Antecedentes locales

Approach 2 says that where ‘should’ means shouldF OE, the information-parameter

is filled with the subject’s FOE; and where it means shouldHOE, the information-

parameter is filled with the subject’s HOE. This idea reflects Christensen’s sugges- tion that in order to respect HOE, we have to bracket our FOE. I think Approach 2 is the way to go for the Evidence-Ambiguity Theory.

Approach 2 gets the cases discussed in section 4.3 right. That I have been slipped a drug that makes my deductive reasoning 50% reliable makes it as likely as not that my belief that ¬F a is true. Therefore, HOELR neither supports ¬F a

nor its negation, and I accordingly should suspend judgement on ¬F a in light of my HOE in Logical Reasoning. Similarly, the fact that my friend believes that the answer is 459 and I believe that it is 457 makes it as probable as not that the answer is 457. Thus, in light of my HOE in Peer Disagreement, I should suspend judgement on whether the answer is 457 or 459. Finally, inAbductive Reasoning I come to know that I made my diagnosis while I was sleep-deprived and that my diagnosis could hence be right just as well as wrong. My HOE in

Abductive Reasoningaccordingly neither favoursArthritis nor its negation, and I shouldHOE suspend judgement onArthritis.

A first objection to Approach 2 might be that it overgeneralizes. Consider

were:

• FOELR: ∀x(F x→Gx) and ¬(F a∧Ga)

• HOELR: I’ve been slipped a drug that makes my deductive reasoning 50%

reliable

• Target proposition: <¬F a>

I have claimed that there is no support relation between HOELRand¬F a. HOELR

neither supports¬F a nor its negation, F a. It follows from Doxastic Should

that I shouldHOE suspend judgement: suspending judgement is the doxastic

attitude to¬F a that best reflects how much HOELR supports¬F a.

Yet something about this explanation seems off. For any information-statei

and target propositionP such thatineither supports P nor its negation, it is true that the doxastic attitude that most appropriately reflects this support relation is suspending judgement onP. Doxastic Should would therefore predict that for any piece of HOE that has no support relation with a target propositionP, S

should (in the sense of shouldHOE) suspend judgement onP. But is this right?

Imagine the following case:

Tree. Hannes sees a tree in front of him and comes to believe that there is a tree in front of him. Now he gathers HOE that his mathematical reasoning is distorted. This is the only HOE he possesses.

Hannes’ HOE, HOET ree, has no support relation with the target proposition

<There is a tree in front of me>, short T ree. If we assume that a lack of support is appropriately reflected by suspending judgement, it follows that Hannes shouldHOE suspend judgement on whether there is a tree in front of him. This is

odd. It seems that he should not, in any sense, suspend judgement on whether there is a tree in front of him. He has clear perceptual evidence supporting that there is a tree in front of him and the HOE has no undermining effect on this.

I bite the bullet and maintain that Hannes shouldHOE suspend judgement

on whether there is a tree in front of him. If some evidence supports neither

P nor its negation, one should, in light of this evidence, support judgement on whether P. I agree, however, that there is something odd about saying that

Hannes should suspend judgement on whether there is a tree in front of him. The reason for this oddness is purely pragmatic: there is no natural context in which one would discuss whether Hannes should believe that there is a tree in front of him and in which this HOE would be the information-state provided by this context. Thus, there is no natural conversation where one is talking about what Hannes should believe in Treeand ‘should’ is relativized to the HOE Hannes has in Tree. As I will explain in section 4.6, a context’s information-state shifts from a subject’s FOE to their HOE if the HOE undermines or ‘brackets’, to put it as Christensen (2010), their FOE. Since HOET ree does not undermine Hannes’ FOE

supporting T ree, this HOE does not become the information-state provided by a normal context in which it is discussed what Hannes should believe. True, I can force ‘should’ to have the relevant sense by saying ‘in light of Hannes’ HOE that his mathematical reasoning is distorted, he should...’, but a context wouldn’t naturally give ‘should’ this sense.

Note that from the truth of ‘Hannes should suspend judgement on T ree

in light of HOET ree’ it does not follow that Hannes has a reason to suspend

judgement onT ree, which would be absurd. It is the FOE-undermining power of HOE that makes it provide reasons. When I gather HOELR, this undermines my

FOE concerning ¬F a, which gives me reason to suspend judgement on whether

¬F a. HOET ree, in contrast, does not undermine Hannes’ perceptual evidence

concerning T reeand hence does not give him reason to suspend judgement on whetherT reeis true. That HOET reecan’t undermine Hannes’ perceptual evidence,

whereas HOELR can undermine my FOE concerning¬F a, is obviously so because

HOET ree is not HOE with respect to T ree, but HOELR is HOE with respect

to ¬F a. Whether my deductive reasoning was distorted when I concluded that

¬F a has something to do with whether ¬F a is true, whereas whether Hannes’ mathematical reasoning was distorted when he perceived the tree does not seem to have any bearing on whether there is a tree in front of him. For a piece of HOE to be HOE with respect to a target proposition P, it needs to be evidence about FOE with respect toP. Given the account of HOE I presented in section 4.2, this means that a body of evidence is HOE with respect to P iff it is evidence about either (i) what FOE one possesses with respect to P, (ii) what the evidential relation between one’s FOE and P is, or (iii) the reliability of one’s cognitive faculties responsible for processing FOE on P. HOET ree is accordingly not HOE

with respect toT ree since it ticks none of these boxes in relation toT ree. A second objection likely to be made against Approach 2 is that it ignores the norm that one should form one’s beliefs based on one’stotal evidence. Both what one shouldF OE and what one shouldHOE believe is relativized only to a part of

one’s total evidence, namely one’s FOE and one’s HOE. However, it seems to be a platitude that when forming one’s beliefs one should take all of one’s evidence into account. Let’s call this position following Carnap (1950) therequirement of total evidence.7

