A Critical Introduction to the Epistemology of Memory

Thomas D. Senor

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781472525598
• eBook ISBN:
  9781472529381
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

In this clear and up-to-date introduction, Thomas D. Senor lays the philosophical foundation needed to understand the justification of memory belief. This book explores traditional accounts of the justification of memory belief and examines the resources that prominent positions in contemporary epistemology have to offer theories of the memorial justification. Along the way, epistemic conservatism, evidentialism, foundationalism, phenomenal conservatism, reliabilism, and preservationism all feature.

Study Questions and annotated Further Reading guides at the end of each chapter make this book ideal for classroom use and independent study. Written in very clear prose, A Critical Introduction to the Epistemology of Memory is a valuable resource for students approaching epistemology for the first time or those looking to advance their understanding of a core area of philosophy.

1

Introduction: Clarifying the issue and laying the groundwork

Introduction

Looking to the west, I see the sun begin to sink into the Pacific Ocean, and I come to believe that the sun is setting. This is a standard, if lovely, situation. The belief I’ve just formed is surely justified. I am not under the influence of any judgment-affecting drugs, and I have no reason to think my belief is false or my senses unreliable. My new belief is typical of the kind that we assume to be both justified and true. It would take a fair amount of philosophical energy to convince us to the contrary.

Now, strictly speaking, the report that I gave of the genesis of my belief is inaccurate—or at least incomplete. I did, in fact, look at the horizon and come to believe that the sun was setting. But that visual experience, by itself, is insufficient to justify that belief or even for me to form the belief at all. Even assuming that I have the concept of sunsets, and know what they look like, my experience together with this background wouldn’t justify me in believing that the sun was setting. Why not? Because had I been on the opposite coast of the United States, for example, and faced east early in the morning, I might have had a visual experience indistinguishable from the one I just had. In such a case, of course, I wouldn’t have been justified in believing that the sun was setting. So, my belief is based in part on my visual experience of seeing the sun over the water, and in part on background information that I’m facing west or that it is late in the day (or both). So, if this newly acquired belief is justified, and it is based in part on a background belief, then it must be either that this background belief is itself justified or that I have some independent justification for my new belief. But I don’t have any independent reason to think that the sun is now setting. Therefore, if my belief is justified it will have to be because the background belief on which it partially depends is justified too. For an unjustified belief can’t be the crucial epistemic basis of a justified belief. Thus, the conviction that my new belief is justified commits one to thinking that these other beliefs are justified too.

To be clear, I’m not arguing that there are no epistemically basic beliefs—that is, beliefs that are justified independently of being positively supported by other beliefs. In the case in question, perhaps my belief that I’m seeing the sun is dependent only on my having a certain kind of intellectual skill—namely, that of being able to distinguish the sun from other objects. Be that as it may, the situation I’m in regarding my sunset belief is extremely common. We regularly form new beliefs that are justified only if earlier formed beliefs are now justified for us. In these ubiquitous cases, we are justified in coming to believe a proposition Ps only if every belief upon which P epistemically depends is justified.¹ Suppose that I am justified in coming to believe that R and, at a later time, I come to believe that P which I base on my belief that R. Given what was said above, my belief that P can be justified only if R is justified. But what is necessary for that? That is, what justifies my previously formed belief that R?

This might sound like a request for a general, sufficient condition for justified belief. But that is not what it is, or at least that is not what I am assuming to be the question’s significance. A distinction that will be of central importance for our purposes is between “coming to believe that P” and “continuing to believe that P. ” This dichotomy might well be unfamiliar even to one well-read in contemporary epistemology. Typically, theories of justification are presented as being simply what one needs to be justified in a belief—where there is no distinction between the conditions needed to justifiably form the belief and those needed to justifiably retain it.² But it is unclear why we should think that the conditions necessary and sufficient for justifiably coming to believe a proposition are identical with those for justifiably continuing to believe it. And, in fact, we’ll see that there are some plausible reasons for thinking that the two sets of conditions are distinct.

For now, let’s go back to our original question: in order for my newly acquired belief that the sun is now setting to be justified, the beliefs upon which it partially depends, that is, my background beliefs that it is morning or I’m facing west must be justified too. But what are the conditions under which that belief is justified?

To get a clear understanding on what this question is asking, we’ll need to make a distinction between prima facie justification and ultima facie justification. To say that a belief is prima facie justified is to say that, as long as there are no reasons against it, it will be justified all things considered or ultima facie justified. Let’s take an example. You see a familiar looking car drive by and knowing that (i) your friend Bill has that model and same color car and (ii) that he lives down the street, you come to believe that Bill is heading home. In this case, as long as there is no good reason for doubting your evidence, you are prima facie justified in your belief and ultima facie justified too. You have a justified belief, plain and simple. But now suppose that Bill’s next-door neighbor Jill has a car of the same model and color, and that you are aware of this. In this case, while you still have reason for thinking that Bill has driven by—even reason that would make you ultima facie justified if you didn’t know about Jill—you aren’t in fact ultima justified since your evidence is faulty. Why? Because your reason for thinking that Bill passed your house is overridden or defeated by your belief that Jill owns an exactly similar car and lives nearby. You have no more reason for thinking that Bill has just headed home than you do for thinking that Jill has driven by. Put slightly differently, given your evidence and circumstance, you aren’t in a position to reliably believe that it was Bill rather than Jill in the car you saw. Therefore, your belief isn’t ultima facie justified.³

Given the distinction between prima facie justification and ultima facie justification, we can see that the initial question about what must be true for our previously held background beliefs to be justified is ambiguous. Are we asking what’s required for prima facie justification only or for ultima facie justification? The answer to this turns out to be tricky and will only be understood after we are much farther along our inquiry. But to foreshadow a bit, it turns out that when philosophers ask about whether a belief is “justified,” they are typically asking about ultima facie justification. However, most of the philosophical action concerns what is required for prima facie justification; so, it will be the latter that will be the protagonist of our epistemological drama. But unless the matter under discussion requires that I be particularly precise, I’ll use the unmodified “justified” (and the like) to make lexical matters cleaner.

