This chapter dwells at the intersection of the social psychology of knowledge resistance and epistemic normativity to offer the first full taxonomy of resistance to evidence. It first individuates the phenomenon via paradigmatic instances, and then it taxonomises it according to two parameters: (1) paradigmatic triggering conditions and (2) epistemic normative status. I argue that the phenomenon of resistance to evidence is epistemologically narrower but psychologically broader than is assumed in the extant literature in social psychology. This, in turn, gives us reason to believe that addressing this phenomenon in policy and practice will be a much more complex endeavour than is currently assumed. In the remainder of the book, I examine the extant literature on evidence, defeat, justification, permissible suspension, and epistemic responsibility in search of the normative resources required to fully accommodate the psychological breadth and epistemic normative status of the phenomenon of resistance to evidence.

1.1 Resistance to Evidence

The notion of resistance to evidence, while subject to thorough investigation in social psychology,Footnote ¹ is acutely under-theorised in the philosophical literature. As a result, we are still to understand the normativity of the resistance phenomenon: What is (epistemically) wrong with resistance to evidence? What are its triggers? How does the normativity of resistance to evidence interact with norms of inquiry and the epistemic justification of belief?

Consider the following cases:

1. Case #1. Testimonial Injustice: Anna is an extremely reliable testifier and an expert in the geography of Glasgow. She tells George that Glasgow Central is to the right. George believes women are not to be trusted; therefore, he fails to form the corresponding belief.

2. Case #2. Political Negligence: Bill is a stubborn supporter of President Dump. In spite of all evidence that is readily available to him (via mainstream media, Dump’s own actions and public statements, etc.) suggesting that Dump is a bad president, Bill stubbornly refuses to believe that Dump is a bad president.

3. Case #3. Science Scepticism: Neda is an anxious cogniser; in particular, she is very careful when it comes to accepting science communication: whenever well-recognised, reliable experts assert that anthropogenic climate change is occurring or that vaccines are safe, Neda suspends belief thinking, ‘Well, scientists sometimes get it wrong! I’ll do my own research.’

4. Case #4. Perceptual Non-responsiveness: Alice is looking straight at the table in front of her and fails to form the belief that there’s a table in front of her.

5. Case #5. Unwarranted Optimism: Mary is an optimist. When her partner Dan spends more and more evening hours at the office, she’s happy that his career is going so well. When he comes home smelling like floral perfume, she thinks to herself: ‘Wow, excellent taste in fragrance!’ Finally, when she repeatedly sees him having coffee in town with his colleague Alice, she is glad he’s making new friends.

6. Case #6. Misdirected Attention: Professor Racist is teaching college-level maths. He believes people of colour are less intelligent than white people. As a result, whenever he asks a question, his attention automatically goes to the white students, such that he doesn’t even notice the Black students who raise their hands. As a result, he believes Black students are not very active in class.

7. Case #7. Friendly Detective: Detective Dave is investigating a crime scene. Dave is extremely thorough but, at the same time, a close friend of the butler. Dave finds conclusive evidence that the butler did it – the butler’s gloves covered in blood, his fingerprints on the murder weapon, a letter written by the butler confessing to the crime – but he fails to form the corresponding belief: Dave just can’t get himself to believe that his friend would do such a thing.

What is going on in these cases? Note that they involve very different sources of knowledge (e.g. testimony, perception, inductive inference) and that the failures at stake come about for very different reasons (e.g. prejudice, motivated reasoning, epistemic anxiety, lack of attention, partisanship, bias, wishful thinking). All of these are bad things, epistemically, in their own right. At the same time, the cases also have one important feature in common: for all these subjects, there is excellent evidence easily available to them, which they fail to take up.

Several philosophers have offered source-bound diagnoses of particular incarnations of this phenomenon (in terms of, e.g., epistemic injustice (Fricker Reference Fricker2007), disregard for the nature and/or normativity of telling (Moran Reference Moran2006, Hazlett Reference Hazlet2017), breach of norms of attention (Siegel Reference Siegel2017)), but very few have tried to offer an overarching explanation of what they all have in common. However, once we look at these cases together, it becomes clear that, on top of the case-specific problems, they plausibly exhibit a common variety of epistemic failure: resistance to easily available evidence.

1.2 The Social Psychology of Evidence Resistance

1.3 Rejecting Evidence: A Taxonomy

What we have seen so far is that the extant research on evidence resistance suffers from both empirical and epistemological shortcomings in identifying the triggers behind the target phenomenon: on the one hand, epistemologically, we need to distinguish between unjustified evidence resistance – sourced in all kinds of epistemically impermissible belief/suspension formation, such as motivated reasonings, biases, etc. – and epistemically justified evidence rejection – sourced in justified prior beliefs. On the other hand, even when zooming in on epistemically problematic instances of the phenomenon it is not clear how much evidence resistance is sourced in cold rather than hot biases or in updating on unjustified priors rather than biases.

These difficulties in answering the question as to what triggers resistance to evidence have, in turn, very significant negative impacts on our prospects of identifying the best ways to address resistance to evidence. If resistance to evidence has one main source – for instance, a particular type of mistake in reasoning, such as motivated reasoning – the strategy to address this problem will be targeted at the individual level. In contrast, should we discover that a pluralistic picture is more plausible when it comes to what triggers resistance to evidence, we would have to develop much more complex interventions at both individual and societal levels. Finally, if it turns out that the vast majority of instances of alleged evidence resistance are actually explained by epistemically justified evidence rejection – say, because cognisers find themselves in environments polluted with misleading defeaters for the evidence at stake – our interventions should only target the relevant epistemic environment rather than any particular cogniser or belief-formation mechanisms.

Of course, the question as to what is actually happening, on the ground, in evidence-resistant communities and individuals is to be answered by careful, epistemologically informed empirical studies. It is not my ambition to settle this question from the armchair – nor should any epistemologist attempt to do so.

The ambition of this book is to offer the first epistemology of evidence resistance that can inform future empirical studies on the topic. To this effect, I will start by putting forth in Table 1.1 a simple taxonomy of the phenomenon in order to isolate the epistemically problematic instances that we are interested in.

In theory and practice, it is crucial, before undergoing an epistemological analysis of problematic cases of evidence resistance and before testing an empirical hypothesis having to do with the instantiation of this problematic phenomenon in a particular community, to first distinguish evidence resistance from its epistemically benign cousin: justified evidence rejection. One reason why this is crucial has to do with addressing the phenomenon in policy and practice: depending on whether we are dealing with justified evidence rejection or epistemically impermissible evidence resistance, different interventions are warranted. For combatting epistemically justified evidence rejection, engineering enhanced social epistemic environments should do the trick: since we are dealing with reliably epistemically responsive agents, we can rely on them to update in line with a non-polluted epistemic environment. This will likely require combatting rebutting defeaters via evidence flooding: evidence-resistant communities, inhabiting polluted epistemic environments, cannot be reached via the average communication strategies designed to reach the mainstream population inhabiting a friendly epistemic environment (with little to no misleading evidence). What is required is quantitatively enhanced reliable evidence flow (more evidence in favour of the scientifically well-supported facts will, in rational agents, work to outweigh the misleading evidence they have against the facts), as well as qualitatively enhanced reliable evidence flow (evidence from sources that the agent trusts – that are trustworthy vis-à-vis the agent’s environment). Furthermore, to combat mistrust in reliable sources, quantitatively and qualitatively enhanced evidence aimed at combatting undercutting defeat (misleading evidence against the trustworthiness of reliable sources) will be needed. One straightforward way to do this is by flooding evidence-resistant communities with evidence from sources they trust in favour of the trustworthiness of sources they fail to trust due to misleading undercutting defeaters.

In contrast, for combatting cases of unjustified evidence resistance agent-based interventions will be needed: for example, increasing the availability of cognitive flexibility training (e.g. in workplaces and schools, alongside anti-bias training) will be among the more efficient interventions. Cognitive flexibility training helps with enhancing open-mindedness to evidence that runs against one’s held beliefs and to alternative decision pathways (Garner Reference Garner2009, Griffin et al. Reference Griffin, McGaw and Care2012).

1.4 Conclusion

This chapter has done two main things: first, I looked at some of the recent literature on evidence resistance in social psychology, and I have argued that it misses important epistemological distinctions – such as, crucially, the distinction between epistemically justified evidence rejection and epistemically impermissible evidence resistance. I have then put forth a taxonomy of evidence rejection to help with isolating the problematic instances thereof, which will be my concern in the remainder of this book. In the following chapters, I will zoom in on evidence resistance and investigate the epistemological resources we need in order to explain its epistemic impermissibility.

The chapter argues that the main extant views of the nature of evidence one has lack the resources to account for the impermissibility of cases of resistance to evidence. I first examine classic internalist, seemings-based evidentialism and argue that it fails to account for evidence resistance. This, I argue, is an in-principle problem: internalist evidentialism cannot recover from this because it is internalist.

I move on to externalist views of evidence, starting with factive externalism (i.e. Williamson’s (Reference Williamson2000) evidence is knowledge (E = K) ), and I argue that, since resistant cognisers don’t take up the relevant facts in the world to begin with, the view fails to predict epistemic impermissibility in resistance cases. I also look at and dismiss several ways in which the champion of E = K might attempt to account for what’s going wrong in resistance cases (i.e. via employing notions such as epistemic dispositions one should have had and epistemic blameworthiness), and I argue that the view faces difficulties. Finally, I move on to less radical, non-factive externalisms and investigate the potential of prominent reliabilist views – indicator reliabilism (Comesaña Reference Comesaña2020) and virtue reliabilism (Turri Reference Turri2010, Sylvan and Sosa Reference Sylvan, Sosa and Star2018, Sosa Reference Sosa2021) – to account for the phenomenon of resistance. I argue that these views are too agent-centric to successfully account for resistance cases.

2.1 Evidence Internalism

Evidence matters: the concept of evidence is central to epistemology, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of law, the ethics of responsibility. Outside philosophy, the concept of evidence is highly employed as well: lawyers, judges, historians, scientists, economists, investigative journalists, and reporters, as well as ordinary folk in the course of everyday life, talk and think about evidence a lot.

Both within and outside of philosophy, what we care most about is not just the nature of evidence alone, but rather what it is for a subject to have evidence. We care, as it were, about evidence had. That makes sense in philosophy because we are interested in the quality of our beliefs and our actions, and the latter will mostly be affected by the evidence we have. Outside of philosophy, evidence one has bears relevance to one’s legal status, professional performance, decisions, policies, voting, plans, etc. Evidence one has, the thought goes, but less so evidence one does not have, will influence all of one’s walks of life.

It is interesting to note – in line with the main scholarly source on the nature of evidence, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the issue (Kelly Reference Kelly and Zalta2016) – that the ways in which we think of evidence outside and within philosophy are strongly incompatible with each other. In philosophy, we disagree a lot about the nature of evidence, but one thing that the vast majority of theorists have always assumed is that the having relation is somehow related to the limits of one’s skull: one has evidence, on this received view, when one uptakes it ‘in one’s head’ – be it via seemings, beliefs, knowings, etc. In contrast, outside of philosophy, the having relation has never been about the skull: just try to tell a judge that you had no evidence that the butler did it, even though he did it right in front of you, because you couldn’t believe your eyes; see how that goes down.

Of course, one might think, what’s the surprise there? Experts know best in all domains – that’s what semantic externalism teaches – and philosophy is not an exception. The way in which us laymen conceptualise ‘depression’ is likely different from the way in which psychiatrists do; that’s fine, we’re wrong, and the experts are right. The same goes for evidence one has.

In what follows, I will argue that this way of thinking about the issue at hand is mistaken: in particular, I will propose that the philosophical conception of the having relation – as having to do with the limits of one’s skull – fails on extensional grounds – having to do with failing to account for the impermissibility of evidence resistance – and, as a result, it also fails to fulfil its central function in predicting accountability and legal responsibility.

Let’s start with a classic: according to internalist evidentialist, phenomenal conceptions of evidence, a subject S’s evidence consists (roughly) in what it seems to S to be the case. This view has a notable tradition: Russell, for instance, thought of evidence as sense data, mental items of one’s present consciousness with which one is immediately acquainted. Similarly, Quine thought that evidence consisted of the stimulation of one’s sensory receptors. Finally, and more recently, according to Connee and Feldman (Reference Conee and Feldman2004), one’s evidence consists exclusively of one’s current mental states.

The view accommodates our intuition in New Evil Daemon cases: the recently envatted brain-in-a-vat version of myself, the thought goes, is, intuitively, just as justified as I am to believe that she’s typing on her laptop right now. An evidentialist account of justification, in conjunction with a phenomenal view of evidence, vindicates this intuition.

A classic problem, however, for this way of thinking has to do with seemings with bad etiologies: sometimes, our seemings are based in wishful thinking and racial bias rather than proper cognitive mechanisms. When this happens, the phenomenal conception predicts – against intuition – that we have evidence for our corresponding beliefs. In turn, this problem renders the phenomenal conception of evidence incapable to distinguish between epistemically permissible evidence rejection and problematic evidence resistance. Take the science sceptic Neda again: in the good case, it seems to Neda that vaccines are unsafe because of reliable testimony that they are unsafe. In the bad case, her seemings are sourced in an irrational fear of needles. The phenomenal conception of evidence has trouble distinguishing between the good and the bad cases.

2.2 E = K

According to the prominent, knowledge-first view of having evidence (Williamson Reference Williamson2000), for any subject S, S’s evidence is S’s knowledge. Since knowledge implies belief, and since all of the protagonists in Cases 1–7 from Chapter 1 lack the relevant beliefs, E = K will predict that the subjects in question lack evidence: for example, Bill, the fervent supporter of President Dump, does not believe, and therefore does not know, that Dump is a bad president; furthermore, he does not believe, and therefore does not know, any of the statements by the media, etc., that suggest as much, and thus, on this view, he has no evidence that Dump is a bad president. And the same will hold for all of the protagonists of Cases 1–7. In this, E = K cannot make good on the resistance intuition – at least not when unpacked as resistance to evidence one has. Furthermore, several knowledge-first theorists explicitly embrace this result: according to people like Hawthorne and Srinivasan (Reference Hawthorne, Srinivasan, Christensen and Lackey2013), for instance, short of knowing, one should withhold belief.

One alternative way to account for our cases within an E = K framework would be by employing the notion of being in a position to know in order to account for evidence that is easily available but not possessed by the agent. Plausibly, the thought would go, the Dump supporter is in a position to know that Dump is a bad president: that’s what explains our intuition that he’s failing epistemically when he fails to form the corresponding belief.

Of course, a lot will hinge on how the relevant notion of ‘being in a position to know’ is spelled out: importantly, the relevant notion should be E = K-friendly (i.e. it should be compatible with the thought that evidence one has amounts to knowledge). Consider, first, a view on which I am in a position to know that p if and only if there is evidence for p available to me, and evidence is available to one just in case it consists of facts that follow from or are made probable by one’s extant knowledge. On this view, Bill is in a position to know p: ‘Dump is a bad president’ in virtue of the fact that it follows from his other extant knowledge – such as his knowledge that presidents shouldn’t lie, shouldn’t make racist and sexist comments, etc., together with his knowledge that Dump engages often in all of the above.

