James R. Beebe, Ph.D.
Appointments:
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Primary Areas of Specialization:
Mainstream and Experimental Epistemology
Other Areas of Interest: Cognitive Science, Science
and Religion, Moral Psychology
Current Research: Experimental Epistemology, Folk Meta-Ethics, Skepticism
About the A Priori, Epistemic Contextualism
Publications:
Experimental philosophers have recently begun to investigate the folk conception of weakness of will (e.g., Mele 2010; May and Holton 2012; Beebe forthcoming; Sousa and Mauro forthcoming). Their work has focused primarily on the ways in which akrasia (i.e., acting contrary to one’s better judgment), unreasonable violations of resolutions, and variations in the moral valence of actions modulate folk attributions of weakness of will. A key finding that has emerged from this research is that—contrary to the predominant view in the history of philosophy—ordinary participants do not think of weakness of will solely in terms of akrasia but see resolution violations and moral evaluations as playing equally important roles. The present article extends this line of research by reporting the results of four experiments that investigate (i) the interplay between hastily revising one’s resolutions and the degree of reasonableness of the actions one had resolved to undertake, (ii) whether ordinary participants are willing to ascribe weakness of will to agents whose actions stem from compulsion or addiction, and (iii) the respects in which akratic action, resolution violations, and the seriousness of an addiction impact attributions of weakness of will to agents acting in accord with their addictions.
Justification has long been considered a necessary condition on the ordinary concept of knowledge, and theories that deny the necessity of justification have been dismissed as non-starters. In this paper, we seek to reopen the question of whether justification is a necessary condition for knowledge by taking a critical look at some of the philosophical arguments offered in favor of its necessity and by reporting the results of empirical studies that show participants are willing to attribute knowledge when there is insufficient evidence in favor of the belief in question. We hope that the resulting blend of philosophical argument and empirical results leads philosophers to take more seriously the suggestion that the ordinary concept of knowledge may not always require justification.
Knobe (2003a, 2003b, 2004b) found that people are more likely to attribute intentionality to agents whose actions resulted in negative side-effects that to agents whose actions resulted in positive ones. Subsequent investigation has extended this result to a variety of other folk psychological attributions. The present article reports experimental findings that demonstrate an analogous effect for belief ascriptions. Participants were found to be more likely to ascribe belief, higher degrees of belief, higher degrees of rational belief, and dispositional belief to agents in central Knobe effect cases who bring about negative side-effects than to agents who bring about positive ones. These findings present a significant challenge to widely held views about the Knobe effect, since many explanations of it assume that agents in contrasting pairs of Knobe effect cases do not differ with respect to their beliefs. Participants were also found to be more confident that knowledge should be attributed than they were that belief or dispositional belief should be attributed. This finding strengthens the challenge that Myers-Schulz and Schwitzgebel (forthcoming) have launched against the traditional view that knowledge entails belief.
We report experimental results showing that participants are more likely to attribute knowledge in familiar Gettier cases when the would-be knowers are performing actions that are negative in some way (e.g., harmful, blameworthy, norm-violating) than when they are performing positive or neutral actions. Our experiments bring together important elements from the Gettier case literature in epistemology and the Knobe effect literature in experimental philosophy and reveal new insights into folk patterns of knowledge attribution.
Recent work in experimental philosophy has shown that people are more likely to attribute intentionality, knowledge, and other psychological properties to someone who causes a bad side-effect than to someone who causes a good one. We argue that all of these asymmetries can be explained in terms of a single underlying asymmetry involving belief attribution because the belief that one's action would result in a certain side-effect is a necessary component of each of the psychological attitudes in question. We argue further that this belief-attribution asymmetry is rational because it mirrors a belief-formation asymmetry and that the belief-formation asymmetry is also rational because it is more useful to form some beliefs than others.
Drawing upon work in evolutionary game theory and experimental philosophy, I argue that one of the roles the concept of knowledge plays in our social cognitive ecology is that of enabling us to make adaptively important distinctions between different kinds of blameworthy and blameless behaviors. In particular, I argue that knowledge enables us to distinguish which agents are most worthy of blame for inflicting harms, violating social norms, or cheating in situations of social exchange.
An overview of the main areas of epistemological debate to which experimental philosophers have been contributing and the larger, philosophical challenges these contributions have raised.
A number of researchers have begun to demonstrate that the widely discussed ‘Knobe effect’ (wherein participants are more likely to think that actions with bad side-effects are brought about intentionally than actions with good or neutral side-effects) can be found in theory of mind judgments that do not involve the concept of intentional action. In this article we report experimental results that show that attributions of knowledge can be influenced by the kinds of (non-epistemic) concerns that drive the Knobe effect. Our findings suggest there is good reason to think that the epistemic version of the Knobe effect is a theoretically significant and robust effect and that the goodness or badness of side-effects can often have greater influence on participant knowledge attributions than explicit information about objective probabilities. Thus, our work sheds light on important ways in which participant assessments of actions can affect the epistemic assessments participants make of agents’ beliefs.
I consider the possibility of radical skepticism about a priori knowledge and argue that it should be taken as seriously as more familiar forms of skepticism. Many philosophers contend that the necessary truth of many of our a priori beliefs or the necessary falsehood of a priori skeptical hypotheses prevents skepticism about the a priori from being possible. Others assert that any form of a priori skepticism will be self-defeating. I show that each of these obstacles can be overcome and that a priori skepticism presents a formidable epistemological challenge.
