing they are reasons for—they favour it, support it,
rationalise it, and so on. The assumption is neutral on the nature of the relata in
each case.
Truthy psychologism about evidence
123
2 The Beast of Two Burdens
2.1 The standard story
According to the standard metaethical story, there are two kinds of reasons for
action: the normative reason, the thing which in fact favours the action; and the
motivating reason, the reason for which the agent acted as he did. The normative
reason is a good reason, something we cite to justify your action, to show what
there is to be said in favour of it; the motivating reason is something we cite to
explain your action, to show what it was you thought there was to be said in
favour of it.6 On this picture, the normative reason to help you is the fact that
you are in distress, whereas my reason for helping you (in the ideal case) is my
belief that you are in distress and my desire to alleviate your distress. Normative
reasons are facts and motivating reasons are psychological items (e.g., Parfit
2011; Raz 1999).
2.2 The Beast of Two Burdens Thesis
What is the relationship between these two kinds of reason? There are two options:
(1) they are two distinct things, as the above story suggests, or
(2) it is the same thing doing double duty.
I am going to defend the second view here. Call it ‘The Beast of Two Burdens
Thesis’, or BTB for short:
BTB: There is one kind of reason for /-ing (acting, or believing, or emoting,
etc.), which can play both the role of a normative reason to / and of a
motivating reason for /-ing.
Interestingly, BTB can be defended through two arguments coming from, and going
in, exactly opposite directions. (I take this to bode well for BTB.) The one is
inspired by Bernard Williams, the other is developed by Jonathan Dancy. The
Williams-inspired argument works to the conclusion that a normative reason must
be of the same ontological kind as a motivating one, while Dancy’s goes to the
conclusion that a motivating reason must be of the same kind as a normative one.
The two arguments support BTB from opposite directions and then part company
again: Williams’s is naturally extended to psychologism, while Dancy’s continues
to anti-psychologism. I will have more to say about these extensions of the
arguments later (§§5 and 3, respectively). For the moment, I will just look at the
premises relevant to BTB.
6 Hence, the distinction is sometimes drawn in terms of ‘justifying‘ and ‘explanatory‘ reasons (Dancy
2002, pp. 20–25).
V. Mitova
123
2.3 The Williams-inspired argument for BTB
Here is the Williams-inspired argument in a nutshell (1981, pp. 106–107)7:
(P1)WILLIAMS A normative reason to / must be able to be someone’s reason
for /-ing on a particular occasion, and so must be able to
explain his /-ing.
(P2)WILLIAMS But no reason could explain an agent’s /-ing unless it could
motivate him to /.
(C)WILLIAMS So, a normative reason to / must be of the same ontological
kind as a motivating reason for /-ing.
This is the first leg of my support for BTB: whatever it is that favours an action or
belief must also be the sort of thing that can move agents to act or believe. Why?
Because otherwise we cannot explain actions and beliefs as done and had for
reasons. Suppose I don’t enjoy jogging. (Not Williams’s example.) You cannot
explain my jogging by citing my desire to do something pleasurable. Your
explanation must, rather, appeal to something that could have in fact moved me to
go jogging, say health considerations. The desire to do something pleasurable is an
example of something that is psychologically incapable of moving me (to go
jogging). If the example is compelling, surely things that are in principle incapable
of motivating anyone would have no hope of explaining anyone’s actions. So, a
normative reason must be the sort of thing that can at least in principle motivate
agents.
Notice the modesty of this conclusion. It says nothing about what sorts of things
can motivate, and so is compatible, at this stage, with both psychologism and anti-
psychologism about both kinds of reasons.
2.4 Dancy’s argument for BTB
Dancy’s argument comes from the opposite direction (2002, pp. 103–108):
(P1)DANCY If a motivating reason for /-ing were of a different kind from a
normative reason to /, then no one could / for a good reason.
(P2)DANCY People can act, believe, etc. for good reasons.
(C)DANCY So a motivating reason for /-ing must be of the same ontological
kind as a normative reason to /.
I take it that (P2)DANCY needs no defence. The idea behind (P1)DANCY is that a
normative reason is a good reason—something that actually favours the action or
belief. Although this identification has not gone unquestioned (e.g., Turri 2009), it
enjoys considerable intuitive plausibility. No bad reason could genuinely favour an
action, so only good reasons can be normative. Conversely, what is a good reason
7 For a justification of this way of reading Williams, see fn. 17.
Truthy psychologism about evidence
123
for jogging or for believing that people who jog are martyrs, if not something that
actually favours jogging or the belief? But ‘something that favours /-ing’ just is a
normative reason to /. The equally plausible thought, then, is that since when I act
for a reason I act in light of what I take to be things that favour the action, there had
better be at least some cases when I get things right and act for a good reason.
