Abstract
Some philosophers accept what I call minimalist views about composition. They either deny that composition ever occurs, or they only allow that composition occurs when some things are taken up into a life. While minimalists often take their views to be somewhat revisionary, they usually want to distinguish their views from truly radical views such as the view that there is no external world at all. They often do this by noting that, although they don’t believe that there are tables, chairs, or planets, they do believe that there are mereological simples arranged tablewise, chairwise, and planetwise. In this paper, I appeal to the nature of perceptual experience to present a problem for this move. I contend that, given some plausible assumptions, compositional minimalists cannot consistently maintain that they are justified in their minimalism and justified in believing propositions about the arrangements of mereological simples. I will argue that this commits such minimalists to external world skepticism.
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Notes
At least given the plausible assumption that any macroscopic entities would be composite. This assumption seems eminently reasonable given our experience of apparently being able to divide macroscopic entities. I will be making this assumption for the remainder of the paper.
One difference between organicist and nihilist brands of minimalism has to do with metaphysical vagueness. Avoiding metaphysical vagueness is sometimes part of the reason offered for being a minimalist (Horgan & Potrč, 2008). Nihilists can deny that the mereological simples they posit involve any metaphysical vagueness at all. However, organicists have a more difficult time avoiding metaphysical vagueness because whether some entities are taken up into a life is plausibly a vague matter. Whether the entities posited by the minimalist involve metaphysical vagueness will make no difference to my argument.
Following Trenton Merricks (2001, p. 4), we can say that some simples are arranged F-wise iff they have the properties and the relations to other microscopic objects upon which composing an F would non-trivially supervene if Fs in fact existed.
My argument will be framed in terms of propositional rather than doxastic justification. Propositional justification concerns which propositions you are in a good epistemic position to believe, regardless of whether you actually believe those propositions. Doxastic justification, on the other hand, only applies to beliefs you actually hold and takes into account whether your beliefs are properly based. Having propositional justification for believing that p is a necessary condition for a person’s belief that p to be doxastically justified. So, my argument will entail that minimalists must deny that any of their external world beliefs are doxastically justified as well. For more on the distinction between propositional and doxastic justification, see Feldman (2003, p. 46). Additionally, I am only concerned with what propositions minimalists are justified in believing all-things-considered, rather than in what they are merely prima facie justified in believing.
I briefly discuss whether compatibilist versions of minimalism could avoid the argument below in footnote 24.
See Horgan and Potrč (2008) for a defense of a monist nihilism. It should be noted that because Horgan & Potrč are compatibilist minimalists, their view would fall outside the scope of my argument even without the restriction to non-monist views. Evaluating whether an incompatibilist version of monist nihilism could be coupled with a plausible epistemology would significantly complicate the argument of this paper, as the challenges facing such a view would be different than those facing non-monist versions of minimalism. Given that incompatibilist existence monists are so rare, I leave the view for others to evaluate.
For more on the distinction between non-inferential and inferential justification, see Pryor (2005).
I believe that you should agree with this even if you believe that cognitive penetration often does little to undermine the ability of a perceptual experience to provide justification. For in the case we are imagining, one would notice the change in one’s perceptual abilities after inculcating the theory. So, one would be aware that the content of one’s perceptual experiences is dependent upon one’s belief in the theory. Thus, one would no longer be justified in trusting one’s perception if one has good reason to doubt that one is justified in believing the theory. Of course, if one were to, say, completely forget about undergoing such an inculcation, then perhaps someone could be justified in accepting the deliverances of one’s changed sense perception without being justified in the relevant theory. But maintaining that one can continue to be justified in believing propositions about the external world only by forgetting that one has undergone such an inculcation is not much of a victory over skepticism. For more on the epistemic consequences of cognitive penetration, see Siegel (2012, 2013), Fumerton (2013), McGrath (2013), and Silins (2016).
Matthen (2004) raises this problem for views that take perception to only attribute properties to locations.
Charles Travis and Bill Brewer, for example, have denied that perceptual experience has content (Brewer, 2006; Travis, 2004). And Matthew McGrath and Nicholas Silins have raised some concerns for the idea that a perceptual experience can provide some non-inferential justification for a proposition p only if p is among the contents of that experience (McGrath, 2018; Silins, 2011).
Thanks to an anonymous referee for help clarifying this proposal.
If one denies that perceptual experience has content, then the problem must be characterized a bit differently. Consider the sphere case again. It is plausible that one could not retain non-inferential justification for the proposition that there is something spherical in the room after becoming justified in believing nihilism because one would have good reason to think that nothing exists in the room that is large enough for one to be non-inferentially justified in believing that it is spherical. Analogously, someone justified in believing nihilism has good reason to think that no objects exist that are large enough for her to be non-inferentially justified in believing that they fill a table-shaped region. Given this, it is implausible that someone who is justified in believing nihilism could retain non-inferential justification for the proposition that there is something filling a table-shaped region R. One might object that the nihilist could sensibly think that there are some things such that she could be non-inferentially justified in believing that they collectively fill a region even if there is no thing such that she could be non-inferentially justified in believing that it fills the region. However, if this were the case, then the person in the grain of sand case above who was examining the grain of sand in a pre-scientific era also ought to be able to be non-inferentially justified in believing that there are some things (plural) that collectively fill the region occupied by the grain of sand, which is implausible.
Ned Markosian (2015) suggests this strategy to help the nihilist deal with the possibility of atomless gunk.
See Merricks (2001).