Unfortunately, this view will not deliver the needed result if we describe the case as one in which Bill’s system of (false) beliefs about Dump being a great president is perfectly coherent (in that Bill either doesn’t believe that lying, etc., are bad or doesn’t believe Dump lies, etc.), although unjustified: p will not follow from any piece of knowledge Bill has. To bring this point into even sharper relief, consider also the Perceptual Non-responsiveness case: what is the relevant piece of knowledge here?Footnote ¹

Here is one alternative E = K-friendly way to unpack being in a position to know: S is in a position to know that p if and only if, were S to believe that p, S would know that p. Bill, then, on this account, is in a position to know that Dump is a bad president if and only if, were he to form the relevant belief, he would come to know that Dump is a bad president.Footnote ²

The problem with this account is that if, on the one hand, we keep Bill’s psychology otherwise fixed, and all that changes is his forming the relevant belief, it will fail to constitute knowledge in virtue of its acute incoherence with the rest of his belief system. On the other hand, if, in order to assess Bill’s actual epistemic situation, we go and look at the closest world where Bill’s psychology is radically different, such that, indeed, were he to form the belief that Dump is a bad president, it would constitute knowledge, our account of being in a position to know becomes too strong.Footnote ³ To see this, consider Alvin Goldman’s (Reference Goldman and Tomberlin1988) benighted cogniser – let us call him Ben. This fellow lives on a secluded island where he’s been taught that reading astrology is an excellent way to form beliefs and where he has no access to any clue to the contrary. Plausibly, there is no evidence available to Ben for p: ‘astrology is an unreliable way to form beliefs’, nor is he in a position to know it. However, at the closest world where things are different enough (say that Ben leaves his benighted community), such that now he believes the relevant proposition, he knows it. As such, the account construed along these lines will mistakenly place Ben in the same boat as the Case 1–7 protagonists, in spite of the fact that Ben has no way to access information of the unreliability of astrology.

One last move available to the defender of E = K is to argue that what is present in Cases 1–7 and explains resistance intuition is potential evidence: evidence that Bill, the Dump supporter, would have had, had he not had bad epistemic dispositions.Footnote ⁴ Since, plausibly, one should have good epistemic dispositions rather than bad epistemic dispositions, the view predicts that Bill is in breach of an epistemic ‘should’. Williamson (Reference Williamson2000, 95 and in conversation) gestures at a view like this.

One important problem with this move, however, is that it is both too weak and too strong.

To see why the view is too weak, note that a version of the E = K account thus construed will miss an important distinction between synchronic and diachronic epistemic shoulds: the distinction between the synchronic ‘should’ of epistemic justification and the diachronic ‘should’ of responsibility in inquiry.Footnote ⁵ Proceeding responsibly in inquiry (e.g. thoroughly searching for evidence diachronically) is one thing; synchronically responding well to available evidence is another. However, both are governed by epistemic shoulds.Footnote ⁶

To see this, think back to the Friendly Detective case. Say that, this time around, Dave is investigating the crime scene with his colleague, Greg. Greg is rather lazy and distracted: he briefly looks around, fails to find any evidence at the crime scene, and concludes that there’s no evidence to suggest that the butler did it. In contrast, Dave is extremely thorough, but, at the same time, a close friend of the butler. Dave finds conclusive evidence that the butler did it at the crime scene but fails to form the corresponding belief.

I submit that both Dave and Greg are rather rubbish detectives, in that they fail to conduct their inquiry well – they are both in breach of the diachronic epistemic should of inquiry. Also, both Dave and Greg display pretty bad epistemic dispositions: Greg is a sloppy epistemic agent, while Dave fails to believe what the evidence supports. Compatibly, I submit, there is an important epistemic difference between Dave and Greg: Dave, but not Greg, is aware of all of the evidence in support of the hypothesis that the butler did it and fails to form the relevant belief nevertheless; Dave is resistant to available evidence.

The view, then, is too coarse grained to do the work needed to account for this datum. What is needed is a principled way to identify the epistemic dispositions and the corresponding epistemic should that matter in resistance cases.

To see why the view is also too strong, note that one need not have bad epistemic dispositions in order to fail, epistemically, in the way in which, for example, Bill, the Dump supporter, does: it can be a one-off affair. Maybe Bill is an excellent epistemic agent in all other walks of life: it’s only this particular belief – that Dump is a bad president – that he refuses to form against all facts speaking in favour of it.Footnote ⁷

2.3 Reliable Indicators

We have seen that strong, factive externalism struggles to accommodate the resistance data. In what follows, I will look at non-factive, reliabilist externalisms, in search for the normative resources we need to this effect. In this section, I take on Juan Comesaña’s (2010, Reference Comesaña2020) reliabilist view of evidence. In the next section, I will look at virtue reliabilist (e.g. Sylvan and Sosa Reference Sylvan, Sosa and Star2018, Sosa Reference Sosa2021) account of reasons to believe and Turri’s virtue reliabilist account of propositional warrant.

It is surprising to see just how very few fully fledged non-factive externalist accounts of the nature of evidence and defeat are available in the literature. Comesaña’s account is one that supplies this lack. The view falls squarely in-between the main camps on the market when it comes to the study of evidence: it is less demanding than factive views of evidence à la Williamson, in that, on Comesaña’s account, one can have evidence that is false. It is, however, more demanding than internalist views, in that experiences will only provide their content as a reason for belief when belief in the content is ultima facie justified. In this, Comesaña’s account promises both to reap the benefits of the main competitors and to avoid all of their downsides. To see this, consider the following case:

Understandably, Tomás is disappointed – but was he irrational in acting as he did? Juan Comesaña’s answer is: obviously not. According to Comesaña, Tomás’s action was rational because it was based on the rational belief that the candy-looking object Lucas was offering him was a candy. Tomás’s belief was rational because it was based on evidence that, in Comesaña’s view, is constituted by those propositions that Tomás is basically justified in believing by his experiences.

According to this account, then, an experience provides its content as a reason when the subject is justified in believing its content. The justification in question in the account, importantly, (1) is non-factive and (2) must be ultima facie: if an experience of the subject S provides them with prima facie justification for believing its content but this justification is defeated by something else S is justified in believing, then S does not have the content of the experience as evidence (Comesaña Reference Comesaña2020, 119).

(Early) Comesaña favours a reliabilist account of justification. If coupled with his view of evidence, this will render the latter stronger than internalism about evidence, in that only those contents of experience that are believed based on a reliable process will qualify as evidence.

In contrast to E = K, the view accounts for the intuition of rationality in CANDY: Tomás’s belief that Lucas is offering him candy will come out as justified and thereby as a proper part of his body of evidence. The view, when coupled with reliabilism about justification, also scores points over the internalist, in that it nicely accounts for a normative difference that we want our view of evidence to predict between Tomás and, for example, a wishful thinker or a biased cogniser: after all, wishful thinking and forming beliefs based on biases are not reliable processes, therefore the contents of the thus generated experiences will not constitute evidence.

At first glance, the account also promises to deliver the result we want in several of the resistance cases. Take, for one, Testimonial Injustice:

• Case #1. Testimonial Injustice: Anna is an extremely reliable testifier and an expert in the geography of Glasgow. She tells George that Glasgow Central is to the right. George believes women are not to be trusted; therefore, he fails to form the corresponding belief.

Since on the view under consideration an experience provides its content as a reason just in case the subject is justified in believing its content, and since, by stipulation, Anna is an extremely reliable testifier, the content of George’s experience of her telling him that Glasgow Central is to the right constitutes evidence. Anna’s testimony provides George with a reason to believe Glasgow Central is to the right, which he fails to take up. Similarly, the account correctly predicts that the Dump supporter has evidence that Dump is a bad president, which he ignores, that Mary has evidence that her husband is cheating, that the detective has evidence that the butler did it, etc. All of these people have experiences with the relevant contents that are reliably generated, the contents of which thus count as evidence on Comesaña’s view.

Unfortunately, on closer inspection, it turns out that granting the indicator reliabilist success on resistance cases is a bit premature. In particular, as I’m about to argue, the reliabilist treatment of the case of Professor Racist (and, relatedly, of any cases with a similar structure; i.e. cases where no experience of the facts at stake is present) is problematic at two crucial junctures. Here is the case again for convenience:

• Case #6. Misdirected Attention: Professor Racist is teaching college-level maths. He believes people of colour are less intelligent than white people. As a result, whenever he asks a question, his attention automatically goes to the white students, such that he doesn’t even notice the Black students who raise their hands. As a result, he believes Black students are not very active in class.

First, note that, against intuition, indicator reliabilism will predict that there is no evidence for Professor Racist that the Black students are active in class. After all, he has no experience with this particular content; therefore, he has no reliably generated experience with this content either. I take it that this is not a great result in itself. More generally, I take it, if our epistemology predicts that, simply because they ignore the facts, there is no evidence for racists and sexists that, for example, Black people and women are to be trusted, that they are deserving of good treatment, etc., we should probably go back to the drawing board.

Furthermore, note that the case of Professor Racist is not unique in this respect: we can modify all of the other cases along the exact same lines (i.e. ramping up the epistemically bad features) to get the same wrong predictions. Here is how: first, we can make it such that our characters not only don’t form the relevant beliefs because of sexism, politically motivated reasoning, etc., but they don’t even host the corresponding experiences. Say that George, for instance, in Testimonial Injustice, not only doesn’t believe what Anna says, but he doesn’t even register that she said anything at all due to his sexist bias: he just zones out when women speak. In all cases like these, contra intuition, indicator reliabilism will predict absence of evidence. Furthermore, the view now has the unpalatable consequence that tuning up epistemically bad properties can lead to an improvement in an agent’s epistemic position. Making sexist George more sexist such that he not only discounts the female passer-by’s words, but he doesn’t even listen to her when she kindly provides him with directions to the Glasgow Central will amount to an improvement in his overall epistemic state. I find this consequence highly problematic.

Second, consider a variation of the case in which sexist George systematically mishears what he is being told by female speakers in general, such that whenever he encounters disagreement, he hears agreement. It is perhaps even harder to believe that this trait should lead to an improvement in his epistemic position towards the relevant propositions.

Third, note that we can now even drop the gender-discriminatory component of the case. We may suppose that George simply mistakes disagreement by anyone for agreement. Again, it’s implausible that, as a result, George should be insulated from epistemic normativity: clearly, George is not justified in his beliefs.

2.4 Virtuous Reasons

This section investigates whether virtue epistemology has the resources needed to account for what is going wrong in Cases 1–7. For the most part, virtue epistemologists distance themselves from talk of evidence. However, they have other resources that they could employ to explain what is going wrong in Cases 1–7: the market features well-developed virtue-theoretic views of reasons to believe (Burge 2013, Sylvan and Sosa Reference Sylvan, Sosa and Star2018) and propositional warrant (Turri Reference Turri2010). According to these authors, broadly speaking, competences come first in epistemic normativity. I will examine these accounts in turn.

According to Kurt Sylvan and Ernie Sosa (Reference Sylvan, Sosa and Star2018), a fact is an epistemic reason to believe for S just in case it is competently taken up and processed by S. At root, then, reliable epistemic competence is doing the epistemic warranting work, even when reasons are involved. The only way in which a reason can have any epistemic normative standing is if it is competently taken up and processed by the agent: “[We] think […] claims [about reasons supporting a species of justified belief] could only be true if possession and proper basing are themselves grounded in a deeper normative property of competence” (Sylvan and Sosa Reference Sylvan, Sosa and Star2018, p. 557).

In turn, epistemic competences are traditionally unpacked as dispositions to believe truly (Sosa Reference Sosa2016) or know (Miracchi Reference Miracchi2015, Kelp Reference Kelp2018, Schellenberg Reference Schellenberg2018).

The view, whether construed along truth-first or knowledge-first lines, is too weak to account for what is going wrong in cases of resistance to evidence: Think back to the case of Bill, the Dump supporter; on this view, we get the result that there are no reasons for Bill to believe that Dump is a bad president, since he is not uptaking the relevant facts (i.e. media testimony, Dump’s own actions, etc.) via his cognitive competences. The same will hold for all of Cases 1–7: there will be no epistemic reasons for sexist and racist subjects to believe women and Black people; there will be no reason for Alice to believe that there is a table right in front of her; there will be no reason for Mary to believe that her partner is cheating; and finally, there will be no reason for Detective Dave to believe that the butler did it. All of these facts fail to constitute epistemic reasons on this view, since they are not competently processed by the subjects.

But can’t the virtue theorist appeal to these epistemic agents’ lack of competence to explain the poor epistemic status of beliefs that they do hold and account thereby for the impermissibility intuition?Footnote ⁸ For instance, can’t the virtue theorist argue that what is going on in cases like Political Negligence is that Bill is an epistemically incompetent believer, which results in him not being justified in his belief that Dump is a good president. This, the virtue theorist may argue, is enough to explain the intuition of epistemic impermissibility; we don’t also need to predict that there are reasons for Bill to believe that Dump is a bad president.

Two things should be said about this: first, note that it need not be that Bill is a rubbish epistemic agent overall. Indeed, maybe Bill is actually an extremely reliable believer, including about political matters. It’s only on this particular instance that he gets it wrong (after all, competences need not be infallible but merely reliable; thereby, their presence and manifestation are compatible with occasional failures). If so, the virtue theorist cannot appeal to lack of competence to explain this datum.

Second, I take it that it is independently problematic if a view predicts that there are no reasons for Bill to believe that Dump is a bad president; that is, independently of the epistemic status of his belief that Dump is a good president. To see this, consider a variation of the case in which Bill just doesn’t have any belief on the issue, in spite of all the media reports, Dump’s own actions, etc. It still seems as though there is something epistemically impermissible about Bill’s doxastic behaviour. However, since Bill is not forming any belief on the matter of Dump’s fitness for office, he isn’t forming any incompetent belief either.

One way to go for the virtue theorist here would be to blame the impermissibility on the availability of propositional warrant. The thought would go something along the following lines: what triggers the resistance intuition has to do with warrant that one has but that one fails to update on.

Unfortunately, resistance cases also generate problems for the virtue-theoretic view of propositional warrant, and for pretty much the same reason why they generate problems for virtue-theoretic accounts of reasons: because virtues come first in the relevant analysis. According to John Turri, for all p, p is propositionally warranted for a subject S iff S possesses at least one means to come to believe p such that, were S to form the relevant belief via one of these means, S’s belief would be doxastically warranted. In turn, doxastic warrant is unpacked in terms of epistemic competence: S is doxastically warranted to believe p iff S’s belief is the product of a reliable belief-formation competence of S’s.

On this view, since sexists, racists, and wishful thinkers are, by definition, people who lack the dispositions to form true or knowledgeable beliefs on the relevant issues, we get the counterintuitive result that these subjects lack propositional warrant and thus are not doing anything wrong, epistemically, in not forming the relevant beliefs.Footnote ⁹

What are we to do? Here is one move the virtue theorist might want to make here: dispositions can fail to manifest themselves when ‘masked.’ Consider the fragility of a vase. When in a room filled with pillows, the vase is still fragile, although its disposition to break cannot manifest itself. Similarly, virtue theorists could argue, Bill has an epistemic ability to form the relevant true belief about Dump, but it’s ‘masked’ by the presence of many incompatible – though false – beliefs about Dump. Similarly, sexist George’s epistemic competences are masked by his sexism, Professor Racist’s by his racism, and so on.

There are two problems with this move, however. First, the view thus construed overgeneralises, for it, once more, threatens to mistakenly place Goldman’s benighted cogniser and the protagonists of Cases 1–7 in the same epistemic boat. After all, Ben the benighted cogniser is the straightforward epistemic counterpart of a vase in a room full of pillows: were he to move to a friendlier epistemic environment, he would employ the right kinds of methods of belief formation. In this, he has a masked disposition to do well, epistemically.