Notice, again, the argument’s neutrality: it still tells us nothing about the nature
of either motivating or normative reasons, and so begs no questions in the fight
between psychologists and anti-psychologists.
3 Taking BTB seriously
We have, then, at least prima facie grounds for accepting BTB: since normative
reasons must be the same sort of thing as motivating reasons, and motivating
reasons must be the same sort of thing as normative, chances are that there is one
sort of thing here doing double duty. If that is right, we need to decide whether this
thing is psychological or non-psychological.
I said earlier that Dancy’s argument goes to anti-psychologism, while the
Williams-inspired argument can be extended to psychologism. Let me start with
Dancy’s, because it makes vivid what it means to take BTB seriously.
Dancy distinguishes three possible views on normative and motivating reasons:
[1] both normative and motivating reasons [are] psychological states of the
agent…[2] all reasons [are] what the agents believe, rather than … their believings
of those things…[3] motivating reasons are psychological states of the agent, while
normative reasons are what agents (we hope) believe (2002,
pp. 99–100, my italics).8
Dancy blithely dismisses the first view as ‘clearly implausible… because it is so
extreme’ (2002, p. 100). His preferred view—anti-psychologism—is the second:
both normative and motivating reasons are facts.9 Psychologism, on his reading, is
the third view: normative reasons are facts while motivating reasons are
psychological states. This, as we saw (§2.1), is the standard story.
Once we read psychologism in this way and accept (what I am calling) BTB,
however, it is plain how Dancy’s argument is going to go: this form of
psychologism violates BTB (2002, p. 106), so it is no good.10 What taking BTB
8 He takes beliefs to be the most eligible psychological candidates, since he has already argued desires
out (2002, Chap. 2). Whatever one might think about that argument, certainly for our purposes of getting
at evidence, it is plausible to assume that if evidence is psychological, it must be cognitive.9 With some charity. Strictly, what is believed are propositions, but Dancy means facts here (2002,
p. 104) and rejects propositionalism (2002, pp. 115–118).10 Dancy argues against two further versions of psychologism (2002, pp. 112–126). One of them
breaches BTB, so no need to go into it. I argue that the other is a misconstrual of psychologism in §6.
V. Mitova
123
seriously does, then, is to put pressure on any self-respecting psychologist to do two
things—go extreme and truthy:
EXTREME: Both normative and motivating reasons are psychological items.
TRUTHY: Normative reasons for belief are factive: they are veridical
(tokens of) psychological states.
EXTREME allows us to honour the plausible BTB thesis. TRUTHY allows us to
show how psychological states can genuinely favour beliefs, since it salvages the
link to how things are in the world and so to what actually favours what. I argue for
EXTREME in §5 and for TRUTHY in §§6, 7.
4 Anti-psychologism’s costs
But why go to all this trouble? Why not just plump for anti-psychologism? The short
answer is that if we do, we incur some fairly abstruse commitments. I will again use
Dancy as the totem for anti-psychologism here because he is most explicit about
these commitments. But it is hard to see how any anti-psychologist who also
endorses BTB, can avoid them (e.g., Collins 1997). Here are the three most striking
ones:
(1) Explanations are not factive (2002, Chap. 6).
(2) Reasons are not causes (2002, Chap. 8).
(3) Beliefs about my reasons and the world are not part of the explanation
proper of my action or belief; they are enabling conditions for the action
or belief (2002, Chap. 6).
(1) means that in cases when you act on the basis of a false belief, we explain
your action by appeal to ‘facts’ that don’t obtain. Suppose I shot my partner because
I falsely believed that he was an intruder.11 Your explanation of my action by appeal
to the fact that there was an intruder in the house, does not entail that there was an
intruder. Here is Dancy:
I suggest that locutions such as
His reason for doing it was that it would increase his pension [and]
The ground on which he acted was that she had lied to him
are not factive (2002, p. 132, my italics).
And his rationale:
The point of all this is, of course, that if reasons-explanations are not factive
there is no need to turn to ‘that he believed that p’ as the agent’s reason
wherever it is not the case that p (2003, p. 427).
11 I use this drastic example because it dramatises the strangeness of the view. Dancy’s own examples
downplay the strangeness, because they don’t involve the non-existence of the explanans.
Truthy psychologism about evidence
123
The rationale for the non-factivity of explanation, in other words, is to avoid citing
mental states as motivating reasons in cases in which the agent acts on the basis of a
false belief. But this has the weird result that, even though the motivation for anti-
psychologism is to hook up reasons to how things are in the world, the locus of my
explanation of your action can be something that does not exist.12
Any anti-psychologist who also buys BTB is saddled with this commitment
because:
(a) we explain action in terms of motivating reasons;
(b) but motivating reasons are facts, since (i) they must be capable of being
good reasons and (ii) good reasons are facts.
