Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. LXVI, No. 2, March 2003

Greco’s Agent Reliabilism

STEWART COHEN

Arizona State Uiiiversity

John Greco’s Putting Skeptics in their Place presents an illuminating per- spective on the nature of the skeptical problem and how to respond to it. Building on Ernest Sosa’s Virtue Epistemology, Greco develops an account of knowledge he calls, “Agent Reliabilism”. In this essay, I will take up sev- eral issues regarding the details of this account.

The Analysis of Knowledge Greco calls the view that knowledge arises from reliable cognitive processes, “Simple Reliabilism”. He cites Goldman’s version which says that a belief is justified iff it is produced by a reliable cognitive process. According to Greco, simple reliabilism goes a long way toward solving important epistemological problems. But, he further argues, i t faces a fatal difficulty, “the Problem of Strange and Fleeting Processes”. These processes, though reliable, “do not give rise to knowledge and justified belief’ (p. 175). This shows that Simple Reliablism is too weak.

Greco presents three examples of such processes. In the first, S suffers from a brain lesion which causes him to believe he has a brain lesion, inde- pendently of whether he has any evidence for his having the lesion. In the second, S reasons that any two people who order the same fruit drink on the same day are genetically related. Because all people are genetically related, the reasoning is reliable. In the third, S reasons according to the gambler’s fallacy but the reasoning is reliable owing to the interventions of a helpful demon.

Greco argues that these cases show that simple reliabilism must be strengthened. The strengthened theory he endorses, he calls “Agent Reli- abilism”: “A belief p has positive epistemic status for a person S just in case S’s believing p results from a stable and reliable dispositions that make up S’s cognitive character.” (p. 177). Agent Reliabilism is stronger than Simple Reliabilism because it requires not only that the belief be produced by a reli- able process, but further, that the process result from a stable disposition that is part of S’s cognitive character. According to Greco

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On the present view, knowledge and justified belief are grounded in stable and reliable cogni- tive character. Such character may include both a person’s natural cognitive faculties and her acquired habits of thought. Accordingly, innate vision gives rise to knowledge if it is reliably accurate. But so can acquired skills of perception and acquired methods of advanced technol- ogy. So long as such habits are both stable and successful, they make up the kind of character that gives rise to knowledge. (p. 177)

Greco claims that Agent Reliabilism can handle the problem of strange and fleeting processes but he never returns to the cases that prove problematic for Simple Reliabilism and demonstrates how. And as I try to do it myself, i t is not at all clear to me that Agent Reliabilism avoids the problem. The view seems still to be too weak to handle the examples. Recall the first case of the brain lesion. As we just noted, Greco holds that a person’s cognitive character includes natural faculties, as well as acquired habits of thought. Presumably believing one has a brain tumor is a case of the latter. Now Greco says that as long as such habits are “both stable and successful”, they make up the kind of character that gives rise to knowledge. So where does the brain lesion process fall short? It is en hypothexi successful. Is it unstable? Greco does not say much about what stability amounts to here. He does say that stable dispositions “ ... are not the kind of thing a person can adopt on a whim or engage in an irregular fashion.” (p. 177). Perhaps then the point is that the brain lesion process occurs just once and so does not occur on a regular basis. But surely that is not essential to the case. We could suppose that the brain lesion sustains the belief once it is formed. Or perhaps that when S goes to sleep, the belief disappears only to be caused again by the lesion. Surely neither of these changes should affect the intuition that S does not know he has a brain lesion.

Next consider Greco’s case where S reasons from the fact that two people order the same fruit drink on the same day that they are genetically related. Since all people are genetically related, this inferential habit is successful. But I see nothing to prevent us from supposing that this habit is stable. So the case seems to satisfy the more stringent conditions of Agent Reliabilism. So how does the move from Simple Reliabilism to Agent Reliabilism help?

Finally consider the case of the helpful demon. S reasons in accordance with the gambler’s fallacy, but successfully, owing to intervention of a demon. Is there any reason why S could not have a stable disposition to reason this way? If not, then the case is a counterexample to Agent Reli- abilism as well.

One response I suppose Greco might make regarding the demon case is to argue that the stable and reliable disposition is not part of S ’ s cognitive char- acter because the reliability of the process depends on the helpful demon. But the reliability of any process will depend on environmental conditions. For example, Greco quotes Sosa giving an example of such a disposition.

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For example it may be one’s faculty of sight operating in good lighr that generates one’s belief in the whiteness and roundness of a facing snowball. Is possession of such a faculty a “vir- tue”? (p. 177) [my emphasis]

“Virtue” is Sosa’s term for a stable and successful disposition of a person. And he answers his own question: “. . . the faculty of sight is . . . in a straight- forward sense, an intellectual virtue.” (p. 177) So the fact that the faculty requires the environment to cooperate via good lighting does not prevent vision from being a virtue. So why should the fact that S’s reasoning with the gambler fallacy requires the environment to cooperate, via the actions of the demon, prevent that reasoning faculty from being a virtue. So again it is not clear why the move to Agent Reliabilism avoids the problem.

I have been arguing that Agent Reliabilism is too weak to rule out the cases that Simple Reliabilism founder on. A further worry is that the view is too strong. To handle the problem of strange and fleeting processes, the view requires that all instances of knowledge result from a stable and reliable disposition that makes up the agent’s character. Now consider an agent who is in general a bad inductive reasoner. He is highly emotional and this fre- quently leads him to make generalizations from samples that are too small or biased. But every now and then, he sees things more clearly and makes an inductive inference on the basis of a sufficiently large and diverse sample. Now it seems clear that such an agent could come to know on the basis of such an inference. The fact that he often makes bad inferences from samples should not keep him from knowing when he makes good inferences from samples. But, it is not clear how Greco’s view can explain this. Insofar as the process is stable in the relevant sense, it is unreliable.

Of course this raises familiar issues concerning exactly how we individu- ate the process. From an intuitive perspective, the reasoning process yields knowledge when the subject is not affected by his emotions. So perhaps Greco could say that we should only count the instances where the subject is not emotional as genuine instances of the process. Let’s put aside the objec- tion that such a maneuver would seem to be ad hoc. The problem remains that although the process would now be reliable, it would not be stable, i.e., i t would be engaged in an irregular fashion. So intuitively good inferences could not produce knowledge.

Perhaps Greco would argue the emotional intluence should be viewed as not part of the reasoning process, but rather as an interfering factor.’ So con- strued the process itselfwould be reliable (construing reliability counterfactu- ally), despite the fact that sometimes the emotional influence interferes with its reliability. Moreover, the process could be viewed as resulting from a stable disposition, since the process is still operating even when subject to an interfering influence. So we could then view the process as both reliable and

’ That Greco might respond in this way was suggested to me by Robert Johnson.

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stable. But if so, then it would follow that even the hasty generalization could yield knowledge, (provided the conclusion of the inference is true), since they result from a stable and reliable disposition.

Moreover, it is not clear to me that the case depends on there even being an emotional influence on the reasoning. Suppose the reasoner, most of the time, fails to see things clearly and so makes bad inferences from samples. But other times he does see things more clearly and makes good inferences from samples. Think of it on the model of a short circuit.’ Can’t the reasoner know when, as it were, the circuit is complete and so he is seeing clearly? This seems true despite the fact that insofar as the process is reliable it is unstable.

Consider a perceptual example. Imagine a visual process that works only intermittently. Now there are two ways to think of this. On the first way, the process sometimes produces true beliefs (accurate percepts) and sometimes produces false beliefs (inaccurate percepts). In such a case, I think it is intui- tive to suppose that the visual beliefs do not constitute knowledge even when they are true. But suppose instead that the process is intermittent in the sense that most of the time it does not work at all, i.e., it produces no per- cepthelief. (Again i t is helpful to think of a short circuit.) But occasionally, the process works and produces an accurate percept and a corresponding true visual belief. By my lights, these visual beliefs could still be instances of knowledge despite the fact that the process is not stable in the relevant sense, i.e., i t operates in an irregular (intermittent) fashion.

Subjective Justification Although Greco claims that Agent Reliabilism can handle the cases that show Simple Reliabilism to be too weak, he argues that Agent Reliabilism, as it stands, is itself too weak (of course for reasons other than the ones I cite). The reason is that knowledge must be “subjectively appropriate as well as objectively reliable.” (p. 180) At other times, Greco says that knowlege requires subjective justification. To illustrate the problem with Agent Reli- abilism, Greco presents BonJour’s case of Norman the clairvoyant.

Due to his highly reliable power of clairvoyance, Norman believes that the president is in New York City-despite the fact that Norman has considerable evidence otherwise, and has no suspicion that he has the power of clairvoyance. (p. 181)

Greco agrees that “. . . there does seem to be something right about Bodour’s general point ... knowledge does seem to require some kind of sensitivity to one’s own reliability.” (p. 187)

Greco recounts Sosa’s attempt to deal with this problem. Simplifying somewhat, Sosa holds that in order to have (reflective) knowledge, one must

* This model was suggested to me by Robert Johnson.

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“see” oneself as believing from a reliable faculty. This requirement would explain why Norman fails to know. Because Norman does not know his fac- ulty of clairvoyance is reliable.

Greco rejects Sosa’s solution to the problem of subjective justification on psychological reality grounds. He argues that in most cases where we know, we fail to have beliefs about the reliability of our faculties-even if we con- strue the beliefs as dispositional. Because of this, Greco weakens the require- ment for subjective justification. He distinguishes between having a disposi- tional belief that one’s faculties are reliable, and having a disposition to believe one’s faculties are reliable, and requires the subject to have only the latter. Here is his proposal:

(VJ) A belief p is subjectively justified for a person S if and only if S’s believing p is grounded in the cognitive dispositions that S manifests when S is thinking conscientiously. (p. 190)

Greco provides some clarification of (VJ). By “thinking conscientiously”, he mean to pick out

the usual state that most people are in as a kind of default mode-the state of trying to form one’s beliefs accurately. One might say “thinking honestly” instead and this is intended to oppose such modes as trying to comfort oneself, trying to get attention, and being pigheaded.. . . (pp. 190-191).

He further clarifies:

the dispositions that a person manifests when she is thinking conscientiously. are stable proper- ties of her character and therefore in an important sense hers. Accordingly, in an important sense, a belief produced from such dispositions will be well formed from the person’s own point of view. (p . 191)

Greco argues that (VJ) avoids the psychological reality problem of Sosa’s view. Recall that Greco introduces (VJ) to handle the problem of subjective justification as illustrated in the case of Norman the clairvoyant. But he does not return to that case and show how (VJ) handles it. Moreover, it looks to me as if it does not. That is, (VJ) does not disqualify Norman from knowing on the basis of his clairvoyant faculty. For is there any reason to think that when Norman believes P on the basis of clairvoyance, his believing P is not grounded in the cognitive dispositions S manifests when S is thinking con- scientiously? When Norman believes as a result of the exercise of his clair- voyance, he need not be in any of the states that Greco contrasts with think- ing conscientiously, or as he sometimes says, thinking honestly. That is, he need not be trying to comfort himself, or trying to get attention, or being ~igheaded.~ Moreover I can see no reason why these dispositions of Norman’s

Perhaps in the particular version of the Norman case Creco discusses. it could be claimed that Norman is being pig-headed in relying on his clairvoyant faculty, since in

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can not be stable properties of his character and so, in an important sense, his.

Skepticism Greco defends a relevant alternatives approach to skepticism. He argues that the most we need grant the skeptic is that “S can know p is true on the basis of evidence E only if E discriminates p’s being true from all relevant possi- bilities that are inconsistent with p’s being true.” (p. 204) And he provides the following analysis of relevance:

(RP) q is a relevant possibility with respect to S’s knowing that p is true if and only if

i. If q is true, then S does not know that p is true; and

ii. Either (a) in some close possible world q is true, or ... (p. 209)

The clause that does the antiskeptical work is ii(a). Skeptical possibilities, e.g., I am a brain-in-a-vat turn out not to be relevant on this analysis, so our inability to discriminate p’s being true from these skeptical possibilities does not count against our knowing p.

Do we know skeptical alternatives are false on Greco’s account? This question is important because if we do not, then his view will run afoul of the deductive closure principle for knowledge. So suppose I look at my hand. On Greco’s view, I can know I have a hand on the basis of my evidence, even though such evidence does not discriminate my having a hand from my being a brain-in-a-vat. The possibility that I am a brain-in-a-vat does not obtain in any close possible world, and so is not relevant.

But do I know I am not a brain-in-a-vat? If not, then the theory violates the closure principle since my having a hand entails that I am not a brain-in- a-vat. Perhaps Greco would say that since any alternative to my not being a brain-in-a-vat will not be relevant, I can know that I am not a brain-in-a- vat-for free. But Greco’s account would require that the belief that I am not a brain-in-a-vat be grounded in my stable and reliable cognitive character. It is not clear to me how to evaluate whether this condition would be met. Exactly which aspect of my stable and reliable cognitive character produces my belief

the case as described, Norman has considerable evidence that contradicts his clairvoyant faculty. But I don’t see that this would require Norman to be pig-headed in relying on his clairvoyance. He may just fail to appreciate the evidence he has. And this need not result from any negligence on Norman’s part. It could just be a cognitive limitation. Moreover, some reliabilists think they can account for the version of the case where Norman has this counterevidence, without appealing to any notion of subjective justification. (See Alvin Goldman, “What is Justified Belief?’ in Just#ration and Knowledge, Pappas. ed. (Dordrecht, 1979)). So the ‘pure’ case against Reliabilism that could motivate a subjec- tive justification requirement specifies that Norman has no evidence one way or the other. In this case, Norman clearly need not be pig-headed in relying on his clairvoy- ance.

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that I am not a brain-in-vat? Moreover, it is important that Greco’s account not be so weak as to count as knowledge any belief whose denial is false at any close possible world, e.g., the belief that a certain natural law is true. Intuitively, I could believe that an actual natural law is true without knowing it. If no account of how I know I am not a brain-in-a-vat is forthcoming from Greco’s account, then it will violate closure. Perhaps Greco is willing to accept this result.

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