Introduction
Matthew A. Benton, John Hawthorne, and Dani Rabinowitz
Mainstream epistemology has enjoyed a fertile period of intense theorizing in the past few years. Several of the nascent views have challenged orthodox methodology in the field whereas others shifted the direction of momentum. In the decades following Gettier’s (1963) influential paper, work in epistemology focused largely on theorizing about knowledge and epistemic justification. Defeasibility analyses of knowledge were refined while causal, reliabilist, virtue theories, and other externalist accounts of epistemic justification developed as rivals to internalist approaches.1 Insofar as these topics touched on skeptical considerations, epistemologists showed renewed interest in arguments for skepticism, and considered their relation to the structure of epistemic justification, debating over foundationalist, coherentist, and even infinitist2 theories.
These topics have given way to lively new epistemological interests, many of which bear on and are influenced by issues in philosophy of language, social philosophy, and formal philosophy. In addition, many central questions in epistemology proper have been given some revolutionary answers. While we cannot hope to offer an exhaustive overview, some highlights are worth covering.
Much recent work in epistemology is influenced by or critically engages with Timothy Williamson’s (2000, 2009) “knowledge-first” epistemology, which makes knowledge itself the primitive notion on which all other epistemological theorizing is based. Importantly, and quite tantalizingly so, Williamson argues for the equation of one’s evidence with one’s knowledge (E = K), an iconoclastic reversal of methodology and theorizing. Williamson further undermines several other fundamental tenets of mainstream epistemology, for example the luminosity of the mental and the implicit, but arguably false, “sameness of evidence” premise in arguments for skepticism. When crafted in a knowledge-first manner and with more humble epistemic aspirations, epistemology emerges stronger, more resilient to skepticism, and open to informing neighboring fields in an interesting and provocative manner.
1 See Shope (1983) for a nice overview. 2 See Klein (1999) and Turri and Klein (2014).
Central to much recent epistemology are the semantics and pragmatics of knowledge ascriptions and knowledge denials. Contextualists and relativists offer a semantics of “know(s)” and its cognates on which it is importantly sensitive to either its context of use or its context of assessment.3 By contrast, some “shifty” invariantists endorse a semantics of “pragmatic encroachment” on which the practical interests of the would-be knower, can affect the truth of a knowledge ascription or its denial.4 Each of these approaches depart from the more traditional stable invariantist semantics5 for “know(s)”; but each also claims to better explain the full linguistic data concerning our use of “know(s).”
Social epistemology emphasizes how reliant we are on our social interactions with others for our epistemic situation, and relates these issues to our individual roles as believing subjects. Significant topics in social epistemology include the following: (a) How is knowledge transmitted or gained by believing the testimony of others?6 In what way can social factors (such as gender, race, class) contribute to a person’s or a group’s credibility as testifiers, or to whether a person (or group) can believe, or learn anything from, the testimony of others?7 (b) How can the existence or acknowledgement of disagreement, especially between those one regards as peers, affect what one knows and how one should revise one’s beliefs?8 (c) What is the nature of expertise or epistemic authority, particularly as they may arise in specialized domains such as empirical science, law and public policy, or religious matters?9 Finally (d) the epistemology arising from groups and group-like agents, including institutions. Can groups have beliefs, and if so, do ordinary methods of epistemic evaluation transfer smoothly to them?10
Additionally, epistemologists have increasingly begun to deploy a wide range of intellectual tools including formal models developed for the understanding of scientific inquiry, scientific work on the nature and limits of human cognition, and work in the life sciences on the etiology of various forms of belief. A shift to credences that are represented using the probability calculus (as opposed to outright beliefs, including outright beliefs about probabilities) has proved a fertile ground for reconsidering a number of central questions in epistemology and has provided a mechanism for proving,
3 See Unger (1984, Ch. 2) for early labeling of contextualism and invariantism. See Cohen (1986, 1998) and DeRose (2009) for contextualist treatments; and MacFarlane (2005, 2014, Ch. 8) for a relativist treatment.
4 See Hawthorne (2004), Stanley (2005), Fantl and McGrath (2009, 2012), and Roeber (forthcoming a, b), though they label the pragmatic encroachment view “subject-sensitive invariantism,” “interest-relative invariantism,” “impurism,” and “anti-intellectualism,” respectively.
5 For discussion, see Brown (2005), Williamson (2005), and Reed (2010).
6 See especially Goldman (1992, Chs 10–14; and 1999), Lackey and Sosa (2006), Goldberg (2010), and Haddock, Millar, and Pritchard (2010), among many others.
7 See Mills (2007), Fricker (2007), and Medina (2012) for influential work on epistemic injustice.
8 For recent work on the epistemology of disagreement, see the collections Feldman and Warfield (2010), and Christensen and Lackey (2013); for discussion of religious disagreement, see Pittard (2015) and Benton (2018).
9 For work on expertise and authority, see Zagzebski (2012) and Goldman (forthcoming); for some applications to specialized domains, see Goldman (1999, Chs 8–11).
10 For important recent work, see Lackey (2016) and Brady and Fricker (2016).
in a more formal manner, some interesting results. Additionally, much time has been spent examining the etiological pedigree of our doxastic states, both in mainstream epistemology and moral philosophy. Suspicious origins that bear little tie to traditional evidential considerations have had many worrying about the epistemic status of a fair chunk of our doxastic homes.
Another lively area of discussion where a range of views has been proposed concerns the nature and scope of the phenomenon called defeat, wherein knowledge that is in place gets destroyed by the acquisition of misleading evidence against the proposition believed or against the propriety of the method whereby the relevant belief was formed. Different views have proposed different explanations of what is virtuous about open-mindedness and what is non-virtuous about dogmatism. The defeat literature has in turn been influenced by the shift towards formal epistemology.
Yet there has been surprisingly little infiltration of these new approaches or ideas into philosophy of religion. In the epistemology of religion, the “Reformed epistemology” of Alvin Plantinga (1967, 2000), William Alston (1991), and Nicholas Wolterstorff (2010) remains the dominant perspective.11 Reformed epistemologists argue that religious belief can be rational, or count as warranted, without the believer needing to appeal to evidence or arguments for theism. Reformed epistemologists offered parity arguments to suggest that religious belief is just as basic to a subject’s cognitive life as the deliverances of perception, memory, or a belief in the existence of other minds or the external world (Plantinga 1967, Alston 1991). Plantinga argued at length that religious belief is in this sense properly basic. On his proper function account of epistemic “warrant” (that which turns a true belief into knowledge), a belief that is true and reliably produced by a cognitive faculty in the environment for which that faculty was designed counts as knowledge (Plantinga 1993). Plantinga supplemented his proper function theory of knowledge with a Reformed account of the sensus divinitatus, the special cognitive faculty with which, Plantinga argues, God has endowed humans so that they may gain immediate and non-inferential knowledge that God exists. Alston, for his part, argued that religious belief is, or at least can be, on similar footing with sensory-perceptual beliefs: religious belief is rational, justified, and a candidate for knowledge if it is the product of a “mystical perceptual doxastic practice” which, he argues, bears similar marks to the practice of sense perception.
Without denying the importance of these figures to recent developments in philosophy of religion, the contributors to this volume wish to bring new insights to bear on issues in religious epistemology. The ideological shifts in recent epistemology are by no means at the level of small detail. Recent investigations into, for example, contextualist and pragmatic dimensions of knowledge suggest radically new ways of meeting skeptical challenges and of understanding the relation between the epistemological and practical environments. New ideas about defeat, testimony, disagreement, probability,
11 For the early definitive discussion, see Plantinga and Wolterstorff (1983). For overviews and criticism, see Zagzebski (1993), McLeod (1993), and Beilby (2005), among others.
the a priori, knowledge-how, and the nature of evidence (among others) all have a potentially revolutionary effect on our understanding of our epistemological place in the world. The epistemology of religion is a place where such rethinking can find fertile application.
The contributions to this volume draw on many of these topics in order to generate new directions for religious epistemology, and to reinvigorate interest in questions that have historically enjoyed much attention from philosophers of religion. Though chapters are grouped into four broad categories—historical, formal, social, and rational— most of them span more than one of these areas.
Charity Anderson, in “Hume, Defeat, and Miracle Reports,” investigates the rationality of failing to believe miracle reports. For the religious and non-religious alike, it is common to disbelieve testimony to the miraculous; it is also common to dismiss such testimony outright. Hume famously argued that it is irrational to believe that a miracle has occurred on the basis of testimony alone. While certain aspects of Hume’s argument have received extensive discussion, other features of his argument have been largely overlooked. After offering a reconstruction of Hume’s argument, Anderson argues that epistemic defeat plays a central role in the argument; she then explores the aptness of, as well as some limitations to, Hume’s reasoning.
In “Testimony, Error, and Reasonable Belief in Medieval Religious Epistemology,” Richard Cross considers epistemological issues taken up by some medieval theologians. Medieval epistemology was not greatly exercised by skeptical worries; but it was centrally concerned with grades of credence, ranging from Aristotelian science (highest degree), through faith, to opinion (lowest degree). Discussion generally focused on the nature of science, but accounts of faith and opinion are found in specifically theological contexts. Cross evaluates both the general epistemological theories that emerge, and their application to religious faith, focusing on disagreements between the two greatest thinkers, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. Aquinas generally adopts a fallibilist epistemology, according to which it is often impossible to have good internalist justification for a belief. In line with this, Aquinas adopts a fully externalist account of the reasonableness of divine faith: faith is justified if and only if it is caused in the believer by God. Scotus is more optimistic about the prospects for internalist justification generally. Hence, Scotus believes that it is possible to have justified belief even on the basis of merely human testimony. Thus Cross suggests that the views that the two thinkers adopt on the theological question are thus wholly parasitic on prior epistemological commitments.