The claim that reasons are not causes (2) is a direct consequence of (1): Since
there was no intruder, the ‘fact’ of there being one could hardly have caused anyone
to do anything.
The claim that beliefs are enabling conditions (3) is necessary to make sense of
the truism—which the anti-psychologist concedes—that I act and believe based on
the facts as I take them to be. The only way for the anti-psychologist to make room
for the agent’s perspective is to treat beliefs as extrinsic to reasons-explanations;
else, he collapses into psychologism. Since they are nonetheless necessary for the
explanation to go through, he demotes them to enabling conditions.
But wherefore all these metaphysical contortions? Why not just be truthy
psychologists? We then have the following far homelier picture:
(1)TP Explanations entail the existence of their explanans: your explanation of
my shooting my partner by appeal to my belief that there was an intruder
in the house, entails that I believed that there was an intruder in the house.
(2)TP Reasons are (non-deviant) causes: My belief that there was an intruder
caused me to shoot. What else?
(3)TP My beliefs about the world are not some explanatory danglers. They are
the things that move me to action and belief. (See also §5.3 below.) When
the beliefs are true, they are good reasons for my actions and beliefs.
If you agree that this way of seeing things chimes better with our intuitions about
reasons and explanations, then we have established a presumption against anti-
psychologism.
5 The argument for extreme psychologism
So far, I have argued for the Beast of Two Burdens Thesis(§2) and shown that
taking it seriously means that we must go either for anti-psychologism or for
12 Why not retain the factivity of explanation by saying that the motivating reason is the fact that the
agent (falsely) believed such and such? Dancy thinks of this view as a version of psychologism and
rejects it (2002, p. 124). See fn. 19 below.
V. Mitova
123
extreme psychologism (§3). I have just listed some anti-psychologist commitments
that hopefully take the shine off anti-psychologism (§4). In this section, I develop a
positive argument for extreme psychologism.
5.1 The argument
The argument is this:
(P1)EXTREME Only psychological states can motivate on their own.
(P2)EXTREME Motivating reasons can motivate on their own.
(C1)EXTREME So, only psychological states can be motivating reasons.
(P3)EXTREME Normative and motivating reasons are of the same ontological
kind.
(C)EXTREME So, extreme psychologism: only psychological states can be
normative and motivating reasons.
(P3)EXTREME is entailed by BTB which I have already defended. That leaves
(P1)EXTREME and (P2)EXTREME.
5.2 (P1)EXTREME
(P1)EXTREME seems to obtain simply in virtue of the concept of a motive. The idea
that motives are psychological states is stock in trade in philosophy of action: it is
accepted by philosophers as widely disagreeing on pretty much everything else as
(Davison 1980), Frankfurt (1988), Velleman (2000) and Wallace (2006), to mention
but a handful. Indeed, it seems such an obvious idea that I am not even sure whether
it can be really defended. But let me try.
Motives are the quintessential springs of action. A bit of unmotivated behaviour
is just that—behaviour, not something done by an agent at all. But if a motive is
what distinguishes action from mere behaviour, it must be the thing that represents,
so to speak, the agent in his action.13 But then this thing that represents the agent
must be his own. Facts are not his own, so they are the wrong thing to represent him.
His mental states, by contrast, seem exactly the right thing.
This argument—if argument it be—speaks strongly against a view on which
motives are entirely non-psychological. What of a hybrid view, though, on which
motives consist in a psychological state plus some non-psychological thing, a fact,
say?
To begin with, notice that it is hard to make much sense of this view for many
cases of ordinary motivation. The class of motives is really large, much larger than
that of motivating reasons. It includes anything that one can be said to act ‘out of’
(Kenny 1963/2003, p. 60). Thus, for example, I can buy you flowers out of love or
lust, spend the evening at home out of laziness or paranoia, try to ruin your life out
13 I borrow this way of speaking from Velleman (2000, Chap. 6).
Truthy psychologism about evidence
123
of envy or curiosity, and so on. The emotions and dispositions move me to do these
things. It isn’t obvious what motivation-relevant14 fact needs to obtain here,
especially for pathological motivations such as paranoia.
But we can set aside the hard cases, and focus on cases which are more congenial
to the hybrid view, cases where we can easily think of a motivation-relevant fact
obtaining. Say that my motive for helping you is my belief that you are in distress
plus your actually being in distress. The hybrid suggestion can then be heard in one
of two ways:
(1) Motives are sometimes this mixture of a psychological state plus a fact.
(2) Motives are always this mixture of a psychological state plus a fact.
It should be clear that (1), even if true, can’t threaten (P1)EXTREME. (1) says that
there are cases in which psychological states can’t motivate on their own. But
(P1)EXTREME does not claim that all psychological states can always motivate on
their own. It says, rather, that only psychological states can motivate on their own.
Suggestion (1) does not threaten this claim, because it doesn’t show that something
other than a psychological state can motivate on its own.
That leaves (2): a non-psychological state is always a constituent of a motive. If
(2) is true, then (P1)EXTREME is clearly false. For then psychological states can never
motivate on their own, and a fortiori it is false that only psychological states can
motivate on their own. But (2), grievous as it would be for (P1)EXTREME, is also
eminently implausible even for the hybrid-friendly class of motives. It’s a platitude
that we can be moved to action by completely misreading a situation. I can be
moved to help someone even though he is not in the slightest distress. In fact, in
some (admittedly, rather sad) cases, I might be moved to help him even though he is
no more (he passed away unbeknownst to me), or never was (I have gradually
forgotten that he is my imaginary friend). So, no motive-relevant fact is required for
motivation in some hybrid-auspicious cases. (2) is false.
So, there is no way of hearing the hybrid view such that it is both plausible and
threatens (P1)EXTREME. The premise goes through.
5.3 (P2)EXTREME
Why should we think that motivating reasons can motivate on their own? Because if
they couldn’t, I now argue, we face a dilemma.
Suppose I helped you. Suppose, for the purposes of a reductio, that my
motivating reason was the fact that you were in distress.15 By (P1)EXTREME (only
psychological states can motivate on their own), this fact cannot motivate me on its
14 I say ‘motivation-relevant fact’ here and throughout this section because for me to be moved to do
anything at all, all sorts of facts need to obtain—I have to have a head, for starters. But we don’t think of
these as my motives.15 To suppose that they are not facts here would beg the question, since that is what the argument for
EXTREME aims to establish.
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own. We need to posit a suitable mental state which does the motivation work.
Suppose this state is a belief.16 What is its content? There are two options: (1) that
you are in distress and (2) that the fact that you are in distress is a reason to help
you. The two options spell a dilemma.
5.3.1 Horn 1
The belief that you are in distress, recall, is not my reason for helping you. My
reason was the fact that you are in distress. The belief is just the motivator. But if so,
when we explain my action by citing my belief, we have not explained the action in
terms of my reason at all. We’ve explained it in terms of a belief about you. The
belief is mine, yes, but
(i) it is not itself the reason, and
(ii) its content: (a) neither says anything about reasons,
(b) nor is itself the reason (reasons are facts; the content is a
proposition).
Of course, we can say that the explanation implicitly cited a reason, but what we
cannot say is that it cited my reason. So, no explanation in terms of my reasons has
been given. But hang on! The whole point of introducing motivating reasons was to
be able to explain action in terms of the agent’s reasons.
5.3.2 Horn 2
The alternative—the belief that your distress is a reason to help—is at least in the right
ballpark for capturing my reason. The trouble, now, however, is that this suggestion rules
out unreflective motivation by reasons. When I get unreflectively moved by a motivating
reason, there are no beliefs about what reasons I have. Rather, the reason itself moves me
to action. The above belief, by contrast, is typical of the result of deliberation—it is a
judgement about what reasons I have. Take the epistemic case. Sometimes I just
unreflectively get moved by the evidence. It is only as a result of deliberation that I get
moved by judgements that something is evidence for a proposition.
(P2)EXTREME is true then: motivating reasons must be able to motivate on their
own. If they couldn’t, then—by (P1)EXTREME—they move us through a psycho-
logical state. But there is no way to cash out this state, such that we preserve both
the intuition that explanations feature the agent’s reasons and the idea that we can
sometimes be unreflectively moved by our reasons.
If this argument is on the right track, it also provides a neat explanation of the
intuition that mental states can’t be merely enabling conditions for our reasons (§4).
For if the content of the relevant mental state concerns simply the object of the
action, then we cannot explain the action in terms of the agent’s reasons (horn 1);
16 The argument will work equally for desire. I use belief here because I am ultimately after the notion of
a reason for belief.
Truthy psychologism about evidence
123
but if the content concerns a reason, then we rule out unreflective motivation
(horn 2).17
5.4 Back to evidence
Would these considerations establish psychologism about reasons for belief, given
that they hinged on the notion of a motive, a notion which does not find an easy
home in epistemology?
The first thing to note here is that epistemologists are getting increasingly
comfortable with talk of motives (Owens 2000; Shah 2006). But less
gratuitously, although talk of motivating reasons in the epistemic case sounds
strange, thinking about the basing relation should dispel the strangeness. The
basing relation is, of course, the subject of plenty of dispute in its own right
(e.g., Neta 2011). But on its most common construal, it is the requirement that
for a belief to be had for a good reason is for the belief to be non-deviantly
caused by that reason (e.g., Turri 2011). The good reason is, straightforwardly,
the normative reason—the thing that favours the belief. And it is natural to think
of the thing that non-deviantly causes the belief as the motivating reason, since
motivating reasons in the action case are (when things go well) precisely the
non-deviant causes of the action.
