Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. LXXVI No.

1, January 2008 2008 International Phenomenological Society

Agent Reliabilism and the Problem of Clairvoyance

sven bernecker University of California, Irvine

This paper argues that John Grecos agent reliabilism fails in its attempt to meet the double requirement of accounting for the internalist intuition that knowledge requires sensitivity to the reliability of ones evidence and evading the charge of psychological implausibility.

There is widespread agreement that knowledge is incompatible with veritic luck. A belief is veritically lucky if it is true in the actual world, but in many close possible worlds in which the subject forms the same belief on the basis of the same evidence or via the same method, the belief is false. By and large, reliabilism is successful in eliminating veritic luck from the ranks of knowledge by devising subjunctive conditionals which ensure that a belief tracks the truth across a range of nearby possible worlds. But epistemic internalists claim that there is another kind of epistemic luck, viz., reective luck, which is also incompatible with knowledge but which reliabilism cannot evade. A belief is reectively lucky if, given all of the internally accessible information a subject has about his epistemic situation, it is a matter of luck that his belief is true. The reason reliabilists are usually not in a position to rule out reective luck is because they tend to subscribe to externalism, i.e., the view that the knower need not have reective access to the truthtracking relation that makes his true belief knowledge. Internalists handle reective luck by demanding that for a true belief to qualify as knowledge the subject must have reective access to the justifying factors. Whether or not a belief is justied is determined by factors which the subject is in a position to know by reective access and which he can be held responsible for.1 Building on Ernest Sosas virtue perspectivism, John Greco develops an account of knowledge that contains both an [internalist] responsibility condition and an [externalist] reliability condition (2004a, p. 6).
1

The terms veritic luck and reective luck are borrowed from Pritchard (2005, ch. 6).

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This mixed theory goes under the name of agent reliabilism. Even though agent reliabilism is a kind of externalist reliabilism, Greco claims that it can accommodate the [internalist] intuition that knowledge requires sensitivity to the reliability of ones evidence, that knowledge must be subjectively appropriate in this sense (1999, p. 285). While process reliabilism explicates justication in terms of beliefformation processes, agent reliabilism uses the notion of an intellectual virtue.2 Intellectual virtues are understood as dispositions (or faculties) of a person such that, under the appropriate circumstances, he believes true propositions and avoids believing false propositions. Examples of such virtues are vision, hearing, introspection, memory, logical intuition, deduction and induction. Objective justication, according to Greco, amounts to a belief resulting from virtues of the subjects cognitive character that reliably produce true beliefs (1999, pp. 287-8; 2000, p. 177). Objective justication is externalist in that the subject need not be aware of the fact that he is believing out of an intellectual virtue. Greco labels his epistemology agent reliabilism because the reliability it requires is reliability of the cognitive agent himself, as opposed to his belief-formation processes, or his evidence. Since, in Grecos view, knowledge must be subjectively appropriate as well as objectively reliable (2000, p. 180) the reliabilist account of objective justication is supplemented with an internalist (or subjective) component. To motivate the introduction of subjective justication Greco employs Laurence BonJours case of Norman the clairvoyant. Norman possesses the power of perfectly reliable clairvoyance with respect to the geographical whereabouts of the President of the United
2

Process reliabilism has long been plagued by counterexamples involving strange and eeting belief-formation processes. Plantingas (1993, p. 199) example of a strange and eeting process concerns a rare sort of brain lesion which causes the patient to believe that he has a brain lesion, independently of whether he has any evidence for having the lesion. In this case, the patients belief that he has a lesion is both true and reliably produced but, crucially, we wouldnt qualify it as knowledge. Agent reliabilism claims to be an improvement over process reliabilism. By restricting the relevant belief-formation processes to those grounded in the knowers virtues, agent reliabilism seems to disallow strange and eeting processes from giving rise to justied belief. However, it is not clear that the process associated with the brain lesion could not be part of the patients intellectual virtue. As Cohen (2003, pp. 438-40) and Kvanvig (2003, pp. 453-4) have pointed out, we can imagine that the lesion has been there since birth, and that the associated process is both stable and reliable in the relevant sense. In response to this objection, Greco has revised his diagnosis of the brain-lesion example. According to his more recent assessment, the reason the cognitive process caused by the lesion doesnt generate justication is because it isnt suciently integrated with other aspects of the patients cognitive system: The process produces only a single belief, for example, and it is unrelated and insensitive to other dispositions governing the formation and evaluation of belief (Greco, 2003a, p. 474).

