There is also a case to be made for the claim that Seeming-Independence does even
better than the traditional Infalliblist view of the a priori at making the a priori/a
posteriori distinction an overtly epistemological distinction. One worry for
understanding the distinction in terms of infallibility— or ‘ultra-reliability’ as Kitcher prefers to put it—is that being ultra-reliable is not a clear hallmark of the a priori. There are clear cases of ultra-reliable a posteriori beliefs as well. Furthermore, and relatedly, the question of whether a belief is ultra-reliable is not obviously an
epistemological question. This is because the ultra-reliability of a belief is a property that need not be explained by any epistemological features of the belief.
Consider a demonstrative judgement like ‘that pen exists’. Now
demonstratives take their semantic content directly from the objects that they pick out: so a thought with that content can only be considered in the first place if I successfully make reference to a pen. In situations where there is no pen in front of me, my judgement is not demonstrative, even though it might seem to me that it is. It has an altogether different content.
And we individuate beliefs not in terms of the content they seem to have, but in terms of the content they do have. So in possible worlds where there is no pen in front of me, I do not believe the same thing as I do in possible worlds where there is a pen in front of me. 4
But a clear implication of this is that when I hold the demonstrative belief ‘that pen exists’, it must be true. The belief is ultra-reliable: there is no possible way to hold this kind of belief without there being a pen to pick out. What makes it possible for me to think that thought also makes the belief true. Yet it is also clearly a posteriori: I know that there is a pen there only because I can see that there is. So, what we have here is an ultra-reliable a posteriori warranted belief.
But on the traditional infalliblist account of the a priori, ultra-reliability is supposed to be the defining characteristic of the a priori. Infallibility was supposed to serve as the clearly epistemological criterion they could point to in support of the
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view that the a priori/a posteriori distinction is an epistemic one rather than a metaphysical or modal distinction. The presence of ultra-reliable a posteriori beliefs, then, suggests that this view does not cleanly capture the distinction between the a priori and the a posteriori.
A closely related point is that ultra-reliability is not an essentially epistemological property. That is to say, the fact that a particular belief cannot possibly be false does not, in itself, add to the epistemological status of the belief. Whether this infallibility makes a difference to the epistemological status of the belief depends on why the belief is ultra-reliable.
Suppose that I am aware that I have been slipped a drug that makes me hallucinate extremely realistic-looking pens. This is a context, I take it, in which norm (4)5 would not permit me to rely purely on how it seems to me in forming beliefs about pens: this would be a situation where the ceteris paribus clause of norm (4) comes into play. Coming to believe that there is a pen in front of me just because it perceptually seems to me that there is in those circumstances where I
have reason to mistrust my perceptual experiences is clearly and even
paradigmatically irrational: this cannot be construed as a belief that follows a legitimate epistemic norm.6
But suppose that I ignore this and maintain my (misplaced) faith in my perceptual faculties. Suppose further that I do manage to make reference to the single genuine pen in my environment and form the demonstrative belief ‘that pen exists’. This belief is ultra-reliable. But that has no relevance to the question of whether the belief is rational. Our epistemic assessment of the belief is not, in this context, altered by considerations of its ultra-reliability. My belief is entirely unwarranted, even though it is ultra-reliable. In this case, then, questions of whether I am warranted in holding my demonstrative belief come apart from questions of its status as an ultra-reliable belief. Ultra-reliability in and of itself is not an indicator of epistemic standing.
5 (4) If it perceptually seems to you that p then all things being equal you may believe that p. 6
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Now Seeming-Independence has an advantage in that it holds that direct a priori beliefs are ultra-reliable in virtue of their having been formed in a manner that is in compliance with a special kind of epistemic norm. So we might say that such beliefs are ultra-reliable because they are warranted.
While Seeming-Independence does not hold that every a priori belief is ultra-reliable, it does make ultra-reliability a product of the belief’s epistemic status.
To rephrase the point, there is something importantly different about why this kind of demonstrative thought is guaranteed to be true, and why a non- inferential a priori warranted judgement is guaranteed to be true. With direct a priori beliefs, this ultra-reliability applies only to those beliefs that are in full
compliance with the relevant epistemic norms; that is, to those beliefs that are fully and genuinely rational. The infallibility, then, comes from the way in which the belief was arrived at.
Consider some logical belief I hold, l. Let us suppose l is a true logical principle that strikes professional logicians as plainly self-evident, but which is beyond the intuitions of some less reflective non-philosophers. Now in this case, professional logicians will believe l because it is self-evident. An unsophisticated layman, however, might come to believe l only on the basis of the testimony of an expert logician.
Now it is important to see that, on Seeming-Independence, whether the belief is infallibly warranted depends on whether one is following norm (10) in believing l. There is nothing wrong with relying on expert testimony when forming logical beliefs. This is most commonly how laymen acquire information about technical subjects. For instance, all or almost all of my scientific beliefs are formed like this. There is no reason to think it inappropriate for logic.
There might even be good reason to prefer that method to the normal, direct method. If I have reasons to doubt that I am good at telling self-evident logical propositions from plausible-looking false ones, then relying on an expert in forming logical beliefs would be better than not doing so.
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But doing this can bring different epistemic norms into play. By employing different belief-forming methodologies, we can actually make our beliefs
answerable to different epistemic norms. If norm (10) has nothing to do with either why I formed the belief, nor why I continue to believe it, then the warrant for that belief must come from another source. The self-evidence of a proposition can only justify my belief in those cases where I follow norm (10). There is nothing
preventing that warrant coming from my trusting the word of an expert. Seeming- Independence does not claim that all logically self-evident propositions are warranted a priori. It is possible that someone might hold that belief for reasons entirely unrelated to its self-evidence. Depending on what those reasons are, this might make the logical belief, unusually, a posteriori. On Seeming-Independence, whether a belief is a priori depends exclusively on the norms the believer is
complying with. Norm (10) offers us an infallible route by which to come to believe
l, but there might also be other acceptable routes that are not infallible.
The point is that on Seeming-Independence, the infallibility of direct a priori beliefs is to be explained not by the content of the beliefs themselves, but by the way we go about acquiring and maintaining that belief. What this type of a priori reasoning does, this suggests, is provide us with a special route to knowledge—a route that, if followed correctly, guarantees truth. The fact remains that a posteriori
warrant cannot itself provide this sort of guarantee, even if sometimes the content
of certain a posteriori beliefs can provide it.
This, I think, suffices to retain a significant epistemic difference between the a priori and the a posteriori. According to Seeming-Independence, the type of warrant that we typically have for those logical, conceptual or mathematical beliefs that strike us as intuitively obvious, is different in kind from the warrant we have for those similarly immediate perceptual beliefs. Propositions like ‘1+1=2’, or ‘nothing is both red and green all over at the same time’ are typically governed by norm (10): that is, we believe these propositions because they are self-evident. 7
7 Though, as we have seen, they are not always governed by this norm. Conceptual truths don’t have
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This supplies them with a kind of infallible epistemic warrant. Since self- evidence is factive, anybody who follows norm (10) correctly will arrive at true belief. Epistemic warrant and truth are inseparable in this case: the former ensures the presence of the latter. Typically, beliefs like ‘there is a pen on my desk’ are governed by norm (4): it is partly because it perceptually seems to me that there is a pen on my desk that I believe there is. Since how it seems to me is not factive, (4) supplies merely fallible warrant: it cannot absolutely guarantee that there is indeed a pen on my desk.