Indexical Reliabilism and the New Evil Demon

Abstract

Stewart Cohen's (1984) New Evil Demon argument raises familiar and widely discussed concerns for reliabilist accounts of epistemic justification. A now standard response to this argument, initiated by Alvin Goldman (1988) and Ernest Sosa (1993;2001), involves distinguishing different notions of justification. Juan Comesaña (2002;2010) has recently and prominently claimed that his Indexical Reliabilism (IR) offers a novel solution in this tradition. We argue, however, that Comesaña's proposal, suffers serious difficulties from the perspective of the philosophy of language. More specifically, we show that the two readings of sentences involving the word 'justified' which are required for Comesaña's solution to the problem are not recoverable within the two-dimensional framework of Robert Stalnaker (1999) to which he appeals. We then consider, and reject, an attempt to overcome this difficulty by appeal to a complication of the theory involving counterfactuals, and conclude the paper by sketching our own preferred solution to Cohen's New Evil Demon. Indexical ReliabilismStewart Cohen's (1984) New Evil Demon argument raises familiar and widely discussed concerns for reliabilist accounts of epistemic justification. Here is the argument (we let 'NED' denote the New Evil Demon Thesis, 'SR' the thesis of Standard Reliabilism, and 'Biv' the brain in a vat in the closest world to actuality in which there is a brain in a vat 1 ):* Thanks to …. The paper is fully collaborative; authors are listed alphabetically. 1 This way of introducing the name 'Biv' commits us to the Limit Assumption (Lewis 1973, pp. 19-21) that there is exactly one closest world to actuality in which there is a brain in a vat. This assumption could be avoided at someThe New Evil Demon Argument:(NED) Biv's beliefs are as justified as our own beliefs. A(1) Our beliefs are justified. A(2) Biv's beliefs are justified.From NED, 1 (SR) x's belief that p is justified iff it was produced by a reliable process. A(3) Biv's beliefs were produced by a reliable process. 2 From 2, SRThe argument is valid, but its conclusion-(3)-is clearly false. Thus, we have to reject at least one of its premises-that is, either (NED), ( 1) or (SR). Typically, epistemologists opt to reject (SR) and consider the example a reductio of Standard Reliabilism. 3

The reliability problem for reliabilism

“…Sosa (2001) defends a view that entails both AWR and Same World Reliabilism but that assigns them distinct concepts of justification. Comesaña (2010Comesaña ( , 2002 defends Indexical Reliabilism, a view intended to express both AWR and Same World Reliabilism; Ball and Blome-Tillman (2013) criticize it. On Indexical Reliabilism, the truth-value of all propositions expressed by a justification attribution depends on either of two worlds (the actual world and the subject's world), so it is not clearly a version of Lone World Reliabilism.…”

Epistemic Value and the New Evil Demon

“…Goldman has objected that there is no evidence that the folk relativize epistemic justification in this way (see section 2 of Goldman, ). More recently, it has been argued such proposals suffer problems from the perspective of the philosophy of language (Ball and Blome‐Tillman, ).…”

A Challenge for Indexical Reliabilism

“…Can the reliabilist effectively respond to the NED problem in a way that explains away or obviates the concerns of the internalist intuitions without thereby being forced into internalism? We also have to ask, with Williamson (2016, 3), whether the NED world inhabitant is justified, or merely blameless (also discussed in Pryor, 2001 andBall &Blome-Tillman, 2012). Of course, we cannot fault the NED inhabitant for what is outside of their frame of possible comprehension and control, but it is not obvious that faultlessness or blamelessness is the same thing as justification.…”