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States, but he has not the slightest inkling that he possesses this power. One day, Norman suddenly nds himself believing accurately, on the basis of his clairvoyant faculty, that the President is in New York (q). Though he has no evidence either way on whether q is true, on whether he possesses the power of clairvoyance, and on whether such a power is even possible, reliabilism commits us to holding that Norman knows that q. Yet BonJour claims that Norman does not know since, in light of his own subjective conception of the situation, believing that q is unwarrantedit is accidental that his belief is true. Knowledge is incompatible with reective luck. As BonJour explains, part of ones epistemic duty is to reect critically upon ones beliefs, and such critical reection precludes believing things to which one has, to ones knowledge, no reliable means of epistemic access.3 And Greco agrees that there does seem to be something right about BonJours general point in that knowledge does seem to require some kind of sensitivity to ones own reliability (2000, p. 187). I think that it is questionable whether the clairvoyance example poses a threat to externalist reliabilism. The intuitive plausibility of the thought experiment hinges on the presumption that clairvoyance is not reliable. Yet if a clairvoyant faculty actually existed, then either it would prove itself reliable or not. If it proved itself reliable, then intuitively there would be no reason to deny clairvoyants justication and knowledge. BonJours internalist interpretation of the thought experiment presupposes a bias against clairvoyance. Yet, for the sake of the argument, I will pass over this diculty. Before discussing Grecos account of subjective justication and how it handles the Norman-example of reective luck, it is instructive to take a look at Sosas treatment. Sosa distinguishes between animal knowledge and reective knowledge. While animal knowledge is only a matter of arriving at true beliefs by the employment of virtuous faculties, reective knowledge requires, in addition, that the subject is internalistically justied in thinking that his beliefs are grounded in reliable cognitive faculties. Reective knowledge consists in a veridical object-level belief which is reliably produced as well as in a veridical meta-belief which establishes that the object-level belief is reliably
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BonJour, 1985, p. 42;. Essentially the same point can be made using the chickensexer example discussed by Foley (1987, pp. 168-9) and others. Chicken-sexers are individuals who possess a natural and highly reliable ability to determine the sex of day-old chicks but who are aware neither how they do this nor that they are reliable in this respect. They tend to assume that they must be seeing or touching something distinctive, but tests have shown that their actual means of telling the sex of chicks is olfactory. So even though they have a highly reliable intellectual virtue, they tend to have no or false beliefs about how that virtue functions. For more on the art of chicken sexing see Martin (1994).

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produced and which meets certain internalist, namely coherentist, demands.4 According to Sosa, Normans clairvoyant beliefs concerning the whereabouts of the President constitute animal knowledge but do not amount to reective knowledge, for he lacks an epistemic perspective on his clairvoyant beliefs. Instead of seeing his clairvoyant beliefs as reliably produced Norman takes them to come out of the blue. They just pop into his head. Sosa demands that the subject must attain some minimum of coherent perspective on her own situation in the relevant environment, and on her modes of reliable access to information about that environment (1991, p. 143). Greco (2000, pp. 187-190) objects to Sosas diagnosis of the clairvoyance case on psychological reality grounds. We seldom have beliefs about the sources of our beliefs, and whether these sources are reliable. So it would be too strong to require that reective knowledge presupposes such meta-beliefs. In response Sosa (1994, pp. 41, 47) concedes that the perspectival meta-beliefs constitutive of internalist justication need only be sketchy and implicit. For reasons that are of no relevance here, Greco (2004b) believes that this concession doesnt help Sosa to overcome the psychological plausibility objection. The challenge, then, is to come up with a reliabilist account of justication and knowledge that is both psychologically plausible and involves sensitivity to the reliability of ones cognitive faculties. Grecos proposal is to understand the relevant kind of subjective justication in terms of the knowers disposition to believe:
(SJ1) A belief that p is subjectively justied for a person S if and only if Ss believing that p is grounded in the cognitive dispositions that S manifests when S is thinking conscientiously, or when S is motivated to believe the truth (Greco, 2003a, p. 475).