Another proposal would be to claim that minimalist paraphrase propositions are disjunctive propositions such as, “Either there is a table here or there are mereological simples arranged tablewise here.” The difficulty with this proposal is that the compositional nihilist cannot have any non-inferential justification for either disjunct, which makes it implausible that she could be non-inferentially justified in believing the whole disjunction. The sphere case can be used to illustrate this point. After becoming justified in accepting nihilism, no one would think that you could be non-inferentially justified in believing the proposition, “Either there is a macroscopic sphere in the room or there are microscopic spheres in the room.” Why? Because you’ve been given reason to think that one disjunct is false, and there is no plausible way you could have any non-inferential justification for the other disjunct. The same applies to the disjunctive table proposition for the nihilist. It is true that there are cases where one could be justified in believing a disjunction without having full justification for outright believing either disjunct. However, there are no plausible cases where you are non-inferentially justified in believing a disjunction without having any non-inferential justification for either disjunct. That is what would be needed for this proposal to work.
Notice that, plausibly, the non-minimalist will be in a very different epistemic position with respect to ruling out skeptical hypotheses. She has plenty of non-inferential justification for propositions about the external world to serve as her evidence base.
McCain (2016) has attempted to defend Vogel’s argument against Gifford’s criticisms. McCain claims that the real-world hypothesis is still a better explanation than the skeptical one because it can appeal to necessary truths (together with other contingent truths) in a way that gives it greater explanatory depth. McCain claims that such explanations have greater depth because they can apply to a wider range of scenarios. However, while it is true that the skeptical hypothesis cannot achieve the same explanatory depth by appeal to necessary truths alone, it could achieve the same depth by positing other contingent truths, such as that the demon wants the world to appear as if it obeys certain metaphysical laws. While this does involve positing some contingent truths to which the real-world hypothesis is not committed, the real-world hypothesis also has to posit a myriad of contingent truths to which the skeptical hypothesis is not committed. So, what matters is whether the total set of truths posited by one hypothesis is simpler than the total set of truths posited by the other hypothesis. Given the enormous complexity involved in the set of contingent truths the real-world hypothesis must posit (e.g., about the physiology of your visual system, the optics of light, etc.), it seems doubtful that the total set of truths posited by the demon hypothesis will be more complex than the total set of truths posited by the real-world hypothesis.
Susanna Rinard (2018) makes an analogous point when comparing the real-world hypothesis to a phenomenalist skeptical hypothesis.
Alston (1993, pp. 78–115), Beebe (2009), Fumerton (1992), and Rinard (2018) provide good overviews of the main issues. For reasons to think that skeptical hypotheses are not necessarily lacking in explanatory depth, see Alston (1993, pp. 79–85). For reasons to think that skeptical hypotheses needn’t be problematically derivative, see Alston (1993, p. 79). The claim that skeptical hypotheses are ad hoc is difficult to evaluate because it is difficult to give a precise characterization of what makes a hypothesis ad hoc. However, see Beebe (2009, fn.9) for some reason to doubt that the skeptical hypothesis will be ad hoc in any sense that the real world hypothesis will not be.
If one denies that perception has content, then the undermining would work differently. In that case, being justified in believing organicism means being justified in believing that the beliefs one normally spontaneously forms on the basis of one’s perceptual experience are inaccurate. This would have the same undermining effect as being justified in believing that the contents of one’s perceptual experiences are typically inaccurate.
See Bailey, Rasmussen, and Horn (2011) for some trenchant criticisms.
I noted above that I am targeting incompatibilist versions of minimalism. Could a compatibilist minimalism avoid the problem I present? The most straightforward way to be a compatibilist is to claim that the contents of ordinary beliefs and statements that are ostensibly about composite objects are really just propositions about mereological simples—propositions that we are expressing loosely. Obviously, such a view won’t help resolve the epistemological problem presented in this paper, as the problem centers around propositions, not sentences.
More complex versions of compatibilism, however, may be more promising. For example, Ross Cameron (2008, 2010a, 2010b) defends a truthmaker theory of ontological commitment that would allow one to affirm that propositions about composite objects are strictly and literally true while avoiding ontological commitment to composite objects. The idea is that one is only ontologically committed to the truthmakers of the propositions one accepts, and perhaps it is mereological simples rather than composite objects that are the truthmakers for propositions about composite objects. If that were right, then one could reject any ontological commitment to composite objects while affirming the accuracy of perceptual experiences whose propositional contents are about composites. Thus, one might be able to claim that one can retain non-inferential justification for propositions about composite objects while rejecting ontological commitment to composite objects.
Another compatibilist view that might help would be the approach defended by Horgan & Potrč (2008) that appeals to a distinction between truth as direct correspondence and truth as indirect correspondence. They might be able to say that the propositional contents of perceptual experiences about composite objects are true by indirect correspondence standards (but not direct correspondence standards) while avoiding any ontological commitment to composite objects. Thus, one might claim that one’s non-inferential justification for propositions about composite objects is not undermined by one’s justification for minimalism. Both sorts of compatibilist views have many contentious components, and fully evaluating them would take us too far afield. However, I take the question of whether those sorts of views could solve the problem presented in this paper to be an interesting line of further research. As I noted in the introduction, if they can, then proponents of those views can take the argument of this paper to be an argument that minimalists ought to prefer one of these compatibilist versions of minimalism—an argument that doesn’t reduce to mere squeamishness about denying common sense.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Karen Bennett, Arc Kocurek, Nico Silins, participants at a department workshop at Cornell, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Da Vee, D. An epistemological problem for minimalist views about composition. Synthese 199, 9649–9668 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03220-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03220-6