Disjoining Disjunctivism

Clayton Littlejohn
cmlittlejohn@gmail.com

1 Introduction
One possible view to take about the evidence of the senses is that of the men-
talist. The mentalists insist that individuals in the same non-factive mental
states have the same evidence for their beliefs.1 This does not tell us what your
evidence is, but it purports to tell us what your evidence could not be. They
would find nothing wrong with this sort of reasoning:
If there is a cat in the corner and it looks to you as if there is, you have
good reason to believe there is a cat in the corner. Indeed, you might
have good enough reason to believe this. Since it can look to you as if
there is a cat there even if the nearest cat is miles away, experience
can provide you with a sufficiently good reason for belief even if
there is no cat. The reasons provided by veridical experience give
you the right to believe. The same is true for the reasons subjectively
indistinguishable hallucination provide. If so, the justificatory work
is done by the elements common to hallucination and perception.
These elements do their justificatory work just as well in cases of
perception and hallucination. After all, you have the same evidence
either way.
On the mentalist view, the conditions that determine whether your experience
is veridical or not have nothing to do with the nature of the psychological states
and events by virtue of which it looks to you as if there is a cat in the corner,
they do not determine what evidence you have, and so they have nothing to
do with the proper description of the reasons you have for believing any of the
worldly propositions you might consider. So, they accept:
1 See Conee and Feldman 2004 and 2008. There are passages where they acknowledge that

someone could say that subjects in the same mental states have the same evidence and still
count as a mentalist, even if they believed that there are factive mental states and believed
also that if two individuals were in different factive mental states, they could have different
evidence even if they were in the same non-factive mental states. They reject this sort of view
for reasons we shall discuss below and I shall reserve the term “mentalist” for the view they
defend.

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 Veridical experience and subjectively indistinguishable hallucination
provide you with the same evidence for your worldly beliefs (Same
Reasons).2
The conditions that distinguish veridical from non-veridical experience clearly
have a role to play in determining whether your perceptual beliefs constitute
knowledge, but not whether they are justifiably held.
Let’s consider an alternative. McDowell thinks the line of reasoning just
sketched is seriously flawed. The mistake, he would say, is in thinking that
since it can look to you as if there is a cat in the corner even if there is no cat,
you have the same reason to believe a feline is present whether one is present
or it merely looks to you as if one is. Everyone agrees that the conditions that
distinguish hallucination from veridical experience are essential to knowledge,
but McDowell insists that knowledge is itself a standing in the space of reasons
and so would insist that the conditions that distinguish veridical experience
from hallucination determine what reasons you have for your worldly beliefs.3
To say that we have the same reasons whether a cat is present or not is to say
that we cannot know whether a cat is truly there when it looks to us as if there
is one. So, as he sees it, Same Reasons leads rather quickly to an unattractive
sort of skepticism. To avoid this unfortunate skeptical view, he thinks we must
say:
The evidence veridical experience provides is better than the evi-
dence provided by subjectively indistinguishable hallucination in the
sense that veridical experience provides evidence that hallucination
does not (Better Reasons).4
Of course, those who accept Same Reasons typically reject skepticism, but he
thinks they have no right to do so. He is right to think this.
While the mentalists critics say that Same Reasons leads to skepticism, Mc-
Dowell would insist that Better Reasons does not save you from the skeptic.
Not on its own, at any rate. Better Reasons tells us nothing about the nature
of perceptual experience. It only tells us that the reasons we have when experi-
ence is veridical are better than the reasons we have when we hallucinate. If you
combine this view with the traditional view of experience on which the nature
of the psychological states and events by virtue of which it looks to you as if p
are the same whether you see p or are hallucinating, the qualities by virtue of
which your reasons are thought to be better would be blankly external to your
subjectivity. For McDowell, this is verboten:
The root idea is that one’s epistemic standing . . . cannot intelligibly
be constituted, even in part, by matters blankly external to how it
is with one subjectively. For how could such matters be other than
beyond one’s ken? And how could matters beyond one’s ken make
2 This is a popular view. See also Huemer 2006 and Silins 2005.
3 McDowell 1995, pp. 877.
4 Williamson 2000 also defends this view.

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 any difference to one’s epistemic standing? . . . But the disjunctive
conception of appearances shows a way to detach this “internalist”
intuition from the requirement of a non-question begging demonstra-
tion. When someone has a fact made manifest to him, the obtaining
of this fact contributes to his epistemic standing on the question.
But the obtaining of the fact is precisely not blankly external to his
subjectivity, as it would be if the truth about that were exhausted
by the highest common factor.5
The one point on which McDowell and the mentalists seem to agree is that
nothing can confer any justificatory benefit upon you unless it corresponds to
some mental difference that distinguishes you from those who do not enjoy this
benefit. Because he thinks that experience can embrace worldly facts, McDowell
is happy to say that the veridicality of an experience can provide a justificatory
benefit an indistinguishable hallucination cannot. For their part, the mentalists
say that the veridicality of an experience cannot confer any benefit upon you,
so the justificatory standing of a belief is constituted wholly by the elements
common to veridical perception and indistinguishable hallucination.6
As the passage indicates, McDowell insists that the problems that arise for
the mentalists arise for anyone who denies:
An appearance can either be a mere appearance, as with halluci-
nation, or a fact made perceptually manifest. The nature of the
psychological states and events by virtue of it looks to you as if p
depends upon whether you are hallucinating or your experience is
veridical (Disjunctivism).
Thus, McDowell’s target seems to include most of the orthodox accounts of
epistemic justification in that they deny that the justification of perceptual
belief depends upon the veridicality of the particular experience that gave rise
to it.7
We can summarize McDowell’s epistemological argument for Disjunctivism
as follows. Knowledge is an epistemic standing and Same Reasons says that the
conditions essential to that standing are blankly external to your subjectivity.
Anything blankly external to your subjectivity is beyond your ken and to say
5 1998,pp. 390.
6 McDowell does not deny that there is something common to veridical experience and
hallucination. In response to a recent paper of Burge’s, McDowell says explicitly that his
view recognizes a common state type that is present in both cases of veridical experience
and hallucination. See his 2010, pp. 244. What he denies is that hallucination and veridical
experience are exhausted by this appearance state.
7 Thus, McDowell’s target is broader than Conee and Feldman’s mentalist view or Huemer’s

phenomenal conservatism. Externalist views such as Goldman’s 1986 reliabilism, Bergmann’s

2006 proper-functionalism, and Comesana’s 2010 evidentialist reliabilism are all targets. It
is not at all clear that those who defend these views defend Better Reasons, but even if
they thought that they had the resources to do so, they cannot point to causal differences
between cases of hallucination and perception as the feature that explains why the reasons
experience provides in the good case are “better” than those provided by an indisitnguishable
hallucinatory experience.