The motivation to believe the truth need not be self-conscious. Rather, it is meant to specify a kind of default position that people are usually in (2000, pp. 190-1). Grecos idea is that when one is trying to believe what is true rather than being motivated by some non-alethic factor (such as greed, prestige or comfort), one is disposed to form rst-order beliefs on the bases of some evidential grounds rather than others. The
4

In (2006) I argue that virtue perspectivism fails to combine satisfactorily internalist and externalist features in a single theory. Internalism and externalism are reconciled at the price of creating a Gettier problem at the level of reective knowledge. Reective knowledge is indistinguishable from gettierized belief because the circumstances that account for the justication of perspectival meta-beliefs are not only independent from, but also unrelated to the circumstances that account for their truth.

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fact that one employs a certain faculty when trying to believe the truth, constitutes a kind of sensitivity to the reliability of that faculty. Greco writes: People manifest highly specic, nely tuned dispositions to form beliefs in some ways rather than others. And this fact, I take it, amounts to an implicit awareness of the reliability of those dispositions (2003b, p. 128). Since the awareness in question does not imply beliefseven dispositional beliefsabout the reliability of ones beliefs and dispositions, Grecos account of subjective justication escapes the charge of psychological implausibility. The problem with this minimalist account of subjective justication, however, is that it is too weak to deny knowledge to Norman the clairvoyant.5 When Norman believes that the President is in New York (q) on the basis of clairvoyance, there is no reason to think that he is not manifesting a disposition to believe the truth. Nothing in BonJours story commits us to think of Norman as being motivated by some nonalethic factor. The fact that he believes q in spite of having no evidence either way on whether q is true or whether he is clairvoyant does not imply that he is not manifesting the disposition to form his beliefs accurately. Thus Norman not only meets the condition for objective justication but he also meets condition SJ1 for subjective justication. But if agent reliabilism allows for knowledge by subjectively unjustied clairvoyance, then it fails to accommodate the internalist intuition according to which reective luck is incompatible with knowledge. In response to this objection, Greco steps up the requirements for justication. For a belief to be justied for S it must not only result from a cognitive disposition that is properly motivated but it must also be well integrated with other aspects of Ss cognitive system. Cognitive integration has been added as a necessary condition for a dispositions qualifying as an intellectual virtue. One aspect of cognitive integration, we are told, is sensitivity to defeating evidence. Greco declares that if the beliefs in question are insensitive to reasons that count against them, then this ... speaks against cognitive integration (2003a, p. 474) and mutatis mutandis against subjective justication. Unfortunately, Greco does not give a full account of cognitive integration. Without distorting his proposal, we may take him to propose the following revised condition for subjective justication: (SJ2) A belief that p is subjectively justied for a person S if and only if Ss believing that p results from the cognitive dispositions that S manifests when S is motivated to
5

Cf. Cohen (2003a, pp. 441-2), Kvanvig (2003, pp. 454-5) as well as Lahroodi and Schmitt (2003, pp. 464-5).

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believe the truth. Manifesting these cognitive dispositions not only amounts to (i) S being implicitly aware of their reliability but also (ii) S being sensitive to defeating evidence. As was noted above, there is no good reason to suppose that the cognitive dispositions manifested by Norman the clairvoyant do not meet condition (i). So the crucial question is whether condition (ii) succeeds in eliminating clairvoyance cases from the ranks of knowledge. Condition (ii) amounts to a no-doxastic-defeater condition. A doxastic defeater is a proposition D that is believed by S to be true, yet indicates that Ss belief that p is either false or unreliably formed or sustained. Defeaters in this sense function by virtue of being believed, regardless of their truth value or justicatory status.6 Greco distinguishes two scenarios. First, when Norman has a defeater system much like our own, both in terms of its contents and in terms of its operative dispositions, then his clairvoyant beliefs are not subjectively justied because they are insensitive to reasons that count against them (2003a, pp. 475-6). In other words, when Norman is like us in that he suspects that clairvoyance is neither possible nor reliable, he fails to meet condition (ii). He is irrational and irresponsible in accepting the clairvoyant beliefs when judged in the light of his own subjective conception of the situation. But in that case, Norman presumably also violates condition (i). Given his awareness of defeaters, his believing that the President is in New York is not grounded in the cognitive dispositions that he manifests when he is motivated to believe the truth. Hence when Normans defeater system is like our own, SJ1 and SJ2 yield the same conclusion: on neither condition does Norman know the Presidents whereabouts. Second, there is the authentic thought experiment according to which Norman has a defeater system different from our own and does not share our bias against clairvoyance. BonJour (1985, p. 41) explicitly

It is common to think of no-doxastic-defeater-conditions as belonging to internalism and as being incompatible with externalist reliabilism. Two comments. First, there is no straightforward inconsistency in arming that what confers justication on a belief is an externalist reliability condition, but what takes justication away from a belief is an internalist defeasibility condition. As Bergmann (1997, pp. 405-6) points out, several leading advocates of externalist reliabilismGoldman, Nozick and Plantingaadopt internalist no-defeater conditions. Second, Greco convincingly argues for externalism about no-defeater conditions: I argue in [my] book [2000] that reliabilism must understand evidence in terms of the contingent belief-forming dispositions of the cognitive agent. Since defeat relations are evidential relations, it follows that reliabilism must understand defeat relations in the same way (2003a, p. 477).