Second, factors that ‘mask’ dispositions are commonly believed to be environmental factors (Choi and Fara Reference Choi, Fara and Zalta2018) – recall again the vase in the room full of pillows – rather than factors somehow ‘internal’ to the item in question; indeed, when the problem lies within the object itself – say that we inject all of the pores of the vase with glue, for instance – the more plausible diagnosis is lack of disposition – no fragility – rather than masked disposition. However, in many of the Cases 1–7, it is the subject’s own mental state (biases, wishful thinking, etc.) that interferes in the formation of the relevant beliefs.Footnote ¹⁰

In a nutshell, then, since the virtue theorist conceives of epistemic normativity as sourced in an agent’s competences, and since Cases 1–7 are cases of incompetent belief formation by stipulation, the virtue theorist has difficulties explaining the datum at hand.Footnote ¹¹

2.5 Conclusion

This chapter has examined the prospects of some of the most popular contemporary internalist and externalist theories of evidence, reasons to believe, and propositional warrant to account for what is going wrong in cases of resistance to evidence. I have first argued that evidence internalism suffers from in-principle difficulties. Further on, I have shown that the belief condition on evidence possession generates inescapable difficulties for the E = K view, according to which one’s evidence is one’s knowledge. Still further on, I looked into indicator reliabilism, and I found that it lacks the normative resources needed to explain resistance to evidence as it predicts – against intuition – that biased cognisers lack evidence speaking against their biased beliefs just in virtue of dogmatically ignoring it. Finally, I have examined virtue epistemological accounts of reasons and propositional warrant, and I found a common culprit that prevents these accounts from accommodating impermissible resistance to evidence: on these views, epistemic virtues constitute the bedrock of epistemic normativity. Unsurprisingly, when virtues are missing or inactive in the case at stake, there are no normative resources available to explain epistemic impermissibility. Since that is precisely what is the case in resistance cases, I have argued, virtue epistemology is too agent-centric to accommodate the phenomenon we are discussing.

This chapter considers one popular way to account for cases of resistance as cases of evidence one should have had, where the normative failure at stake is taken to be either (1) a breach of social normativity (Goldberg Reference Goldberg2018) or (2) a breach of moral normativity (Feldman Reference Feldman, Conee and Feldman2004). I argue that the social normative option is too weak, in that it allows problematic social norms to encroach on epistemic normativity, and that the appeal to moral oughts fails both on theoretical grounds – in that it cannot accommodate widely accepted epistemic conditions on moral blame – and on extensional adequacy.

3.1 The Social ‘Should’

In recent work, Sandy Goldberg has taken up the task of developing an account of the normativity of evidence one should have had and normative defeat. One key thought that motivates Goldberg’s project is that social roles – for instance, being a medical doctor – come with normative expectations. These normative expectations may be, and often enough are, epistemic. For instance, there is a social epistemic expectation that medical doctors are up to speed on the relevant literature in their field. Another key thought is that to believe that p justifiably one must live up to all of these legitimate expectations. Doctors who fail to be up to speed with the most recent research in their field are not justified in their corresponding beliefs, in virtue of being in breach of the social expectation associated with their role. For instance, a doctor who believes that stomach ulcers are caused by stress, in ignorance of the widely available evidence that suggests that they are caused by bacteria, is not justified to believe that ulcers are caused by stress. As such, Goldberg grounds the normativity of evidence one should have had in the social expectations associated with the believer in question’s social role.

It is easy to see that Goldberg’s key thoughts promise to give us the ideal resources to handle cases of resistance to evidence. Take, for instance, the case of Professor Racist from Chapter 1. Recall that this fellow is biased against people of colour, and, as a result, whenever he asks a question, his attention automatically goes to the white students, such that he doesn’t even notice the Black students who raise their hands. In virtue of occupying his social role, by the first key thought, Professor Racist is subject to normative expectations that are associated with this social role. In particular, he is subject to the expectation to fairly distribute his care and attention in the student population. Since Professor Racist doesn’t live up to this expectation, by the second key thought, he does not believe justifiably that the Black students are not active in his class.

This is a very rough description of how Goldberg aims to deal with the kind of cases of resistance to evidence that we are concerned with here. Even so, here is a worry that arises immediately: social expectations can be legitimate social expectations, but also illegitimate social expectations. Women, for instance, are often illegitimately expected to carry most of the household burden and to underperform in leadership roles. If so, it would seem as though social expectations cannot play the normative grounding role that Goldberg wants them to play, since they seem to require further normative unpacking themselves: we seem to need further normative notions to help distinguish between epistemically legitimate and epistemically illegitimate social expectations.

If so, the question that arises is: aren’t the social epistemic expectations that Goldberg appeals to in order to explain intuitive epistemic failure grounded in epistemic norms? And if so, won’t we have to invoke the relevant epistemic norms in the final analysis of what goes wrong in cases of resistance to evidence? As a result, doesn’t Goldberg’s story remain very much at the surface, too much so to offer a satisfactory account of resistance cases?

To see why one might think this, suppose that social epistemic expectations are grounded in epistemic norms. If so, the reason why there is a social epistemic expectation that doctors be up to speed with the literature is grounded in an epistemic norm that applies to doctors and that requires them to be up to speed with the literature. Crucially, however, it is precisely these epistemic norms that we need to explain if we are to give a satisfactory account of the epistemic impermissibility of resistance to evidence. It may appear, then, that Goldberg’s treatment of evidence one should have had does little more than appeal to a symptom of the norms that need to be explained by an adequate account of what is wrong with resistance to evidence. As a result, it may also appear that Goldberg’s treatment doesn’t cut deep enough to offer a satisfactory account of evidence resistance.

While this worry seems prima facie legitimate, it is ultimately unfounded. The reason for this is that Goldberg develops a view that reverses the standard direction of explanation between norms and expectations. According to Goldberg, epistemic norms are explained in terms of social epistemic expectations rather than the other way around. If Goldberg is right about this, the above worry can be laid to rest. His account cuts exactly as deep as it needs to.

At the same time, a lot hinges on the credentials of Goldberg’s account of epistemic norms. Goldberg defends a view he calls ‘coherence-infused reliabilism’. According to this view, very roughly, one’s belief that p is prima facie proper if and only if it is held by a process that one is permitted to rely on and that satisfies a reliability and a minimal coherence-checking condition.

Goldberg observes that we are deeply social creatures who are engaged in practices of information sharing and joint action. These practices are supported by a rationale in that opting out of them would be practically irrational for us. Crucially, these can only be supported by this kind of rationale if we are entitled to certain expectations. More specifically, Goldberg argues that we must be entitled to expect others to live up to the requirements of coherence-infused reliabilism. We must expect them not to form beliefs in unreliable ways, and we must expect them to ensure coherence. If we couldn’t expect them to form their beliefs in these ways, it would not be rational for us to engage in the kind of cooperative ventures in which we rely on the truth of others’ beliefs for success. For instance, suppose you and I wanted to move a sofa. If you couldn’t expect me to reliably form beliefs about where the sofa is and not to have incoherent beliefs about the matter, it would not make sense for you to embark on this venture with me.

In this way, the fact that we are engaged in information sharing and joint practical ventures and the fact that there is a rationale for this presuppose that we are entitled to have certain expectations of one another. These expectations ground epistemic norms. In particular, one important norm that they ground is the norm that specifies the conditions for prima facie proper belief.

What about ultima facie proper belief and evidence one should have had? To explain cases like these, Goldberg appeals to general expectations that go beyond the explicit normative criteria at issue in prima facie proper belief and that may serve to disqualify a prima facie proper belief from being ultima facie proper.

Goldberg argues that there is independent reason for thinking that these general normative expectations do exist, and that they can and often do the work in the way that he needs them to do. By way of support, Goldberg considers a number of examples. Suppose your firm is hiring, and you are currently interviewing a number of applicants. The explicit criteria for the job provide one important standard for your evaluation, perhaps the most important one. However, beyond the explicitly stated criteria, there are also general expectations, including, for example, that candidates be appropriately dressed. Or suppose that you are on the committee that awards the Nobel Prize. Again, while the explicit criteria for your evaluation provide an important standard for your evaluation, there are general expectations, including that nominees mustn’t be Nazis. Crucially, job applicants and Nobel Prize nominees who do not live up to these general expectations may be disqualified because they don’t. If I show up in flip-flops, shorts, and a vest to your job interview, you may not give me the job even if I meet all of the criteria explicitly mentioned in the job description. Similarly, even if a certain person produced amazing science, if it transpires that they are an all-out Nazi, they should not be awarded a Nobel Prize.

Goldberg’s thought is that we find these general normative expectations in cases of epistemic assessment, too. Most importantly for present purposes, one relevant expectation is that one play one’s social epistemic roles properly. In the case of a medical doctor, to play this role properly is to remain up to speed with the relevant literature. As a result, while a doctor who fails to do so may satisfy the conditions for prima facie proper belief that p, they fail to live up to the general normative expectations that come with their role as a practicing doctor.

Similarly, the thought could go, there are social epistemic expectations on taking up easily available evidence that explain the impermissibility intuition in the resistance cases. The characters in Cases 1–7 fail to live up to these social expectations. In turn, this failure disqualifies their beliefs from being proper, just as the underdressed job applicant was disqualified from getting the job and the Nazi scientist was disqualified from winning the Nobel Prize.

3.2 Worries for Social Epistemic Normativity

While Goldberg’s account may look promising at first glance, there is reason to think that it remains ultimately unsuccessful. I will argue that there are two main problems that Goldberg’s view encounters due to the social grounding of epistemic normativity: the first has to do with the scope of epistemic normativity; the second is a normative strength problem.

3.3 Problems for the Moral ‘Should’

We have seen that Goldberg’s view, accounting for what is intuitively epistemically amiss in resistance cases in terms of evidence one (socially) should have had, runs into trouble due to its underlying strong normative co-variance claim for the epistemic and the practical.

One might wonder, alternatively, whether the resistance cases we have been worried about aren’t really cases of moral failure rather than cases of genuine epistemic failure to begin with. On this account of the data, the intuition of impropriety in the resistance cases has a non-epistemic normative source: we think, for instance, that George is doing something wrong in the Testimonial Injustice case because he’s doing something morally wrong in not listening to the female passer-by: epistemic injustice, the thought would go, is the stuff of intellectual ethics, not of theory of knowledge proper. However, our intuitions are not fine grained enough to see the difference: theory is needed. Indeed, here is Ernie Sosa on this topic:

Here also is Richard Feldman:

I don’t find this move particularly plausible: the failure in question in Cases 1–7 is a genuinely epistemic failure. Here are a few reasons to think so: first, it is hard to see how, in the cases that exhibit morally problematic features, these could be instantiated without bad epistemic underpinnings. After all, one thing that the vast majority of the theorists of blameFootnote ³ strongly agree with is that there is an epistemic condition on moral blame: very roughly, moral blameworthiness implies that one is not epistemically blamelessly ignorant that one is doing something wrong. But this suggests that in the morally pregnant cases above, for example, the sexist and the racist are doing something epistemically wrong as well. Otherwise, if they were epistemically blameless, they could not be morally blameworthy. But they are.

Second, and most crucially, while some of these cases exhibit ethically problematic features, others do not. To the contrary, some of these cases (e.g. the case of Mary the wishful thinker and that of the friendly detective) can be plausibly construed as cases of moral success while remaining intuitively problematic with regard to the lack of evidence uptake. This suggest that the source of the intuition is, indeed, epistemic failure (absent other normative constraints at the context). Take, for instance, the case of Mary, the optimistic spouse: when her partner, Dan, spends more and more evening hours at the office, she’s happy that his career is going so well. When he comes home smelling like floral perfume, she compliments his taste in fragrance. Finally, when she repeatedly sees him having coffee in town with his colleague, Alice, she is glad he’s making new friends. She never considers the question as to whether Dan is having an affair. Is Mary justified to believe as she does that Dan is a faithful, loving husband? Clearly not. Note, however, that it’s hard to find moral flaws with Mary’s epistemic ways: after all, many moral philosophers (and a good number of epistemologists, e.g. Stroud 2006) agree that we owe more trust to our friends and family than to people we have never met: if so, Mary’s suspension is morally impeccable but epistemically problematic.

3.4 Conclusion

This chapter has looked into the option of explaining the impermissibility datum in resistance cases via appeal to social or moral normativity. I have argued that a social expectations-based account of the epistemic impermissibility of resistance is too weak to explain cases of epistemically bad social expectations, sourced in practical considerations pertaining to cooperation. Further on, I looked at the plausibility of explaining resistance cases away as pertaining to the moral rather than the epistemic domain, and I argued this doesn’t work on both theoretical and empirical grounds: first, a view like this fails to accommodate a widely accepted epistemic condition on moral responsibility. Second, since some of the resistance cases we have been looking at are cases of clear moral success, the view will be unsatisfactory on grounds of extensional adequacy.

This chapter surveys recent accounts of the epistemic permissibility of suspended judgement in an attempt to thereby identify the normative resources required for explaining the epistemically problematic nature of evidence resistance. Since paradigmatic cases of evidence resistance involve belief suspension on propositions that are well supported by evidence, such as vaccine safety and climate change, the literature on permissible suspension seems to be a straightforward starting point for my investigation: after all, any plausible view of permissible suspension will have to predict epistemic impermissibility in these paradigmatic resistance cases. I look at three extant accounts of permissible suspension – a simple knowledge-based account, a virtue-based account, and a respect-based account – and argue that they fail to provide the needed resources for this project. Further on, the chapter identifies the source of the said difficulties and gestures towards a better way forward.

4.1 Proper Suspension: The Simple Knowledge-Based View

It is widely agreed that justification – be it moral, prudential, epistemic, etc. – is defeasible. For instance, suppose that you justifiably head towards High Street on a Sunday because you wish for a new pair of shoes, but as you’re walking, I tell you that you left your wallet at home. In this case, you have a defeater for your (prudential) justification for going into town. Should you continue on your way, your action will no longer be (prudentially) justified. Similarly, suppose that you (epistemically) justifiably believe that the structure you are looking at is a barn. Suppose, further, that I tell you that most of the things that look like barns are actually fakes. In this case, you have a defeater for your belief that the structure you are looking at is a barn. If you continue to hold this belief, your belief is no longer justified.

While it is widely agreed that epistemic justification is defeasible, and much ink in epistemology has been spilled on the issue of the defeasibility of the justification of positive doxastic attitudes, such as beliefs and credences, very little has been said about the justification of suspension and about its defeasibility conditions. However, paradigmatic cases of evidence resistance involve epistemically unjustified belief suspension on propositions that are well supported by evidence. Of course, this need not be the case: one can be evidence resistant by simply not taking up evidence and not updating properly in the light thereof, without thereby being suspended on the issue: indeed, it may even be that one hosts a fairly high credence that p is the case while, at the same time, resisting genuine evidence for p due to, for instance, bias against a particular source.

However, given that paradigmatic cases of evidence resistance involve defeated suspension, work on permissible suspension seems like an excellent place to start an inquiry into resistance impermissibility. As such, the fact that the amount of work done to date on the justification and defeasibility of suspension is relatively minimal poses a problem.

I take the most notable views of permissible suspension on the market to be the following: (1) the simple knowledge-based account (e.g. often implied but not often explicitly defended in Williamson Reference Williamson2000, Sutton Reference Sutton2005, Reference Sutton2007, Hawthorne and Srinivasan Reference Hawthorne, Srinivasan, Christensen and Lackey2013), (2) the virtue-based account (Sosa Reference Sosa2021), and (3) the respect-based account (Miracchi Reference Miracchi2017, Sylvan and Lord Reference Sylvan, Lord, Lord, Brown and Simion2021, Reference Lord, Sylvan, Oliveira and Silva2022).

