Philosophia (2015) 43:427–434 DOI 10.1007/s11406-015-9592-8
Anti-Luck Virtue Epistemology as Religious Epistemology: A Response to Bobier Joe Milburn 1
Received: 11 December 2014 / Revised: 27 February 2015 / Accepted: 11 March 2015 / Published online: 21 March 2015 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
Abstract In a recent paper, Christopher Bobier (2014) has argued that Duncan Pritchard’s (2012) Anti-Luck Virtue Epistemology (ALVE) cannot account for knowledge that we have through Divine Revelation. This gives philosophers who believe that Divine Revelation can be source of knowledge reason to reject ALVE. Bobier’s arguments are specifically against ALVE, but they serve as arguments against all sorts of (modest) virtue epistemologies. In this paper then, I will critically examine Bobier’s argument, and contend that (modest) virtue epistemologies are compatible with knowledge through Divine Revelation. Keywords Anti-luck virtue epistemology . Religious epistemology . Divine revelation Bobier argues against anti-luck virtue epistemology by having us consider two different cases in which an epistemic agent dreams that a being speaks, claiming to be the creator of the universe; as a result the epistemic agent believes that God exists. Both cases are stipulated to be the same in every way except that in the one case God is divinely revealing himself to the dreamer, whereas in the other case, the epistemic agent is merely dreaming (Bobier 2014, 311–312). Bobier claims that in the case of divine revelation, one has knowledge that God exists on the basis of the dream; in the other case, in which one is merely dreaming, one might have a true belief, but his belief is not an instance of knowledge.
* Joe Milburn
[email protected] 1
Philosophy Department, The University of Pittsburgh, 1001 C. Learning, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA
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Bobier argues that ALVE does not have the resources to explain the difference between these cases. According to ALVE: S knows that p if and only if S’s safe true belief that p is the product of her relevant cognitive abilities (such that her safe cognitive success is to a significant degree creditable to her cognitive agency) (Pritchard 2012, 273).1 First, Bobier thinks we have reason to doubt that in either case the epistemic subject has a safe belief. Says Bobier: [In both cases] the beliefwas formed on the basis of a dream (M) that presumably had a vivid and imagistic input (I)… [Thus] it would appear that [in neither case the] belief is safe, because in some nearby possible worlds where they form a belief on the basis of a vivid and imagistic dream in similar circumstances, their belief will be false (Bobier 2014, 313). Second, Bobier thinks we have reason to believe that knowledge on the basis of Divine Revelation cannot meet the relevant virtue/credit conditions put forward by ALVE. That is, Bobier thinks that in the case in which one believes that God exists on the basis of God revealing himself in a dream, even if one’s belief is safe, one’s cognitive success is not significantly attributable to one’s cognitive agency. Says Bobier: How does [the relevant belief] fare with respect to the virtue component? Unfortunately [the relevant] safe true belief does not fare well. First, [the] safe true belief is formed on the basis of an unreliable cognitive disposition. Dreams are ‘disconnected’ with reality, and for this reason, are unreliable indicators of truth. Generally speaking, if [one’s] dream-beliefs are true, their truthfulness is [not creditable to oneself]. Second, forming beliefs on the basis of dreams is not a feature of a well-integrated cognitive system. Presumably, [one] is [not] in the habit of regularly forming beliefs on the basis of dreams. Third, chances are high that such vivid dreams are rare, and thus, forming beliefs on the basis of such vivid dreams cannot become a stable habit or disposition (Bobier 2014, 314). To make his argument against ALVE go through, Bobier assumes that the relevant method of belief formation is forming a belief that p on the basis of a vividly imagistic dream. But such a method of belief formation seems irrelevant to cases of knowledge on the basis of divine revelation. To see this consider the Act of Faith, a prayer recited by Roman Catholics: O my God, I firmly believe that you are one God in three divine persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I believe that your divine Son became man and died for our sins, and that He will come to judge the living and the dead. I believe these and
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In turn we can understand safety in the following way: S’s belief that p formed on the basis of some method m is safe just in case in the great majority (if not all) of the nearby worlds in which S forms a belief that p using method m, S’s belief that p is true. Cf. Pritchard (2009).
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all the truths which the holy catholic Church teaches, because in revealing them You can neither deceive nor be deceived. In this prayer, it is clear that a number of beliefs are held because they are revealed by God through the Church.2 I am supposing that philosophers who hold that there is knowledge on the basis of Divine Revelation are interested in these sorts of cases; i.e., cases in which the relevant method is believing that p because it is divinely revealed that p. On this view, knowledge through Divine Revelation should be treated as a special instance of testimonial knowledge; we believe that p, because it is God himself that tells us that p. This seems to be how Anscombe (2008) thinks of the matter, and she takes herself to be following an old tradition. Consider the following remarks she makes in her essay BWhat Is it to Believe Someone?^ If words always kept their old values, I might have called my subject ‘Faith’. That short term has in the past been used in just this meaning, of believing someone… At one time there was the following way of speaking: faith was distinguished as human and divine. Human faith was believing a mere human being; divine faith was believing God. Occuring in discussion without any qualifiying adjective, the word ‘faith’ tended to mean only or mostly ‘divine faith’. But its value in this line of descent has quite altered. Nowadays it is used to mean much the same thing as ‘religion’ or possibly ‘religious belief’. Thus belief in God would now generally be called ‘faith’ – belief in God at all… This is a great pity. It has had a disgusting effect on thought about religion. The astounding idea that there should be such a thing as believing God has been lost sight of (Anscombe 2008, 23–24). Indeed Bobier, himself seems to have lost sight of this idea in his discussion of Divine Revelation. For Bobier, believing on the basis of Divine Revelation is reduced to believing on the basis of a dream. But once we understand that beliefs on the basis of Divine Revelation are special cases of beliefs based on testimony, it becomes clear that Bobier’s arguments against ALVE miss the mark. On the one hand, Bobier’s examples seem beside the point. As Anscombe (1981) points out, in general you cannot believe that someone exists on the basis of her testimony. Believing what she says presupposes that you believe she exists. Traditionally, therefore, knowledge of God’s existence is taken to be one of the preambulae fidei – something that comes before we have any knowledge on the basis of God’s self-revelation. On the other hand, once we understand knowledge on the basis of Divine Revelation as a case of knowledge on the basis of Divine Testimony, we have no reason for thinking that ALVE and other (modest) virtue epistemologies cannot accommodate this sort of knowledge. To see this, it is helpful to consider two different sorts of cases, prophetic cases and doctrinal cases. I will examine the prophetic sort of case first.
2 If you don’t think that these propositions are actually revealed, change the example to fit your religious beliefs. The general point holds.
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In the prophetic sort of cases we have two people who dream that God is telling them that a certain future event will take place. They both accept this to be an act of Divine revelation, and on this basis believe with certainty that the future event will take place. Everything is exactly the same in these two cases, except that in the one case God actually is revealing to this person that the future event is to take place; in the other case, the person is merely dreaming. Let us stipulate that in the case in which one believes that a future event is going to occur on the basis of Divine Revelation, one knows that p. 3 In this case, one forms one’s belief that p on the basis of Divine Revelation and one has no defeaters for one’s belief. Now, it is obvious that when we describe the case in this manner, one’s belief is safe. For now we have a case of accepting that something will take place on the basis of Divine testimony; but in no possible world in which we believe something on the basis of Divine testimony do we form a false belief (assuming that God can neither deceive nor be deceived). Things are otherwise, of course, for the case in which one merely dreams God is revealing that some future event will take place. In this case, one accepts something will take place on the basis of a dream. And this way of forming beliefs is not safe. The question, then, is whether beliefs formed on the basis of Divine Revelation can meet the virtue/credit conditions laid down by ALVE. The answer to this question is yes. One’s cognitive success in cases of prophetic knowledge can be significantly creditable to one’s cognitive agency. First, one’s beliefs formed on the basis of Divine Revelation are maximally reliable. Thus a disposition to form beliefs on the basis of Divine Revelation will be maximally reliable in the sense that whenever it is exercised, one will always form a true belief. Second, it seems that the disposition to form beliefs on the basis of Divine Revelation can be an integrated part of one’s cognitive character. Even if one does not form a very wide range of beliefs on the basis of Divine Revelation, so long as the content of what is revealed and the idea that future events might be revealed to oneself are compatible with one’s other beliefs and cognitive dispositions, we can think of a disposition to believe on the basis of Divine Revelation as fitting into one’s cognitive character (Cf. Greco 2010, 152). Indeed, if one’s disposition to form beliefs on the basis of Divine Revelation is not integrated into one’s cognitive character in this way, then there is a defeater for one’s belief, since this would imply that one had reason strong reason for denying that God had revealed anything to oneself. Third, it seems that the disposition to form beliefs on the basis of Divine Revelation can be a stable disposition. This is true even if one does not regularly form beliefs (regarding the future) on the basis of Divine Revelation. A disposition can be stable even if it is not regularly manifested; after all one can have a disposition to Φ in conditions C through an expanse of time even if one never finds herself in conditions C and so never manifests the relevant disposition.
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Bobier’s challenge to ALVE and virtue epistemology in general is to explain why in the one case there is knowledge, but in the other case there is not. This challenge, however, strikes me as premature. For it seems that even if God were to reveal a future event is to take place to someone, and this person believes that the future event will take place because she thinks (rightfully) God has revealed it to her, she might still lack knowledge. After all, she might possess a defeater for her knowledge: e.g., she might have overwhelming reason for doubting that God had revealed anything to her. The upshot of this is that Bobier’s cases (and my modified version of them) do not serve as obvious cases of knowledge on the basis of Divine Revelation.