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states that Norman possesses no evidence or reasons of any kind for or against the general possibility of [the power of clairvoyance] or for or against the thesis that he possesses it. This is precisely what distinguishes Norman from Samantha, Casper and MaudBonJours other ctitious characters. With them the belief that the President is in New York conicts with other opinions and beliefs that they hold. In Normans case, no such conict exists, only ungroundedness. Now with regard to this situation, condition (ii) fails to accommodate the internalist intuition according to which Norman does not know the Presidents whereabouts. Greco (2003a, p. 476) explicitly states that it is not clear that this sort of clairvoyant lacks knowledge. Once we ll out the details of the case in this way, it is plausible that the clairvoyant does have knowledge. So given that Norman doesnt share our bias against clairvoyance, SJ1 and SJ2 are again on a par: neither condition yields the intended result, namely that Norman does not know. The revised theory of subjective justication makes no progress with the problem of clairvoyance. To account for the internalist intuition according to which BonJours Norman does not know the Presidents whereabouts SJ2 has to be replaced by a stronger condition demanding that the subject has positive reasons for thinking that his beliefs are objectively justied. It is not surprising that BonJour (1985, p. 31) proposes such a condition. He maintains that for S to justiably believe that p there must be a good reason for thinking that p is true, S must believe this reason, and S must think it is a good reason for thinking that p is true. Using Grecos terminology, BonJours condition for subjective justication looks something like this: (SJ3) A belief that p is subjectively justied for a person S if and only if Ss believing that p results from the cognitive dispositions that S manifests when S is motivated to believe the truth and when S believes that the belief that p results from such cognitive dispositions and that they are reliable. Nothing short of SJ3 will manage to rule out cases of reective luck from the ranks of knowledge. But if Greco were to substitute SJ3 for SJ2, he would become a victim of his own psychological plausibility objection. The reason is that SJ3 requires the knower to have metabeliefs concerning the reliability of his object-level beliefs. But if Greco is right in claiming that people rarely have beliefs about the genesis of their beliefs, then it follows that SJ3 is psychologically implausible. SJ3 bears some resemblance to Sosas virtue perspectivism in that it requires the knower to hold beliefs about his epistemic situation. Yet
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SJ3 is weaker than Sosas conception of an epistemic perspective.7 According to Sosa (1991, pp. 210, 282), reective knowledge not only requires that one has meta-beliefs indicating that ones object-level beliefs are virtuously formed but requires these meta-beliefs to meet three conditions: they must be true, virtuously produced, and t together coherently with each other and with the rest of the subjects belief system. Notice that by demanding that meta-beliefs be veridical Sosa (1991, pp. 133-4) can eliminate cases where an agent is in error about the intellectual virtue that produces his belief. Suppose that S holds a belief that p which results from his cognitive faculty F but which he takes to be the output of faculty F*. Further suppose that S mistakenly thinks that F is an unreliable faculty and correctly thinks that F* is a reliable faculty. In this case Ss belief that p satises SJ3. But if only S were to get clear about which cognitive faculty his belief derives from, he would take it to be defeated. Given Grecos intuition that knowledge requires sensitivity to the reliability of ones cognitive faculties, it seems strained to maintain that S is subjectively justied in believing that p. In conclusion, Grecos conception of subjective justication fails in its attempt to meet the double requirement of accounting for the internalist intuition according to which BonJours ctitious character Norman does not know on the basis of his clairvoyant faculty and evading the charge of psychological implausibility.8 References Bergmann, M. 1997, Internalism, Externalism and the No-Defeater Condition, Synthese 110, pp. 399417. Bernecker, S. 2006, Prospects of Epistemic Compatibilism, Philosophical Studies 130, pp. 81104. BonJour, L. 1985, The Structure of Empirical Knowledge, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Cohen, S. 2003, Grecos Agent Reliabilism, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 66, 437443. Foley, R. 1987, A Theory of Epistemic Rationality, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Greco, J. 1999, Agent Reliabilism, Philosophical Perspectives 13, 273 296.

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I am grateful to an anonymous referee of this journal for pressing me on this point. I wish to thank Peter Baumann, John Greco and an anonymous referee for helpful comments. Financial support for this research was provided by a Heisenberg Grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

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 2000, Putting Skeptics in Their Place, New York: Cambridge University Press. 2003a, Further Thoughts on Agent Reliabilism: Replies to Cohen, Geivett, Kvanvig, and Schmitt and Lahroodi, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 66, 466480. 2003b, Knowledge as Credit for True Belief, in M. DePaul and L. Zagzebski (eds.), Intellectual Virtue, Oxford: Calrendon Press, pp. 111134. 2004a, Virtue Epistemology, in E.N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, October 2004 edition, <http:// plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-virtue/> 2004b, How to Preserve your Virtue while Losing your Perspective, in J. Greco (ed.), Sosa and his Critics, Oxford: Blackwell, 96 105. Kvanvig, J. 2003, Simple Reliabilism and Agent Reliabilism, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 66, 451456. Lahroodi, R. and Schmitt, F.F. 2003, Comments on John Grecos Putting Skeptics in their Place, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 66, 457465. Martin, R.D. 1994, The Specialist Chick Sexer, Melbourne: Bernal Publishing. Plantinga, A. 1993: Warrant: The Current Debate, New York: Oxford University Press. Pritchard, D. 2005, Epistemic Luck, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sosa, E. 1991, Knowledge in Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1994, Virtue Perspectivism: A Response to Foley and Fumerton, Philosophical Issues 5, 2950.

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