The knowledge-based account, while not being explicitly defended in many places, follows straightforwardly from endorsing a biconditional knowledge norm of belief (defended most notably in Williamson (Reference Williamson2000), but also in, e.g., Sutton (Reference Sutton2005, Reference Sutton2007), Hawthorne and Srinivasan (Reference Hawthorne, Srinivasan, Christensen and Lackey2013), and Littlejohn (Reference Littlejohn, Dorsch and Dutant2020)), according to which belief is epistemically permissible just in case it is knowledge. If non-knowledgeable belief is impermissible, it follows that one should suspend belief in cases in which one does not know.

To put my cards on the table from the very beginning: I take a simple knowledge-based account of permissible suspension to suffer from insurmountable in-principle difficulties in dealing with resistance cases. On a view like this, one is permissibly suspended on p just in case on does not know that p. The main trouble for any account along these lines comes from the sufficiency claim: since knowledge implies belief, the sufficiency of lack of knowledge for permissible suspension claim implies that suspension implies permissible suspension. After all, should one not know in virtue of refusing to believe, on a view that takes lack of knowledge to be enough for permissible suspension, one would thereby be diagnosed as permissibly suspended. ‘x implies permissible x’ is not a great result for suspension or, more generally, for any x, subject to any sorts of normativity. Furthermore, and even more interestingly, upon closer scrutiny, the account has further problematic results: since belief is predicted to be impermissible in cases of lack of knowledge due to lack of belief, suspension of belief will not only be merely permissible, but even obligatory. To see this, take a paradigmatic case of evidence resistance. I falsely believe that not-p: it is not the case that climate change is happening. All experts in climate change come and tell me that p. In virtue of politically motivated bias, I refuse to believe them and suspend on the issue. At this stage, the simple knowledge account’s diagnosis is that indeed I should suspend, since I don’t know that climate change is happening – even though the reason why I don’t know is because I refuse to believe it. As such, on the simple knowledge-based view, suspension implies obligatory suspension.

I take these considerations to signal insurmountable difficulties for a simple knowledge-based view of permissible suspension.

Williamson is sensitive to this problem when he writes:

I agree with Williamson that what is needed here is input from positive epistemology. This book attempts to do just this, and it does so in keeping with the knowledge-first picture – albeit not with a simple version thereof. Chapter 9 develops a view according to which proper suspension has to do with what one is in a position to know.

Before this, however, in what follows, I will look at a prominent recent defence of a virtue-theoretic account of permissible suspension from Ernie Sosa.

4.2 Sosa on Virtue, Telic Normativity, and Suspension

Very little has been said in the literature about the justification of suspension and about its defeasibility conditions. Ernie Sosa’s most recent book (Reference Sosa2021) supplies this lack: Sosa offers a comprehensive virtue-theoretic account of the nature and normativity of suspension in terms of the nature and telic normativity of agential attempts more generally.

In what follows, I first briefly outline the position and take issue with some details of its normative structure. In particular, I argue that Sosa’s telic normativity is in need of normative expansion if it is to accommodate the defeasibility of justification to suspend. Further on, I consider several paths for developing Sosa’s view to accommodate this datum and argue that we can find the needed resources in general telic normativity.

Sosa’s virtue epistemology is a normative framework for the evaluation of attempts (henceforth also ‘telic normativity’). Attempts have constitutive aims. As a result, we can ask whether or not a given attempt is successful. We can also ask whether a given attempt is competent (i.e. produced by an ability to attain the attempt’s aim). Finally, we can ask whether a given attempt is apt (i.e. successful because competent).

Virtue epistemologists standardly take beliefs to be attempts that have truth and/or knowledge as their constitutive aims. Given that this is so, we can ask whether beliefs are successful (i.e. whether they are true). In addition, we can also ask whether they are competent (i.e. whether they are produced by an ability to believe truly) and whether they are apt (i.e. true because competent).

According to Sosa, the above gives us the basic account for first-order evaluations of attempts. Crucially, however, Sosa does not take this to be the whole story. Rather, he countenances two further types of aptness alongside first-order aptness, or ‘animal’ aptness as Sosa calls it. These additional types of aptness are ‘reflective’ and ‘full’ aptness. Attaining these further types of aptness requires accurate and indeed apt attempt at a higher order, in addition to animal aptness. In a nutshell, the thought is that attempts will rise to these higher levels of aptness only if, alongside animal aptness, one has aptly ascertained that one’s attempt is free from any relevant risk that one may be running: one must have arrived at an apt awareness that one’s attempt would be apt. While animal aptness in conjunction with apt risk assessment will be enough for reflective aptness, full aptness additionally requires that first- and second-order aptness are connected in the right way: one must be guided to animal aptness by one’s reflectively apt risk assessment.

It comes to light that there are a number of normative properties that attempts can enjoy. Crucially, according to Sosa, full aptness enjoys special status among these properties. More specifically, according to Sosa, full aptness is the fully desirable status for attempts, and attempts fall short unless they attain full aptness. Moreover, he is also clear that this claim holds with full generality: any attempt attains fully desirable status qua attempt if and only if it is fully apt; and it falls short qua attempt if and only if it isn’t.

According to Sosa, various psychological categories – most importantly, guessing, belief, and judgement – are species of affirmation and, as a result, attempts. (Sosa’s main interest is with affirmations with a specifically epistemic aim that, at a minimum, involves truth.) While Sosa countenances a variety of psychological categories with epistemic aims, his main focus is on judgement (and judgemental belief). Judgement differs from other psychological categories in that it has a particularly robust epistemic aim: judgement aims not only at truth, but at aptness. To understand this normative requirement on judgement, Sosa asks us to consider Diana, the huntress: as Diana surveys a landscape in search of game, she may see prey in the distance (in good light and calm wind). If a shot is too risky, it is ill-advised. A shot, then, can attain quality in it being well rather than negligently selected. An aiming, then, is assessable by reference to how likely it is to succeed (relative to one’s possession of the pertinent competence), so as to avoid recklessness, and it is also assessable by reference to how negligent (or not) it may be.

Similarly, according to Sosa, for a judgement to be apt, more is required than merely apt affirmation. What is needed for apt judgement is that one is guided to aptness by apt risk assessment. An apt judgement is a fully apt affirmation.

Where does suspension fit in this picture? After all, telic normativity is a normativity of attempts, but isn’t suspension a paradigm of something that is not an attempt, but rather an instance of forbearing from attempting?

To answer this question, Sosa introduces a distinction between two varieties of intentional forbearing:

• Narrow-scope: (Forbearing from X’ing) in the endeavour to attain a given aim A.

• Broad-scope: Forbearing from (X’ing in the endeavour to attain a given aim A).

According to Sosa, the first, narrow-scope variety of forbearing pertains to telic normativity proper: the forbearing is done with the domain-internal aim in view. The second, in contrast, is domain-external forbearing, in that the agent who forbears in this sense does not attempt to reach the central aim of the domain in question to begin with: whether to engage in a domain is not a question within the domain itself. In that, broad-scope forbearing, according to Sosa, does not make the proper subject of telic normativity.

To see the place of forbearing in the normativity of attempts, consider Diana again. Diana’s archery shots can be more or less well selected. When she spots some prey, Diana can properly aim as follows: to make an attempt on that target if and only if the attempt would succeed aptly. Accordingly, there are two ways in which Diana can fall short with regard to this aim: she could make an attempt on the target when she would not succeed aptly – because, maybe, the shot would be too risky, given the wind. But she could also fail in her attempt by failing to make an attempt (on the target) when one would succeed aptly.

So, in a nutshell, according to Sosa, narrow-scope forbearing is itself an attempt with an aim: that of attempting if and only if the attempt would succeed aptly. This is the place of forbearing in telic normativity.

How does this translate to epistemology? Again, just like with normativity in general, Sosa thinks that it is only narrow-scope forbearing that is of internal interest to the theory of knowledge proper in that it is aimed at the epistemic goal of attaining aptness. More specifically, Sosa thinks that epistemic narrow-scope forbearing is what constitutes deliberative suspension of judgement, which is an attempt in its own right, one that shares with judging an epistemically distinctive aim: the aim of affirming alethically (positively or negatively) if and only if that affirming would be apt (and otherwise suspend). Conversely, on Sosa’s view, one properly suspends belief on a question if and only if one suspends based sufficiently on one’s lack of the competence required in order to answer that question aptly (Reference Sosa2021, 85).

In contrast, broad-scope forbearing, according to Sosa, is the stuff of intellectual ethics (i.e. it pertains to the question as to whether to engage in inquiry as to whether p to begin with). In this sense, it is external to the theory of knowledge proper. Here is Sosa:

Similarly, Sosa thinks that epistemic broad-scope forbearing is tantamount to non-deliberative suspension of judgement. It is also an intentional forbearing from alethic affirmation (both positive and negative), but it is not aimed at apt judgement as to whether p; it derives rather from omitting inquiry into the question as to whether p to begin with, whether the refusal is implicit or consciously explicit. As such, norms governing broad-scope forbearing will be norms of intellectual ethics, not epistemic norms proper:

To bring my first worry into clear view, I’d like to start with a particular case of evidence resistance involving ignored defeat. To take a variation on a famous example, consider the case of a scientist, Gabriel, who doesn’t believe anything his female colleagues say, because he is a sexist (Lackey Reference Lackey and McCain2018). Now suppose Gabriel carries out two experiments to test his hypothesis that p. Experiment §1 strongly supports that p. Experiment §2 strongly supports that not-p. The scientist comes to suspend on p on this basis. Suppose, next, that a female colleague of his, Dana, discovers a serious flaw with experiment §2, which she points out to Gabriel. Due to sexist bias, Gabriel discounts Dana’s word and maintains his suspension on p. This is a paradigm case of higher-order defeat: after Dana’s testimony that q: ‘there is a flaw in experiment §2’, Gabriel’s suspension on p is no longer justified.

What does Sosa’s account have to say about this case? It would seem that, for all we have been told so far, telic normativity does not have the resources to accommodate the result that Gabriel is not justified to suspend. Rather, Gabriel’s failure will, at best, be categorised as pertaining to intellectual ethics. To see this, note that Gabriel never takes up the question as to whether q to begin with due to his sexist bias. As such, since no attempt at apt judgement is made, the suspension at stake in the case of q will have to be classified as non-deliberative suspension. If that is so, however, its normative properties will not have the capacity to affect the normative properties of Gabriel’s suspension on p either: after all, even if present, normative failure outside the domain of theory of knowledge proper need not affect domain-internal normative properties. Even if Gabriel’s suspension on q is impermissible on non-epistemic grounds, it cannot affect the epistemic permissibility of Gabriel’s suspension on p.

Recall also that, on Sosa’s view, suspension is permissible insofar as it is sufficiently based on one’s lack of the competence required in order to answer that question aptly. It is easy to see that this account predicts, against intuition, that it is permissible for Gabriel to suspend based on his sexism-generated lack of competence to believe aptly what Dana tells him.

Now, it is worth mentioning that there may be an easy way for Sosa out of this case: one thing he could do is insist that Gabriel does, in fact – albeit implicitly – inquire into whether q by simply hearing the testimony from Dana. After all, Sosa’s notion of inquiry is a very ‘light’ one, whereby the mere monitoring of one’s environment counts as such. If so, Gabriel will count as having epistemically impermissibly suspended on q, since, in the course of his (implicit) inquiry into whether q, he missed the opportunity to affirm aptly that q.

That said, the route back to problems for Sosa’s account is quite short from here. To see this, note that we can easily tweak the case following a recipe that will be familiar by now, such that Gabriel doesn’t even hear that Dana told him that q. Once more, suppose that Gabriel simply zones out whenever a female colleague talks to him. As a result, Gabriel didn’t even register that Dana told him that there is a problem with his experiment. In this case, Gabriel’s epistemic behaviour is no better than in the original case. If anything, it’s worse. Most importantly for present purposes, the case is equally one of testimonial injustice and one of defeat. Once Gabriel is told about the flaw in his experiment, Gabriel’s suspension on p is no longer justified. The fact that Gabriel didn’t bother to listen does not improve his situation vis-à-vis the original case on either count.

Sosa has not discussed the issue of normative defeat directly. However, in Epistemic Explanations (Reference Sosa2021), he has started theorising about negligence within his virtue-epistemological framework. Most importantly for present purposes, he suggests that negligence may preclude competent performance. In particular, negligent failure to inquire may preclude competent judgement. If so, we could maybe avail ourselves of this normative resource to explain how negligent failure to inquire may preclude competent suspension as well.

Note, first, that cases of normative defeat do plausibly count as cases of negligent failure to inquire. Consider the case of Gabriel, the sexist scientist, once more. Gabriel is told by his female colleague, Dana, that there is a flaw in one of the experiments that led him to suspend on p, but Gabriel doesn’t even listen. Isn’t this a prime example of a negligent failure to engage with the question as to what he was told? If Sosa is right and negligent failure to inquire precludes competent judgement, then presumably it also precludes competent suspension. Given that justified suspension is competent suspension, we get the desired result that Gabriel is not justified in his suspension.

Unfortunately, there remains a fly in the ointment: negligence is itself a normative property. If your failure to inquire into whether p is negligent, then you didn’t inquire into whether p, although you should have. Crucially, while one may agree that we need to understand normative defeat in terms of violations of the norms requiring us inquire, the task Sosa faces is to offer an account of these norms within the scope of theory of knowledge proper – rather than intellectual ethics. For virtue epistemologists like Sosa, this means offering an account that is available to virtue epistemology. Since the kind of negligence that precludes justified suspension is a normative epistemic property, this means that what we need is a substantive account of the kind of negligence that precludes justified suspension in terms of the abilities or other resources available in the theoretical machinery of Sosa’s framework. To say that cases of external defeat are cases in which competent suspension is precluded by negligent failures to inquire gives us a way of identifying the task that we are facing, but not yet a way of accomplishing it.

Unfortunately, there is an in-principle reason to worry that it will not be trivial to accomplish this task, given Sosa’s framework. To see why, note again that Sosa conceives of telic normativity as the normativity of attempts: whether an attempt is successful, competent, or apt presupposes that an attempt was made. In this way, telic normativity presupposes that the agent has made an attempt. As a result, whether or not the agent should make an attempt is not assessable in terms of Sosa’s telic normativity of attempts. Recall also that, to make sense of norms requiring us to inquire, Sosa distinguishes between the epistemic normativity of the theory of knowledge (i.e. telic normativity) and the broader normativity of inquiry. Obligations to inquire fall into the broader normativity of inquiry, which pertains to intellectual ethics.

The trouble is that Sosa’s suggestion that negligence may preclude competent judgement is hard to square with the claims above. To see this, let’s return to the case of the sexist scientist once more. Recall that the thought was that when Gabriel doesn’t even listen to Dana, he falls foul of negligent failure to engage with the question of what Dana tells him. But negligence is normative: to be negligent is to fail to do certain things that one should have done. In particular, the way in which Gabriel is negligent here is that he fails to take up the question of what Dana tells him, even though he should have done so.

We are now in a position to see the in-principle problem for Sosa. If Gabriel’s negligence consists in his failure to take up the question whether q, even though he should have done so, his failure does not fall within the normativity proper to the theory of knowledge, but into the broader epistemic normativity of inquiry. As a result, it is now hard to see how his negligence may preclude deliberative competent suspension on p. After all, deliberative competent suspension does fall within the normativity proper to the theory of knowledge. At the same time, this normativity is autonomous and protected from incursion of extraneous normativity, including that of the broader normativity of intellectual ethics. It looks as though accounting for cases of normative defeat in terms of negligence that we are envisaging is not available to Sosa after all, at least not provided that the rest of his theory stays put.