If so, we may transpose the above argument for extreme psychologism to
epistemic reasons:
(P1)EVIDENCE By BTB, a reason for belief must be a single thing doing double
duty.
(P2)EVIDENCE One of these duties is to move belief.
(P3)EVIDENCE But only psychological states can move belief.
(C)EVIDENCE So, only psychological states can be normative and motivating
reasons for belief.
If both kinds of reasons are psychological states, then it is going to be the relevant
properties of these states that determine when the reason is a good one. If
evidence is ever a good reason for belief, it will be a psychological state with
these properties.
17 This argument also justifies my reading of Williams as claiming that a reason, R, must itself be able to
motivate. The two standard readings are that what must be capable of motivating is:
(1) my belief that R (Finlay 2009, p. 12), or
(2) my belief that R is a reason to / (Shah 2006, pp. 485–486).
Clearly, (1) falls against Horn 1, and (2) falls against Horn 2 of the present dilemma. More generally, the
dilemma faces anyone who thinks that the motivation requirement is a requirement on having reasons
rather than on something’s being a reason (e.g., Comesana and McGrath 2014).
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6 From extreme-to truthy psychologism
In Sect. 3, I said that the psychologist worth his salt should go extreme and truthy:
EXTREME: Both normative and motivating reasons are psychological items.
TRUTHY: Normative reasons for belief are factive: they are veridical
(tokens of) psychological states.
So far I have tried to make plausible EXTREME. I promised that TRUTHY will fall
out of EXTREME, thus giving the notion of evidence the right connections to both
the world and good reasons for belief (§1.2). Here is the intuitive argument for
TRUTHY:
(P1)TRUTHY Only psychological states can be normative reasons for belief.
(P2)TRUTHY Normative reasons for a belief speak in favour of the belief.
(P3)TRUTHY Non-veridical psychological states—false beliefs and non-
veridical perceptual experiences—do not genuinely speak in
favour of a belief.
(C)TRUTHY So, only veridical psychological states are normative reasons for
belief.
(P1)TRUTHY is entailed by EXTREME which has already been defended at
length. (P2)TRUTHY is simply the widely accepted definition of a normative
reason. (P3)TRUTHY is a near platitude. How could a false belief really speak in
favour of anything? Suppose I once again think I should help you. If I have a
false belief that you are in distress, then you are not in distress, and it is not the
case that I should help you. So my false belief patently cannot favour helping you.
Or suppose I falsely believe that the butler did it, and that if he did it then you
didn’t. Clearly, my false belief that the butler did it cannot favour believing that you
didn’t.18 This is why, after all, we needed motivating reasons—to make room for
cases when the agent takes X to favour a belief or an action without that entailing
that X in fact favours the belief or action. If this is correct, then so is TRUTHY.
On the assumption that the evidence for a belief can be a good reason for the belief,
it follows that evidence is factive.
This is the intuitive thinking behind truthy psychologism. In the next section I
bolster it by showing how the view can accommodate all roles that evidence has
been asked to play. But before I do that, I wish to stress that according to truthy
psychologism, the veridical states themselves are the evidence. This claim needs
distinguishing from a different one with which psychologism is sometimes saddled:
18 This is one of the reasons that epistemic normative requirements are understood to take wide scope
(e.g., Broome 2000).
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123
the evidence for a belief is the fact that I am in a particular mental state.19 This is
decidedly not what truthy psychologism claims. Indeed, it can’t be. On this different
view the evidence—or good reason—would be a fact (about my mental states) and
the motivating reason would be the mental state itself. The view violates the Beast
of Two Burdens Thesis.
I think that it is the conflation of psychologism with this fact-view that accounts
for much of the animosity to psychologism. For, intuitively, facts about what is
going on in my head are in no position to favour either belief or action. The view is
like saying that what fries an egg is not the oil in the pan, but the fact that there is oil
in the pan. Happily, truthy psychologism is committed to no such view: the oil and
belief themselves do the relevant job; and they only do the job well when the oil is
hot and the belief is true.
7 Truthy psychologism gives us everything we want from the evidence
I began this paper by pointing out that three of the monist views on the market—
propositionalism, factualism, and standard psychologism—privilege one role
evidence has been expected to play, at the expense of the others. I said that
pluralism was a natural response to such dubious favouritism, and that our only
egalitarian monist option—only known propositions are evidence—is fairly radical
(§1.2). In this section I show that truthy psychologism is up to all the standard roles
required of evidence. So we don’t need to go either pluralist or radical.20
Truthy psychologism can plainly accommodate the three roles with which I
started. First, evidence is propositional, and so can enter into logical and
probabilistic relations (although this is the one aspect of truthy psychologism that
I have not defended here—see §1.2 and fn. 5).21 Second, evidence is factive, so it
can genuinely favour belief (see also §§7.3 and 7.4 below). Finally, evidence is
psychological, so it is in a good position to make sense of our beliefs (see also §7.2
below). That truthy psychologism can accommodate all of these roles should hardly
come as a surprise: it was designed to do so.