Let’s return to the question of the justification of our background beliefs. Broadly speaking, there are two fundamentally different possibilities: either their justification is (largely) a function of their earlier epistemic status or their justification is (largely) a function of what is true of the subject now. Put slightly differently, one type of position contends that what is required for the justification of continued beliefs is primarily a matter of diachronic factors, and the competing account takes it to be primarily a matter of synchronic matters.⁴ These different ways of approaching our topic will be spelled out in detail in later chapters. For now, I want only to clarify them just a bit.

The first perspective emphasizes the epistemic history of the belief. The idea is, more or less, that if the belief was justified when it was first formed, and if it has been maintained in memory for the intermediate time, then (other things being equal) it will be justified at the later time. Similarly, if it was unjustified when it was originally formed and the subject has not acquired any new justification in the meantime, then it is unjustified when it is later recalled. Because this position emphasizes memory’s epistemically preservative effects, it is known as preservationism.

In contrast with preservationism are views according to which what is important is not the belief’s past but its present. This perspective is that what matters for the epistemic evaluation of a belief are only its current, ahistorical properties. If a memory belief is now justified it must be because of what is true of the belief (and of the subject) at the present time. That a belief was justified (or unjustified) when it was first formed is beside the point.

I said earlier that the distinction between what is needed for justifiably coming to believe a proposition as opposed to what is required for justifiably continuing to believe it is underappreciated and will play an important role in this book. In the next section, I will argue for the plausibility that this distinction is needed, and that an account of the justification of memory belief can only be understood in light of it.

Justifiably coming to believe versus justifiably continuing to believe

Let’s begin by considering the evidentialist theory of justification. Championed in the current debate by Richard Feldman and Earl Conee, evidentialism claims that a proposition is justified if and only if (“iff” for short) the subject has good evidence for it. Put a bit more formally, they offer the following analysis of epistemic justification

Doxastic attitude D toward proposition P is epistemically justified for S at t iff having D toward P fits the evidence S has at t. ⁵

The details of their theory need not concern us at this point (we will discuss them in depth in Chapter 4). I assume that we have some intuitive notion of what constitutes evidence, as well as what evidential “fit” comes to. Their basic idea is initially appealing as an account of epistemic justification. Or it is, I shall argue, until one considers it in light of the “coming to believe”/“continuing to believe” distinction. As a theory of what is required for justifiably coming to believe a proposition, evidentialism is attractive. To see this, let’s put the theory in action. Suppose that Rasheed has just formed the belief that the nearest star, discounting the sun, is 4.3 light-years away. Is his belief justified? Evidentialism tells us that if the evidence for this proposition is suitably strong, then his belief is justified; if his evidence is weak, then it is not. For instance, suppose Rasheed believes it because a friend who he knows to be notoriously unreliable with respect to scientific facts has told him so. In that case, his belief is unjustified because his evidence is bad. On the other hand, if Rasheed is now taking a college astronomy course, and has both read this in the text and heard his instructor say it, then his evidence is very good and his belief is justified. So far, so good for evidentialism.

Now let’s change the case a bit. Rasheed has a friend, Monique, who is an astronomy major. One day over lunch, Monique tells Rasheed that the earth is 4.3 light-years from the nearest star (besides the sun) and Rasheed comes to have this belief on the basis of this evidence. Since Rasheed has good reason to take Monique to be reliable and has no reason to think that Monique wants to deceive him, Rasheed has good testimonial evidence for his astronomical belief. And so he is justified. However, twenty years later, Rasheed has forgotten a lot of what he learned in college. Among the things that Rasheed has forgotten is that he had a friend in college who was a budding astronomer. He no longer remembers either his lunch with Monique or that Monique told him the distance of the earth to the nearest star.

Rasheed does remember this astronomical belief, however, because he is something of a trivia buff. He has recalled it on a few occasions, and never had the slightest doubt about whether his memory on this was reliable. It’s just something that Rasheed knows. Yet it isn’t at all clear now what evidence he has for believing it. By hypothesis, he no longer remembers the testimony on which it was based, and we can make it part of the story that he hasn’t come to have any relevant new evidence in the meantime. It appears that the evidentialist will have to say that his belief is no longer justified. But I think that we can see with another example that this is an untenable result.⁶

Consider my belief that my first-grade teacher’s name was “Mrs. McDonald.” Undoubtedly, when I came to believe this and for a while thereafter, I had a great deal of evidence. I must have heard her refer to herself as “Mrs. McDonald,” or heard other people refer to her by this name, and she probably had her name on the door of her room or on a plaque on her desk. However, the first grade was quite some time ago, and I don’t now remember any of this evidence, nor do I remember that there even was this kind of evidence. I have a vague mental image of Mrs. McDonald’s face, but other than that I don’t have any recollections of, or about, her—or at least none that I can access just by reflection. Nevertheless, my belief that my first-grade teacher’s name was “Mrs. McDonald” is very firm, and I would be quite surprised to find out that I am wrong. I take it that this kind of case is very common. And we typically think that beliefs of this sort are justified and even count as knowledge. Bu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgment
• 1 Introduction: Clarifying the issue and laying the groundwork
• 2 Harman’s argument for epistemic conservatism
• 3 McGrath’s defense of conservatism
• 4 Evidentialism
• 5 Foundationalism
• 6 Preservationism and reliabilism
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright