Coordinación y consulta a Órganos de administración del Estado

Some things feel so obvious, you know them to be true. Here’s a vivid and horrifying example from Eleonore Stump:

A young Muslim mother in Bosnia was repeatedly raped in front of her husband and father, with her baby screaming on the floor beside her. When her tormentors seemed finally tired of her, she begged permission to nurse the child. In response, one of the rapists swiftly decapitated the baby and threw the head in the mother’s lap. This evil is different, and we feel it immediately. We don’t have to reason about it or think it over. As we read the story, we are filled with grief and distress, shaken with revulsion and

incomprehension. The taste of real wickedness is sharply different from the taste of garden-variety moral evil, and we discern it directly, with pain. (1994, 239)

Reading this story, you know the act to be wrong, and horribly so. You don’t have to commit to knowing that the rapist was blameworthy; perhaps there are equally horrifying circumstances of the rapist’s upbringing that are somehow exculpatory. But you know the situation is awful and that the acts done in the situation are awful as well. You don’t need to reason from a prior moral theory; the intuition about the case is a constraint on moral theory.

Nor must your knowledge be unrevisable; perhaps there are further details you could discover—bizarre science-fiction-thought-experiment type details—that would rightly change

2 _{As a reminder, the Novice Knowledge Principle says that, often, if a counterargument invokes evidence-types,}

methods, and principles with respect to which you lack relevant background knowledge or requisite methodological acumen, then knowledge can survive the counterargument being apparently flawless.

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your mind about the case. Still, the felt obviousness of a proposition sometimes provides knowledge that the proposition is true. Call this view Minimal Conservatism about Knowledge (MCK):

(MCK) If it feels obvious to you that p then you prima facie know that p.

You prima facie know that p when, unless there are defeaters, you know that p. The plausibility of MCK depends on the range of defeaters it allows to defeat the prima facie knowledge

conferred by felt obviousness. We should be liberal about allowable defeaters because there are lots of cases in which felt obviousness is not sufficient for knowledge. This can happen if

• the other conditions of knowledge aren’t satisfied (for example, the conclusion is false) • you have good reason to believe that your feelings of obviousness are unreliable about

the issue in question

• there is a knowledge-destroying salient counterargument against p

• your feeling of obviousness is the result of unreliable belief-forming faculties • p shouldn’t feel obvious to you

• your belief that p conflicts with other attitudes you have

• objective prior probabilities require that you have low confidence in p

Because of the wide range of allowable defeaters, it doesn’t follow from MCK that if you

disagree with someone, neither of you have good arguments at the ready, and you each take your respective positions to be “just obvious,” that either both of you or neither of you have

knowledge (or even are in a position to know). One of you, for various, possibly externalist- friendly reasons, can know while the other doesn’t. This makes MCK seem in some ways stronger and in some ways weaker than Michael Huemer’s phenomenal conservatism:

(PC) If it seems to S as if P, then S thereby has at least prima facie justification for believing that P. (Huemer 2001, 98)3

3 _{In later work, Huemer modifies the account to make the seeming that p sufficient, barring defeaters, for S to}

thereby have “at least some degree of justification for believing that p” (Huemer 2007, 30). The reason for adding the “at least some degree of” is “to make clear that one need not have full justification for belief merely by having, for example, a weak and wavering appearance” (30). In the cases of interest in this chapter the feeling of

obviousness is not “weak and wavering.” If phenomenal conservatism is true, in the absence of defeaters, such felt obviousness should suffice for outright justification.

Phenomenal conservatism is a view about justification. MCK is a view about knowledge. In that way, MCK might seem stronger than phenomenal conservatism. But because of the wide range of defeaters MCK allows, MCK is no less plausible than PC. For if externalist conditions prevent a prima facie justified belief from counting as knowledge, it’s still the case, according to MCK, that the prima facie justified believer prima facie knows.