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So we have good reason for holding that a disposition to form beliefs on the basis of Divine Revelation is reliable, and we have no principled reason for doubting that such a disposition could be an integrated part of one’s cognitive character as a stable disposition. But if one comes to believe truly that p on the basis of a reliable, stable disposition that is integrated into one’s cognitive character, then one’s cognitive success is significantly creditable to one’s cognitive agency. So it seems that there is no reason for believing that in some cases at least, one’s believing truly on the basis of Divine Revelation can meet the virtue conditions on knowledge put forward by ALVE and other modest virtue epistemologies. One might grant this but still find it difficult to believe that one’s cognitive success in cases of Divine Revelation could be significantly attributable to one’s own cognitive agency. After all, it seems that it is the Divinity that is really creditable for one’s cognitive success in cases of prophetic knowledge on the basis of Divine Revelation. The input of our cognitive agency in all this is negligible. This worry is related to a common worry, i.e., that in general, credit/virtue theories of knowledge cannot accommodate cases of testimonial knowledge. (cf. Lackey 2009; Pritchard 2012). I think however, these worries are ungrounded, and, at any rate, ALVE is specifically designed to overcome them. Remember that ALVE (and other modest forms of virtue epistemology) only require that one’s cognitive success be significantly attributable to one’s cognitive agency. This contrasts with claiming that in order to know, one’s cognitive success must be primarily creditable to one’s cognitive agency. Of course, God himself is primarily creditable for one’s cognitive success in cases of prophetic knowledge. But ALVE and modest forms of virtue epistemology need not deny this; to allow for cases of prophetic knowledge, all they need to claim is that in such cases one’s cognitive agency is significantly creditable for one’s cognitive success. As we have seen, however, there is good reason for thinking that one’s cognitive success in cases of prophetic knowledge can be significantly creditable to one’s cognitive agency. To be sure, it seems that in the case of Divinely revealed knowledge the relevant disposition must be Divinely infused; it does not belong to human nature (even second nature) to recognize and respond to Divine Revelation. But though a prophetic gift is a Divinely infused power/disposition, this does not imply that it is not a power of the epistemic agent. It is a power of the agent for which they are completely dependent on God. There is no reason, therefore, for supposing that ALVE and virtue epistemology in general are incompatible with knowledge of future events on the basis of Divine Revelation. This is not to say that ALVE and virtue epistemology guarantee that such knowledge is easy to have. In the preceding I have simply stipulated that one had knowledge of future events on the basis of Divine Revelation in some particular case. And so I assumed that there were no defeaters for one’s belief on the basis of Divine Revelation. I believe that as things stand, however, we have a great number of undermining defeaters for believing on the basis of Divine Revelation that some future event is going to take place, even if we were to experience a veridical Divine revelation of future events. These defeaters include: knowledge that there are a number of sincere false prophets; reasons for doubting that God would intervene miraculously in
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this way in our lives; reasons for doubting that seeming Divine revelation is a true revelation etc. etc.4 Theists of the Judeo-Christian variety, I take it, have no reason for doubting that these defeaters in turn might be defeated; after all one might put a prophetic gift to the test and find it to be true, or one might have one’s prophetic gift confirmed by a series of miraculous events. But knowledge of future events through Divine revelation might require this sort of testing to be knowledge at all. In this case, one would not know that some future event is going to occur if they simply have a one-off dream in which God reveals to them that the future event is to occur. We can consider, now, the second sort of case, the doctrinal case. In this sort of case we have two dreamers; one merely dreams that God is revealing some sort of doctrinal truth that p, the other actually has the doctrinal truth that p revealed to him by God through a dream. I bring up this case, not because it is essentially different than the case of prophetic knowledge through Divine Revelation, but because it should be clear that philosophers in the Jewish or Christian traditions should be happy to regularly deny knowledge to both dreamers. In the Jewish and Christian traditions, Divine Revelation of doctrinal matters is not typically a private affair, but public; and the revelations of God come to be known by individuals, in the normal course of affairs, through partaking in a shared communal life. Of course, it might be argued that knowledge of doctrine might be revealed to an individual in a dream; so for instance, Peter is portrayed in the Acts of the Apostles as having a revelation that the dietary restriction set forth in the Pentateuch were no longer binding. But supposing that such divinely revealed knowledge is possible in principle, it seems that ALVE and other modest virtue epistemologies can accommodate it. For supposing that one believes some doctrine because God himself says it is true, then one’s belief is safe; and we have no reason for supposing that in cases in which one believes on the basis of Divine Testimony and there are no defeaters for one’s belief, that one’s true belief on the basis of Divine Testimony cannot be both safe and significantly creditable to one’s epistemic agency. Again, it seems that believing on the basis of Divine Testimony without having epistemic defeaters for one’s belief might be hard to come by, for it seems we have standing undermining defeaters for thinking that God has revealed anything to us in a dream regarding His nature or His plan for humanity. These defeaters, again, however, are defeasible. In particular they might be defeated through a shared, communal life that is lived in relation to God. It seems to me, however, that these defeaters would rule out any one-off act of Divine Revelation of doctrine through dreams as instances of knowledge.
