1. Introduction

Shoenfield begins by presenting a concern regarding belief. Oftentimes, our most deeply held beliefs are caused by seemingly irrelevant influences, such as the community in which we grew up, the school we attended, or the immediate people in our lives. These cases are called “IF cases.” Shoenfield claims we need not worry in many such cases. First, Schoenfield argues for the truth of permissivism. Second, Shoenfield argues that, if we take permissivism to be true, the concern raised by irrelevant influences on belief is, in many cases, unwarranted. Third, Shoenfield raises an issue with her view and responds to it. Finally, Shoenfield turns to the issue of peer disagreement and examines how permissivism sorts out issues related to the topic.

2. What is permissivism and why is it true?

Shoenfield defines permissivism as “the claim that sometimes, there is more than one rational response to a given body of evidence” (194). There are non-permissive cases in which there is only one rational way to respond to a body of evidence, and permissive cases in which there is more than one rational way to respond to a body of evidence. Shoenfield argues that, starting with a non-permissive case, if we learn that it is an IF case, a significant reduction in confidence may be warranted. In a permissive case, however, finding out such a case is an IF case need not worry us. Shoenfield’s main argument goes as follows:

P1. Permissivism is true.

P2. If permissivism is true, the view that you should reduce confidence significantly in permissive irrelevant influence cases is unmotivated.

P3. If the view that you should reduce confidence significantly in permissive irrelevant influence cases is unmotivated, you don’t need to reduce confidence in such cases.

C1. You don’t need to reduce confidence significantly on the basis of irrelevant influences in permissive cases. (P1-P3).

To argue for the truth of P1, Shoenfield first introduces a countering view:

UNIQUENESS: For any body of evidence E, and proposition P, there is only one doxastic attitude to take towards P that is consistent with being rational and having evidence E.

Permissivism is simply the denial of UNIQUENESS. In other words, permissivism states that there are at least some cases in which there is more than one rational response to a body of evidence E. Shoenfield provides two arguments to motivate permissivism, one intuitive and one theoretical.

1. Intuitive Motivations

Intuitively, it seems reasonable people can disagree when confronted with the same body of evidence. This extends beyond scientific contexts. For example, it seems jury members may rationally arrive at different conclusions given the same body of evidence. Some argue that everyone’s unique experiences constitute different bodies of evidence which may influence what is rational to believe. If this is true, we can maintain belief in UNIQUENESS while accepting that different jurors can rationally come to different conclusions. Shoenfield shows it seems very unlikely that all cases work this way. For example, paleontologists’ unique life experiences don’t seem to make substantive differences in the debate between what killed the dinosaurs. A further concern is, if we assign such importance to life experiences, this calls into question the trustworthiness of experts’ opinions in their given fields.

2. Theoretical Motivations

Shoenfield argues that many plausible theories of justification require the truth of permissivism including coherentism, conservatism, and subjective Bayesianism. Furthermore, some theories of justification that reject permissivism contain unfortunate metaphysical commitments. For example, consider the Bayesian who thinks in terms of degrees of belief. According to UNIQUENESS, the Bayesian must believe in a unique real number between 0 and 1 that measures the appropriate credence to have in a proposition. Furthermore, she must believe that there exists some general principles that can objectively determine such a number. Given a proposition such as “there exist more than three hundred elephants,” this seems like an undesirable feature of UNIQUENESS. Rather, it seems like some principle is necessary to explain what is unreasonable about a given position, rather than some brute fact.

Question/Comment: Are you persuaded to believe in permissivism given these intuitive and theoretical motivations? It seems to me that the intuitive motivations are much stronger than the theoretical ones. Nevertheless, it seems to me like there is a rational position which denies these arguments. So is permissivism itself a permissive case? Note that Schoenfield’s entire argument hinges on the truth of permissivism.

2.1 Problems with permissivism

First, Shoenfield notes an important aspect of her permissivism. That is, “what one ought to believe depends, in part, on what epistemic standards one has” (199). Shoenfield defines a set of epistemic standards as “a function from bodies of evidence to doxastic states which the agent takes to be truth conducive” (199).

Question/Comment: Shoenfield’s epistemic standards are like stances/values in the sense that these standards precede beliefs and thus do much to determine them. Furthermore, Shoenfield argues that, according to permissivism, there are multiple permissible standards. Do you see any benefits/drawbacks to defining standards in this way?

With this talk of epistemic standards in our back pocket, we are ready to look at the objections levied against permissivism.

1. The evidence pointing problem (Sosa, White)

A seemingly problematic aspect of permissivism is that it is permissible, given E, to believe p and permissible, given E, to believe ~p. Surely, we do not want to accept that the evidence supports both p and ~p. This idea rests, however, on a faulty assumption. Shoenfield’s permissivist does not think that the evidence “dial” points both to p and ~p simultaneously. Rather, there are multiple evidence “dials” corresponding to different permissible ways of weighing the evidence, due to different epistemic standards. Thus, it is not the case that given one set of epistemic standards, one is permitted to believe p and ~p.

2. A cluster of worries: arbitrariness (Christensen, Feldman, White)

If one thinks that, given E, it is reasonable to both believe p and ~p, it seems having one belief, rather than the other, is arbitrary. According to Roger White, we can think of belief forming as taking a pill. If we take pill #1, we believe p. If we take pill #2, we believe ~p. Either we can look at evidence and come to whatever conclusion we come to, or we can take a randomly selected pill and come to our conclusion that way. If one is a permissivist, it seems both methods are equally likely to lead to truth, both being rational. Standards can help ease our worries here. Recall that one’s epistemic standards are thought to be more truth conducive to the individual than other standards. Taking the pill could either result in a belief conflicting with one’s standards, or result in changing one’s standards themselves. Both of these instances look undesirable to the permissivist, so she should deny the pill. Importantly, regardless of whether one is a permissivist, one cannot give independent reasons for weighing evidence in a certain way.

3. How permissivism bears on irrelevant factor cases (defense of P2)

Now that we can assume permissivism is true, Shoenfield turns to P2.

P2. If permissivism is true, the view that you should reduce confidence significantly in permissive irrelevant influence cases is unmotivated.

Shoenfield introduces two hypotheses which motivate decreasing confidence.

RATIONAL INDEPENDENCE: Suppose that independently of your reasoning about p, you reasonably think the following: “were I to reason to the conclusion that p in my present circumstances, there is a significant chance my belief would not be rational.” Then, if you find yourself believing p on the basis of your reasoning, you should significantly reduce confidence in that belief.

TRUTH INDEPENDENCE: Suppose that independently of your reasoning about p, you reasonably think the following: “were I to reason to the conclusion that p in my present circumstances, there is a significant chance my belief would not be true.” Then, if you find yourself believing in p on the basis of your reasoning, you should significantly reduce confidence in that belief.

Schoenfield then presents a practical case COMMUNITY in which growing up in a religious community leads one to rationally believe in the existence of God. Had this individual grown up in a different place, she would have come to believe otherwise given the same body of evidence. Taking this to be a permissive case, Schoenfield argues that one should not decrease confidence in one’s belief.

P3. The best motivation for reducing confidence in permissive irrelevant influence cases requires TRUTH INDEPENDENCE.

P4. TRUTH INDEPENDENCE says to decrease confidence in all permissive cases (even when there are no irrelevant influences!).

P5. If you have to give up your belief in all permissive cases, there are no permissive cases, (definition of permissivism)

P6. TRUTH INDEPENDENCE is inconsistent with permissivism. (P4, P5)

C2. If permissivism is true, the view that you should reduce confidence in permissive irrelevant influence cases is unmotivated. (P3, P6)

P3 is true because if RATIONAL INDEPENDENCE is true, it is permissible to maintain belief, whereas if TRUTH INDEPENDENCE is true, you must give up your belief. Thus the worry about irrelevant influences, such as in COMMUNITY, only arises with TRUTH INDEPENDENCE. If Schoenfield can show that TRUTH INDEPENDENCE is inconsistent with permissivism, we need not worry about irrelevant influences in permissive cases.

TRUTH INDEPENDENCE is inconsistent with permissivism because it requires one to give up belief in permissive cases all the time. Consider the following example without irrelevant influences:

A caveman considers the arguments for and against the existence of God. He comes to believe in the existence of God (G), but also recognizes one could rationally reject G given the same evidence. TRUTH INDEPENDENCE will require him to give up his belief, as he must consider the likelihood of being right independent of his reasoning about the existence of God. Doing so leads to the conclusion that he is not likely to be right. So, if we accept TRUTH INDEPENDENCE, there can be no permissive cases, because each time we are forced to reject our belief absent independent justification. Since permissivism says there can be such cases, TRUTH INDEPENDENCE is inconsistent with permissivism. “What TRUTH INDEPENDENCE demands is exactly what the permissivist cannot provide: an independent reason for thinking it likely that her beliefs, in permissive cases, are true” (208).

4. A problem with permissivism

Schoenfield notes that it is odd to argue on the one hand that a permissivist should not be willing to take a belief pill, but if one does take that pill (or grow up in a certain community), there is no reason to abandon that belief. The idea that we need not reduce confidence in permissive cases seems to conflict with REFLECTION.

REFLECTION: If you know that, in the future, you will rationally, without loss of information, have doxastic attitude A towards p, you ought to now have doxastic attitude A towards p.

Schoenfield gets around this issue by revising REFLECTION.

PERMISSIVE REFLECTION: If you know that, in the future, you will rationally, without loss of information, rationally have doxastic attitude A towards p, and your future self has the same standards of reasoning as your current self, you ought to now have doxastic attitude A towards p.

This move allows the permissivist to deny believing p or ~p, because the future self may have epistemic standards that conflict with the current self.

5. Disagreement

Schoenfield’s permissivism can shed light on the debate surrounding peer disagreement. Views that argue a decrease in confidence in light of peer disagreement are motivated by the same independent reasoning principle that motivates a decrease in confidence for IF cases. Independently of one’s reasoning, one cannot assign a high probability of being right. This can lead to the spineless accusation because we would too often have to reject our beliefs. But according to permissivism, this is not enough to decrease confidence (you should instead decrease confidence in light of a high probability of being irrational). Thus decreasing confidence in IF cases hinges on whether or not the case is permissive. So, there will be some scenarios where we should decrease confidence and some where we should not.