Allowing this wide range of defeaters makes MCK in another way seem weaker than phenomenal conservatism. Huemer’s phenomenal conservatism is an internalist view; the

defeaters Huemer allows to defeat the prima facie justification provided by it seeming to S that P are all internal defeaters.4 In that sense, MCK is closer to Berit Brogaard’s “Sensible

Dogmatism,” according to which

the mental states that confer prima facie justification on belief are states to which you have introspective access but the factors that determine whether those states confer justification is not something to which you have introspective access. (Brogaard 2013, 278–279)5

This is not to say that we should be committed to externalism—just that there is a weak version of phenomenal conservatism that is consistent with externalism. MCK is like that, except about knowledge rather than justification.6

Liberally interpreting what counts as knowledge-destroying defeaters makes MCK on one reading trivial: if it feels obvious to you that p, then you know that p except when you don’t. MCK is not trivial if it is stipulated to include an implicit existential claim: that there are some

4 _{See (Huemer 2006).}

5 _{It’s also similar to Peter Markie’s Qualified General Dogmatism, which holds that “seemings are a source of prima}

facie justification only when appropriate background conditions are met” (Markie 2013, 250). Though Markie wants the appropriate background conditions to be consistent with internalism, the requirement of background conditions might allow externalists to adopt the general schema of Markie’s view.

6 _{Allowing external constraints on which feelings of obviousness confer knowledge allows MCK to avoid certain}

objections to phenomenal conservatism, for example Clayton Littlejohn’s (2011) worry that phenomenal

conservatism is committed to the possibility that you can be justified in believing that you shouldn’t do something even though, in fact, you should.

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cases in which there are no appropriate defeaters—in which it feeling obvious to you that p is sufficient for knowing that p. Phenomenal conservatism benefits from a similar supplementation. For PC to be not only plausible but substantial, there have to be some cases in which its seeming to S as if p results not only in prima facie justification, but outright justification. MCK is no less plausible in this regard than PC. If seemings sometimes result in outright justification, felt obviousness sometimes results in outright knowledge.

Here’s an objection to the claim that felt obviousness sometimes results in outright knowledge: felt obviousness is fallible; falsehoods can feel obviously true. Perhaps the mere fallibility of felt obviousness destroys knowledge. This could happen if the fallibility of felt obviousness were a Gettierizing feature. Since, it might be said, we could easily go wrong by relying on felt obviousness, reliance on felt obviousness makes the truth of our beliefs too much subject to luck.

Seemings can’t result in outright justification—as PC claims they can—if the fallibility of our seemings is a Gettierizing feature. We are all aware of the fact that our seemings are fallible. But awareness of Gettierizing features renders the resultant beliefs unjustified. Awareness of the prevalence of barn facades renders unjustified the belief that you are looking at a barn.

Awareness that the sheep-shaped object you’re looking at is a rock renders unjustified the belief that there is a sheep in the field. Therefore, if mere fallibility of felt obviousness destroys

knowledge of what feels obvious to you, the universal awareness of the fallibility of felt obviousness should destroy justification of what feels obvious. Because PC requires that awareness of the fallibility of felt obviousness does not destroy outright justification, any advocate of PC needs to agree with MCK that the mere fallibility of felt obviousness does not destroy knowledge.

Therefore, if we grant with PC that felt obviousness results in prima facie justification and sometimes results in outright justification, we should grant that felt obviousness results in prima facie knowledge and sometimes results in outright knowledge. The existential claim is confirmed by example.7 In addition to Stump’s case of horrific action, it’s also just obvious that no magic is going on at magic shows, that your lost car keys didn’t just vanish into thin air, that the world is more than five minutes old, that three is less than eight, that my eight-year-old daughter is not the Zodiac Killer, and that there are fewer than 1,000 speckles on this hen:

.