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How we should understand such defeaters if we subscribe to ALVE is an interesting question; the obvious answer is that somehow possessing these defeaters keeps our belief from either being safe or creditable to our epistemic agency. The details are sketchy. Of course, ALVE might be unable to give a satisfactory account of all the kinds of defeaters we might possess for knowledge; but this problem, if it exists, is a general problem that does not depend on issues with Divine Revelation. Furthermore, whether or not ALVE can makes sense of defeaters for knowledge, modest forms of virtue epistemology that simply claim that there are virtue/credit conditions on knowledge could still be true.
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One might reply on Bobier’s behalf that we don’t have the right to describe the cases in which one believes that p because he believes (rightly) that God reveals to him that p in a dream, as cases in which one believes truly that p because he has manifested a disposition to believe on the basis of God’s revelation. That is, one might demand that in both the epistemically good case and in the epistemically bad case, the same method of belief formation is used. And indeed, Bobier does push something like this line. 5 But this demand is hard to take seriously. Consider a case in which one receives testimony that p and so believes that p, and consider a case in which one merely believes that he receives testimony that p and so believes that p. If we accept that in both cases there must be the same method of belief formation, then it seems that we could never simply take it on someone’s word that p is the case; rather we would have to believe that p because we believe someone told us that p. But why should we accept this? It seems that sometimes I can believe that p because I believe S who told me that p. Indeed, this is the paradigmatic case of testimonial belief. But we have been treating knowledge on the basis of Divine Revelation as a special case of testimonial knowledge; knowledge that comes about on the basis of believing God. So the demand that we take the method of belief formation being used in the epistemically good and 5
Says Bobier:
One might think that there is an easy solution that has been staring us in the face all along – specify in a more fine-grained manner the cognitive processes that gave rise to [our dreamers’] beliefs. It might thought that [one person’s] belief was formed on the basis of a divinely-caused dream, which is reliable, whereas Bob’s belief was formed on the basis of a mere dream, which is unreliable… While I think that this is the most promising line of attack, I that it falls short for a number of reasons. First, God-caused dreams are still dreams, and divine revelation via dreams is still revelation through a dream. It appears to be ad-hoc to claim that God-caused dreams are in a class of their own, distinct form mere dreams. What reason, apart from wanting to avoid an unpleasant conclusion, do we have for claiming that a sub-class for dreams (those that are divinely caused) is distinct from all others? Second, Pritchard himself is hesitant to relativize belief-forming processes to environment in a fine-grained manner, and this suggests that he would be hesitant to draw a distinction between dreams and divinely caused dreams… That is, Pritchard has argued that there is no linguistic precedent to relativize our faculty of sight to a local environment, and it might though that his argument applies to the claim that we need to relativize dreams to their causes… Third, and most importantly, forming safe beliefs on the basis of divinely caused dreams does not appear to satisfy the virue-condition for three reasons. (1) Dreams are not features of well-integrated cognitive processes…(2)… [D]ivinely caused dreams are not a stable belief forming process. (3) Divinely caused dreams do not appear to be ‘creditable’ to the agent who has them. (Bobier 2014, 319).
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epistemically bad cases to be the same can be rejected. This demand is simply a demand that we disallow the possibility that we believe that p because we believe God, and accept only the possibility that we believe that p because we believe that God has revealed it. In other words, it is a demand that we deny the possibility of believing God, and so a demand that we deny the possibility of Divine Revelation. The upshot of these reflections, then, is that pace Bobier, ALVE and other forms of modest epistemology are not only compatible with knowledge on the basis of Divine Revelation, but they shed some light on it.
References Anscombe, G. E. M. (1981). BFaith^, in Ethics, religion and politics: collected philosophical papers (IIIth ed., pp. 113–122). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Anscombe, G. E. M. (2008). What is it to believe someone? In M. Geach & L. Gormally (Eds.), Faith in a hard ground (pp. 24–33). Exete: Imprint Academic. Bobier, C. (2014). Anti-luck virtue epistemology and divine revelation. Philosophia, 42, 309–320. Greco, J. (2010). Achieving knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lackey, J. (2009). Knowledge and credit. Philosophical Studies, 142, 27–42. Pritchard, D. (2009). Safety-based epistemology: whither now? Journal of Philosophical Research, 34, 33–45. Pritchard, D. (2012). Anti-luck virtue epistemology. Journal of Philosophy, 109, 247–279.