19 Dancy (2002), for example, thinks that this is the most promising version of psychologism. But, he
argues, it is vulnerable to a major objection (2002, p. 124). Suppose I believe that there are pink rats in my
shoes. The fact that I have this belief seems to be a good reason to see a doctor. But (a) we only have such
reasons in weird cases, so reasons aren’t typically facts about our mental states; and (b) such reasons are
good reasons regardless of whether the state is veridical or not. Truthy psychologism is not vulnerable to
this objection, since it does not concern facts about mental states.20 In arguing for truthy psychologism by showing how it can accommodate all of these roles, I take my
cue from Rysiew (2011). This is dialectically fitting, since he is the most explicit current pluralist, and he
defends the view precisely by appeal to these roles.21 The claim that only propositions can enter in such relations is rejected by opponents of
propositionalism (e.g., Conee and Feldman 2008, 2011) as well as by some of its friends (e.g., Neta
2008). This doesn’t matter in the current context, as long as it is allowed that propositions can enter in
such relations.
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What about other roles that have been historically envisaged for the notion of
evidence? Four such roles are nowadays distinguished in the literature, after Kelly
(2008)22:
(1) that which justifies belief,
(2) that which rational thinkers respect,
(3) a guide to truth—a sign, symptom, or mark,
(4) a neutral arbiter.
It should be obvious at a first glance that this is a lot to expect from a single concept.
Crudely put, the first two roles tug in the direction of psychologism, since they
involve the believer’s perspective; the second two roles push towards factualism,
since they presuppose objectivity. Given these competing demands on the concept
of evidence, some have doubted whether there is a unified concept here in the first
place (Kelly 2008), and others have despaired of finding one single thing that falls
under its extension (Rysiew 2011).23
Truthy psychologism is a monist refuge from both of these forms of pluralism.
Whether we want such a refuge would, of course, depend on what other advantages
the two kinds of pluralism enjoy. But, I now argue, they enjoy no advantage when it
comes to accommodating these roles at any rate: truthy psychologism can
accommodate roles (1) and (2) in virtue of its psychologism, and (3) and (4) in
virtue of its truthiness. So, if the main motivation for pluralism is the failure of
current accounts of evidence to accommodate all important roles the concept plays,
we don’t need to be pluralists.
7.1 Evidence as that which justifies belief
The first role the concept of evidence has been expected to play is the near-truism
that one’s evidence concerning p makes a difference to whether one’s belief that p is
justified (Kelly 2008, §1).
Now, if this role is kindled by a purely internalist notion of justification
(justification supervenes on one’s mental states) then the truthy psychologist will
not accommodate it as smoothly as a pure psychologist would.24 According to
truthy psychologism, the truth-value of the mental state makes a difference to
whether the state constitutes evidence. So, two subjects in the same mental states
can have different evidence. If we take justification to be a purely internal affair,
truthy psychologism can only accommodate the intuition that if something is
evidence for p, then it makes a difference to the justificatory status of the belief that
22 See, e.g., Dougherty and Rysiew (2014), Littlejohn (2012, §3.1), and Rysiew (2011).23 Kelly argues that one concept—‘normative evidence’—drives the first two roles, and another —
‘indicator evidence’—the third and fourth (Kelly 2008, §3). Rysiew (2011) argues for the unity of the
concept by showing, with Thomas Reid, that what makes many different things evidence is that they all
make the believed proposition ‘evident’. But the unity of the concept notwithstanding, he thinks that we
should be pluralists about its extension.24 This is the so-called ‘mentalist’ conception of internalism. Truthy psychologism will also be at a
disadvantage on the ‘accessibilist’ view. (See Conee and Feldman 2004, Chap. 3.)
Truthy psychologism about evidence
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p. The view cannot go in the opposite direction and accept that if something makes a
difference to the (purely internalistically construed) justificatory status of a belief,
then it is evidence.
This may seem like a disadvantage, until we notice that the justificatory role for
evidence is supposed to be uncontroversial, and so cannot assume a substantive
account of justification. An account of evidence that accommodates this role, is
therefore not required to do so on a purely internalist (or any other substantive)
conception of justification. It is only required to accommodate the role on the
uncontroversial view that our mental states make some difference to justificatory
status, since this is the only tenet that opposing views of justification accept. (The
tenet is accepted even by externalists: my belief that you are a pathological liar, for
instance, is a defeater for my beliefs based on your testimony. See Kelly 2008, §1.)