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that these matters contribute to your epistemic standing cuts against the inter-
nalist intuition. If you endorse Better Reasons but hold to the traditional view
of experience, you do not avoid the skeptical consequences of Same Reasons
since your view implies that the conditions essential to knowledge are always
blankly external to your subjectivity and so beyond your ken. The only alterna-
tive to skepticism is a view that combines Better Reasons with Disjunctivism.
So, on the plausible assumption that we have perceptual knowledge, we have to
reject the traditional conception of experience.8
Those who take a dim view of the epistemological argument for Disjunctivism
might say that McDowell tries to derive an implausible claim about the nature of
experience from implausible claims about the justification of perceptual belief.
Not only is he wrong to think that Same Reasons leads to skepticism and wrong
to endorse Better Reasons, he is wrong to think Disjunctivism could explain
Better Reasons. While I think McDowell’s argument does not succeed, the
problem with the argument is not Better Reasons. For reasons I shall discuss
below, we should endorse both Better Reasons and this stronger claim:

Only in the case of veridical perception do you have good enough

reason for your worldly beliefs. If you believe on the basis of hallu-
cination, you cannot believe with justification. You can believe with
sufficient justification if your experience is veridical (Good Enough).
The questionable step in McDowell’s argument is precisely the step where Mc-
Dowell tries to derive Disjunctivism from Better Reasons. Once we see why
Better Reasons and Good Enough are true, we can see why we do not need to
take any stand on whether Disjunctivism is true.9

2 A Dilemma
According to McDowell, the mentalist view leads to an implausible form of
skepticism, and for reasons discussed below, I think he is right. In fairness, we
should observe that McDowell’s view comes with its own skeptical problems.
In the course of trying to explain how perceptual knowledge is possible, he
provides us with the materials we need to argue that we can never come to
know something by means of inductive inference. So, we face a dilemma and it
seems the only way to understand how both perceptual and inductive knowledge
is possible is to reject both views and find some third way.
To see what the worry is, suppose knowledge is a standing in the space
of reasons and that the difference between knowledge and ignorance cannot
be blankly external to your subjectivity. Given these assumptions, it seems
8 Remember that McDowell’s ambitions are relatively modest. He hopes to describe the

conditions under which a kind of skeptical argument fails, not provide premises for refuting
the skeptic. See his 2008, pp. 378.
9 Byrne and Logue 2008 say that you can accept McDowell’s epistemological claims without

endorsing his Disjunctivist approach to experience, but they do not try o show where his
epistemological argument for Disjunctivism goes wrong .

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McDowell is committed to the view that the difference between someone who
knows p and someone who does not know p cannot just be that one subject has a
true belief and the other believes something false.10 Compare cases of mistaken
belief and knowledge and on McDowell’s view there must always be a further
difference in the reasons that bear on these subjects beliefs. Not only is there a
difference in the reasons that bear on their beliefs, this is a difference that has
to do with their reasons for believing. If it did not, the difference between their
situations would be blankly external to them. So, it appears that McDowell is
committed to the following claim:
If you know p, you believe p on a different basis than anyone who
believes p but happens not to know that p is true (Different Basis).11

Different Basis entails that if you know p, you believe p on a different basis than
anyone who mistakenly believes p. So, in ∼p-worlds, subjects in very similar
epistemic situations must believe p on a different basis than you do. But, this
entails that if you know p, you believe on a basis that is incompatible with ∼p.
This just is the infallibilist view:

If you know p, your belief must be based on something incompatible

with ∼p (Infallibilism).12
Infallibilism rules out the possibility of coming to know something by means of
inductive inference. If such knowledge is possible, it is possible that the basis
for your belief is a basis you could have had even if your belief were mistaken. If
I believe correctly that the n+1st draw from my bag of marbles will be black on
the basis of n observations of black draws and you believe incorrectly that the
n+1st draw from your bag will be black on the basis of n observations of black
draws, there is a perfectly good sense in which we believe on the same basis.
10 See Comesana 2005.
11 Van Cleve 2004 also ascribes this view to McDowell. Dodd 2007 ascribes a similar view
to Williamson 2000, but for reasons discussed in Littlejohn 2008, this is a mistake. The
fallibilist does not have to deny that when we have knowledge, we have evidence that rules
out the possibility of being mistaken. Indeed, the fallibilist need not deny that when we have
knowledge, we have evidence that entails that our beliefs are correct. What the fallibilist has
to deny is that the possession of such evidence is a necessary precondition for coming to know.
On a view such as Williamson’s, having evidence that entails p is a consequence of coming
to know p because in the wake of coming to know p, p is included in your evidence. This is
very different from saying that in order to come to know p, you must first have evidence that
entails p.
12 Rödl 2007 defends an infallibilist view of knowledge on which knowledge is just justified

belief. Most epistemologists would reject this view on the grounds that it leads to skepticism
and that it delivers the wrong verdicts in Gettier cases. A response available to Rödl that is
very much in the spirit of his discussion is to say that Gettier cases are possible only if we
can have justified beliefs that fail to constitute knowledge where those beliefs are based on
fallible grounds. Given his arguments, beliefs held on fallible grounds can neither constitute
knowledge nor be justifiably held. The problem with his response is that he assumes that
Gettier cases only arise when beliefs are held on fallible grounds. This is true for Gettier’s
cases, but Feldman 1974 showed that there can be Gettier-like cases where beliefs are not
based on any false lemmas. The same is true for Ginet-inspired fake barn cases discussed by
Goldman 1976.

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I get things right, but you do not. According to Infallibilism, I cannot know
unless everyone who believes on our basis knows. But, you did not know the
next marble would be black. We can stipulate that you pulled the first white
marble.
To block the objection, we have to deny Different Basis:

It is possible to know p even if you believe p on the same basis as

someone who mistakenly believes p (Same Basis).
McDowell will say that if you reject Different Basis, you have to also reject
Better Reasons. If you accept Same Basis, your better reasons cannot make you
better off, epistemically, because the qualities by virtue of which your reasons
are alleged to be better than the reasons you would have in a matching case
of error are beyond your ken. Similarly, he would say that if you deny Better
Reasons, you also have to deny Good Enough. How could you have the same
reasons as someone else and only one of you have reasons that are good enough?
If Same Reasons is true and the reasons in the case of hallucination are not good
enough to justify belief, those reasons cannot be good enough to justify belief
in the case of veridical experience. Thus, it seems we are led right back to the
skeptical problem McDowell wanted to avoid. Once you deny Different Basis, it
seems you have to deny the epistemological claims that could save us from the
skeptic who would deny that we could ever come to have perceptual knowledge.
To avoid these difficulties, we have to find where one of the skeptical arguments
goes wrong. Below, I shall argue that Same Reasons does lead to skepticism.
Our best hope is to find some flaw in McDowell’s epistemological argument for
Disjunctivism.

3 The Refutation of Mentalism

According to Better Reasons, veridical perceptual experience provides better
reasons for your worldly beliefs than subjectively indistinguishable hallucina-
tion. Why think that? Because this anti-mentalist argument is sound:
(1) If I know non-inferentially that I have hands, my evidence in-
cludes the proposition that I have hands.
(2) If my evidence includes the proposition that I have hands, I have
hands.
(3) The fact that I have hands does not supervene upon facts about
my mental states.
(C) Thus, if I can know non-inferentially that I have hands, it is pos-
sible for two individuals to differ in the reasons they have for their
beliefs even if their respective experiences are indistinguishable–
the proposition that I have hands is not evidence that my hand-
less non-factive mental duplicates have.
(4) I can know non-inferentially that I have hands.

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 (C2) Thus, it is possible for two individuals to differ in the reasons
they have for their beliefs even if their respective experiences are
indistinguishable.
In support of (1), I shall argue that:

If you know p non-inferentially, p is part of your evidence (IKSE).

In support of (2), I shall argue for:
If p is part of your evidence, p is true (FactivityE ).
In support of (3), I will say little. Moore was right, hands are the sorts of things
we meet in space. In support of (4), I shall also say little. Maybe we cannot know
non-inferentially that we have hands. The scope of non-inferential knowledge
might not be this broad. It is broad enough, however, for our purposes. To
show that Better Reasons is true, we only have to show that the scope of non-
inferential knowledge is broad enough that there are some propositions you can
know directly in the case of veridical experience that cannot be known in the
case of subjectively indistinguishable hallucination. Since the mentalists have to
deny Better Reasons, an argument for Better Reasons is an argument against the
mentalist view. Given the shape of the argument, it shows that Same Reasons
can be true only if we cannot have perceptual knowledge of the external world.

3.1 Facts and Evidence

According to FactivityE , evidence consists of true propositions.13 The linguistic
evidence does support the claim that evidence ascriptions are factive and a nat-
ural explanation as to why these ascriptions are factive is that evidence consists
of facts, not attitudes or the contents of non-factive mental states irrespective
of whether those states are accurate.
Consider:
Scarlet: Do they have solid evidence against Mustard?
Green: The prosecution thinks it does. Here’s the evidence they
have: that he was the last one to see the victim alive, that he lied
about his whereabouts on the night of the crime, that his fingerprints
were on the murder weapon, and that he wrote a letter containing
details the police think only the killer could have known.
Scarlet: But, didn’t you say that he wasn’t the last person to see
him alive and his fingerprints couldn’t have been on the weapon?
13 Some writers do deny that evidence is propositional. In Littlejohn (ms.), I offer further

evidence that evidence is propositional and address arguments that are supposed to show that
evidence consists of propositional attitudes rather than propositions. In saying that evidence
is propositional, I do not mean to deny that facts can constitute evidence. If the reader thinks
facts just are true propositions, great. If the reader thinks that facts and true propositions are
distinct, the reader should know that I would be happy to say that evidence either consists of
facts or true propositions.

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 Green: That’s right. He also didn’t lie about his whereabouts and
wasn’t the last one to see him alive.
Green’s remarks seem contradictory. In stating the facts of the case as he takes
them to be, it appears that he contradicts his claims about the prosecution’s
evidence. If evidence ascriptions were non-factive, Green’s remarks should be
perfectly coherent. Ascribing evidence and denying that the propositions as-
cribed as evidence are true would be akin to ascribing false beliefs.
His remarks here seem defective as well:
Scarlet: Do they have solid evidence against Mustard?
Green: People seem to think they do. Here’s the evidence they have:
that he was the last one to see the victim alive, that he lied about
his whereabouts on the night of the crime, that his fingerprints were
on the murder weapon, and that he wrote a letter containing details
the police think only the killer could have known. That being said, I
don’t know if he’s the last one who saw the victim alive and I don’t
know if he lied.
There is nothing wrong with:
(1) The prosecution believes on reasonably solid evidence that Mus-
tard was the killer, but I don’t know if they are right. I want to
hear Mustard’s side of things.
This, however, seems defective:
(2) The prosecution knows that Mustard was the killer, but I don’t
know if they are right. I want to hear Mustard’s side of things.
That (2) is defective is further evidence that evidence ascriptions are factive in
the way knowledge ascriptions are. If evidence ascriptions were not factive, (2)
should be no more problematic than (1).
Briefly, I want to consider an objection to FactivityE . Versions of the objec-
tion have appeared in the literature as an objection to Williamson’s claim that
your knowledge consists of all and only what you know:
Your evidence includes p iff you know p (E=K).14
On one version of the objection, the problem with FactivityE is said to be that
it is incompatible with an intuitively plausible closure principle.15 On another,
it is said that cases of mistaken belief cause trouble for FactivityE because these
cases force us to say implausible things about the evidential bases of beliefs.16
In their own ways, these objections all assume something in the neighborhood
of this principle:
14 See Williamson 2000, pp. 197. In Littlejohn Forthcoming, I defend Williamson from a

number of his critics but argue that E=K does need revision.
15 Comesana and Kantin 2010.
16 See Conee and Feldman 2008, Goldman 2009, and Rizzieri Forthcoming.

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 If you justifiably believe p, p is a justifying reason of yours that can
justify further beliefs (Justified Basis).
These objections fail, but their failure is instructive.
Let’s start with an example:

I believe that nobody can enter my office (O for now) because I be-
lieve that I have just locked the door (LD for now). Let us stipulate
that I have inferred (O) from (LD). I pushed the lock in and gave it
a quick twist to the left, which usually does the trick; however, my
lock is damaged and does not work. Hence, (LD) is false.17

Rizzieri says this about the example:

If Williamson’s proposal that (E=K) is correct then (LD) cannot
serve as an evidential ground for (O). This generates problems for
(E=K). The first difficulty is that it is very plausible that (LD) does
partially constitute my evidence for (O). After all, I am justified in
believing (LD), (LD) supports (O), and an explicit inference from
(LD) is my most immediate basis or ground for (O).18
Given the features of the case, he says it is difficult to deny that LD is evidence
for O because LD renders O more probable than it would have been otherwise.19
Adding to the difficulties facing E=K and FactivityE , Comesaña and Kantin
allege that these theses are incompatible with an attractive closure principle:

If your belief in p is justified, you have sufficient justification for

believing the obvious consequences of p and can justifiably believe
these consequences if these beliefs are arrived at by means of com-
petent deduction (J-Closure).

They say that if we assume that the proposition that p can justify you in
believing something only if it is part of your evidence, E=K implies that the
following is true:
The proposition that p justifies you in believing that q only if you
knows that p (E=K1).

They then they argue against E=K1 and E=K as follows:

[S]uppose that Terry is a recently envatted human. On the basis
of an experience very much like the one that you have when you
are facing a dog in your neighborhood, Terry believes that there
is a dog in her neighborhood. Of course, Terry doesn’t know that
there is a dog in her neighborhood (if only because it is false, let
us suppose, but not only because of that), but she is still justified
17 Rizzieri
Forthcoming, pp. 2.
18 Forthcoming, pp. 3.
19 Forthcoming, pp. 3.

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 in believing it. She then deduces from that belief that there is a
nonhuman animal in her neighborhood. Isn’t she thereby justified
in believing that there is a non-human animal in her neighborhood?
J-Closure (and intuition) say ‘‘Yes,’’ E=K1 says ‘‘No.’’ But the
proposition that there is a non-human animal in the neighborhood
is a lightweight implication of the proposition that there is a dog in
the neighborhood. Therefore, again, if E=K 1 is true then closure
fails miserably.20
While there are reasons to doubt E=K, it is not because it commits you to
FactivityE .
For the first case to constitute a counterexample to FactivityE , we have to
assume:
(3) That I have just locked my door is evidence that nobody can
enter my office.
Assume that if p is evidence for q, the probability of q has to be higher on p
than it would have been otherwise. Given this assumption, (3) entails:
(4) Because I just locked my door, it is more probable than it would
have been otherwise that nobody could get into my office.
The problem is that (4) entails:

(5) I just locked my door.

The case is only a potential counterexample to FactivityE if (5) is false. The
argument just sketched shows that (∼5) entails (∼3). So, the objection to
FactivityE comes to this. Those who accept FactivityE have to deny something
false.21
20 Comesana and Kantin 2010, pp. 453.
21 Chris Cloos noted that my response rests on the controversial claim that p is evidence
for q only if there is some explanatory connection between p and q’s evidential probability.
someone could say that it is possible for p to be evidence for q even if the probability of q
on the total evidence is not increased by the addition of p. This worry is easily addressed.
The objection to FactivityE assumed that evidence is evidence for something only if it raises
its probability. Suppose that this is not the only way for something to serve as evidence for
something else. There has to be some necessary condition on evidential support for p to be
evidence for q. It might be a highly disjunctive condition, but whatever that condition is, C is
that (possibly disjunctive) condition. Unless “p is evidence for q” entails “q satisfies C”, p is not
evidence for q. To argue against Factivity, you have to start with a putative counterexample
in which (i) is true:
(i) p is evidence for q.
This entails:
(iia) Because p, q satisfies C.
(iib) q satisfies C because p.
But, these entail:
(iii) p is true.
If (iii) is true, the example is not a potential counterexample to Factivity. If (iii) is false, (i) is

10
 My response assumes “because” is factive. I have found that not everyone is
happy to grant me this assumption, but the linguistic evidence for the factivity
of “because” is solid.22 Consider:
(6) The colonists protested because the tea was taxed. Not only
that, the tea was taxed.
(7) He knows that they are angry and confused protestors. Indeed,
they are angry protestors.
(8) I have two tea members of the tea party living in my building.
Indeed, I have precisely two. I’m lucky not to have more.

You cannot reinforce entailments (e.g., in (6) and (7)). If you try, you end
up with redundant conjunctions. You can reinforce pragmatically imparted
information (e.g., in (8)).23
This seems contradictory and this seems to provide further support for the
factivity of “because”:
(9) The bolt snapped because there were too many people on the
bridge, but nobody was on the bridge.
It would not be surprising that (9) is contradictory if these were equivalent:
(10) The bolt snapped because there were too many people on the
bridge.
(11) There were too many people on the bridge. That’s why the bolt
snapped.
These do seem to be equivalent. After all, it is contradictory to assert (10) and
(∼11) or to assert (∼10) and (11). Also, you cannot reinforce (10) with (11) or
vice-versa.
Finally, consider our first example. Suppose you were under the impression
that LD was true and so thought you had evidence that O was true. Suppose
you said as you were leaving the office:
(12) It is likely that nobody will get into the office because the door
is locked.
false, and so the example is not a potential counterexample to any claims about what it takes
for p to be evidence for q. Notice that the crucial move in the argument is the move from the
claim that something is evidence to the further claim that the thing that constitutes evidence
explains something about what is supported by the evidence. If this works for evidence,
it should work for other kinds of normative reasons as well. Any attempt to show that,
say, normative reasons or justifying reasons consists of false propositions will fail because if
something has the status of a reason to believe or act, it has to explain something about the
normative properties of the belief or act in question. It might be something trivial (e.g., it
might explain why it is that the belief or act in question has something going for it), but even
trivial explanations require facts rather than false propositions.
22 Thanks to Trent Dougherty for raising the objection.
23 I owe this point to Stanley 2008 who credits it to Sadock 1978.

11
Later, we discover that the door had not locked. Looking back, we cannot say
that you knew (12) was true when you uttered it. Why not? You could have
had excellent evidence for (12). You believed (12). If ‘because’ is not factive, it
seems (12) could be true. The most natural explanation as to why you cannot
say you knew (12) was true is that (12) is false if the explanans proposition is
false.24
In addition to the linguistic evidence, we can say this on behalf of FactivityE .
Anything that constitutes evidence has to figure in explanations. If something
constitutes a reason to act, for example, it typically does so by explaining why
it is that there is something good about a prospective course of action. If
something constitutes a reason to believe some proposition, it has to explain
something about the kind of rational support there is for believing that propo-
sition. It might do this by explaining why something believed is more likely than
it would have been otherwise given the antecedent evidence or it might do it in
some entirely different way, but it has to explain some support fact or other.
False propositions explain nothing. So, false propositions explain nothing about
normative standing. So, false propositions do not constitute normative reasons
for action or belief.

3.2 Having Evidence

In the previous section, I argued that if my evidence includes the proposition
that I have hands, I have hands. To complete the anti-mentalist argument,
I shall argue for two further claims. The first is that p is part of your evi-
dence if you know p directly or non-inferentially. The second is that the scope
of non-inferential knowledge is broad enough that it includes some contingent
propositions about the external world, propositions the truth of which does not
depend entirely upon facts about any individual’s non-factive mental states.
In their recent work, Conee and Feldman have been willing to grant that
there is a sense in which your evidence might include contingent worldly propo-
sitions about your environment, but they also insist on drawing a distinction
between “ultimate” and “intermediate” evidence.25 Their view is that your in-
24 Comesana and Kantin’s objection fails for essentially the same reasons. Their case is a

counterexample to FactivityE only if we assume that Terry’s belief that there is an animal in
the neighborhood is based on the justified belief that there is a dog in the neighborhood and
that the proposition that there is a dog in the neighborhood is part of Terry’s evidence. If
this were so, then this would have to be true:
(13) That there is a dog in the neighborhood is a reason for Terry to believe
that there is an animal in the neighborhood.
This entails:
(14) Because there is a dog in the neighborhood, Terry has a reason to believe
there is an animal in the neighborhood.
In turn, this entails:
(15) There is a dog in the neighborhood.
But, we were told that (15) is false. Otherwise, the example would not threaten FactivityE .
If (15) is false, so is (13).
25 Conee and Feldman 2008, pp. 87.

12
termediate evidence might include such worldly propositions, but non-factive
mental duplicates never have different ultimate evidence. They offer this char-
acterization of the notion of ultimate evidence:
Some philosophers have argued that only believed propositions can
be part of the evidence one has. Their typical ground for this claim is
that only believed propositions can serve as premises of arguments.
Our view differs radically from this one. We hold that experiences
can be evidence, and beliefs are only derivatively evidence ... Experi-
ence is our point of intersection with the world–conscious awareness
is how we gain whatever evidence we have.
Furthermore, all ultimate evidence is experiential. Believing a propo-
sition, all by itself, is not evidence for its truth. Something at the
interface of your mind and the world –your experiences –serves to
justify belief in a proposition, if anything does. What we are calling
your “ultimate evidence” does this without needing any justification
in order to provide it.26

In another passage they say that a person’s ultimate evidence is, “evidence one
has for which one need not have evidence.” 27 They defend two claims about
ultimate evidence:
If p is part of your ultimate evidence, p is experiential (Experien-
tiality).
If p is part of your ultimate evidence, p is a justifying reason that
you do not need evidence for in order for p to have that status
(Basicality).
I think there are different ways of interpreting Experientiality. Surely your
ultimate evidence will include propositions that you know about experience on
the basis of introspection. The question is whether mentalists can also say that
the propositions that are the contents of experience are themselves part of your
evidence. So, let us consider two versions of Mentalism. The first understands
Experientiality quite narrowly:

p is part of your ultimate evidence only if p is the content of some

introspective state that represents your experiences and not a contin-
gent worldly proposition that is the content of an experience (Narrow
Experientiality).
The second understands Experientiality more broadly:

If p is part of your ultimate evidence, p is either the content of an

introspective state or the content of an experience (Broad Experien-
tiality).
26 Conee and Feldman 2008, pp. 87-88.
27 Conee and Feldman 2008, pp. 87, fn. 5.

13
Problems arise for the mentalist view when combined with either Narrow or
Broad Experientiality.
Recall the anti-mentalist argument from above. Suppose we modify it as
follows:
(1’) I know non-inferentially that I have hands.
(2’) If I know I have hands non-inferentially, I believe that I have
hands, this belief is non-inferentially justified, and this belief is
true.
(3’) If I believe that I have hands, this belief is non-inferentially
justified, and this belief is true, then my evidence includes the
proposition that I have hands.
(4) My evidence includes the proposition that I have hands.
(5) My evidence includes the proposition that I have hands only if I
have hands.
(C) Thus, it is possible for two individuals to differ evidentially with-
out differing mentally–the proposition that I have hands is not
evidence that my handless mental duplicates have.
Is (1’) plausible? It is a relatively weak anti-skeptical assumption. We might
quibble a bit about whether I can know non-inferentially that I have hands.
Maybe all I know non-inferentially is that the facing surface of an object with
the shape of a human hand exists in space. This fact does not supervene upon
anyone’s mental states, so modify the argument accordingly if you so desire.
(2’) is relatively uncontroversial. Now, suppose Broad Experientiality is true.
The content of perceptual experience includes contingent worldly propositions
as evidenced by the fact that the veridicality conditions of such experiences
make reference to facts external to us. The only way to block the argument is
to deny Broad Experientiality.28
Mentalists are free to deny Broad Experientiality to try to save their view,
but doing so comes at a cost. Consider an argument inspired by one of Pryor’s.29
Imagine we discovered that some people were wired in such a way that they
formed their beliefs about the external world by taking perceptual experience
at face value and others were wired in such a way that they formed beliefs
about present experience and arrived at their beliefs about the external world by
means of inference. This seems to be the sort of thing that cognitive scientists
could discover, so let us imagine that they did discover this. Intuitively, we
28 There is an interesting question as to whether the scope of non-inferential perceptual
knowledge is limited to propositions that are part of the representational content of experience.
There are also interesting questions as to how to go about determining how “broad” the
representational content of experience is. For an argument that the scope of perceptual
knowledge is not limited to propositions that are themselves the contents of our perceptual
experiences, see Brewer 1999 and Millar 2000. As for the content of experience, I am not
entirely sure that perceptual experience has a content, but I am not persuaded that the
content of perceptual experience is quite so broad that it would include kind concepts.
29 See Pryor 2000. Feldman 2004 endorses the argument discussed here.

14
want to say that this psychological difference is just a psychological difference.
These subjects all know the same range of propositions about the external world
provided that they end up with the same beliefs and end up reasoning in similar
ways (exclusive, of course, of the early transitions in thought). If this is right
and we assume Basicality, some of these subjects would have contingent worldly
propositions as part of their ultimate evidence. This would force us to reject
the mentalist view. To save the view that combines mentalism and Basicality, it
seems you have to reject Broad Experientiality, but the guiding intuition seems
to be that when it came to knowledge, the difference in these subjects’ wiring is
irrelevant. So, if you deny that subjects could have non-inferential knowledge of
the external world, it would seem that you would have to deny that they could
have inferential knowledge of the external world. But, this is just to say that
mentalism forces us to deny that we could have perceptual knowledge of the
external world.
This objection assumes Basicality and Experientiality. Mentalists are of
course free to deny Basicality, but if they do so, they have to say that p can fail to
be ultimate evidence of yours even if p is evidence and you do not need evidence
to treat it as such, believe it, reason from it, etc... It seems then that this would
rob the notion of ultimate evidence of all interest. The difference between
perception and introspection is a psychological difference, not a normative one.
If they agree that claims about which psychological faculties (if any) deliver
ultimate evidence should be determined by normative considerations about what
can be treated as a reason without the need for prior reasons, then they could
accept Basicality if they accept skepticism. The obvious problem with this
option is that it concedes everything to the external world skeptic. The more
damning problem is that the mentalists sold us out to the skeptics at so cheap
a price. They have declared the external world skeptics victors on the grounds
that the beliefs we form in direct response to experience could be false.
It should be clear now why the denial of Better Reasons leads to skepticism.
The argument offered for Better Reasons neither assumed nor in any obvious way
implied that you have to have an infallible basis for your belief to have perceptual
knowledge. Instead, it sought to show that a consequence of having perceptual
knowledge is that you acquire evidence consisting of the propositions you learned
through observation. Introspection is a source of evidence or reasons, no doubt,
but so is perception. Because you can know a wider range of propositions on
the basis of perceptual experience than you can on the basis of introspection,
Better Reasons is true.

3.3 From Better Reasons to Good Enough

Although there is some controversy as to whether evidence ascriptions are fac-
tive, parties to the disagreement tend to agree that justification ascriptions are
not.30 I think this is a mistake. If justifying reasons are constituted by facts,
30 One of the main reasons for this is that people share the sort of intuitions that Cohen

1984 appeals to in his new evil demon argument against reliabilism. See Littlejohn 2009
for a discussion of responses to Cohen’s attack on reliabilism and other forms of epistemic

15
justification ascriptions are factive:
You cannot justifiably believe p unless p is true (FactivityJ ).
If the argument for FactivityJ is sound, whatever reasons you might have to
believe something false in response to hallucination, those reasons are not good
enough to justify the mistaken belief. In this section, I shall argue from Better
Reasons to Good Enough.
The following thesis enjoys widespread acceptance:
If you justifiably believe p, you have some justifying reason for be-
lieving p and your belief is based on it (Proper Basis).
Those who deny Proper Basis have to say that it is possible for a belief to be
justified even if it is not based on evidence. Anyone who denies Proper Basis
faces a dilemma. Either they have to say you do not need evidence for p to
justifiably believe it or they have to say that you have to have evidence but
don’t have to base your beliefs on it. The problem with the first option is that
if it is true, it is possible to justifiably believe p and have no reason to believe
p at all. Suppose that J-Closure is true. If you knew that q was a consequence
of p and deduced q from p, J-Closure says that you justifiably believe q. But,
surely you have a reason to believe q if q is inferentially justified. Did you just
get a reason from nothing? It seems not, but then it seems you had a reason to
believe p. Should we say instead that justified belief doesn’t have to be based
on evidence? I think not. We want to capture the intuition that someone who
believes on the evidence is epistemically better off than if they just happen to
have evidence that supports what they would have believed anyway. As Pollock
and Cruz put it:
One could have a good reason at one’s disposal but never make the
connection. Suppose, for instance, that you are giving a mathemat-
ical proof. At a certain point you get stuck. You want to derive a
particular intermediate conclusion, but you cannot see how to do it.
In despair, you just write it down and think to youself, “That’s got
to be true.” In fact, the conclusion follows from two earlier lines by
modus ponens, but you have overlooked that. Surely, you are not
justified in believing the conclusion, despite tha fact that you have
impeccable reasons for it at your disposal. What is lacking is that
you do not believe the conclusion on the basis of those reasons.31
It makes little sense to endorse the standard view that doxastic justification
ascriptions (i.e., ascriptions of the form, “S justifiably believes p” or “S’s belief
that p is justified”) entail propositional justification ascriptions (i.e., “S has a
justification for believing p” or “There is a justification for S to believe p”)
while allowing that that the propositional justification you have to have to have
externalism that deny that the justificatory status of a belief is determined entirely by facts
that supervene upon a subject’s non-factive mental states.
31 Pollock and Cruz 1999, pp. 35.

16
justified beliefs might play no role in supporting your beliefs. If you are not
going to use it, why would you have to have it on hand?
So, suppose Proper Basis is true. If your belief concerning p is justified,
it is either inferentially justified or non-inferentially justified. Let’s suppose
the former. If p is non-inferentially justified, maybe your belief in p is based
directly on the fact or some factive mental state (e.g., seeing that p). Given the
argument for FactivityE , it is obvious that such a belief can only be justified if
true. The content of the belief and the justifying reason are the same.
Suppose your belief concerning p is inferentially justified. If your belief is
inferentially justified, it is either based on propositions that entail p or propo-
sitions that do not entail p. If the former, given the argument for FactivityE ,
you cannot justifiably believe p if ∼p.
What about cases of inferential belief based on non-entailing evidence? If
there can be false, justified beliefs, this is where we should expect to find them.
This is precisely where Williamson thinks he has found them. In his discussion
of perceptual error, he says:
In unfavorable circumstances, one fails to gain perceptual knowl-
edge, perhaps because things are not the way they appear to be.
One does not know that things are that way, and E = K excludes
the proposition that they are as evidence. Nevertheless, one still has
perceptual evidence, even if the propositions it supports are false.
True propositions can make a false proposition probable, as when
someone is skillfully framed for a crime of which she is innocent. If
perceptual evidence in the case of illusions consists of true proposi-
tions, what are they? The obvious answer is: the proposition that
things appear to be that way. The mountain appears to be that
shape.32
There is reason to be skeptical. Consider:
If you and another subject both believe p on the basis of a justifying
reason, these will only be different justifying reasons if your justifying
reasons for believing p differ or there is some difference in your non-
factive mental states (Same Basis).
The thought behind Same Basis is that your justifying reasons for believing
something are not just justifying reasons (i.e., facts), they are the things you
treat as if they are reasons. What you treat as if it is a reason depends upon your
mental states rather than the facts. You believe p on the basis of non-entailing
evidence, r. You are the non-factive mental duplicate of someone who believes p
on the basis of r in a p-world. Are you also in a p-world? Yes. You both deduce q
from p because you both know that q is an obvious consequence of p. According
to J-Closure, you both justifiably believe q. According to Same Basis, you both
believe q for the reason that p. According to Proper Basis, you justifiably believe
q only if p is a justifying reason. But, Factivity says, this is true only if p is true.
32 2000, pp. 197.

17
So, yes, you are in a p-world. If p is non-inferentially justified, Proper Basis
says that p is the justifying reason for believing p. FactivityE says that p must
be true. If p is inferentially justified and based on entailing evidence, FactivityE
implies that p is true. If p is inferentially justified and based on non-entailing
evidence, p still turns out to be true. So, there are no false, justified beliefs and
Good Enough must be true.
How would Williamson try to block the argument? Williamson can say that
your evidence in the case of illusion consists of propositions about appearances
and say that this is the evidence the belief is based on. If he says this and also
accepts Same Basis, he has to say that our beliefs cannot be based on evidence
that consists of propositions about the external world. Either, this means that
our knowledge of the external world cannot justify our beliefs or we cannot
have knowledge of the external world. He wouldn’t want to say such things.
So, should he deny Same Basis? To say that someone based her belief on p is
to say, in part, that p is the reason for which she believes. The form such a
reason explanation takes should not depend upon whether the agent’s beliefs
are true or false.33 A subject’s reasons for believing are limited to what she
takes to support her beliefs, and it seems impossible for two subjects to differ in
terms of what they take to support their beliefs if these subjects are non-factive
mental duplicates.
We know why Williamson thinks there can be false, justified beliefs. He says,
“Knowledge figures in the account primarily as what justifies, not as what gets
justified. Knowledge can justify a belief which is not itself knowledge, for the
justification relation is not deductive.” 34 He is right that the justification rela-
tion is not deductive. You can justifiably believe p on the basis of non-entailing
evidence. This is compatible with FactivityJ . The justification of a belief de-
pends in part upon what a belief is based on, but also upon what the belief
can do for you. A belief is not justified if it cannot provide reasons for further
beliefs. True beliefs based on sufficiently strong but non-entailing evidence can
provide you with (genuine) reasons for further beliefs, but false beliefs based on
the same evidence cannot. This is why there cannot be false, justified beliefs.
The mistake Williamson makes is in thinking that the justificatory standing of
a belief is fixed by what the belief ‘stands on’, its basis or the evidence that sup-
ports it. The justificatory standing of a belief depends, in part, upon whether
it stands on a proper basis, but also upon whether it can shoulder its burden in
providing support for further beliefs. Given the arguments for FactivityE , only
true beliefs can do that. Given the arguments for FactivityJ , there is no reason
to think that only beliefs based on entailing evidence can do that. So, while
Williamson’s remark that the justification relation is not deductive is technically
correct, it is misleading.
33 Rizzieri Forthcoming stresses this point in his discussion. Williams 1981 and Dancy 1995
say essentially the same thing concerning reasons for action.
34 2000, pp. 9.

18
4 Defeat
In trying to explain how perceptual knowledge is possible, McDowell rejects
Same Reasons and argues that Disjunctivism is needed to explain Better Rea-
sons. Nothing could be a reason that contributes to the justificatory standing
of your belief unless that reason is part of your basis for believing. For reasons
we have touched on, having such a reason requires having a kind of unmedi-
ated, unbroken mental contact with the facts you come to know via perceptual
experience. Conee objects that Disjunctivism could not explain Better Reasons
because any such explanation would run afoul of the following principle:

A subject’s justification for a belief is not stronger than a second

subject’s justification for the same belief, if their respective justifi-
cations are prone to being equally well defeated by the same defeaters
(Defeat).35
Conee’s objection fails. He thinks veridical perceptual experience and subjec-
tively indistinguishable hallucination are equally well defeated by the same de-
featers because they are subjectively indistinguishable. If his objection is sound,
it shows that if two conscious experiences are indistinguishable, the reasons they
provide for your beliefs are equally strong and these experiences will justify the
same beliefs to the same degree. Consider two theses about indiscriminability
and justification:
TransitivityI : (x)(y)(z)[(Ixy & Iyz) → Ixz)].
TransitivityJ : (x)(y)(z)[(Jxy & Jyz) → Jxz)].
According to TransitivityI , a and c must be indiscriminable or indistinguishable
for you if you cannot distinguish a from b and cannot distinguish b from c.
According to TransitivityJ , if a and b justify the same (i.e., justify the same
35 Conee 2007, pp. 19. If Defeat says that two reasons defeated by the same defeater cannot

differ in strength, the principle is not very plausible. A full house is stronger than a pair
even if four aces would beat both hands. On a more charitable reading, Defeat says that the
justification provided by two conscious experiences is equally strong if these justifications are
liable to defeat by all the same defeaters. This is more plausible, but still hardly self-evident.
It is not obvious that the strength of a reason can be measured in terms of what can defeat it.
Forget about reasons for a moment and think about boxers. Nobody can defeat Mustard in
a boxing match. Apart from Mustard, nobody can defeat White or Plum. White and Plum
cannot box against each other because they share gloves. Plum and Green cannot box each
other because they share trunks. No one can box without both gloves and trunks. Suppose
you have debts that you can only repay if you come into some quick money. The only way
to come into some quick money is to set up a boxing match for tomorrow night. You have to
bet on the boxer you send to the ring and you manage White and Plum. You do not know
whether the opponent will be Green, Mustard, or someone else. You know the fight will not
take place if you try to send Plum up against Green, so there is stronger reason to send in
White. While White and Plum would lose to the same boxers, you have stronger reason to
send White in. One lesson to take from this is that if reasons are like boxers, strength cannot
simply be measured in terms of who could defeat the reason or boxer you have. Surely some
reasons are like boxers. Reasons to pick between boxers are reasons and they behave a bit
like boxers.

19
beliefs to the same degree) and b and c justify the same, a and c must justify
the same as well.
TransitivityI is false. Suppose a, b, and c are perceptual experiences you
have while looking at three different paint chips in good viewing conditions. It
seems possible for a and b to be indiscriminable, b and c to be indiscriminable,
even if you can discriminate a from c. If these chips differ only slightly, you
might be unable to distinguish the first from the second and the second from
the third even if you can discriminate the first from the third by sight.36 What
goes for the chips goes for the perceptual experiences of the chips. Although
it seems that TransitivityI is false, TransitivityJ is true. For TransitivityJ to
be false, there would have to be some proposition, p, such that the degrees to
which a and c justified belief in p differed even though both a and c justified
belief in p to the same degree that b does. This is impossible.
With this in mind, I shall argue that Conee cannot use Defeat to show that
Disjunctivism cannot explain Better Reasons. His objection assumes:
(1) (x)(y)(Ixy → Jxy).

Let me introduce a further assumption:

(2) (x)(y)(∼ Ixy →∼ Jxy).
The justification for (2) is that in discriminating between two things, you can
know that these two things are distinct.37 If you can discriminate between a
and c, you will have stronger reasons for believing that you are undergoing a
while undergoing a than you will have for believing that you are undergoing
some experience you can knowingly discriminate from a (e.g., c).
If TransitivityI is false, we can coherently suppose that a is indiscriminable
from b, b is indiscriminable from c, but you can discriminate between a and
c. (1) entails that a and b justify the same beliefs to the same degree. It also
entails that b and c justify the same beliefs to the same degree. It follows by
TransitivityJ that a and c justify the same beliefs to the same degree. But, if (2)
is correct, this contradicts the further assumption that a and c are experiences
that you can discriminate between. The most obvious way to avoid this con-
tradiction is to deny (1). If (1) is false, Conee’s Defeat principle is no threat to
Better Reasons. His objection was that McDowell’s view implied that it is pos-
sible for indistinguishable states to provide different reasons for belief, reasons
that differed in strength. His objection assumed that indistinguishable states
can be defeated by precisely the same considerations and that states that can be
defeated by precisely the same considerations cannot offer reasons that differ in
strength. We know now that these assumptions cannot both be correct. Either
the reasons provided by two indistinguishable states are not defeated by the
very same considerations or the reasons provided by two states can be defeated
by the same considerations even if these states provide different reasons.
36 For discussion, see Williamson 1990, pp. 237-44.
37 See Williamson 1990.

20
 There is a deeper problem with Conee’s objection. It is tempting to think
that Better Reasons and Good Enough are only true if the reasons we have in
the case of perceptual knowledge are stronger than the reasons we have in cases
of hallucination. While we do have stronger reasons in the case of veridical
perception, it is also important to remember that strength of epistemic position
is not simply a function of the strength of reasons to believe. Strength of
position depends upon how strong your reasons are and what those reasons are
up against.

5 The Epistemological Argument for Disjunctivism

Let’s take stock. Why does veridical experience provide better reasons than
the reasons provided by a subjectively indistinguishable hallucination? Be-
cause anything you know non-inferentially is part of your evidence only true
propositions constitute evidence. Since the scope of things that you know non-
inferentially in the case of veridical perception is greater than the scope of things
you can know non-inferentially when you undergo a subjectively indistinguish-
able hallucination, you have better reasons when you veridically perceive how
things are. If it looks as if there is a cat in the corner, you can know non-
inferentially that a cat is there if there is a cat. You cannot if there is no cat.
That there is a cat in the corner is a better reason to believe there is a cat
in the room than the fact that it looks to you that there is a cat there. One
reason entails that there is a cat in the room, the other does not. In the case
of veridical perception, you have both reasons. In the case of hallucination,
you have only one of these reasons. The argument for FactivityJ gives us an
argument for Good Enough. If you take experience at face value in the case of
veridical perception, there seems to be no reason not to hold such beliefs. If
you take experience at face value in the case of hallucination, there seems to be
a reason not to hold such beliefs. These beliefs lack a proper basis and so such
beliefs cannot provide us with reasons to form further beliefs. Conee tried to
show that nothing could explain how you could have better reasons by virtue
of having veridical experiences, but his argument from Defeat failed.
McDowell might agree with some of this, but he will say that this does not go
far enough. Nothing in the arguments for Good Enough or Better Reasons told
us anything about the nature of perceptual experience. If the traditional view
of experience is left in place, he would say all is lost. Remember that McDowell
wanted to hold onto the internalist thought that your epistemic standing cannot
be constituted even partially by matters blankly external to you. Why not?
Because, he says, such matters are beyond your ken and what is beyond your
ken cannot make any difference to your epistemic standing.
His reasoning seems to be this:
(1) If something is blankly external to your subjectivity, it is beyond
your ken.
(2) If something is beyond your ken, it cannot make a difference to

21
 your epistemic standing.
(3) Thus, if something is blankly external to your subjectivity, it
cannot make a difference to your epistemic standing.
If we combine Better Reasons and Good Enough with a traditional view of
experience on which there is no psychological differences that distinguishes cases
of hallucination and veridical perception, the thought is that the veridicality of
an experience and the conditions necessary for the experience to be veridical
are blankly external to your subjectivity, they are beyond your ken, and they
cannot make a difference to your epistemic standing. Good Enough tells us
that given the reasons that bear on your beliefs in the case of hallucination, you
should not believe. If your beliefs are of the same normative standing in the
good case and bad, your reasons cannot be good enough in the good case. We
are led right back to the skeptical conclusion that we cannot have perceptual
knowledge.
In response to this argument, I shall argue that (2) is false. Indeed, (2) is
false even if McDowell’s internalist thought is perfectly sound. Once we see this,
we can see why we have no real reason to accept (1). If we do not accept (1),
we need not accept the argument for Different Basis. So, if we reject (1) and
(2), we can opt for a view on which Better Reasons and Good Enough are true
while rejecting both Different Basis and Infallibilism. This allows us to avoid
the skeptical problems that arise for McDowell’s view as well as the mentalist
view.
McDowell is right to deny that something inaccessible to you can confer
upon you an epistemic benefit. Consider some examples. Suppose someone
does something there is reason not to do. Suppose that there happens also to
be reason to do it. Bernie shoots a kid carrying a weapon (that is something
there is a pro tanto reason not to do), but doesn’t know that the kid is carrying a
weapon. Maybe the kid was going to use that weapon to attack a bunch of people
(perhaps that’s a pro tanto reason to shoot the kid). Since this has nothing to do
with Bernie’s reasons for shooting, it is hard to see how facts about what the kid
was carrying and what the kid planned to do with his weapon could be cited to
justify his deeds. Even if Bernie were made aware of the kid’s weapon, if Bernie is
shooting the kid just because he hates kids it is hard to see how these facts could
justify his conduct. To justifiably act against a reason, it seems that it is not
enough that there is overriding reason that happens to be out there somewhere.
It seems that this reason to act has to be the reason for which the subject acts
if that reason is going to be the reason in virtue of which some other agent’s
deeds are going to have a moral standing superior to the standing of Bernie’s
deeds. The reasons that count in favor of acting seem to contribute positively
to moral standing only if they play some motivational role. They cannot play
that motivational role, however, if they are beyond the subject’s ken. Indeed,
one argument for the claim that considerations beyond your ken cannot confer
any justification is predicated on the assumption that considerations can only
justify when they play some motivational role. If Bernie’s reasons for shooting
were not the reasons for which he shot, those reasons seem to do nothing to

22
justify his action even if he is aware of them but is motivated instead wholly by
malice. We do not need practical examples to make the point. One lesson you
might take from BonJour’s clairvoyant examples is precisely that considerations
that are inaccessible to you cannot be reasons that justify forming beliefs.
This much seems right. It seems to be the sort of thing that might lead
McDowell to say that there is something a subject in the good case is cog-
nizant of that explains why a subject in this case ends up with beliefs better
justified than beliefs formed in the bad case. The reasons that count against
acting, however, can contribute negatively to the normative standing of an ac-
tion without playing any motivational role. Moreover, the reasons that count
against acting can contribute to normative standing of an action even if the
agent is non-culpably ignorant of them. Think about cases where someone is
imprisoned for a crime that we later discover that they did not commit. In the
wake of this discovery, we discover that we have a duty of reparation and must
compensate the victim. Such reparative duties are, however, not mere duties of
beneficence. Such reparative duties should leave the victim better off than they
were, but unlike duties of beneficence the duty is one that arises between the
victim and the subject(s) that harmed the victim. These duties can exist when
the parties responsible for imprisoning the victim were non-culpably ignorant of
the fact that the accused was innocent. (Just think about cases where reliable
eyewitnesses came forward to suggest that the victim was guilty and it was only
later developments in forensic science that exonerated the person imprisoned.)
These duties only exist when the agent acted against some genuine reason that
contributed negatively to the normative standing of the original act. (Other-
wise, helping the wrongly accused would not be a response to some past wrong
and would be a mere duty of beneficence.) If this is right, the act of putting
the innocent victim away and forcing them to suffer the hardships of prison
was wrongful and wrongful for reasons that all relevant parties could have been
non-culpably ignorant of.
Examples like these suggest that there is an important asymmetry between
reasons for belief or action and reasons against.38 Even if reasons for believing or
acting cannot contribute to normative standing unless the subject is cognizant
of them, reasons against can contribute negatively to normative standing when
the subject is not cognizant of them. McDowell himself seems to concede this
much if he accepts Better Reasons and accepts that subjects in the bad case
are in no position to realize that their reasons are defective. Since comparative
normative standing is a function of both the reasons for and reasons against,
there is a serious lacuna in McDowell’s argument for Disjunctivism. Why? Well,
suppose there are reasons not to believe p on the basis of how things look when
its looking as if p is due to hallucination. It could be that beliefs in the good
case are comparatively better off even if there is not something internal to the
subject’s experience that is distinctive of the good case. The disparity is due
entirely to reasons not to believe that are present only in the bad case that make
beliefs formed in that case defective.
38 For further discussion of this asymmetry, see Gardner 2007.

