Philosophical Review 124 (2015): 159-162.
Linda Zagzebski, Epistemic Authority: A Theory of Trust, Authority, and Autonomy in Belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. xiii + 279 pp. It is an exceptionally rare book that can be both a cutting-edge work on recently hot topics in epistemology—e.g., rationality, disagreement, trust, and testimony—and also, under the surface, the latest defense of Catholicism in its centuries-long dispute with Protestantism over fundamental epistemic principles. Linda Zagzebski’s highly ambitious book on epistemic authority manages to be both. The ultimate aim is to vindicate epistemic authority as a crucial and unavoidable aspect of our intellectual lives—where this includes the moral and religious dimensions of our lives, as well as our more narrowly theoretical concerns. This is not a commonly accepted position in current epistemology, so Zagzebski begins by attempting to ground the acceptance of epistemic authority in epistemic autonomy and individual’s self-trust. In the first step of this project, she follows Richard Foley and William Alston in arguing that there is no noncircular way to show that our cognitive faculties reliably produce true beliefs. Foley and Alston think that our recognition of this circularity forces us to seek refuge in self-trust: we cannot know that our faculties are reliable, but we must use them anyway. For Zagzebski, however, reliance on self-trust is not a matter of settling for an inferior position. Rather, the argument from circularity is useful insofar as it reveals our natural self-trust. Zagzebski’s optimistic reading of our epistemic predicament is grounded in her account of rationality. She holds that “To be rational is to do a better job of what we do in any case—what our faculties do naturally” (30). If it is natural for us to desire the truth and to trust that our faculties are capable of allowing us to discover it, then it is rational for us to trust our faculties and to use them conscientiously. In addition to the natural desire for truth, we also “naturally desire and attempt to achieve a harmonious self” (31). This means that we try to resolve various forms of dissonance, which arise when there is some conflict to be found among the various components of the self: our beliefs, desires, and other attitudes, our decisions, and our emotions. Conscientious reflection is an extension of the natural psychological processes that lead to harmony in the self. And so, because “there is a connection between the natural and the normative” (33), what it is rational for us to believe and do and feel will be what survives conscientious reflection. It is worth noting that this conception of rationality is more subjective than one might have expected, notwithstanding its grounding in the natural. In Zagzebski’s earlier work on virtue epistemology,
2
knowledge is taken to arise from acts of intellectual virtue, where it is essential to acts of virtue that they are successful in attaining their goal of producing true belief.1 Given that picture, one might expect to see epistemic rationality characterized as resulting from the exercise of the intellectual virtues. Instead, her focus in the present book is on conscientious reflection, where the link between such reflection and attaining the truth is largely set aside. On the resulting view, then, epistemic rationality is apparently divorced from knowledge and justification. Epistemic authority can give us reasons that make our beliefs rational, in some sense, but it is unclear whether those reasons can also permit us to know the truth. After identifying the self-trust that is both natural and rational to each of us individually, Zagzebski argues that I am rationally committed to extending trust to others. This is so because I believe “that they are like me and that I should treat like cases alike” (61). If I trust my own conscientious efforts to reach the truth, then I should trust the similarly conscientious efforts of others. This does not mean that I should merely treat the beliefs of others as evidence to be weighed against other sources of evidence I might have. In cases where I trust the way someone else forms his belief more than I trust my own (isolated) attempts, “the conscientious thing to do is to let the other person stand in for me in my attempt to get the truth in that domain and to adopt his belief” (105). The other person is an authority for me; he generates a preemptive reason—i.e., “a reason that replaces other reasons” I have (102)—for the belief in question. The authority of another person’s belief, though preemptive for me, is nevertheless grounded in my own conscientious reflection. It is justified either by my conscientious judgment that I am more likely to get a true belief if I accept what the authority believes (110) or by my conscientious judgment that I am more likely to get a belief that survives my conscientious self-reflection if I accept what the authority believes (111) than if I try to figure out what to believe on my own. This conception of epistemic authority fits naturally with the interpersonal view of testimony. According to that view, when a speaker tells a hearer that p, the speaker has invited the hearer to trust her (122). The hearer “is not being offered evidence, and accepting [the invitation] is not taking the testimony as evidence” (129). The trust the hearer has for the speaker is “irreducibly first personal” and is grounded in the hearer’s relationship with the speaker (130).
