Burge on Our Privileged Access to the World

Burge on our privileged access to the external world

WILLIAM S. LARKIN

Tyler Burge has been accused before of allowing us privileged access to the external world. The specific accusation then was that Burge’s anti-individualism and his commitment to authoritative self-knowledge together imply the absurd possibility that one can have non-empirical knowledge of the external world based on introspective knowledge of one’s own thought contents.[1] Burge is innocent on that particular count of allowing us privileged access to the external world.[2] However, I will argue that he is guilty on a separate count of the same charge. My accusation now is that Burge’s entitlement account of self-knowledge and his commitment to the idea that introspective judgments are immune to brute error together imply that some ordinary beliefs about the external world can be warranted in the very same way as our introspective judgments about the contents of our own thoughts.

In “Our Entitlement to Self-Knowledge”, Burge contends that the warrant for introspective judgments (about the contents of our own thoughts) is a kind of entitlement, which he says, “consists in a status of operating in an appropriate way in accord with the norms of reason, even when these norms cannot be articulated by the individual who has that status.” (Burge 93) In general then we are epistemically entitled to any belief that allows us to operate in an appropriate way in accordance with the norms of reason. Burge thinks we are entitled in this sense to certain perceptual beliefs and logical inferences; so entitlement per se does not account for the distinctive warrant we have for introspective judgments. One must ask, then, what entitles us to introspective judgments in particular. Or in Burge’s words, “Wherein are we being reasonable—in the sense of operating under norms sanctioned by reason—in making judgments about our own minds?” (Burge 94)

Burge’s answer involves the essential role that introspective judgments play in critical reasoning—that is, “reasoning guided by an appreciation, use, and assessment of reasons and reasoning as such.” The ‘basic idea’ says Burge is this:

Since one’s beliefs or judgments about one’s thoughts, reasons, and reasoning are an integral part of the overall procedures of critical reasoning, one must have an epistemic right to those beliefs or judgments. To be reasonable in the whole enterprise, one must be reasonable in that essential aspect of it. (Burge 101).

He then puts the same argument ‘less crudely’ as:

Consider the process which involves the confirming and weighing of one’s reasons. One must make judgments about one’s attitudes and inferences. If one’s judgments about one’s attitudes or inferences were not reasonable—if one had no epistemic entitlement to them—one’s reflection on one’s attitudes and their interrelations could add no rational element to the reasonability of the whole process. But reflection does add a rational element to the reasonability of reasoning. It gives one some rational control over one’s reasoning. (Burge 1996 p. 249)

Clearly Burge is claiming that introspective judgments are essential to critical reasoning and that critical reasoning would not be warranted or reasonable unless those introspective judgments were warranted. But how exactly do we get from here to the idea that introspective judgments are warranted in virtue of their role in critical reasoning? It might look like Burge’s argument is something like this:

P1: Critical reasoning requires introspective judgments.

P2: So if introspective judgments are not warranted, neither is critical reasoning.

P3: But critical reasoning is warranted.

C: So introspective judgments are warranted.

But this cannot be what Burge intended. This is an argument from the fact that introspective judgments are essential to critical reasoning to the effect that introspective judgments must therefore be warranted; it is not an argument that because introspective judgments are essential to critical reasoning they are thereby warranted. Burge has not shown, on the above interpretation, that introspective judgments are warranted in virtue of their role in critical reasoning. For all this argument establishes, introspective judgments might be warranted in virtue of being produced by a reliable mechanism—something Burge decidedly does not want.

So we must interpret Burge’s argument differently. In particular, we have to connect up what he says about the role of introspective judgments in critical reasoning with his notion of entitlement. I suggest that Burge’s reasoning is something like the following:

P1: Introspective judgments are necessary for critical reasoning.

P2: Critical reasoning is itself a way of (or is essential to) operating in an appropriate way in accord with the norms of reason.

C: So we are epistemically entitled to introspective judgments.

This interpretation effectively has Burge arguing that since introspective judgments are a necessary means to a reasonable end (i.e., critical reasoning) those judgments are warranted. The argument clearly relies on the kind of general entitlement principle to which Burge commits himself earlier—a general principle to the effect that we are warranted in making those judgments necessary for operating in accordance with the norms of reason. Now the more specific warrant for introspective judgments derives from the fact that they are necessary for us to operate in accordance with the norms of reason in a particular way; namely, as critical reasoners. Thus Burge seems committed to the more specific entitlement principle:

(EP) If S’s belief that P is necessary for S to be a critical reasoner, then S is thereby warranted in believing P in virtue of that role.

