I donāt think penalizing complexity is enough to escape radical skepticism in general. Consider the āuniverse popped into existence (fully-formed) 5 minutes agoā hypothesis. Itās not obvious that this is more complex than the alternative hypothesis that includes the past five minutes PLUS billions of years before that. One could try to argue for this claim, but I donāt think that our confidence in history should be *contingent* on that extremely contentious philosophical project working out successfully!
But to clarify: I donāt think I say anything much in that post about āthe reasons why we should start withā various anti-skeptical priors, and Iām certainly not committed to saying that there are āsimilar reasonsā in every anti-skeptical case. The similarity I point to is simply that we clearly should have anti-skeptical priors. āWhyā is a separate question (if it has an answer at all, the answer may vary from case to case).
On whether we agree: When I talk about exercising better rather than worse judgment, I take success here to be determined by the contents of our judgments. Some claims warrant higher credence than others, and we should try to have our credences match as close as possible to the objectively warranted level.
But thatās quite different from focusing on whether our judgments stem from a āreliable sourceā. I think thereās very little chance that you could show that almost any of your philosophical beliefs (including this very epistemic demand) stem from a source that we can independently demonstrate to be reliable. I think the kind of higher-order inquiry youāre proposing is a dead end: you canāt really judge which philosophical dispositions are reliable until youāve determined which philosophical beliefs are true.
To illustrate with a couple of concrete examples:
(1) You claim that āan evolutionary pressure toward pro-natalist beliefsā is an āunreliableā source. But that isnāt unreliable if pro-natalism is (broadly) correct.
(2) Compare evolutionary pressures to judge that pain is bad. A skeptic might claim this source is āunreliableā, but we neednāt accept that claim. Since pain is bad, when evolution disposes us to believe this, it is disposing us towards a true belief. (To simply assert this obviously wonāt suffice to convince a skeptic, but the lesson of post-Cartesian epistemology is that trying to convince skeptics is a foolās game.)
Re (1): I mean, say we know the reason why Alice is a pro-natalist is 100% due to the mere fact that this belief was evolutionarily advantageous for her ancestors (and 0% due to good philosophical reasoning). This would discredit her belief, right? This wouldnāt mean pro-natalism is incorrect. It would just mean that if it is correct, it is for reasons that have nothing to do with what led Alice to endorse it. She just happened to luckily be āright for the wrong reasonsā. Do you at least agree with this in this particular contrived example or do you think that evolutionary pressures cannot ever be a reason to question our beliefs?
(Waiting for your answer on this before potentially responding to the rest as I think this will help us pin down the crux.)
Philosophical truths are causally inefficacious, so we already know that there is a causal explanation for any philosophical belief you have that (one could characterize as) having ānothing to do withā the reasons why it is true. So if you accept that causal condition as sufficient for debunking, you cannot have any philosophical beliefs whatsoever.
Put another way: we should already be āquestioning our beliefsā; spinning out a causal debunking story offers nothing new. Itās just an isolated demand for rigor, when you should already be questioning everything, and forming the overall most coherent belief-set you can in light of that questioning.
We do better, I argue, to regard the causal origins of a (normative) belief as lacking intrinsic epistemic significance. The important question is instead just whether the proposition in question is itself either intrinsically credible or otherwise justified. Parfit rejects this (p.287):
Suppose we discover that we have some belief because we were hypnotized to have this belief, by some hypnotist who chose at random what to cause us to believe. One example might be the belief that incest between siblings is morally wrong. If the hypnotistās flipped coin had landed the other way up, he would have caused us to believe that such incest is not wrong. If we discovered that this was how our belief was caused, we could not justifiably assume that this belief was true.