23
 Notice that there is a way of accomodating the internalist point about rea-
sons to believe. None justify if they are beyond your ken. However, if he must
concede that reasons not to believe can do their work by making it wrongful to
believe even if they are beyond the subject’s ken, we can explain the difference
in epistemic standing between the good case and bad in terms of this difference
in the reasons not to believe. We could say, if we wanted, that there were the
same reasons to believe in these cases. Thus, it seems that the right to believe
does not depend upon the possession of reasons that entail that the belief in
question is true. One might have such reasons on hand, say, in the case of
non-inferentially justified belief, but there is no necessary connection between
rightly held belief and entailing evidence.
I think McDowell has to grant this point, which is that reasons beyond your
ken can contribute to your normative standing if those reasons are reasons
against. Why? According to McDowell, the difference between the good case
and bad cannot be a difference just in the truth value of what is believed, it
also has to be a normative difference. Now, it seems that the difference between
the good case and bad is beyond the ken of the subject in the bad case even on
McDowell’s view. Surely, if you are undergoing a hallucination that you cannot
distinguish from a veridical perception, that you are hallucinating is beyond
your ken and it makes a difference to the normative standing of belief. It does
not follow from the fact that the differences between the good and bad case are
beyond the subject in the bad case that it is beyond the subject in the good
case. Indeed, it would seem on McDowell’s view that the difference cannot be
beyond the ken of the subject in the good case because if it were, the subject
would not have perceptual knowledge and so would not be in the good case.
But, McDowell assumes that we can have this knowledge, tries to describe the
conditions under which we can have it, and concludes that this requires that it
is possible for some subject to know p and for the fact that p is a fact to be one
that is not beyond this subject’s ken.
While it is great fun to talk McDowellese, it is worth stopping for a moment
to try to work out what it is that we have been saying. It might be helpful to
try to say in plain English what it is for something to be beyond your ken and
what it is for something to be blankly external to your subjectivity. Given the
argument sketched above, we know that McDowell assumes that if something
is beyond your ken, it is something that you cannot know. So, we can say
this much: if you do know something non-inferentially, it is not beyond your
ken. What does it actually mean to say that something is blankly external
to your subjectivity? One interpretation that seems plausible is given by van
Cleve–q is blankly external to your subjectivity iff a complete description of
your psychological states neither entails q nor ∼q.39
In my argument for Better Reasons, I assumed, as McDowell did, that we
do have direct or non-inferential knowledge of the external world and then tried
to describe the conditions under which this is possible. This is possible, I said,
only if Better Reasons is true. McDowell insists that this is possible only if
39 van Cleve 2004, pp. 486.

24
Disjunctivism is true. We know that (2) cannot support the argument for Dis-
junctivism because (2) is false and the revised version of (2) does not seem to
support it. He could appeal to (1), but if my translation from McDowellese to
English is correct, all that (1) really says is that if some fact is not entailed by
a full description of your psychology, it is not something that you could know
non-inferentially. What reason could there be to think that? The internalist
thought does not support that, it supports the thought that nothing beyond
your ken can confer any epistemic benefit upon you. I’ve granted that. Since
there seems to be no reason for someone who accepts what is right about the
internalist thought that supports a modified version of (2) to accept (1), I see
little hope for the epistemological argument for Disjunctivism. Yes, McDow-
ell could say that in the course of arguing for Better Reasons, I helped myself
to the assumption that we can have non-inferential knowledge of the external
world arrived at by taking experience at face value and that I have no right
to help myself to that assumption, but it is worth remembering that I am en-
gaged in the very same project he is. We both assume that we can have this
sort of knowledge and then try to describe the conditions under which it is
possible. And while it would be possible if by some miracle we had the sort of
psychologies that we hypersensitive to the facts that there are changes in our
psychologies whenever the facts change, there is no reason yet to think that we
cannot have this knowledge if the traditional view of experience is correct. If
we do not accept (1), we have no reason to accept the problematic claim that
whenever we have knowledge, we believe on the sort of basis that itself rules
out the possibility of error. So, without (1), there is no argument from Better
Reasons and Good Enough to Different Basis and we do not incur the costly
commitment to Infallibilism.

6 Conclusion
In the opening, we looked at an argument for the mentalist view. That argument
was no good. McDowell would say that the problem was the way in which it
assumed that if it looks to you as if p, you have the same reasons whether you
veridically perceive that p is so or are hallucinating. This leads him to say that
the nature of the psychological states by virtue of which it looks to you as if p
depend, in part, upon whether the conditions necessary for veridical experience
obtain. Myself, I think you do not have the same reasons in both cases because
in only one case do you have a genuine reason in mind. Reasons are facts. Take
the facts away and leave the attitudes in place, you think you have reasons that
do not exist.
The mentalists worry, quite reasonably, that the reasoning leads to Disjunc-
tivism lead to Infallibilism. McDowell’s view simply trades in one set of skeptical
difficulties for another. They reject the epistemological argument for Disjunc-
tivism because they insisting that the difference between the good and bad case
is a difference in what is known, not a normative difference or a difference in the
reasons that bear on whether to believe. While they are right that not every dif-

25
ference between cases of knowledge and ignorance corresponds to a difference in
normative standing, beliefs formed in response to hallucination have a different
normative standing than beliefs formed in response to veridical experience.
We avoid the skeptical worries that arise for the mentalists and McDowell
once we realize that Better Reasons and Different Basis do not stand or fall
together. McDowell thought they did, but the argument that was supposed to
show this rested on a reading of the internalist thought (i.e., the thought that
matters beyond your ken cannot contribute to your epistemic standing) that
he himself could not consistently maintain. Once that thought was properly
understood as the view that nothing beyond your ken can provide an epistemic
benefit, we saw that there was no argument from Better Reasons to Different
Basis. We avoid the skeptical problems that arise for mentalism by helping
ourselves to Better Reasons. We avoid the skeptical problems that arise for
McDowell by denying Different Basis.
I have not offered any positive characterization of the nature of perceptual
experience here and have not provided an account that explains how it is that our
perceptual beliefs are justified. What I have done is defended a package of claims
that I think any plausible account of perceptual knowledge will accommodate
and argued that this package of claims does not commit us to any particularly
contentious views about the nature of perceptual experience. Briefly, here is a
sketch of a view of perceptually justified belief. Why are our beliefs not justified
in the case of hallucination? Because beliefs formed in response to hallucination
will pass off non-reasons or counterfeit evidence as if it is genuine. So, there is
a reason not to have such beliefs. (Remember, J-Closure tells us that a belief is
justified if the beliefs we infer from it can be justifiably held, and this requires
that the belief can provide reasons for this further belief.) If there is a reason
not to hold these beliefs and no reason to hold these beliefs, holding such beliefs
is a matter of believing against an undefeated reason. Just as you ought never
act against an undefeated reason, you ought never believe against an undefeated
reason. Why are our beliefs justified in the case of veridical experience? If our
beliefs were not justified, there would be an undefeated reason not to have them.
What could that reason be? The belief does not fail to pass of genuine reasons
to support further beliefs. The belief is not formed in such a way as to indicate
that the believer is not sufficiently concerned with the truth or that the believer
is irresponsible in any way. Nothing seems to stand in the way of their being
justified. So, are they justified? Sure, why not? They count as justified trivially
if they are not wrongful in any way. The justified just is the permissible, after
all. They are not epistemically wrongful in either of the only two ways I can
think of for a belief to be wrongfully held (i.e., they pass of counterfeit reasons
as if they are genuine or are held in such a way as to indicate that the believer
has failed in her responsibilities as someone pursuing the truth). 40
40 Thanks to Chris Cloos, Michael Conboy, Earl Conee, Trent Dougherty, Leo Iacano, Dun-

can Pritchard, and John Turri for written comments and discussion. Parts of an earlier draft
of this paper were presented at King’s College London and the University of Edinburgh and
I am grateful to audiences at both places for their questions and comments.

26
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