There is more to Burge’s story about self-knowledge. He is keenly interested in establishing that the warrant for introspective judgments is “stronger than that involved in perceptual judgments” (Burge 98); and so he argues that introspective judgments must be immune to brute error in order to play their integral role in critical reasoning. A judgment is immune to brute error when that judgment cannot be mistaken so long as the subject making the judgment is not suffering from any cognitive or rational deficiencies. Brute errors are ‘no fault’ errors. Burge says the following about perceptual brute errors in Burge (1988):

Brute errors do not result from any sort of carelessness, malfunction, or irrationality on our part. Brute errors depend on the independence of physical objects’ natures from how we conceive or perceive them, and on the contingency of our causal relations to them. The possibility of such errors follows from the fact that no matter what one’s cognitive state is like...one’s perceptual states could in individual instances fail to be veridical—if physical circumstances were sufficiently unfortunate. (Reprinted in Ludlow 1998, p. 120)

Now Burge thinks that it is a distinctive feature of introspective judgments that they are immune to brute error. So he wants his entitlement view of authoritative self-knowledge to account for this. He argues that introspective judgments must be immune to brute error in order to play their essential, warrant-conferring role in critical reasoning:

It is constitutive of critical reasoning that if the reasons or assumptions being reviewed are justifiably found wanting by the reviewer, it rationally follows immediately that there is prima facie reason for changing or supplementing them, where this reason applies within the point of view of the reviewed material (not just within the reviewing perspective). If the relation between the reviewing point of view and the reasons or assumptions being reviewed always fit the simple observational model, there would never be an immediate rationally necessary connection between justified rational evaluation within the review, on one hand, and its being prima facie reasonable within the reviewed perspective to shape attitudes in accord with that evaluation, on the other. (Burge 1996, p.257)

The idea here is that if introspective judgments were like ordinary observational/perceptual judgments, then they would be subject to brute error. But then it would not “rationally follow immediately” from a prescriptive critical reasoning judgment that one had a prima facie reason for changing her attitudes accordingly. This is so, presumably, because a further premise about the reliability of one’s introspective judgments would be needed to insure against a brute error in the particular case.

There seem to me to be serious difficulties with this argument, but I do not want to get into the dirty details of reconstructing and then criticizing Burge’s subtle argument here. I just want it to be clear that Burge is claiming that in order for introspective judgments to play their crucial role in critical reasoning, they cannot be the product of some simple observational mechanism that allows for brute error. The idea is that an introspective judgment can contribute to a (reasonable) bit of critical reasoning only if it is immune to brute error. In other words, critical reasoning requires that introspective judgments be immune to brute error. So Burge is committed to:

(IBET) A bit of proper critical reasoning involving S’s introspective judgment J requires that J be immune to brute error—i.e., it requires that J be true so long as S is a properly functioning rational agent.

Burge’s entitlement account of self-knowledge is committed to both EP and IBET. I will argue in the next section that these two claims together imply the absurd possibility of having a kind of privileged access to the external world.

Burge is committed to saying that if a certain type of belief is necessary for critical reasoning, then we are epistemically entitled to it—that belief is epistemically warranted for us. He is also committed to saying that the self-attributions essential to critical reasoning must be immune to brute error in order to play their integral role. But these two claims together imply that we could be entitled to some perfectly ordinary first-order beliefs about the external world in the very same way that we are supposed to be distinctively entitled to introspective judgments about the contents of our own thoughts.

Imagine that a properly functioning rational agent S forms an introspective judgment J to the effect that she believe that there is a table in front of her. Now imagine that J plays a crucial role in a certain bit of critical reasoning by S. It follows from IBET that J has to be correct. For, J is playing a crucial role in a bit of critical reasoning and according to IBET any such introspective judgment must be immune to brute error. That is, in order to play its crucial role in critical reasoning, J must be correct so long as S is not suffering from any cognitive or rational deficiencies. Since by hypothesis S is a properly functioning rational agent, it follows that her introspective judgment J must be correct in order for it to play its crucial role in S’s bit of critical reasoning.

If S’s introspective judgment J must be correct in order for it to play its crucial role in critical reasoning, then S must in fact have the belief that there is a table in front of her in order for J to play its crucial role in critical reasoning. This means that S’s belief that there is a table in front of her is necessary for her bit of critical reasoning. IBET implies that S’s first-order belief that there is a table in front of her is a necessary means to a reasonable/warranted bit of critical reasoning. But then by EP, it follows that S is thereby warranted in believing that there is a table in front of her, and that the belief is warranted in virtue of it crucial role in a bit of critical reasoning. Thus it is that EP and IBET together imply that some ordinary first-order belief about the world can be non-empirically warranted in the very same way that introspective judgments about the contents of our own thoughts are supposed to be non-empirically warranted.

In short: If introspective judgments have to be immune to brute error in order to play their essential role in critical reasoning, then the attributed first-order beliefs are themselves necessary for critical reasoning; and so they are warranted solely in virtue of their role in critical reasoning. IBET makes the first-order beliefs attributed by introspective judgments necessary for critical reasoning, and then EP claims that those first-order beliefs are warranted in virtue of their integral role in critical reasoning. Thus if we accept Burge’s entitlement account of self-knowledge, we must accept that we can be entitled to some perfectly ordinary first-order beliefs in the same way that we are entitled to PSAs. That is, we must accept that we have a kind of privileged access to the external world.