Sosa (Reference Sosa2021) does offer an account of the kind of negligence that is at stake in the cases discussed. He considers a case in which you are adding numbers via mental arithmetic. If the set of numbers you are adding is sufficiently large, you will not be sufficiently reliable to arrive at a competent belief about the sum. Suppose you are still sufficiently reliable but barely so. At the same time, you have a calculator ready at hand, which would keep you safely above the relevant reliability threshold. If you insist on mental arithmetic here, Sosa argues, you fall foul of negligence.

With the case in play, let’s move on to Sosa’s view of negligence. Here is the crucial passage:

Sosa’s key idea is that if you can assess your first-order competence by more reliable means but fail to do so, then you are negligent. In particular, you fall foul of a kind of negligence that precludes what he calls the competent attainment of aptness.

Most importantly for present purposes, given that competent suspension requires that one suspends based sufficiently on one’s lack of the competence required in order to answer the question aptly, negligence precludes competent suspension: sexist scientist Gabriel does have sufficiently available means that would enable a more reliable assessment of the aptness of his suspension – Dana’s testimony. Since he ignores it, Gabriel will count as a negligent suspender.

The problem with this account of negligence, however, is that it is too strong: it makes negligence, and hence defeat, too easy to come by. To see this, consider a case in which I ask my flatmate, who is currently in the kitchen, whether we have any milk left. He tells me that we do. Now, I do have several more reliable means of assessing my first-order competence available to me. For instance, I could go to the kitchen and have a look myself. Crucially, however, failure to avail myself of these means doesn’t make me negligent. And, most importantly for present purposes, it doesn’t preclude my judgement that there is milk in the fridge from being competent.

Sosa’s account of negligence is insufficiently normative. What matters, according to Sosa, is the availability of alternative means that would lead to a more reliable assessment of first-order aptness and competence. However, the difference maker is normative, not descriptive: what matters is not (only) whether one has alternative means available that would have led one to a more reliable assessment of first-order aptness and competence, but (also) whether one should have availed oneself of these means. In the case of the sexist scientist, he should have taken the woman’s testimony into account in assessing the credentials of hypothesis p. Similarly, Mary should not have ignored all of the evidence suggesting that her husband is having an affair. In contrast, in the milk case, it is not the case that I should have had a look myself.

Sosa’s account of the normativity of negligence in terms of available alternative means doesn’t work unless we add that the available means are means one should have availed oneself of. Crucially, it is precisely this ‘should’ that we wanted to explain in virtue-epistemological terms. We are thus back to square one once more.

In more recent work (Sosa Reference Sosa2022), and in reply to my worries, Sosa goes into more detail about the normativity of negligence. On this novel view, availing oneself of more reliable alternative means is only normative in cases in which the initial performance was lacking to begin with. Looking left and right, for instance, is something you could easily enough have done and should have done before crossing the street. Omitting to do so is a case of negligence. This refurbished view straightforwardly takes care of the flatmate case, since that is a case of permissible belief formation. The question that arises is: how does this account of negligence fit with Sosa’s general normative picture?

According to Sosa, such lacks and omissions can diminish the agency of an agent and can thus be negatively assessable telically even though they are not attempts. Since they are attributable to the agent, they thereby speak to their skill. When you cross that London street without looking, the failure to look is presumably attributable to you – it speaks badly of your competence.

Here is, however, the worry I have for this reply: Sosa’s telic epistemic normative picture is a reliabilist normative picture. As such, Sosa’s competences admit for failure even when they are manifest – indeed, any reliabilism will predict this. Consider, now, one-off cases of suspension on p in spite of easily available evidence for p: say that Gabriel, the scientist, is not a sexist, and indeed he’s a fantastically competent epistemic agent, but he simply fails this time around to give the weight it deserves to his colleague’s testimony. This failure will not speak against his competence – indeed, it cannot: failures are predicted in a reliabilist picture about competence. If this failure does not speak to Gabriel’s competence, however, Sosa’s picture is left without resources to predict it as epistemically relevantly negligent – since, on his view, epistemically relevant negligence is competence-relevant negligence. As such, Sosa’s picture will lack the needed resources to accommodate cases of one-off impermissible suspension by competence-manifesting epistemic agents.

One way around this problemFootnote ¹ would be to derive the impermissibility of negligence straight from the success condition involved in Sosa’s picture – in the case of judgement, from knowledge. I agree: this is exactly the route I will take in Chapter 9.

4.3 The Respect-Based View of Permissible Suspension

More recently, Lisa Miracchi (Reference Miracchi2017) and Kurt Sylvan and Errol Lord (Reference Lord, Sylvan, Oliveira and Silva2022) have proposed more nuanced virtue-theoretic views of permissible suspension. The views are more nuanced than their straightforward knowledge-based and virtue-based competition in the following ways: in contrast to the simple knowledge-based account, these views do not make direct appeal to the absence of epistemic value to explain the permissibility of suspension. In contrast also to Sosa’s classic virtue-theoretic approach, their accounts conceive of the permissibility of suspension in terms of manifesting respect for the epistemic value in question – be it truth or knowledge – rather than in terms of value-conduciveness.

Henceforth, I will run with Miracchi’s view, due to hers being the first such proposal on the market. According to Miracchi, epistemic virtue not only involves aiming to get what is fundamentally valuable (knowledge, on her knowledge-first virtue epistemological picture), but also involves respecting the aim of getting what is fundamentally valuable. Respecting the aim of getting knowledge, she claims, is derivative from the fundamental aim. On Miracchi’s view, suspension is permissible just in case it manifests respect for the aim of knowing. In this, the features that make epistemic rational assessment applicable to suspension are derivative from the features that make such assessment applicable to beliefs. Here is Miracchi:

This account is well equipped to deal nicely with many paradigmatic cases of evidence resistance: it seems right that, in not uptalking relevant, easily available evidence, our resistant agents in the cases under discussion fail to manifest respect for what it takes to know, which, indeed, casts doubt on their knowing competences. This suggests that the sufficiency direction of Miracchi’s view holds.

I think Miracchi’s derivative, respect-based account makes significant progress in understanding the paradigmatic virtue-theoretic flaws involved in impermissible suspension. Unfortunately, I don’t think it will quite get us there as an analysis of permissible suspension due to considerations having to do with the strength of the respect condition. Here is why: one worry one might have for Miracchi’s view follows the necessity direction – isn’t a requirement of manifesting respect for knowledge going to be too strong for permissible suspension? After all, one might think, paradigmatically bad believers – conspiracy theorists, wishful thinkers, bullshitting politicians – can also, on occasion, suspend properly on everyday matters – for instance, on whether there is milk in the fridge. Think back also to the Pyrrhonist sceptic: this agent, one might think, is the paradigmatic example of a bad suspender, with little respect for knowledge. Compatibly, should the Pyrrhonist (or conspiracy theorist, etc.) suspend on whether there’s milk in the fridge based on, for example, conflicting testimony, their suspension would be justified.

Miracchi is aware that the respect condition needs to be fairly weak to do the job. She writes:

As such, at least on the face of it, making the respect condition very weak may afford Miracchi the following way to accommodate one-off permissible suspension cases: paradigmatically bad believers can also, on occasion, manifest respect for knowledge simply in suspending in ways that demonstrate their having a competence to know – even if, in the vast majority of their epistemic walks of life, they fail to do so, and thus fail to either manifest or demonstrate their said competence. Systematic failure to manifest a competence need not imply one does not have the said competence. I can have a competence to play the piano fabulously and still fail to do so whenever I get to it because, say, I am distracted. Insofar as the competence exists, however, it allows for one-off manifestations of competence, as well as for one-off demonstrations of competence. I can still play the piano fabulously on the few occasions when I care to do so (and thereby manifest my competence); I can also abstain from playing when I ascertain, for instance, that the conditions are not favourable (too dark), and thus I demonstrate my competence in forbearing from playing. Similarly, one could argue, bad believers and the Pyrrhonist may still have a competence to know and thus both manifest and demonstrate it on occasion. So far, so good.

Unfortunately, upon closer inspection, this response is not available to Miracchi. Miracchi’s view is a reliabilist one. This will present her account with a strength dilemma related to cases of bad believers and what is involved in having a competence to know: according to Miracchi, the having of the said competence has to do with it being sufficiently objectively likely that whenever the sub-personal cognitive mechanisms that constitute the basis of the competence are operative, the conditions constitutive of knowledge obtain. It is easy to see that the case of bad believers presents an account like this with a strength dilemma: make the sufficiency threshold for the objective likelihood at stake too high and bad believers don’t count as having the competence; if so, the account cannot explain one-off cases in which these people suspend permissibly. Conversely, make the likelihood threshold too low and the view is not a plausible reliabilism anymore.

The second reason why a reliabilist view like Miracchi’s will struggle with permissible suspension goes, to some extent, back to the discussion of Sosa’s negligence condition in the following sense: at the core of any reliabilist account lies an allowance for fallibility. My competences to know can fail to generate knowledge even when exercised; these are what Miracchi (Reference Miracchi2015) calls degenerate exercises of competence. When this happens, on Miracchi’s view, one forms justified beliefs. The question that arises now is: if competences to know can be manifest in belief-formation episodes that fail to result in knowledge, it seems plausible that we should take the corresponding competence-demonstrating respect for knowledge to be manifest even in instances in which there is failure of permissible suspension. After all, since the competence is fallible, it should also be possible for it to fail in this way: I am an excellent epistemic agent, I evaluate my evidence thoroughly, and I come to suspend on the issue; unfortunately, this is one of the (otherwise very few) instances in which I am wrong about what my evidence supports. My suspension, intuitively, demonstrates my (fallible) competence to know; nevertheless, my suspension is unjustified. Note that this is also plausible on general grounds having to do with how manifesting respect works more generally: it doesn’t always lead to success in treating the respected party in the right way due to, for example, moral bad luck. But if manifesting respect for knowledge allows for instances that lead to improper suspension, we are left without resources to explain what exactly is going wrong in these cases.Footnote ²

4.4 Gesturing towards a Better Way

I share with several of the people discussed so far a commitment to a telic normative structure. In what follows, I thus want to go back to Ernie Sosa’s view, for illustrative purposes, and gesture at a different way to accommodate the normative defeasibility of suspension within general telic normativity. In particular, I will suggest that what is needed is to enlarge the normative remit of epistemic telic normativity in line with plausible normative facts about general telic normativity.

Recall that we have identified two in-principle problems with the virtue-theoretic account of epistemically permissible suspension under discussion. First, Sosa’s epistemic telic normativity is the normativity of attempts, but in the cases under discussion no attempt is being made to begin with: the defeating evidence is totally ignored. As such, what we need is an account that accommodates attempts that should have been made.

Second, on Sosa’s account of suspension, one properly suspends belief on a question if one suspends based sufficiently on one’s lack of the competence required in order to judge aptly. However, many of the protagonists in the cases we have looked at do lack the relevant competences: the sexist scientist, for instance, is not a competent uptaker of testimony from women due to his sexist bias. He does suspend based on his (sexism-induced) lack of competence to judge aptly. What seems to matter, then, is not whether one misses a competence or not, but rather whether one should have had the competence to begin with.

Both of these points suggest that we need more normative resources than epistemic telic normativity, as put forth by Sosa, provides: for a correct account of justified suspension, we need to be able to also assess (at least some) attempts that should be made and competences one should have within theory of knowledge proper, rather than merely at the level of intellectual ethics.

At the same time, of course, some ‘shoulds’ governing attempts and competences will fall outside of theory of knowledge proper indeed, falling squarely within the remit of intellectual ethics. The question as to whether I should or should not know more about mathematics, the geography of oceans, and the workings of the human lungs than I presently do will not concern the theory of knowledge, and the corresponding normative failures – should I exhibit them – will not defeat my justification for my current beliefs and suspensions.Footnote ³

If all of this is right, it would seem that what needs to be done is that we must move the border between the theory of knowledge proper and intellectual ethics, such that we allow some ‘shoulds’ governing attempts and competences to fall on the side of theory of knowledge while others remain squarely within intellectual ethics.

I will begin by discussing shoulds governing attempts. First, to see why it is independently plausible that attempts that should have been made can be domain-internal, let’s go back to Diana, the huntress: Diana’s archery shots can be more or less well selected. We have seen that Sosa agrees that there are two ways in which Diana can fall short with regard to her aim to succeed aptly: she could make an attempt on the target when she would not succeed aptly – because, maybe, the shot would be too risky, given the wind. But she could also fail in her attempt by failing to make an attempt (on the target) when one would succeed aptly. There are thus two types of meta-competence failure that Diana can display: failure to assess risk properly, but also failure to assess opportunity properly. When going back to epistemology, the latter failure is the stuff of unjustified suspension: a failure to judge (affirmatively or negatively) when one would have judged aptly (independently of whether one attempted to do so or not).

Now, here is one question: why think that Diana’s failure of the second kind (opportunity assessment failure) is conditional upon her making any attempts (including attempting to shoot and including attempts to shoot if and only if the shot is apt) to begin with? Why think that this should pertain to the normativity of extant attempts rather than to the normativity of attempts that should have been made? After all, it is plausibly constitutive of the huntress’s professional role that she should make hunting attempts, including attempting to shoot if and only if the shot is apt. A huntress that fails to make any hunting attempts is a rubbish huntress. The meta-competence to assess risks and opportunities in Diana’s case is not attempt-conditional. It is also, at the same time, not domain-external: the question is not whether Diana should become a huntress to begin with – that’s, of course, the stuff of professional ethics. Rather, what is going on is that, in her capacity as a huntress, Diana shoulders shoulds pertaining to attempts she should make, not just shoulds governing the ones she does make. Indeed, plausibly, these shoulds are constitutive of what it is to be a huntress to begin with.

If this is so, on pain of losing the analogy, we should expect that the normativity internal to the domain of the theory of knowledge proper follows suit: there will be attempts that the epistemic agent should make, given that the opportunity arises to judge or suspend aptly as a result of making said attempts. Epistemic agents who will ignore easy opportunities by not even attempting will be rubbish epistemic agents, just like huntresses who don’t bother to take easy targets, or who don’t even bother to assess shooting opportunities, are rubbish huntresses.

There is, of course, an important disanalogy between the two cases: one can choose not to be a huntress. It’s harder for agents like us, with our cognitive capacities, to choose not to be epistemic agents. If so, the domain-external question – should I engage in epistemic endeavours? – does not even arise for us: we just can’t help it. What room is there left, then, on this picture, for questions of intellectual ethics?

Note that Diana is not an ideal huntress: there are limits to the amount of opportunities she can take. Should she find herself in a forest filled with thousands of easily available targets, she can only reasonably be expected to make a limited number of attempts. Likely, she will be normatively constrained to shoot at the most readily available targets. For the rest, it’s up to her: she can’t attempt to shoot at all of them, so it’s up to other normative considerations not pertaining to the domain of hunting to decide which to go for. Maybe Diana has moral concerns against shooting cubs; maybe she has prudential interests in favour of shooting valuable prey; in all of these cases, these domain-external normative considerations will guide her choices.

Our epistemic environment is a bit like the forest filled with too many shooting opportunities. We have plenty of opportunities to judge aptly about thousands of things just as we walk down the street. We can’t take them all: we are psychologically limited creatures. Some we should (epistemically) take: I should form the belief that there’s a building before me when it’s in plain sight; I should believe the testimony of others, absent defeat; and so on.

For the rest, there will be many opportunities that I just can’t take because of the limited kind of being that I aim: there’s a limited number of attempts at apt judgement I can make. That’s why whether I decide to study maths is a question of intellectual ethics, guided by prudential, moral, and other non-epistemic normative constraints. Epistemology only asks that I take the easiest of opportunities that lie right in front of me, just like hunting only asks that Diana makes attempts at the easy targets.