Insofar as there is an uncontroversial psychological core to the notion of
justification, then, truthy psychologism can readily explain how the evidence—in
virtue of being a psychological thing—can make a difference to one’s justification.
7.2 Evidence as that which rational thinkers respect
The second, and related, role for evidence is the one informing the idea that rational
thinkers respect their evidence. This role again tugs in the direction of psychol-
ogism, because what is rational or reasonable for you to believe obviously depends
on what other things you believe. Thus psychologism fits more naturally with this
role than does factualism (Kelly 2008, §2).
But truthy psychologism fits better than both. Because the plain psychologist
identifies the evidence for p with that which makes it reasonable to believe that p, he
is forced to think that my evidence in a skeptical scenario is the same as my
evidence in the normal case. I am, intuitively, equally rational or reasonable in the
two cases, the thought goes, so my evidence is the same. This has familiar
consequences: if my evidence is the same in the two cases, then my evidence is no
indicator of whether I am in the good or bad case. But if it is no indicator, then it is
no indicator of truth, so it becomes unclear why following it is something a rational
person should want to do.
Truthy psychologism has no such consequences: my evidence is different in the
two cases, since only veridical states can be evidence. I am equally reasonable in the
two cases in so far as I equally respect what I take to be evidence. Such respect is a
rational thing to do because the evidence is something that indicates truth. All this
point requires, as in the justification case, is that we don’t posit a biconditional link
between the evidence and that which makes belief reasonable. But we can still think
that if something is evidence for p then it makes believing p reasonable.
7.3 Evidence as a guide to truth—a sign, symptom, or mark
The third role evidence is supposed to play is that of a guide to, or reliable indicator
of, truth (Kelly 2008, §3). To use Kelly’s example, Koplik spots are a reliable
indicator of measles; so the presence of such spots is evidence for my belief that I
have measles.
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The idea here is that ‘attending to evidence constitute[s] a promising way of
pursuing an accurate view of the world’ (ibid.). And here factualism has its natural
home, for the best sort of indicator of the truth of a proposition are facts relevant to
that proposition. Kelly summarises the point neatly:
Given that no true proposition is inconsistent with any fact, one has an
immediate rationale for not believing any proposition that is inconsistent with
one’s evidence [understood as facts], for only propositions that are consistent
with one’s evidence are even candidates for being true (ibid.).
Kelly rightly notes that Williamson’s view is equally felicitous for this role, since no
true proposition would be inconsistent with any known proposition. But, one might
add, Williamson’s view is superior to factualism here. For it not only secures the
right connection between evidence and truth, but also, in virtue of its psychologism,
enables the evidence to play the justificatory and rationalising roles just discussed.
Patently, truthy psychologism is equally up to all of these jobs, since it also
construes evidence as both factive and psychological.
7.4 Evidence as a neutral arbiter
The final role that the concept of evidence has been asked to play is that of neutral
arbiter. On this conception, the evidence is something essentially public, to which
we can point as the final court of appeal in disagreement (Kelly 2008, §4). The most
eligible candidates for this role are again facts. Mental states, being essentially
private, seem to have no place here. It is not as though I can literally point to my
belief as the final arbiter in the way I can point to the Koplik spots to convince you
that I have measles.
We might try to evade this thought by emphasising that truthy psychologism is a
view about evidence for belief, and that it is not clear that this public conception of
evidence concerns belief. Indeed, Kelly notes that it is more the scientist’s
conception of evidence than the epistemologist’s. Still, presumably we don’t want
our epistemic notion to be entirely unmoored from less recondite notions of
evidence, so it would be good to be able to accommodate this role. And we can, by
appeal to three considerations.
First, the idea of evidence as ‘a kind of ultimate court of appeal, uniquely
qualified to generate agreement among those who hold rival theories’ (ibid.) is
highly naıve. All we need to note is that the evidence resolves disagreement only if
the disputants have the same background theory, since whether something is taken
as evidence depends on this theory (Kelly 2008, §4). Suppose we disagree over
whether I have measles. We both see the Koplik spots. But you know they are a sign
of measles, while I don’t. Clearly you will take them as evidence for measles while I
won’t. Just pointing to the spots, in other words, won’t do the trick. Both parties
need to have true background beliefs, for the court-of-appeal trick to work.
Second, truthy psychologism, unlike plain psychologism, is not motivated by the
privacy of mental states. Its impetus is, rather, the thought that the veridical nature
of certain mental state tokens is what suits those states for being evidence. The
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123
view, therefore, doesn’t threaten the objectivity and publicity of evidence in the way
that plain psychologism does.