1
Virtues of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
3
The relationships that permit trust between speaker and hearer also provide the basis for communities of various sizes. The authority that other individuals have for me can be generalized to the broader community. There are two justifications for communal authority: either I conscientiously judge that I am more likely to get a true belief if I accept what the community believes or I conscientiously judge that I am more likely to get a belief that will survive conscientious self-reflection if I believe what the community believes than if I try to figure out what to believe on my own (155). Because I belong to the community and accept it as “an extended self,” its authority is not an alien imposition on me (155). It shapes my thinking as I engage in critical self-reflection; for this reason, “the justification of authority in some cases can be partially circular” (157). This is not problematic, Zagzebski says, because “the authority has helped me attain a higher level of integrity of the self” (157). Given this account of epistemic authority, it is easy to see how religious belief can be rational. If you belong to a religious community, its religious beliefs will have authority for you. When one of those beliefs is challenged, if it is “firmly rooted in a network of other beliefs and has already survived considerable self-reflection, it can be reasonable to treat putative evidence against it as either false or misleading” (214). This is so even when there is “a substantial amount of putative evidence against it” (215). Zagzebski cites as an example Alvin Plantinga’s argument “that it is possible for a person rationally to be a young earth creationist in full knowledge of the evidence against it” (215 n.12).2 But here one might well think, as Hume says, that we “are got into fairy land, long ere we have reached the last steps of our theory.”3 The problem is that, of the two justifications for authority Zagzebski has offered—I conscientiously judge that I am more likely to get a true belief or I conscientiously judge that I am more likely to get a belief that survives critical self-reflection—it is the latter that serves in the justification of religious authority and in the resolution of intractable disagreements. The purpose of critical self-reflection is to resolve dissonance, as may arise when one is presented with counterevidence to a belief or when one has conflicting desires. But notice, in the case of conflicting desires, that the dissonance may be
Plantinga, “When Faith and Reason Clash: Evolution and the Bible,” Christian Scholars Review 21 (1991): 8-33. 3 David Hume, Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), section 7. 2
4
resolved by abandoning either of the desires: you can give up the desire to stay on your diet, or you can suppress the desire for chocolate—in either case, the dissonance is gone. This symmetry holds just as well in the case of beliefs: you can drop the belief, or you can ignore the counterevidence. In either case, the discomfort of dissonance is gone. But it is absurd to think that this way of proceeding can result in beliefs that are epistemically rational. The brainwashed members of a cult may have selves that are extremely harmonious, living in communities where neither dissent nor dissonance is tolerated, but they are living lives that are paradigmatically irrational. A broader problem has to do with the preemptive reasons that epistemic authorities generate. Reasons of this sort, if there were any, would be very difficult to integrate into one’s belief system. Suppose that an authority on the weather tells you that it will not rain all week; nevertheless, when you look out of your window, you can see rain falling. How can this dissonance be resolved? On the evidence picture, which Zagzebski rejects, the authority’s testimony is evidence to be weighed against (and is presumably outweighed by) your perceptual evidence. But on the view Zagzebski favors, the authority “stands in” for you intellectually; her testimony preempts your evidence. This would obviously be the wrong result. To be clear, Zagzebski does allow us to stop viewing particular others as authorities. The difficulty, though, is in understanding how this can happen. The evidence that would be your basis for rejecting the authority appears to be incommensurable with the reason you derive from the authority. 4 On what basis, then, could you determine that the perceptual evidence is more trustworthy than the authority’s reason? The most natural answer is that it is because your perceptual evidence is stronger than your evidence that the authority is a reliable testifier. But to say this is to retreat from the interpersonal view of testimony to the evidence view; it is to reject the idea that authority can be a distinctive source of epistemic reasons. Zagzebski’s book is much richer in conception and in detail than the brief summary of it given above. Her concern for the role of emotions in belief formation, evident in her work on the intellectual virtues, also finds expression here, and she examines a broader range of epistemic phenomena—including trust, autonomy, and the role of communities—than is usual in epistemology. The book comprises a complete epistemic worldview—one that will surely be very influential,
For this criticism, see Jennifer Lackey, Learning from Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), ch. 8. 4
5
both in epistemology and in philosophy of religion. Despite the misgivings raised above, I think it is an admirable and extremely valuable contribution to the literature. Baron Reed Northwestern University
[email protected]