This concludes my discussion of attempts one (epistemically) should make: they correspond to (easy) epistemic opportunities one should take because one would thereby aptly judge. The should at stake is internal to the epistemic domain because it pertains to what it is to be a good epistemic agent to begin with.

How about cases in which you lack the relevant competence to begin with, although you should have had it? Recall that the case of the sexist scientist is plausibly like that: he does suspend based on his lack of competence to judge aptly, which, in turn, is triggered by his sexism: he can’t give the woman the credibility she deserves. Is this failure also going to be epistemic domain-internal? After all, by stipulation, the sexist scientist does not miss an opportunity to believe aptly, since he lacks the competence to properly assess the woman’s credibility to begin with.

I suggest that we step away from epistemology once more, go back to cases of general telic normativity, and ask the question: is it plausible to think that there are norms internal to the domain of hunting that regulate what competences huntresses should have? I think the answer is clearly ‘yes’. Indeed, it is arguable that these are norms that are constitutive of the domain: huntresses should, at a minimum, be able to spot her prey, shoot, and hit it with some degree of reliability in normal environmental conditions. Huntresses who lack these basic abilities are rubbish huntresses; indeed, if they lack them all, they may no longer count as huntresses to begin with. And this is not the stuff of professional ethics but rather is constitutively normative of the domain of hunting itself.

Similarly, I want to suggest that epistemic agents who lack competences that are constitutive of the kind of epistemic agents that we are rubbish epistemic agents by the light of normativity internal to the epistemic domain itself. Sexists, hallucinators, and wishful thinkers alike are in breach of epistemic norms proper. This explains why the normativity of competences one should (epistemically) have can affect the normative status of one’s epistemic attempts.

This section did not have the ambition to develop a full account of permissible suspension within a more inclusive theory that takes competences to matter for justification, but rather to gesture towards the resources that are needed if we are to make progress on this front. Chapter 9 will develop an account along these lines of permissible suspension that places centre stage the notion of being in a position to know.

4.5 Conclusion

This chapter looked at what I take to be the three most prominent accounts of permissible suspension recently put forth in the literature: the simple knowledge-based account, the simple virtue-based account, and the respect-based account. I have argued that the simple knowledge-based view faces insurmountable difficulties, in that it implies a highly problematic claim: that suspension implies obligatory suspension. I have then argued that Sosa’s epistemic telic normativity is in need of normative expansion or else it cannot deal with normative defeat. I have also looked at a respect-centric variety of virtue theory about permissible suspension from Miracchi and Sylvan and Lord, and I argued that, while the knowledge/truth respect condition on permissible suspension that they favour may deal exceptionally well with paradigmatic cases of impermissible suspension, it is both too strong and too weak to be useful for an analysis thereof. Finally, on a positive note, I have suggested that, in line with general telic normativity, we should conceive of epistemic telic normativity as also concerning attempts we should have made, as well as competences we should have had.

We have seen that available accounts of possessed evidence, evidence one should have possessed, and permissible suspension of judgement struggle to accommodate the phenomenon of evidence resistance. Along the way, we have, in particular, seen that virtue reliabilist accounts of reasons to believe, permissible suspension, and propositional warrant don’t do the needed work. At that point, some readers would have already thought that one straightforward explanation of the resistance data is afforded by the competing, virtue responsibilist camp: roughly, on this view, evidence resistance could be conceptualised as a failure to manifest epistemic responsibility in inquiry and/or as a manifestation/indication of epistemic vice. This chapter looks into the credentials of this move. I argue that once we distinguish epistemic virtues and vices proper from mere moral virtues and vices with epistemic content, it transpires that accounting for resistance cases, as well as accounting for epistemic virtue and vice, requires epistemic value-first unpacking.

5.1 Responsible Inquiry and Epistemic Character Traits

A prominent project in responsibilist virtue epistemology (henceforth also VR for short) is to develop ‘maps’ or ‘perspicuous representations’ of intellectual virtues, such as intellectual humility, intellectual courage, open-mindedness, and curiosity. The basic idea is to develop empirically grounded characterisations of epistemically admirable or praiseworthy character traits and to use these characterisations as guidance in a kind of regulative epistemology, sometimes with the aim of informing education theory. To take a few examples, Jason Baehr characterises the ‘open-minded’ person as someone who is ‘willing […] to transcend a default cognitive standpoint in order to […] take seriously a distinct cognitive standpoint’ (Reference Baehr2011, 152). Heather Battaly characterises the ‘epistemically humble’ person as someone who is ‘disposed to recognize her own fallibility, and to recognize and value the epistemic abilities of others […]’ (Reference Battaly, Matheson and Vitz2014, 194). James Montmarquet characterises the ‘epistemically courageous’ person as someone who has the disposition to ‘persevere in the face of opposition from others (until one is convinced that one is mistaken) […]’ (Reference Montmarquet1993, 23). And Roberts and Wood characterise the ‘epistemically autonomous’ person as someone who has the ‘proper ability to think for herself and not be […] improperly dependent on or influenced by others’ (Reference Roberts and Wood2007, 259).

In many ways, this work is an exciting new development in epistemology. For example, it highlights possible avenues for widening the traditional epistemological project. In particular, and importantly for my purposes, it might be thought that intellectual virtue and vice bear in crucial ways on the phenomenon of evidence resistance. Look back at our toy cases of resistance: in many of them, one might think, plausible epistemic vices – sexism, racism, laziness, partiality, closed-mindedness, wishful thinking, etc. – are explicitly present and manifest. The particular resistant episode traces back to said vice.

Let me, however, get a few things out of the way: it is crucial to note that, whatever the virtue responsibilist account of the impermissibility of evidence resistance will turn out to be, it cannot be too straightforward a view; that is, it cannot account for said impermissibility simply in terms of the absence of virtue/presence of vice in the resistant cogniser, nor can evidence resistance be simply accounted for in terms of the manifestation of some bad character trait. Agents with excellent epistemic characters can undergo isolated episodes of evidence resistance, and their virtuousness does not make the latter any less epistemically bad. Whatever the view is, then, it needs to be more subtle than this.

Jason Baehr notably champions an early (Reference Baehr2009) stance on the issue that treats the data and VR’s theoretical resources with the necessary care. Baehr argues at length against traditional evidentialism by bringing forth two types of cases: cases of failure in inquiry – where S’s body of evidence is problematically affected by lazy or biased inquiry – and cases of bad responses to available evidence due, again, to some variety of bias or wishful thinking. His diagnosis is that traditional evidentialism needs to be supplemented with a good epistemic character condition. In what follows, I will mostly focus my analysis on Baehr’s account, but, since his account features a fairly minimal responsibilist condition, everything I say should apply, mutatis mutandis, to all accounts that want to explain cases of evidence resistance as, in one way or another, having to do with character failure. Here is Baehr’s proposal for what it means for a subject S to be justified:

Note a few advantages of RE. First, while it does feature a good character requirement on top of traditional evidentialist necessary conditions for justification, is not a very strong character requirement: the justified subject need not manifest intellectual virtues, nor be a virtuous agent to begin with – the epistemically vicious among us can also form justified beliefs, insofar as either their agency is not munch involved in arriving at a particular body of evidence at work in a particular belief-formation episode (and here Baehr has in mind as paradigmatic garden-variety automatic perceptual belief formation) or else, should their agency be thus involved, their evidential situation will have been arrived at in a manner consistent with intellectual virtue. In a nutshell, the vicious can form justified beliefs either automatically or via virtuous-like agency. The fact that the account does not require virtue to be present or manifest is a great feat: it does not implausibly exclude the vicious from having a chance at justified beliefs, and, even more crucially, it can, at least at first glance, accommodate one-off cases of evidence resistance, in which the subject’s bad epistemic character is not to blame – since the subject is a virtuous yet fallible believer.

I think Baehr’s account, in not imposing a particularly demanding epistemic character condition on justification, is probably as good an account as possible for trying to explain the impermissibility of instances of evidence resistance within a virtue responsibilist framework: after all, again, clearly, episodes of resistance do not require vice, nor vice manifestation, but rather can be mere one-off failures of otherwise perfectly virtuous believers.

Nevertheless, in what follows I will argue that Baehr’s account does not work for two main reasons, having to do with (1) difficulties in precisifying the character condition and (2) epistemic virtue individuation. If I am right, these two problems together will paint a pessimistic picture for the prospects of accounting for the impermissibility of evidence resistance for the champion of virtue responsibilism: since Baehr’s character condition is a very non-demanding one, mutatis mutandis, all of Baehr’s difficulties will translate to most virtue responsibilist attempts to accommodate these data. In what follows, I will take these worries in turn.

The crucial responsibility requirement in Baehr’s account of justification, and the one that is designed to take care of resistance cases, requires there to be the case that, if S’s agency makes a salient contribution to S’s evidential situation with respect to p, S functions (qua agent) in a manner consistent with intellectual virtue. Two things require more spelling out: first, what it is for a virtue to be a genuine intellectual (rather than, for example, moral or prudential) virtue – this is the individuation issue that we will look at in the next section; and second, what it is for a believer to function qua agent in a manner that is consistent with such intellectual virtue.

I will start with the latter: my worry is that it will be difficult to spell out the virtue consistency relation in a manner that is permissive enough for allowing for ubiquity of epistemic justification but also efficient in dealing with resistance cases. To see why, note, once more, that we are fallible creatures: whatever virtues we may have, it will be consistent with them that we fail to manifest them on occasion, and also that we fail to do the right thing on occasion, in spite of manifesting them. No matter how courageous I might be, I may, on occasion, fail to be the first to reach the enemy’s lines. I need not do the perfectly courageous thing all of the time in order for my actions to be consistent with having the relevant character virtue. Furthermore, even in manifesting courage, I may end up doing things that look cowardly due to misreading the facts on the ground. Again, we are fallible creatures: in us, virtues can be manifested in instances of failure. If so, however, one-off cases of evidence resistance will be consistent with both having and manifesting intellectual virtue. In what sense of consistency, then, are we to interpret Baehr’s character constraint?

One option would be to follow Williamson (Reference Williamson, Dorsch and Dutantforthcominga) and go modal: maybe what it is for a believer to function qua agent in a manner that is consistent with intellectual virtue has to do with doing what the virtuous person would do in the situation at stake. Unfortunately, this will not work either, once more, in virtue of virtue fallibility: after all, the impeccably virtuous person involved in a one-off case of evidence resistance is doing what a virtuous person – namely, themselves – would do in that situation.

As far as I can tell, what the Baehr account requires to solve this problem is character virtue infallibilism: on a view like this, resistance cases are not consistent with epistemic virtue because the virtuous person just would not fail in this way. Unfortunately, though, as soon as we go down this route, we lose both general plausibility for our account of epistemic character traits (we are fallible creatures!) and, even more crucially for our purposes, Baehr’s responsibilist evidentialism renders justification a rare commodity, to be held only by the flawless among us.

I started off by saying that I had two worries for Baehr’s view, having to do with spelling out consistency with epistemic virtue and, respectively, with individuating epistemic virtue. The remainder of this chapter concerns itself with the latter.

5.2 Content-Individuating Responsibilist Virtues and Vices

Virtue responsibilist epistemologies reveal some of the complex ways in which the disciplines of epistemology and ethics seem to overlap: character matters for normativity, the thought goes – be it moral or epistemic. However, this raises an important question: that of whether, or to what extent, a given intellectual virtue counts as distinctively epistemic as opposed to moral or prudential; after all, as we have already seen in Chapter 3, we have strong reason to be sceptical of the possibility of explaining away resistance cases in terms of mere moral failures.

It is here that I think the virtue responsibilist project requires careful handling. After all, the notion of virtue (in the responsibilist sense of a character trait) is familiar first and foremost from ethics. Moreover, it’s not clear what relation the virtues at stake stand in to more traditional moral virtues, for example. Indeed, it seems plausible that some of them just are paradigm cases of garden-variety moral virtues as opposed to some other kind of virtue. A fully worked out account of the intellectual virtues should be able to clearly address this issue. It seems central to our understanding of the relevance of an investigation into some virtue or another for epistemology. It also seems central to our understanding of the scope of epistemology itself.

In what follows, I do three things: first, I argue that two popular individuation recipes for epistemic virtues and vices don’t work. Second, I defend a value-centric way of individuating virtues, including intellectual ones. Third, I argue that this way of individuating virtues gives us reason to be somewhat more cautious in our claims to make progress in the epistemology of evidence resistance (and, more generally, in the epistemology of justification) by investigating intellectual virtues.

How can we individuate distinctively epistemic character traits? In order to answer this question, I’d like to start by looking into the way in which philosophers in the epistemic norms literature individuate epistemic norms and take it from there. After all, virtues and vices are normative; if so, individuating epistemic virtues and vices will benefit from whatever the correct individuation recipe is for epistemic norms. Let’s first consider the following proposal:

It is safe to say that, if there is such a thing as a received view in the epistemic norms literature concerning what that literature is theorising about in the first place, it is CI.Footnote ¹ Many philosophers, for instance, when they ask what the epistemic norm for phi-ing is, take themselves to be asking, roughly, how much epistemic warrant one needs for proper phi-ing. For example, here is Jennifer Lackey (arguing that cases of isolated second-hand knowledge show that knowledge is not the epistemic norm of assertion):

Thus, according to Lackey, insofar as norms concern epistemic grounds, they will be genuine epistemic norms. On a similar note, here is Ishani Maitra (on a view about the nature of assertion that she takes to be widely endorsed):

There is very good methodological reason to endorse CI: it is both simple and user-friendly. CI provides a neat and straightforward way to individuate epistemic norms, ensuring that the debate can be framed on common terminological ground.

Most importantly for present purposes, CI might help us to individuate distinctively epistemic virtues. After all, if epistemic norms are individuated by content, as CI has it, since virtues are normative, it is independently plausible that the same goes for epistemic virtues.

Note that the sorts of virtues that the VR literature has focused on, including open-mindedness, intellectual humility, curiosity, epistemic courageousness, and temperance, clearly concern epistemic features. By VCI, these virtues are epistemic virtues.

In fact, there is yet another way of making the very same point. Once more, virtues are widely taken to be normative. The following is an attractive way of capturing this thought:

By NCV, virtues are associated with oughts. Note also that the oughts they are associated with are typed by the type of virtue in question. For instance, if the virtue to be manifested is a moral virtue, the ought at issue in NCV is a moral ought; if the virtue to be manifested is an aesthetic virtue, the ought at issue in NCV is an aesthetic ought; and so on.

NCV gives us the result that virtues of a certain type are associated with oughts of the same type. Now we may expect to use our recipe for individuating epistemic norms to home in on distinctively epistemic virtues. After all, given that types of virtues are by NCV associated with the corresponding types of norms, if we have a recipe for individuating types of norms, we might be able to use it to individuate the associated virtues as well. In particular, should CI be the right way to individuate epistemic norms, we get the result that, if the virtuous character trait at issue in NCV concerns epistemic features, then the norm is epistemic. And since the sorts of virtues that the VR literature has focused on and that are at issue in the relevant instances of NCV do concern epistemic features, we once more get the result that these virtues are indeed epistemic virtues.

And while it might be thought that this is all entirely as it should be, on reflection, there is reason to think otherwise. To see why, note that both of the above arguments rely on CI for their motivation. The first uses CI to motivate VCI, which is key to that argument, and the second uses CI expressly in the relevant derivation. The trouble is that there is excellent reason to think that CI is false. More specifically, as I will argue momentarily, first, CI does not generalise in the right way, and, second, it is extensionally inadequate.