Some of the examples are arguably examples of a priori knowledge—as in Stump’s example and your knowledge that three is less than eight. In others the resultant knowledge is at least partly empirical, as in the example of the speckled hen. Sometimes felt obviousness stands in for the epistemic source that generated the feeling of obviousness and transfers epistemic standing onto the proposition you know—as in your knowledge that no magic is going on in magic shows, which presumably is the result of a lifetime of experiences that you aren’t immediately able to bring to mind. In some examples—most plausibly your knowledge that your keys didn’t just vanish and that the world is more than five minutes old—perhaps the knowledge is grounded in your worldview, or is a framework judgment, or a Wittgensteinian hinge, or a “blik” in R. M.

7 _{This case-based argument for MCK is somewhat similar to Jessica Brown’s (2013) case-based argument for the}

principle she calls Immediacy: “(Sometimes) when S has the intuition that p, the belief which is S’s intuition is immediately justified” (74).

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Hare’s (1955) sense (if such things can be construed loosely enough to allow them to count as knowledge). MCK takes no stand on the reasons why obviousness can be sufficient for

knowledge. It claims only that, however felt obviousness is sufficient for knowledge, it sometimes, barring defeaters, is.

This leaves MCK open to a second worry—not that it is trivial, but that it leaves no epistemic work for the feeling of obviousness to do. MCK says that there are cases in which it is just obvious to you that p and you know that p. Because it allows that, ultimately, you know that p because of a lifetime of experience, or because p is a fundamental part of your worldview, the feeling of obviousness itself might seem to be epistemically inert. What provides knowledge is your lifetime of experience or the fact that p is a fundamental part of your worldview, not that it feels obvious to you that p. MCK, the worry goes, is no more epistemologically revealing than a principle that says, “Sometimes it’s Tuesday and, also, you know that p.” According to MCK, sometimes it feels obvious to you that p and, also, you know that p.

Felt obviousness does epistemic work in all these cases because in all these cases felt obviousness is an essential part of the basis for your belief. Take the case in which your knowledge is most clearly empirical: the case of the hen with fewer than 1,000 speckles. You could, of course, count the speckles and reason to the conclusion that they number fewer than 1,000. But you don’t have to. When asked, “How do you know without counting that there are fewer than 1,000?” you’ll answer, “Just look! It’s obvious.” You cite the obviousness of the conclusion when asked for your basis.8

8 _{When you cite felt obviousness as your basis, you need not be claiming that your belief is an inference from the}

fact that the content feels obvious to you. Felt obviousness can be a phenomenal justification-maker as opposed to a premise used in an inference.

You can be wrong about the bases of your beliefs. You might sincerely report that your reason for condemning Trump’s missile assault on a Syrian airbase is that it risks alienating Russia, when in fact your reason is that you voted against Trump and so have an interest in concluding that any decisions he makes are wrongheaded. Much research in cognitive

psychology has the lesson that motives and methods are opaque.9 Therefore, the fact that you cite the felt obviousness of your conclusion when asked for your basis may not reveal your actual basis.

Still, in many cases, it’s not clear why you’d misreport felt obviousness as your basis. It’s not like you have some self-motivated interest in misreporting your actual basis in the case of the speckled hen. Even if there were, it seems plausible that your self-motivated interests would create a feeling of obviousness when there otherwise would be none. It’s certainly no less plausible than that you wrongly report that the felt-obviousness is partly the basis of your belief. Furthermore, the basis of your belief may not require a causal relation between the basis and the belief it bases. This is demonstrated in Keith Lehrer’s (1971) Gypsy Lawyer case. It may be sufficient for basing that you’d sincerely cite a state or proposition when asked to justify your belief. Therefore, I assume without further argument that in many of these cases felt obviousness is an essential part of the basis for your belief.