Finally, there is a perfectly respectable way for me to ‘point to’ my mental states
as arbiter, as long as the pointing is understood to carry a claim to their being
veridical. Here, for instance, is Sherlock Holmes doing just that, in citing his
evidence for the belief that Watson has just been to the post office and dispatched a
telegram:
[1] Observation tells me that you have a little reddish mould adhering to
your instep.
[2] Just opposite the Seymour Street Office they have taken up the pavement
and thrown up some earth which lies in such a way that it is difficult to
avoid treading in it in entering.
[3] The earth is of this peculiar reddish tint which is found, as far as I know,
nowhere else in the neighbourhood…[4] of course I knew that you had not written a letter, since I sat opposite to
you all morning.
[5] I see also in your open desk there that you have a sheet of stamps and a
thick bundle of post-cards.
[6] What could you go into the post-office for, then, but to send a wire?
(Doyle 2008, p. 6, my italics).
[2] is the only point at which Sherlock cites a fact as evidence. The rest of the time
he cites perceptual experiences (1 and 5), belief (3), knowledge (4), and the act of
drawing an inference (6). So, five out of the six things to which Sherlock is
‘pointing’ as evidence are psychological items.25 Detective work is usually taken to
be congenial to factualism and to the present neutral-arbiter conception of evidence.
Yet, here is the arch-detective citing his mental states as evidence. Does that strike
us as odd? I take it not. And if not, then we can point to our mental states as a final
court of appeal. If these states are veridical, they are indeed such a final court of
appeal.
The truthy psychologist, then, can accommodate all of the central roles the
concept of evidence has been asked to play. Unlike pluralism, the very same thing—
a mental state—plays each of the four roles. For sure, in some cases it plays it
primarily in virtue of its psychological nature, and in others in virtue of its veridical
nature, but it is still the same beast doing the work. The pluralist, by contrast, must
accommodate some of the roles by appeal to one bunch of things that fall under the
extension of ‘evidence’, and the rest of the roles by appeal to a different bunch of
things. Thus, what would justify and rationalise my belief that I have measles,
would be a belief about, or experience of, Koplik spots. But what would count as an
indicator of measles, or as an arbiter in a dispute, will be the spots themselves. This
25 This example also speaks strongly against a popular anti-psychologism argument (e.g., Collins 1997):
We deliberate in light of what we take to be good reasons; We do not deliberate in light of our
psychological states; So, good reasons are not psychological states. But here is Sherlock deliberating in
light of both. So, the deliberation-argument is inconclusive. (Thanks to an anonymous referee for making
me see this.) For the stronger claim that the argument is unsound, see Turri (2009).
V. Mitova
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story, as Dancy rightly cautioned, drives an insuperable wedge between the good
reasons there are for believing something and my reasons for believing it. Perhaps
there are good reasons to be pluralists, which outweigh the costs of this wedge. But
the inability of a single thing to play all evidence-roles is not one of them.
8 Conclusion
I trust that these arguments, rough as they are, show that truthy psychologism is a
viable alternative to existing views on evidence. I argued, first, for the Beast of Two
Burdens Thesis (§2). Once we go that road, traditional psychologism is discredited
(§3). So, we need to decide between extreme psychologism and anti-psychologism.
I suggested that anti-psychologism is too costly (§4). That was the negative
argument. The positive argument was that we should be extreme psychologists in
virtue of taking seriously the idea that motivating reasons can motivate on their
own, and that only psychological states can motivate on their own (§5). This way of
looking at things ensures that we do not do violence to our basic intuitions:
explanations entail that their explanans exist; motivating reasons are causes; beliefs
are an essential part of explanations of action and other beliefs (§4). Add the truthy
bit—good reasons are factive—and we can have all of our ontological cake and eat
it: we hook up our reasons to the world without any of the anti-psychologist’s more
suspect commitments (§6). If evidence can ever be a good reason for belief, then,
evidence is factive and psychological. The psychological bit allows it to feature in
rationalising explanations and to justify belief. The factive bit allows us to believe
for good reasons which are genuine indicators of how things stand in the world (§7).
What more (or less) could we want from the evidence?
Acknowledgments Thanks to Alexandra Couto, Christoph Hanisch, Katherina Kinzel, Sebastian
Kletzl, Martin Kusch, Dejan Makovec, Herlinde Pauer-Studer, Martha Rossler, and an anonymous referee
for Philosophical Studies, for really helpful comments on earlier drafts. Thanks also to Santiago Echeverri
and Pascal Engel for inviting me to the Ontology of Evidence Workshop (Geneva, 2013), and to Florian
Steinberger for asking me to give a talk on truthy psychologism at the Munich Center for Mathematical
Philosophy (LMU, 2013). The audiences at these events helped a lot with this paper.
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