To see this why CI doesn’t generalise as it should, let’s get the generalisation on the table. Here is what it looks like:

Unfortunately, there is excellent reason to think that GCI is false. Consider, for instance, traffic norms: driving one’s car within city bounds will surely be subject to whatever the local traffic regulations have to say about it. Say that the relevant traffic norm forbids one from driving faster than 30 miles per hour. However, imagine that a terrorist group has placed a bomb in the centre of town and you are the only one able to diffuse it. In order to get there in time, you must break the traffic norm and drive at 40 miles per hour. Clearly, the latter (moral, prudential) requirement overrides the traffic norm and renders driving at 40 miles per hour the all-things-considered proper thing to do. In this case, the bomb threat drives the all-things-considered proper speed up to 40 miles per hour. The moral requirement, in this case, has traffic-related content: it regulates the morally (and all-things-considered) appropriate speed. If that is the case, however, it looks as though, just because a norm has traffic-related content – just because it regulates the appropriate speed – it need not follow that it is a traffic norm. GCI fails for traffic norms.

What’s more, the traffic case is hardly isolated. Similar examples can be construed for many types of normativity. It can be prudentially or morally appropriate to drive faster or slower, to have a better or a worse grade point average, to wear a lighter or a darker dress at a funeral, or to speak louder or more quietly. Just because a norm regulates the appropriate degree of a traffic-related feature (i.e. speed), it need not follow that it is a traffic norm. Just because a norm regulates a fashion-related feature (i.e. colour of dress), it need not follow that it is a fashion norm. And so on. GCI is false.

What about CI? Given that GCI does not hold, there is, of course, every reason to believe that the same goes for epistemic norms: just because a norm regulates the appropriate degree of an epistemic feature, it need not follow that it is an epistemic norm. It may indeed happen to be an epistemic norm; but it may also be the case that it is a norm of a different nature – say, a prudential or moral norm – with epistemic content. It may be a norm of some other kind that simply happens to regulate the (morally, prudentially, etc.) proper degree of an epistemic feature. To see this, consider the following examples:

• SING. One must sing only songs one knows.

• JUMP. One must not jump in lakes unless one knows how to swim.

• ASSERT. One must assert only what one knows.

• BELIEVE. One must believe only what one has sufficient evidence for.

All four norms have epistemic content. Accordingly, CI will predict that they are all distinctively epistemic norms. However, that is intuitively implausible; while ASSERT and BELIEVE are plausibly epistemic norms, SING and JUMP are not. Instead, SING is plausibly an aesthetic and/or prudential norm, and JUMP is plausibly a prudential norm, although both have epistemic content.

What transpires, then, is that just because a norm has epistemic content, it does not follow that it is an epistemic norm. Just because it concerns epistemic features (i.e. what epistemic position one needs to be in in order to permissibly phi), it does not follow that it concerns distinctively epistemic permissibility. It can also regulate an epistemic feature required for prudentially, morally, aesthetically, etc., permissible phi-ing. What CI allows us to home in on are norms with epistemic content rather than genuinely epistemic norms.

If all of this is right, however – that is, if CI fails as a criterion for individuating genuinely epistemic norms – we should also be suspicious of the ways of individuating epistemic virtues that it serves to motivate, since virtues are normative. For instance, since CI fails to distinguish between epistemic norms and mere (moral, prudential, aesthetic, etc.) norms with epistemic content, we may legitimately wonder whether VCI correspondingly fails to distinguish between genuinely epistemic virtues and virtues of different stripes (e.g. moral, prudential, etc.) with epistemic content. And, of course, this worry is only more pressing for the individuating recipe that relies on CI directly.

And, indeed, on closer inspection, one encounters such cases in the literature. Consider, for instance, Roberts and Wood’s example of the intellectual virtue of epistemic temperance:

Although this virtue is associated with an epistemic feature, it is not at all clear that it qualifies as a genuinely epistemic virtue rather than a virtue of some other denomination that has epistemic content. After all, by the lights of the authors themselves, this particular virtue expresses ‘respect for the women’s privacy and a sense of the limits that human proprieties set to appropriate knowledge’ (Roberts and Wood Reference Roberts and Wood2007, 175, emphases added). As such, it is more natural to read it as a kind of moral virtue, albeit one that has something to do with the epistemic domain – a moral virtue with epistemic content. Indeed, epistemic temperance through the foregoing of acquaintance looks like a paradigmatic example of a moral virtue, the exercise of which limits the gathering of information and knowledge. And from a purely epistemic perspective, at any rate, this seems like precisely the opposite of what the exercise of an epistemic virtue would be apt to limit.

Let us take stock. The challenge we aim to meet on behalf of VR is to find a criterion for normative typing that will allow VR to remain within the boundaries of epistemology proper. This will help us determine whether and to what extent the intellectual virtues being mapped by VR theorists are genuinely epistemic virtues and thus to be usefully employed for an account of epistemic justification and, conversely, of the epistemic impermissibility of evidence resistance. On the first view we looked at, epistemic norms and, by extension, epistemic virtues are concerned with distinctively epistemic features; that is to say, epistemic norms and virtues, as such, are norms and virtues with epistemic content. We have seen, however, that CI for epistemic norms and virtues runs into trouble on at least two counts. First, it doesn’t generalise to other normative domains in the way it ought to. And second, on reflection, there is reason to think that it even makes counterintuitive predictions in the epistemic domain.

In what follows, I will look at a different proposal for individuating epistemic virtues and vices: by the psychological reality that they describe.

5.3 Psychological Vice Individuation

In her recent book, Alessandra Tanesini (Reference Tanesini2021) offers a systematic, comprehensive, thoroughly empirically informed picture of the nature and normativity of epistemic vice. The book is also aiming to carve out new methodological space in the epistemology of vice beyond the reliabilist/responsibilist divide in virtue epistemology. Tanesini sees her project to be one of ‘autonomous’ epistemology. The ground of epistemic vice on this view is neither responsibility nor reliability: it lies with psychological reality. If successful, the view offers an alternative individuation recipe for epistemic virtues and vices and thereby an alternative, psychology-of-vice-based explanation of what is going on in resistance cases.

On Tanesini’s account, epistemic vices are taken to be essentially sourced in attitudes towards the self: fatalism, self-satisfaction, narcissistic infatuation, and self-abasement. The thought, roughly, is that some people have a self-infatuated stance towards their intellectual qualities, which they therefore assess as superlative without pausing to consider their true epistemic worth. Others, in contrast, adopt a self-abasing and negative stance towards their intellectual abilities. Consequently, they become ashamed of their intellectual qualities, which they perceive to be extremely limited.

Fatalism, self-satisfaction, narcissistic infatuation, and self-abasement are attitudes towards the self that ground epistemic vices of self-assessment. These are exemplified by those who do not have the measure of their intellectual abilities because they assess their epistemic worth using the wrong unit of measurement:

Since these evaluations are crucial in the setting of realistic epistemic goals, in the choices of methods and strategies to adopt in inquiry, and in the process of epistemic self-improvement, those whose self-assessments are thus misguided are unlikely in ordinary circumstances to excel in their epistemic pursuits.

That being said, on Tanesini’s account, the presence of vice is essentially connected to its being sourced in self-assessments that employ the wrong unit of measurement and not to the falsity of its constitutive doxastic attitudes, nor its (likely) unfortunate epistemic consequences.

In what follows, I take issue with Tanesini’s vice internalism: epistemic vices are vices, I argue, only if externalistically individuated. I’ll focus on what Tanesini calls ‘vices of self-satisfaction’, like narcissism and superbia, because they are the ones that are most paradigmatically relevant to episodes of evidence resistance – although evidence resistance in virtue of unwarranted lack of trust in one’s epistemic abilities is also perfectly possible, and likely often encountered in historically marginalised groups. Nothing hinges on this though – the worries I outline generalise neatly to the entire framework.

The presence of vice, on Tanesini’s account, is independent of the accuracy of the vice-constitutive beliefs about oneself – I might be right that I am the smartest person in the world, but if this belief is sourced in bad self-assessment processes, it has the disposition to be vice-constitutive nevertheless. Furthermore, it may be that my narcissism is, de facto, extremely reliable, in that it mostly outputs true beliefs: it remains an epistemic vice on Tanesini’s view nevertheless. For this, Tanesini takes vices to supervene on subjects’ psychologies (i.e. on particular attitudes towards the self). Here is what Tanesini thinks about individuals who are in the grips of vices of self-satisfaction:

Vices of self-satisfaction will be individuated by the corresponding attitude. Accuracy doesn’t matter: my self-satisfied beliefs about myself may well be (luckily) true. What’s crucial to vice presence is that they are not sourced in/based on evidence, but rather are sourced in/based on mistaken self-directed attitudes (self-admiration, self-defence, etc). Here is Tanesini:

One can distinguish between two truth-independence claims in Tanesini’s view: first, the presence of the vice is compatible with it being (mostly) constituted by true beliefs about oneself. Second, the presence of the vice is also independent of its epistemic consequences: it might be that, in virtue of holding this attitude towards myself, I am highly successful in inquiry – in the sense that I am more likely to discover truths and avoid falsehoods. Here they are, just for simplicity of use:

• Constitutive Truth Independence (CTI): epistemic vices are compatible with the truth of their constitutive beliefs.

• Consequence Valence Independence (CVI): vices are compatible with a positive epistemic valence of their epistemic consequences.

Furthermore, Tanesini proposes that epistemic vice fully supervenes on one’s psychology – both metaphysically and normatively. Let’s formulate this claim for ease of use as well:

• Tanesini’s Vice Internalism (TVI): epistemic vices supervene on the subject’s psychological attitudes.

In what follows, I argue for three claims: first, that CTI and CVI do not suffice to support TVI, nor any other internalism about vice. Rather, CTI and CVI merely reinforce the already popular view that a simple, de facto reliabilist view of epistemic normativity is wrong. Compatibly, I argue, epistemic vices might still require externalistic individuation of a different flavour.

Second, I argue that, indeed, epistemic vice will need a hook in the world outside of one’s skull if it is to be plausibly epistemically normatively problematic.

Finally, I consider a comeback on behalf of vice internalism: even though, if I’m right, CTI and CVI do not do the analytic work that the vice internalist needs them to do, they might still be useful for doing the social psychological work – that is, while vice internalism need not follow from CTI and CVI, it might still be the case that, in the world we inhabit, and given the kinds of creatures that we are, it is paradigmatically the case that vices will survive truth and reliability. I will put forth some worries for this claim.

Here it goes: I think Tanesini is right about CTI and CVI. Plausibly, epistemic vice can survive accuracy of constitutive beliefs and de facto reliability. That’s hardly surprising, one would think: we already know from research on externalist theories of justification and the norm of belief that (1) plausibly, there’s more to attributively good belief than truth, and (2) blunt, de facto reliabilism just won’t do as a theory of epistemic justification (e.g. Norman the ClairvoyantFootnote ⁴ has taught us as much). If so (i.e. if positive normative properties of beliefs don’t supervene on either truth or de facto reliability), we should also expect that negative epistemic dispositional properties need not imply the lack thereof.

Luckily true beliefs based on, for example, coin tosses don’t make for (attributively) good beliefs: they don’t make for good tokens of their type. If so, the fact that a particular attitude towards the self is grounded in true beliefs need not suggest it’s not an (attributively) bad attitude. Vices can be grounded in true beliefs.

Wishful thinking is not a proper way to form beliefs, nor does it lead to good beliefs, even if it’s reliable. If so, just because a way to form beliefs reliably results in true beliefs, it does not follow that it is not a bad way to form beliefs. Vices can be reliable.

That being said, CTI and CVI do not imply vice internalism, more than, for example, the knowledge norm of belief is an internalist norm or normal worlds reliabilism is an internalist view of justification. Champions of both of these views agree, respectively, that true beliefs are not good tokens of their type, and that de facto reliability need not imply that a method of belief formation is a good way to form beliefs. Indeed, any externalism about epistemic normativity in general that denies these two claims will be perfectly compatible with CTI and CVI, while, at the same time, denying that epistemic normative categories are internalistically individuated. Knowledge normers, for instance, are free to claim that non-knowledgeable (albeit true) beliefs can constitute vice, and that dispositions or attitudes that reliably lead to truths – but not knowledge – can be epistemic vices. Non-de-facto reliabilists will agree that vices can be de facto reliable: they will just hold that they are incompatible with normal worlds reliability, or proper function, and so on.

CTI and CVI do not imply vice internalism and thereby fail to offer support to TVI. But is TVI independently plausibly true? If yes, maybe CTI and CVI are mere symptoms of this reality.

I don’t think so: vice internalism is false. To see this, let’s ask the following question: what is it that makes, for example, narcissism and superbia into vices? On Tanesini’s view, recall, it is the biased selection of the measuring unit used to measure oneself that explains the problematic nature of vices of self-assessment. But what is wrong with biased selection? What explains its negative epistemic valence, in virtue of which it grounds vice? Here are a few answers that are not available to internalism: self-measurements involving biased unit selection are epistemically problematic because they cannot lead to knowledge, because they don’t have a tendency to get it right in normal conditions, or in normal worlds, because they were selected for biological rather than epistemic success, etc. All of these normative grounds are not available to the vice internalist because they lie outside of the skull’s limits. In a nutshell, then, when Tanesini talks of vice being grounded in self-measurements that employ the wrong measuring unit, what is it that explains the relevant wrongness? More precisely, what is it, within the subject’s skull, that explains it?

I conjecture that vice internalism will have just as hard a time answering this question as general internalism about epistemic normativity has historically had: what is wrong with beliefs based on wishful thinking? Well, they are formed via a bad belief-forming process. Why is wishful thinking bad? Because it’s not the right kind of process for forming beliefs. What is the right kind of process? Short of offering an ad hoc list, notoriously the answer will have to appeal to something outside the believer’s skull.Footnote ⁵

Maybe TVI was never intended as a dismantling analysis of epistemic vice (i.e. as offering necessary and sufficient conditions for its instantiation) but rather as a paradigm case analysis thereof: maybe, that is, the claim is rather that, paradigmatically, vices are independent of the truth of their constitutive beliefs, as well as of the valence of their epistemic consequences.

I worry about the plausibility of this take on the view: first, it seems to me as though it is both psychologically and epistemologically implausible that the exercise of epistemic vice will often and easily co-exist with accuracy. Consider: I believe I’m very good at maths due to self-admiration alone. Next, I do some maths. As it turns out, I’m getting things right all of the time. I find it implausible, at this juncture, to think that the inductive evidence is not (at least part) of the basis of my belief. Implausibility is not impossibility, of course: it may be that I totally ignore this inductive evidence. I submit, however, that it is psychologically implausible, so it will not serve as a paradigm case analysis of the phenomenon we are looking at.

Second, the problem generalises: if, whenever I believe (from self-mismeasuring) that I am good at phi-ing, I phi and get inductive evidence that I am good at phi-ing, it will be hard to see how it is that I am still instantiating narcissism or superbia rather than a merely justified belief that I’m great, sourced in a solid inductive basis.

In sum, Tanesini’s rich account teaches us a lot about the psychology and epistemology of vice: de facto lack of reliability does not matter, and false constitutive beliefs are not needed for vice. Compatibly, though, I have argued, Tanesini’s self-mismeasuring attitudes need externalist normative grounding: the ‘mis’ in the ‘mismeasure of the self’ can’t be restricted to the limits of the skull. Epistemic normativity – be it of virtue or of vice – is externalist normativity: it has to do with epistemic values that lie outside our skulls, such as truth and knowledge.