If felt obviousness is an essential part of the basis for your belief, it had better be part of what confers epistemic status on the proposition you believe. This follows from a premise Huemer uses in his self-defeat argument for phenomenal conservatism: “if one’s belief that p is based on something that does not constitute a source of justification for believing that p, then one’s belief that p is unjustified” (Huemer 2007, 40). The premise depends on a distinction

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between doxastic justification—the justification that accrues to beliefs—and propositional justification—the justification that accrues to propositions. On the construal I favor, a proposition is justified for you just in case you should believe it, while your belief in that proposition is doxastically justified only if your belief is based in the right way on whatever justifies the proposition. This is standardly referred to as the “basing requirement” for doxastic justification. Here’s Declan Smithies’ statement of the requirement:

One’s belief that p is doxastically justified if and only if one has propositional

justification to believe that p and, moreover, one uses one’s propositional justification in believing that p on the basis of one’s propositional justification to believe that p. (2011, 26)

To sum up the standard picture, doxastic justification = propositional justified + proper basing. The standard picture is more than a claim about entailments. It’s a metaphysical claim: propositional justification comes first. Your belief is justified because it’s a belief in a

proposition with propositional justification and it’s properly based.10 The standard view is also two-directional: propositional justification plus proper basing is both necessary and sufficient for doxastic justification. Neither the metaphysical claim nor the sufficiency direction is required to show that felt obviousness is epistemically relevant to the knowledge it’s sometimes sufficient for. All that’s needed is a minimal conception of doxastic justification: that if your belief that p is doxastically justified, then your belief that p is properly based—based on whatever it is that propositionally justifies p.

10 _{See (Kvanvig and Menzel 1990) for an argument for the metaphysical claim. Smithies (2012, 6) also endorses the}

order of explanation required by the metaphysical claim. Alvin Goldman (1979, 21) and John Turri (2010, 320) deny the metaphysical claim. But even Goldman and Turri either are committed to or leave open the bare entailment claim that if your belief that p is doxastically justified, then p is propositionally justified for you and properly based. Turri offers counterexamples to the other direction of this bare entailment claim—to the claim that propositional justification plus basing suffices for doxastic justification. The direction he leaves open is all that is needed for felt obviousness to have epistemic force.

This minimal conception of doxastic justification entails that, in the above examples, felt obviousness is a source of propositional justification for what you know. Focusing on the hen example, suppose by hypothesis that you know that the hen has fewer than 1,000 speckles and that an essential part of your basis is that it’s just obvious to you that it does. By the minimal conception of doxastic justification, your belief is properly based; it is based on something that makes it justified for you that the hen has fewer than 1,000 speckles. Therefore, once it’s granted that you know that the hen has fewer than 1,000 speckles and that your basis is (in essential part) that it’s just obvious it does, it follows from the minimal conception of doxastic justification that felt obviousness is a proper basis for belief in that case.

Sometimes the felt obviousness of your position is supplemented by other kinds of evidence. For example, when it comes to the denial of psychic phenomena, non-believers— sometimes called “goats” (as opposed to “sheep”) (Blackmore 1992, 368)—supplement their feelings of obviousness with the fact that there is no single decisive study that demonstrates the existence of psychic phenomena and that whenever believers are called upon for a

demonstration, they fail. Atheists supplement their feeling that God’s non-existence is obvious with arguments about flying spaghetti monsters, the Problem of Evil, the existence of multiple competing religious views, and the fact that a person’s religion tends to be a product of

contingencies of their upbringing.

As we saw in the last chapter, some of these arguments—if they rely on the principle that absence of evidence is evidence of absence—won’t ground the kind of knowledge that resists being unable to figure out what’s wrong with a relevant counterargument. References to flying spaghetti monsters won’t help sustain knowledge in the face of relevant counterarguments, because they rely for their force on there being no relevant counterarguments in need of

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resistance. These kinds of supplements to felt obviousness won’t help show how atheistic or goat knowledge can resist the inability to figure out what’s wrong with theistic arguments or

arguments for psychic phenomena.

Other arguments—like the Problem of Evil—may offer more hope, though they also have a number of problems for those looking to avoid reliance on felt obviousness. First, they may themselves rely on felt obviousness in the making of their case—for example, the felt

obviousness (to the atheist) that there is no plausible secret greater good that could make the suffering in the world worth it. Second, some of the arguments may undermine atheistic and goat knowledge just as much as they undermine the relevant counterarguments. Worries about the role of upbringing in religious beliefs might undermine atheism as much as any specific religious