For a start, I should point out that a lot of the statements I defend in this thesis are, at first sight, at odds with the requirement of total evidence. For example, in the previous chapter, I have defended the view that one should, in the objective sense of ‘should’, believe and only believe what is true. This is often not what one’s total evidence supports. Furthermore, we sometimes talk about what someone should believe in light of the evidence they had at some point in the past, which is different from their current total evidence.8 Finally, in the next chapter I will propose that when you give epistemic advice you talk about what your advisee should believe in light of the collective evidence, i.e., the combined evidence of the two of you, which often goes beyond your advisee’s total evidence.

This is not to say that I necessarily reject the requirement of total evidence. Rather, I believe that there are a number of senses of the doxastic ‘should’ and that the requirement of total evidence does not apply to all of them, as for example the collective or the objective one. Yes, it might be true that in some sense of ‘should’, one should believe what is supported by one’s total evidence, but certainly not in every sense of ‘should’. I would argue that shouldHOE is another

sense of the doxastic ‘should’ that is not tied to the requirement of total evidence. Christensen’s (2010) view that HOE brackets one’s FOE provides support for this idea. He believes that in response to gathering HOE, one should ignore one’s FOE, rather than take it into account.

Kelly (2005, 2010) has criticised Christensen’s view precisely because he thinks that it violates the requirement of total evidence. Unlike Christensen, I have the resources to respond to this worry by claiming that I don’t disagree with Kelly

7_{The requirement is also endorsed, among others, by Adler (1989), Williamson (2000: 189),}

and Kelly (2008: 938).

that in some sense the requirement of total evidence has to be respected. The sense I have in mind is ‘shouldF OE’. As already mentioned in section 4.3, Kelly

(2005) himself suggests that in Peer Disagreementthe total evidence supports what the FOE supports since the HOE, i.e., that I believe that the answer is 457 and my peer believes that it is 459, outweighs each other.9 Furthermore, I have argued in the previous subsection, when discussing Approach 1, that all the bodies of FOE in the cases in section 4.2 do not change the support relations with their target proposition even if the respective bodies of HOE are added to them. In short, if the arguments in the previous subsection are sound, then what one shouldF OE believe and what one should believe in light of one’s total evidence is

co-extensive in the cases discussed.

One might protest that even if following the requirement of total evidence and believing what one shouldF OE each leads to the same doxastic attitudes, the

latter is still a violation of the former since it only requires one to believe what is supported by one’s FOE, not one’s total evidence. The worry seems overly pedantic. If the effects of following two different norms is the same, why would it matter which norm one follows?

In any case, there is a way to fully reconcile Approach 2 with the requirement of total evidence. If one’s FOE and HOE combined have the same support relations with every target proposition as FOE alone has, then we could stipulate that it is not our FOE that the doxastic ‘should’ is sometimes relativised to, but rather our total evidence. That is, I can propose that defenders of Steadfastness are not talking about what one shouldF OE believe, but about what one should believe in

light of one’s total evidence, or short, what one shouldT E believe. On this version

of the Evidence-Ambiguity Theory, Steadfastness and Conciliationism are not in conflict because defenders of the former are talking about what one shouldT E

believe, whereas defenders of the latter are talking about what one shouldHOE

believe.

9_{Kelly (2010: 143) weakens this claim. He reasons that since the total body of evidence}

now contains two pieces of HOE that cancel each other out and thus together neither support that the answer is 457 nor 459, the whole body now supports457 to a lesser degree than it did before. For this reason, one should lower one’s confidence in 457 somewhat, even though by far not so much that one comes to suspend judgement. Matheson (2009: 274) shows that this argument is flawed. By this reasoning, adding any kind of evidence that doesn’t bear on our target propositionP and thus neither supportsP nor¬P to our total body of evidence should push us towards suspending onP. This is obviously absurd.

One might attack the idea that one’s FOE and one’s total evidence always have the same support relations with any target proposition by pointing out that HOE can also work as FOE. If I get HOE that my FOE supportsP isn’t this also evidence forP? As Worsnip (2015b: 23) puts it, the effects of HOE sometimes “trickle down” to FOE. Thus, if HOE sometimes has FOE-like effects, then, in some cases, one’s total evidence should have different support relations with some target propositions compared to FOE on it’s own. I reply to this that if a body of evidenceE, which is HOE with respect toP, is also FOE with respect toP, then

E is not only part of our HOE, but also of our FOE. Thus, combining FOE and HOE and thus ‘adding’E to FOE does not make a difference in such cases since

E would be part of one’s FOE already anyway.

To conclude, the requirement of total evidence is already respected by the Evidence-Ambiguity Theory in that what one shouldF OE believe is co-extensive

with what one shouldT E believe in the cases discussed in section 4.3. If this

does not suffice for a proponent of the requirement of total evidence, I could adjust the Evidence-Ambiguity Theory such that defenders of Steadfastness are talking about what one shouldT E believe, not what one shouldF OE believe. In

the following, however, I will put this issue aside and return to speaking of what one shouldF OE believe.