In what follows, I will look at a competing proposal for individuating genuinely epistemic normative notions: by the values they are associated with. This option, I argue, is not only theoretically superior, but it is also extensionally adequate. However, alas, with this improved method to hand, many of the virtues discussed in the VR literature will fail to qualify as genuinely epistemic virtues. Rather, as ever, they are moral virtues with epistemic content. If so, the prospects of employing them in unpacking the epistemic impermissibility of resistance to evidence are dim.

5.4 Value-Based Vice Individuation

This section looks at a theory-neutral individuation recipe for epistemic virtues and vices based on a widely accepted claim concerning the relation between the axiological and the deontic.

The theory of normativity has a theory-neutral answer to the question of normative individuation ready to hand: norms can be typed by the type of good they are associated with.

According to VI, prudential norms are associated with prudential goods, moral norms are associated with moral goods, and so on. All normative domains have goods (values) that are central to them, in virtue of the kind of normative domains they are: survival is a prudential good; promise-keeping is a moral good; politeness is a social good; beauty is an aesthetic good; money is a financial good. Similarly, if etymology is any guide to what normative domain ‘the epistemic’ is supposed to refer to, knowledge is an epistemic good. But given that this is so, philosophers cannot just stipulate that, starting tomorrow, they will use ‘moral’ to refer to a type of normative domain that does not care about promise-keeping but does care about money, or ‘financial’ to refer to a domain of which the chief good is safe driving. Similarly, it would be odd to count wealth and having short nails amongst epistemic goods. We have some independent hold on the relevant types of goods. Given that this is so, VI holds out the hope of offering a helpful way of typing norms by the goods associated with them.

This is, of course, still rather vague, and in particular the association relation at issue requires spelling out. After all, one way in which a norm can be associated with a particular good is by requiring more or less of that good. This, however, will put us back in the same trouble we faced with CI: just because a norm requires me to know how to swim before jumping into lakes and is thereby associated with an epistemic good (i.e. knowledge), it does not follow that it is an epistemic norm.

On the view I favour, the association relation stands for one or another direction of explanation: either the goods explain the norm or the other way around. To see how this goes, it may be worth noting that VI is value-theoretically neutral in the sense that it does not come with any substantive commitments about the relation between the axiological and the deontic. That is because the association claim between norms and goals of the same type does not imply any particular direction of explanation. As a result, it is compatible with both of the two leading views about the relationship between the axiological and the deontic. Teleologists (e.g. Sidgwick Reference Sidgwick1907, Slote Reference Slote1989, Moore Reference Moore1993) explain the ‘ought’ in terms of the ‘good’; they claim that the norm of type X is there to guide us in reaching the good of type X. In contrast, deontologists (e.g. Ewing Reference Ewing1947, Scanlon Reference Scanlon1998, Rabinowicz and Rönnow-Rasmussen Reference Rabinowicz and Rönnow-Rasmussen2004) reverse the order of explanation: according to ‘fitting attitude’ accounts of value, for example, the goods of type X are only valuable to begin with because the norm of type X gives us reasons to favour them. Crucially, in either case, the mere association claim at issue in VI holds.Footnote ⁶

Since we are interested specifically in the epistemic domain, I want to take a moment to take a quick look at how the association claim may be unpacked for distinctively epistemic norms within both a teleological and a deontological framework. Here is Peter Graham for an explicit statement of the teleological direction of explanation:

Here is Kurt Sylvan for a statement of the deontological direction of VI:

Note also that VI makes plausible predictions about epistemic norms and norms with epistemic content. For instance, BELIEVE is correctly characterised as an epistemic norm. After all, it is a norm that is associated with the epistemic good of true belief. The easiest way to see this is by looking at the teleological direction of the association claim. Believing what one has good evidence for believing is a good means to true belief; it promotes true belief. Consider, by way of contrast, SING. Rather than being associated with distinctively epistemic goods (e.g. promoting true belief), it is associated with an aesthetic good. Again, in a teleological framework, singing only songs one knows is a way of promoting beauty. As a result, VI classifies it, again correctly, as an aesthetic norm, albeit one with epistemic content.

Now, just as we took CI to motivate the parallel content-based recipe for individuating epistemic virtues (due to the normativity of virtues), we may take VI to motivate the obvious value-based recipe for so doing. Here it goes:

One might initially worry whether VVI preserves VI’s value-theoretic neutrality. After all, given that virtues are associated with epistemic goods, one may get the impression that VVI commits me to a distinctively teleological value theory. Fortunately, the answer to this question is ‘no’. After all, it may be that, in accordance with VI, the axiological is analysed in terms of the deontic. If so, it may still be that norms explain both goods and virtues. By the same token, VVI does preserve the value-theoretic neutrality after all.Footnote ⁷

Importantly, there is reason to believe that several virtue responsibilists are attracted to VVI. In several places, leading VR theorists hint at something along VVI lines. Let’s start with what Roberts and Wood themselves say about this issue:

Here is Montmarquet on epistemic virtues:

Also, Jason Baehr’s view about what distinguishes epistemic virtues from other types of virtues seems very similar to VVI;

Last but not least, here is Linda Zagzebski:

Unfortunately, if VVI is correct, many of the purportedly epistemic virtues discussed in the literature turn out to be moral virtues with epistemic content rather than genuinely epistemic virtues. By the same token, these virtues will not be relevant to epistemic justification, nor will they be helpful in accounting for the epistemic impermissibility of resistance cases.

Let us start with an easy case. Consider, again, the virtue of epistemic temperance discussed by Roberts and Wood. Intuitively, Roberts and Wood are right: the slave-owner who looked away when the slave women were nursing their infants was, to this extent, manifesting virtue.Footnote ⁸ As Roberts and Wood well put it, ‘To be an indiscriminate ogler is a trait of bad intellectual character, a failure of discipline of the will to know’ (Reference Roberts and Wood2007, 175). However, since we have seen that typing norms and virtues by content will not do, the question is: when Roberts and Wood talk about ‘bad intellectual character’, what type of badness is that? Is it genuinely epistemic (i.e. associated in the relevant way with epistemic goods) or rather badness of a different sort (i.e. associated with different types of goods), albeit badness that has epistemic content? It is hard to deny that it must be the latter. After all, what seems to be going on here is that a properly epistemic virtue, ‘the love of knowledge’ (which is, in the relevant way – either teleologically or deontologically – associated with an epistemic good, in this case knowledge), is being overridden (‘disciplined’) by another virtue, namely the virtue of ‘epistemic temperance’. Plausibly, though, the latter is precisely not associated with epistemic goods in the relevant sense. After all, on neither direction of explanation does it plausibly stand in an association relation with epistemic goods. Neither is it is conducive to their acquisition, nor does it give one reasons to favour them. Rather, what seems to be the case is that epistemic temperance stands in the relevant relation with moral goods, such as respect for privacy or discretion. Indeed, depending on the details, one might conceive of the Roberts and Wood case as a case of all-things-considered permissible evidence resistance due to moral considerations overriding epistemic considerations.

If all this is so, then, the Roberts and Wood account is guilty of normative ambiguation: it is not the case that the slave-owner is an epistemically virtuous person in virtue of tempering his will to know in the relevant case; rather, the slave-owner manifests a moral virtue with epistemic content by tempering his will to know.

On a similar note, consider Heather Battaly’s discussion of epistemic temperance as well as the corresponding vice that she calls ‘epistemic self-indulgence’:

Note that the goods secured by ‘epistemic temperance’ are again social or prudential, precisely at the expense of epistemic goods. According to Battaly herself, the epistemically temperate person sacrifices the consumption of epistemic goods for the sake of ‘pursuing other things of value’. Conversely, it is not clear why ‘epistemic self-indulgence’ should be considered an epistemic vice. After all, on both directions of explanation it is strongly associated with epistemic goods rather than bads. Thus, by the lights of VVI, it seems that Battaly’s discussion also manifests the familiar mistake.

Importantly, this is not to say that a case cannot be made for the claim that epistemic temperance, in a particular context, can be an epistemic virtue proper, or that epistemic self-indulgence could be an epistemic vice – again, depending on context (i.e. depending on whether the relevant context associates these virtues with epistemic goods). Here is, very roughly, how an argument to this effect might go: consider someone who spends all of their epistemic resources on acquisitioning disparate items of knowledge about completely unrelated topics. Perhaps this person should temper their will for a high quantity of epistemic goods in favour of the quality of the epistemic goods. That is, perhaps a project of diving more deeply into a particular domain, in order to achieve understanding thereof, would be more epistemically worthwhile than one of simply acquisitioning disparate items of knowledge. At the very least, this question is well worth investigating.

Nenad Miscevic’s (Reference Miscevic2016) discussion of curiosity (which he takes to be the basic epistemic virtue) raises similar concerns. Miscevic carefully draws our attention to the fact that what he means by the ‘virtue of curiosity’ is something that excludes nosiness. Indeed, he stipulates the term ‘curiosity+’ to pick out a kind of curiosity that is not too strong. Curiosity+ is just strong enough to secure some epistemic goods without thereby giving rise to bad moral side effects. Here is Miscevic:

Conduciveness to moral goods, though, does not bear on whether or to what extent a particular character trait is an epistemic virtue or not. Indeed, it is unclear why nosiness is not legitimately understood as an epistemic virtue, precisely insofar as it is associated with epistemic goods, and despite the fact that it plausibly fails to qualify as a moral virtue. Consider a teleological direction of explanation: nosiness, as morally indecent as it might be, will definitely be one good character trait to have for securing epistemic goods, such as knowledge or true beliefs. It is, then, unclear why we should endorse Miscevic’s distinction between good curiosity (curiosity+) and bad curiosity (curiosity−) rather than allowing that curiosity simpliciter is an epistemic virtue, albeit one that may or may not also count as a moral virtue depending on whether or not it brings about bad moral consequences.

One question that the VR champion might rightly ask at this point is the following: is it not the case that, on the Aristotelian model, only proper exercise of a ‘virtue’ counts as an instance of genuine virtue, whereas improper exercise does not really count as an instance of virtue? Here is Miscevic on this issue, referencing a discussion by Philippa Foot:

The problem with this way to go is that ‘proper exercise’ is a normative notion. As such, it requires typing itself. There is such a thing as the epistemically proper exercise of a virtue, the morally proper exercise of a virtue, and so on. If VVI is right, epistemically proper exercise of curiosity will represent an epistemically virtuous exercise. Once again, though, it is not clear why episodes of nosiness will not count as epistemically proper exercises of curiosity – after all, they are apt to secure epistemic goods.

Instances of normative ambiguation resulting from a lack of a clear individuation recipe for virtues are ubiquitous in the VR literature and beyond. It would take too much space to point them all out in this chapter. However, I need not do so for present purposes. Rather, the ambition here is to draw attention to a potential problem sourced in this lack for the project at hand: that of explaining the impermissibility of evidence resistance by reference to genuinely epistemic character traits.

Importantly for our project, by the lights of VVI, even virtues that have been at the very heart of the VR literature, and that might be taken to paradigmatically explain the impermissibility of resistance to evidence – such as open-mindedness or intellectual humility – deserve closer scrutiny.

To see why this is the case, let’s close with a brief examination of open-mindedness. Of course, at least at first glance, open-mindedness comes across as a paradigmatic epistemic virtue, and one that is paradigmatically missing in cases of evidence resistance: being open-minded opens one towards properly appreciating the views of others and thus properly assessing available evidence. Note, however, that whether a given case really qualifies as proper appreciation may depend on (1) the direction of explanation for unpacking VVI and (2) contextual features. To see this, consider open-mindedness in a teleological framework according to which virtues count as genuinely epistemic only insofar as they are conducive to epistemic goods. Now, plausibly, for most people of average epistemic endowment and living in an average epistemic environment, being open-minded is indeed conducive to epistemic goods. After all, when undertaking intellectual projects most of us are likely to encounter better (as in epistemically better) ideas/views, etc., than our own. Being receptive to these other ideas/views, etc., will thus be conducive to epistemic improvement.

In contrast, however, it is not clear that the same is the case when we move further up the scale of epistemic endowment. For a being that is well above average in cognitive ability, open-mindedness will often be conducive to epistemic loss. After all, it may be conducive to abandoning perfectly fine beliefs in the light of misleading evidence. An open-minded mathematical genius shouldn’t abandon worthwhile beliefs in the light of less qualified testimony. Similarly, an expert in vaccines or climate change should not update on layman sceptical testimony. And so on.

If this is the case, whether open-mindedness is an epistemic virtue is a highly contextual matter.

Jeremy Fantl (Reference Fantl2018) makes a similar point against the tout court epistemic goodness of open-mindedness, but in a more interesting way. He starts off with a fairly minimal account of open-mindedness, on which you are open-minded towards an argument if and only if (1) affective factors do not dispose you against being persuaded by the argument, (2) you are not disposed to unreasonably violate any procedural norms in your response to the argument, and (3) you are willing to be significantly persuaded conditional on spending significant time with the argument, finding the steps compelling, and being unable to locate a flaw. He then goes on to argue that open-mindedness is not always a good thing: in particular, he argues, there are many situations in which you know that a relevant counterargument is misleading whether or not you have spent significant time with the argument, found each step compelling, and been unable to expose a flaw. In cases like these, he argues, you should not let yourself be convinced by the argument. Such a dogmatism can be rational, according to Fantl, since often the best explanation of your situation is that your well-supported belief is correct and a clever individual has simply come up with a misleading counterargument (Reference Fantl2018, 34). Furthermore, Fantl argues, such closed-minded dogmatism is a manifestation of intellectual humility – since you know of yourself to be fallible at identifying flaws in misleading arguments. This is why, according to Fantl, your knowledge can survive coming across an apparently flawless counterargument.

Of course, independently of its reliability in generating epistemic goods, open-mindedness is plausibly accurately characterised as a moral virtue with epistemic content. After all, being an open-minded person quite plausibly means treating other human beings as worthwhile epistemic sources, independently of whether they actually are reliable sources. This, arguably, is an instance of acting in accordance with a more general moral law requiring us to respect humanity.

Similarly, and for similar reasons, intellectual humility is more properly thought of as a moral virtue with epistemic content that, contextually, may become an epistemic virtue proper in cases where the context is such that it is associated with epistemic goods. In other contexts, to the contrary, epistemic courage will be the genuinely epistemically virtuous character trait to have and manifest (see Ichikawa (Reference Ichikawaforthcoming) for an excellent book-length treatment of epistemic courage in relation to evidence resistance and positive epistemology more broadly).

Virtue responsibilist character traits are epistemic virtues only insofar as they are associated with epistemic goods. If this is so, however, appealing to character traits cannot constitute the normative bedrock for any account that tries to explain the epistemic impermissibility of evidence resistance: epistemic values will do the work. Values will come before virtues in explaining resistance data (as well as in accounting for other interesting epistemic notions and phenomena). The view developed in this book will do just that: explain the impermissibility of evidence resistance by appeal to knowledge and its availability.

5.5 Conclusion

This chapter investigated the virtue responsibilist camp for resources to explain the epistemic impermissibility of evidence resistance. I have argued that, if plausible at all, a responsibilist account of these cases better not be too strong (i.e. had better not explain resistance as absence/lack of manifestation of virtue or presence/manifestation of vice) since, in slogan form, good people can also believe bad things (Levy Reference Levy2021): the epistemically virtuous are fallible, as they can be involved in one-off resistance cases. I have then looked at what I take to be the most successful account on the market in keeping the character condition permissive: Jason Baehr’s responsibilist evidentialism. I have argued that the notion of virtue consistency in the account does not afford plausible unpackings that explain evidence resistance. Furthermore, I have shown that individuating epistemic character traits requires an appeal to epistemic values. If this is so, intellectual character traits don’t do the grounding normative work in explaining what goes wrong in resistance cases: epistemic values do.