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What is the role of causation in justification?
Just a short note regarding some disputes that i’ve been having recently with some colleagues. I’ve recently been concerned with sub-doxastic mental states. Subdoxastic mental states are representational mental states that are not beliefs, are non-conceptual (this is controversial), are inaccessible to consciousness (this is controversial), and are inferentially isolated (this is controversial, though less so). They are representational mental states which play a role in causing beliefs.
They are the representations that we attach to subpersonal cognitive mechanisms (for instance, things like edge detection mechanisms, facial recognition mechanisms) because we need to do so in order to draw a clear causal line between such low level mechanisms and the conscious, conceptual representations they make possible. I am able to form beliefs about the table in front of me, in part, because of the way in which my surroundings are being represented by my edge detectors, though the representations produced by those detectors are not accessible to consciousness.
Take it for granted that subdoxastic representations are produced without the assistance of consciousness and are inaccessible to consciousness (and leave aside questions concerning how genuinely representational such representations are if they bear no relationship to a conscious subject. At the very least, we’d want to say that such productions in the brain of a zombie would serve to represent the zombie’s world in some sense.) I am interested in the possibility that consciousness plays a neccessary role in justification, in agent’s being justified in their beliefs.A number of my colleagues have, somewhat to my surprise, suggested that there is no problem with saying that subdoxastic states playing a justificatory role. That is, someone could be justified in believing p because they are in subdoxastic state S. I constructed the following example in an attempt to make it clear to myself what they were committing themselves too, and they happily acknowledged that they were taking the following to be true:
Suppose I have the belief that Bill is sick, and that if Bill is sick he won’t come to class. I walk into class and my face-recognition-computational-mechanisms go to work and produce a subdoxastic representation of Bill sitting at a desk in the second row. This causes me to form the conscious representation that goes into the belief that bill is in class. From this I conclude (based on my antecedent belief in the conditional) that Bill is not sick. In this situation, the subdoxastic representation of Bill plays a justificatory role in my being warranted in believing that Bill is not sick.
There’s something plausible about this, but it seems quite wrong to me. It seems wrong because it seems to suppose that causation is the right kind of relationship between events for one event to justify the other. The fact that I am caused to represent that S is p doesn’t justify, or even play a significant role in my being justified, in believing that S is p. Causal explanations and justificatory explanations simply seem to be different levels of explanations. But to say it this way is terribly mysterious. I’d really appreciate some help from some commenters: is there a clear way to make this point? Or am I being dogmatic?
29. October 2009 at 10:44
There is an interesting analog of your work in the problems AI scientists are working on. (Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine by J. Storrs Hall) The shift needed is to suggest that intelligence doesn’t spring from a tabula rasa, but rather genetically programmed structures in a person. This is not a structuralist answer, i.e. linguistics or essentialism, but rather the product of natural selection. They just figured out that without built in structures for counting, reproduction, language, etc. an intelligence could not be birthed. This answer is also not a Freudian answer requiring an “unconscious.”
30. October 2009 at 13:54
Doug, thanks for the comment!
Sorry, but though I know that your answer is neither linguistic, structuralistic, essentialistic, nor Freudian, I don’t quite know what question your answering…
You refer to some assumptions that are familiar to the likes of Jerry Fodor’s work, but their relevance to the question posed by this post is a little opaque to me.
Could you say more?
1. December 2009 at 05:03
I think the problem might be the actual awareness of the individual. If a person is not aware of a particular bias in their perspective then the belief is sub-doxastic. This can be changed by a conscious effort of the individual involved. However, this would end up requiring a progressive self-realization. A person could be justified insofar as they are aware of no biases where biases exist, but only if they made a conscious effort to eliminate biases. I don’t think the problem is strictly causal, rather it is the manner in which the belief is inferred through pattern recognition. A faulty inference is made from insufficient data or bias. The human mind has the ability to introspect and become aware of itself in various representational structure. The degree to which a person does this effects their overall outlook.
I think the idea of sub-doxastic content is problematic. It suggests that the more you understand about yourself the more responsible you are and the less you understand the less responsible you are. I might agree with this on epistemic grounds, but the gap between reality and social order can appear quite broad. If this were to become the new social ethos it would possibly destroy notions of legal justification and responsibility. Alternatively everyone is required by law to spend a certain amount of time studying themselves equanimously, seeking out subconscious biases.
W.K. Clifford proposed the view that doxastic responsibility relied on epistemic and ethical justification. But clearly epistemic justification cannot be taken too far to the extent of the sub-doxastic in normal life circumstances, as your example illustrates. Whenever we try to epistemically justify somethings existence we appeal to an external source, something which is not-it. For example looking for symptoms of sickness for justifying the existence of a sickness. In the simplest we ask “What caused this?”, “Why did this occur?” and in so doing we appeal to an antecedent. We can follow this race indefinitely. Continuously trying to justify somethings existence. Even if we consider all the events immediately antecedent and contemporaneous with the event in question, we’d have left out the justification for the existence of those antecedent and contemporaneous events. I mean, even epistemic justification is subject to relativity.
It seems to be an inescapable paradox of how humans think humans ought to be and how we think we actually are. In neither case can we give ultimate justification. It may not be that this is a problem to be fixed by analytic philosophy. It could be that the solution to improving social responsibility will be one of embracing human virtue rather than relying on concrete justification. That is to say that people will seek to study and learn with equanimity because it is respected and considered to be a virtue. In so doing they will attain greater justification for their beliefs and act more appropriately but not absolutely. How violators of the social ethos are handled is another matter all-together. Whether they are gassed, locked-up in prison or treated for amotivational syndrome. It would seem appropriate to treat such people as lacking in correct point of view or motivation and not necessarily with heightened emotions.
I don’t know if that helps at all. Cheers