I consider a variety of interpretations of the metaethical views of the average, philosophically untrained moral relativist and evaluate them in light of how well they explain certain facts about relativist behavior. I conclude that the best interpretations of ordinary relativism are based on the idea that the ethical standards of those who attribute moral praise or blame or who assess attributions of praise or blame for truth or falsity are the primary determinants of the truth values of moral judgments. Such a view allows an agent's practical reasons to affect the truth values of moral judgments when those reasons are sufficiently salient in the attributor's or assessor's context. I also offer a relevant alternatives account of moral judgment that models relativistic thinking about how changes in the ethical standards in place in various contexts occur and how these changes affect the correctness of moral judgments.
Knobe (2003a, 2003b, 2004b) and others have demonstrated the surprising fact that the valence of a side-effect action can affect intuitions about whether that action was performed intentionally. Here we report the results of an experiment that extends these findings by testing for an analogous effect regarding knowledge attributions. Our results suggest that subjects are less likely to find that an agent knows an action will bring about a side-effect when the effect is good than when it is bad. It is further argued that these findings, while preliminary, have important implications for recent debates within epistemology about the relationship between knowledge and action.
In this article I examine the constraints that skeptical hypotheses must satisfy in order to be used to raise significant skeptical challenges. I argue that skeptical hypotheses do not have to be logically, metaphysically or epistemically possible. They only need to depict scenarios that are subjectively indistinguishable from the actual world and must provide some indication of how subjects can believe what they do while failing to have knowledge. I also argue that skeptical challenges can be raised against a priori beliefs, even if those beliefs are necessarily true. In this way I hope to broaden our conception of the legitimate kinds of skeptical challenges that can be raised.
I provide a comprehensive, critical examination of the family of abductivist responses to skepticism and the common problems they face. Abductivists claim that explanatory considerations (e.g., simplicity, parsimony, explanatory breadth, etc.) favor belief in the external world over skeptical hypotheses involving evil demons and brains in vats. After showing how most versions of abductivism succumb fairly easily to obvious and fatal objections, I explain how rationalist versions of abductivism can avoid these difficulties. I then discuss the most pressing challenges facing abductivist appeals to the a priori and offer suggestions on how to overcome them.
[Penultimate draft] [Published article]
I critically examine Laurence BonJour's (1998) recent a priori solution to the problem of induction. According to BonJour, it is necessarily true that explanations involving ordinary inductive conclusions are the best explanations of inductive premises, and we can be justified in believing this fact a priori. I clarify the probability claims that form the core of his account and argue that on the most charitable interpretation of these claims, almost all of the published objections that have been raised against them are erroneous. I then argue that the most serious challenge facing BonJour's account stems from the purported necessity of claims he makes about the relative frequencies of worlds within the total class of possible worlds.
I reconstruct and critique two arguments Laurence BonJour offers for the necessity of believing in the a priori, arguing that neither argument succeeds.
After explaining why BonJour's rationalist version of the abductivist reply to skepticism is more defensible than other versions of the view, I argue that the notion of probability he relies upon is deeply problematic, that he incorporates an implausible double-standard concerning a priori and a posteriori justification, and that his view is vulnerable to skepticism about the a priori. I suggest that some of these problems are due to idiosyncratic commitments BonJour makes and that abductivists would be better off without them. I conclude with some suggestions about how to improve BonJour's abductivist response to skepticism.
I examine two arguments that purport to show that an externalist epistemological theory like reliabilism cannot be combined with antirealist and epistemic theories of truth. I take antirealism about truth to be the denial of the recognition-transcendence of truth, and epistemic theories to be those that identify truth with some kind of positive epistemic status. I show that, because the recognition-transcendence of reliabilist justification is significantly weaker than the recognition-transcendence required by a realist conception of truth, antirealist theories of truth that deny the strong transcendence of truth do not threaten the externalist character of reliabilism. I show that reliabilists can analyze positive epistemic status in terms of truth and truth in terms of positive epistemic by appealing to a multiplicity of positive epistemic statuses.
I explore several issues concerning reliabilism and deflationism, including the question of whether reliabilism is compatible with deflationary theories of truth, what a deflationary account of the explanatory role of truth in reliabilism might look like, and whether a deflationary epistemology is possible.
According to the Truetemp counterexample to reliabilism, an unsuspecting subject (Mr. Truetemp) receives a weird but highly reliable new perceptual faculty. Since he is unaware of both the existence and the reliability of the faculty, many find it impossible to believe the beliefs resulting from this faculty could be justified for Truetemp. I undermine the key intuition behind the counterexample by describing and generalizing from case studies of actual subjects who have received new perceptual faculties.
In this article I propose a two-part solution to the Generality Problem for reliabilism that draws upon theoretical resources in the cognitive sciences for modeling cognitive process types.
Defenders of the prosentential theory of truth claim that the content of these prosentences (e.g., 'That is true' or 'It is true') is exhausted by the content of their antecedents. They then use the notion of the inheritance of content from an antecedent to explain the various functions of the predicate '.is true'. I argue that prosentential theorists are mistaken in thinking that in order to oppose the view that '.is true' is used to ascribe a substantive truth property to propositions they need to claim that no uses of '.is true' ever attribute any property. I identify an 'attributive' use of prosentences in which reliability is implicitly attributed to a subject.
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