I agree that we cannot just assume that such a belief is true (but this was just as true before we learned of its causal originsāthe hypnotist makes no difference). We need to expose it to critical reflection in light of all else that we believe. Perhaps we will find that there is no basis for believing such incest to be wrong. Or perhaps we will find a basis after all (perhaps on indirect consequentialist grounds). Either way, what matters is just whether there is a good justification to be found or not, which is a matter completely independent of us and how we originally came by the belief. Parfit commits the genetic fallacy when he asserts that the causal origins āwould cast grave doubt on the justifiability of these beliefs.ā (288)
Note that āphilosophical reasoningā governs how we update our beliefs, iron out inconsistencies, etc. But the raw starting points are not reached by āreasoningā (what would you be reasoning from, if you donāt already accept any premises?) So your assumed contrast between āgood philosophical reasoningā and āsuspicious causal forces that undermine beliefā would actually undermine all beliefs, once you trace them back to foundational premises.
The only way to actually maintain coherent beliefs is to make your peace with having starting points that were not themselves determined via a rational process. Such causal ādebunkingā gives us a reason to take another look at our starting points, and consider whether (in light of everything we now believe) we want to revise them. But if the starting points still seem right to us, in light of everything, then it has to be reasonable to stick with them whatever their original causal basis may have been.
Overall, the solution is just to assess the first-order issues on their merits. āDebunkingā arguments are a sideshow. They should never convince anyone who shouldnāt already have been equally convinced on independent (first-order) grounds.
Imagine you and I have laid out all the possible considerations for and against reducing X-risks and still disagree (because we make different opaque judgment calls when weighing these considerations against one another). Then, do you agree that we have nothing left to discuss other than whether any of our judgment calls correlate with the truth?
(This, on its own, doesnāt prove anything about whether EDAs can ever help us; Iām just trying to pin down which assumption Iām making that you donāt or vice versa).
Probably nothing left to discuss, period. (Which judgment calls we take to correlate with the truth will simply depend on what we take the truth to be, which is just whatās in dispute. I donāt think thereās any neutral way to establish whose starting points are more intrinsically credible.)
> I donāt think thereās any neutral way to establish whose starting points are more intrinsically credible.
So do I have any good reason to favor my starting points (/ājudgment calls) over yours, then? Whether to keep mine or to adopt yours becomes an arbitrary choice, no?
It depends what constraints you put on what can qualify as a āgood reasonā. If you think that a good reason has to be āneutrally recognizableā as such, then thereāll be no good reason to prefer any internally-coherent worldview over any other. That includes some really crazy (by our lights) worldviews. So we may instead allow that good reasons arenāt always recognizable by others. Each person may then take themselves to have good reason to stick with their starting points, though perhaps only one is actually right about thisāand since it isnāt independently verifiable which, there would seem an element of epistemic luck to it all. (A disheartening result, if you had hoped that rational argumentation could guarantee that we would all converge on the truth!)
I discuss this epistemic picture in a bit more detail in āKnowing What Mattersā.
I just posted the following reply to Jesse:
But to clarify: I donāt think I say anything much in that post about āthe reasons why we should start withā various anti-skeptical priors, and Iām certainly not committed to saying that there are āsimilar reasonsā in every anti-skeptical case. The similarity I point to is simply that we clearly should have anti-skeptical priors. āWhyā is a separate question (if it has an answer at all, the answer may vary from case to case).
On whether we agree: When I talk about exercising better rather than worse judgment, I take success here to be determined by the contents of our judgments. Some claims warrant higher credence than others, and we should try to have our credences match as close as possible to the objectively warranted level.
But thatās quite different from focusing on whether our judgments stem from a āreliable sourceā. I think thereās very little chance that you could show that almost any of your philosophical beliefs (including this very epistemic demand) stem from a source that we can independently demonstrate to be reliable. I think the kind of higher-order inquiry youāre proposing is a dead end: you canāt really judge which philosophical dispositions are reliable until youāve determined which philosophical beliefs are true.
To illustrate with a couple of concrete examples:
(1) You claim that āan evolutionary pressure toward pro-natalist beliefsā is an āunreliableā source. But that isnāt unreliable if pro-natalism is (broadly) correct.
(2) Compare evolutionary pressures to judge that pain is bad. A skeptic might claim this source is āunreliableā, but we neednāt accept that claim. Since pain is bad, when evolution disposes us to believe this, it is disposing us towards a true belief. (To simply assert this obviously wonāt suffice to convince a skeptic, but the lesson of post-Cartesian epistemology is that trying to convince skeptics is a foolās game.)
Re (1): I mean, say we know the reason why Alice is a pro-natalist is 100% due to the mere fact that this belief was evolutionarily advantageous for her ancestors (and 0% due to good philosophical reasoning). This would discredit her belief, right? This wouldnāt mean pro-natalism is incorrect. It would just mean that if it is correct, it is for reasons that have nothing to do with what led Alice to endorse it. She just happened to luckily be āright for the wrong reasonsā. Do you at least agree with this in this particular contrived example or do you think that evolutionary pressures cannot ever be a reason to question our beliefs?
(Waiting for your answer on this before potentially responding to the rest as I think this will help us pin down the crux.)
Philosophical truths are causally inefficacious, so we already know that there is a causal explanation for any philosophical belief you have that (one could characterize as) having ānothing to do withā the reasons why it is true. So if you accept that causal condition as sufficient for debunking, you cannot have any philosophical beliefs whatsoever.
Put another way: we should already be āquestioning our beliefsā; spinning out a causal debunking story offers nothing new. Itās just an isolated demand for rigor, when you should already be questioning everything, and forming the overall most coherent belief-set you can in light of that questioning.
Compare my response to Parfit:
Note that āphilosophical reasoningā governs how we update our beliefs, iron out inconsistencies, etc. But the raw starting points are not reached by āreasoningā (what would you be reasoning from, if you donāt already accept any premises?) So your assumed contrast between āgood philosophical reasoningā and āsuspicious causal forces that undermine beliefā would actually undermine all beliefs, once you trace them back to foundational premises.
The only way to actually maintain coherent beliefs is to make your peace with having starting points that were not themselves determined via a rational process. Such causal ādebunkingā gives us a reason to take another look at our starting points, and consider whether (in light of everything we now believe) we want to revise them. But if the starting points still seem right to us, in light of everything, then it has to be reasonable to stick with them whatever their original causal basis may have been.
Overall, the solution is just to assess the first-order issues on their merits. āDebunkingā arguments are a sideshow. They should never convince anyone who shouldnāt already have been equally convinced on independent (first-order) grounds.
Imagine you and I have laid out all the possible considerations for and against reducing X-risks and still disagree (because we make different opaque judgment calls when weighing these considerations against one another). Then, do you agree that we have nothing left to discuss other than whether any of our judgment calls correlate with the truth?
(This, on its own, doesnāt prove anything about whether EDAs can ever help us; Iām just trying to pin down which assumption Iām making that you donāt or vice versa).
Probably nothing left to discuss, period. (Which judgment calls we take to correlate with the truth will simply depend on what we take the truth to be, which is just whatās in dispute. I donāt think thereās any neutral way to establish whose starting points are more intrinsically credible.)
Oh interesting.
> I donāt think thereās any neutral way to establish whose starting points are more intrinsically credible.
So do I have any good reason to favor my starting points (/ājudgment calls) over yours, then? Whether to keep mine or to adopt yours becomes an arbitrary choice, no?
It depends what constraints you put on what can qualify as a āgood reasonā. If you think that a good reason has to be āneutrally recognizableā as such, then thereāll be no good reason to prefer any internally-coherent worldview over any other. That includes some really crazy (by our lights) worldviews. So we may instead allow that good reasons arenāt always recognizable by others. Each person may then take themselves to have good reason to stick with their starting points, though perhaps only one is actually right about thisāand since it isnāt independently verifiable which, there would seem an element of epistemic luck to it all. (A disheartening result, if you had hoped that rational argumentation could guarantee that we would all converge on the truth!)
I discuss this epistemic picture in a bit more detail in āKnowing What Mattersā.
Nice, I see. Iāll go read that in more detail. Thanks for taking the time to clarify your view in this thread. Glad we identified the crux. :)