Reply to critics, I

Maybe someday I'll be a world-famous philosopher and have an opportunity to reply to critics who find my work deeply engaging and paradigm-shifting. For now, my critic is my advisor who is pretty skeptical of my arguments. So here's my attempt to respond to the concerns that he raises. He attacks my central line of argument in the first chapter, which is really pretty crucial to my argument.

OBJECTION: "You say that there can be no internal epistemic reasons to reject epistemology, because any reasons would be self-defeating or paradoxical. Any such reasons, you claim, would be akin to a person who says 'Don't believe what I am saying!'

But here's one way someone might resist this argument, and I don't think that it appeals to any particularly epistemic norms. A system of norms must provide some guidance; if it doesn't, accepting that system does not allow one to guide one's behavior or belief-formation. Hence, incoherent systems are thereby shown to be such that one can't adopt them."

REPLY: This certainly seems to make sense--what good to us is some incoherent system?--but I want to move carefully through this point. Let's first consider if the objector is alleging that some norm requires us to reject epistemic realism, or if the believer is under some sort of obligation to reject epistemic realism.

Here's one thing that this objection could be saying: we have epistemic reason to reject any system of norms that is incoherent. The fact that a system of norms is incoherent gives us an epistemic reason to believe that it is false. This, I think, is a fairly weak objection. I think that there is something very confusing about obeying a norm that loses its force as soon as you believe it. (The reader does object to my contention that we can't follow paradoxical norms, but I'll take that up later). Anyway, that's not what this objection was claiming to do--it was suggesting that we don't have to rely on epistemic norms in order to reject epistemic realism, since it's incoherent.

I'll attack another straw man, as long as I'm at it: one might say that there's a requirement that goes above and beyond epistemology such that it can pass judgement on epistemology from outside it. That is, perhaps the norm(s) of coherence, that state that we have reason to reject any system of norms that is incoherent, stands outside epistemology and is prior to it. This, however, would merely place some other set of norms above epistemology. Of course, this is possible, but two things should be noted. First, the objector is usually motivated by a kind of queasiness about norms-realism in general, and it's unclear why he would feel more comfortable with accepting one system of norms governing belief rather than some other. Further, by assumption I am considered "epistemology" to cover all norms governing belief that are truth-related. (There's a debate in epistemology about the value or aim of epistemology, but we all know that epistemic reasons are more truth-related in some regard than any other system of norms governing belief, and it's that sense that I want to invoke here). So, according to my defintions and usage of epistemology, such an objection would actually concede epistemic realism to me.

Perhaps the objector might mean that there are non-epistemic (even for my usage) norms that give us reason not to accept epistemology as real. And I concede this in the thesis. Incoherence gives us a strong, non-epistemic reason to reject a system of norms, for they are of no practical use to us whatsoever. How are we supposed to be guided by norms if they're incoherent?

The objector, however, does not rest. He still claims that he has an objection. But I've exhausted the possibilities while considering that there is some sort of norm that the objector wishes the believer to respond to. Such a norm would either have to be epistemic or non-epistemic; if epistemic, I object on the grounds that such a norm would be paradoxical and self-defeating; if non-epistemic, I concede the point. What else could the objector mean?

Allow me to put some words in the objector's mouth. He writes, "A system of norms must provide some guidance; if it doesn't, accepting that system does not allow one to guide one's behavior or belief-formation. Hence, incoherent systems are thereby shown to be such that one can't adopt them."

Perhaps, then, what he means is that it is constitutive of a system of norms that they be able to guide belief or action. Anything system that is incoherent fails to be a system of norms. And so epistemology, if it is incoherent, fails to be a system of norms.

This is an interesting objection, but I don't think it's a very good one. Here's why I'm not swayed by this objection. Somebody smart once said that in philosophy there are only two kinds of replies to objections: "Who says?!" and "So what?!" First, I'll concede that part of what it means to be a system of norms is that it is able to guide belief or action. The question is, what's the cut-off between saying that a system of norms fails to guide belief-formation WELL, and that a system of norms fails to guide belief-formation AT ALL? If the idea of a system of norms that tells you to both do something and not to do it seems like a problem for you, then why is it only that MASSIVE tensions do the trick. After all, it's a fairly common occurrence where one norm of etiquette tell you not to do something, and another tells you to do that very thing. That doesn't mean that we can't accept that system of norms anymore. But if the idea was that an inconsistent system can't count as a normative system, then why don't we reject etiquette at the first sign of trouble? The reason, I think, is because inner tensions and conflicts are the signs of a bad system, one that doesn't help us very much. But this just means that we're offering a non-epistemic reason to reject a system of norms.

Let me put the point again: The question is whether coherence is definitional of something counting as a system of norms. I'd concede that guiding behavior is definitional of something counting as a system of norms, but I don't think that coherence is. That is because coherence, I think, has to do with how well a system guides behavior. But how do you tell the difference between whether a system is just failing to guide belief well, or whether it's failing to guide anything at all? This is a really tough question. (Part of the problem is that meaning is normative in some sense as well, which is an interesting twist, I think...)

I don't think it matters much. There's a good way to reply to claims that something is constitutive of something else, and that's because such an argument usually only succeeds in hiding normativity, not eliminating it. Here's how it works in this case: suppose that it's constitutive of a system of norms that it be coherent. So epistemology fails as a system of norms, and so I reject it. Fine. Call a system of norms that fails to be coherent a nystum of sorms (or whatever). It turns out epistemology is a nystem of sorms, not a system of norms. I claim that this is fine for epistemology, though, and I continue to appeal to these things as reasons for my beliefs. Then you say "Why, that's stupid, those don't count as anything that could guide your belief" and I say, "Why not?" And it's precisely at this point that you have to give me a reason of some sort or another.

In short: I chased down the objection so that it can't be giving me any normative reason to reject epistemic realism. Then, I considered the idea that it fails to count as a system of norms as a matter of meaning, but then I showed how this is just hiding a norm of belief at some other level, and I decided that this line of objection doesn't sway me. You need objective normativity guiding belief somewhere in the equation.

But there's a more challenging objection that the objector raises against me. This one alleges that there's nothing wrong with a reason being "paradoxical" or "self-defeating" in the sense in which I use it. Such a norm is only self-defeating in the sense that it defeats its own system, but that this is a perfectly understandable thing to say. I will consider that in my next post, coming in 25 hours (religious norms are guiding my action in this case).