Billy Dunaway, in “Duns Scotus’s Epistemic Argument against Divine Illumination,” explores epistemic risk and safety in a late medieval debate over divine illumination between Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus. Both Henry and Scotus agree that beliefs that are at risk of being false are not knowledge. For Henry, this condition applies to all of our beliefs formed by purely natural processes, and he takes this to be an argument for the conclusion that a kind of divine illumination occurs: we avoid ignorance only because God intervenes and illuminates our minds with materials that aren’t susceptible
to such risks. Scotus replies that illumination isn’t the answer to Henry’s skeptical worries. Dunaway interprets Scotus as claiming that Henry’s theory aims, but fails, to avoid skepticism—the conclusion that we can’t have any knowledge on the basis of sensation. Dunaway shows how this argument can be understood formally on the basis of an analogy with modal logic, which Scotus explicitly calls attention to. According to Dunaway, this way of understanding Scotus’s argument points toward some important refinements that contemporary anti-risk principles in epistemology will need to account for.
Dani Rabinowitz, in “Knowledge and the Cathartic Value of Repentance,” notes that the psychology of repentance has dominated the attention of both Jewish scholars and Western philosophers at the expense of the epistemology of repentance. Rabinowitz rectifies this lacuna by applying current analytic epistemology to the system of legalism and clemency found in Judaism. Apart from a limited set of exceptions, every adult Jew is required to observe the full gamut of relevant biblical and rabbinic laws. Success in this endeavor is handsomely rewarded and failure severely punished. Despite the apparent bleakness of this legalism, the system licenses a divine pardon in cases where the offending individual repents. Rabinowitz begins by discussing this clemency, as understood by Moses Maimonides, before moving on to a reading of a Talmudic debate that introduces an epistemic puzzle regarding repentance. With the epistemic contours of repentance thus exposed, Rabinowitz then evaluates how Timothy Williamson’s work on knowledge might undermine the cathartic value of repentance. The results reached naturally generalize to the cathartic role of repentance in Christianity and Islam.
Isaac Choi, in “Infinite Cardinalities, Measuring Knowledge, and Probabilities in Fine-Tuning Arguments,” investigates the role that infinities play in two problems: first, the problem of how to measure how much someone knows, and second, as they apply in objections to fine-tuning arguments. Choi first answers an objection to the view that we can measure how much we know by counting true beliefs. Given the two different ways one can compare sizes of infinite sets, based on the one-to-one correspondence principle and the subset principle respectively, Choi argues that when it comes to knowledge we should opt for the subset principle. Then he considers the normalizability and coarse-tuning objections to fine-tuning arguments for the existence of God or a multiverse. Such objections trade on the fact that an infinite range of possible values for a constant in a law of nature causes problems for talking about the epistemic probability of that constant falling within a finite life-permitting range. By applying the lessons learned regarding infinity while discussing the measurement of knowledge, Choi aims to blunt the force of the normalizability and coarse-tuning objections to fine-tuning arguments.
Hans Halvorson, in “A Theological Critique of the Fine-Tuning Argument,” presents a challenge to the fine-tuning argument for God’s existence. The fine-tuning argument attempts to use data from contemporary physics as evidence for God’s existence. In particular, contemporary physics suggests that—in absence of any divine intervention— there was little chance that a universe like ours would come into existence. Halvorson
raises a theological problem with the fine-tuning argument: since God can choose the laws of nature, God can set the chances that a universe like ours would come into existence. He argues, however, that if God could be expected to create a nice universe, then God could also be expected to set favorable chances for a nice universe. Therefore, he argues, the fine-tuning argument defeats itself.
In “Fine-Tuning Fine-Tuning,” John Hawthorne and Yoaav Isaacs argue that the fine-tuning argument is a straightforwardly legitimate argument. The fine-tuning argument takes certain features of fundamental physics to confirm the existence of God because these features of fundamental physics are more likely given the existence of God than they are given the non-existence of God. And any such argument is straightforwardly legitimate, as such arguments follow a canonically legitimate form of empirical argumentation. Hawthorne and Isaacs explore various objections to the fine-tuning argument: that it requires an ill-defined notion of small changes in the laws of physics, that it over-generalizes, that it requires implausible presuppositions about divine intentions, and that it is debunked by anthropic reasoning. In each case they find either that the putatively objectionable feature of the fine-tuning argument is inessential to it or that the putatively objectionable feature of the fine-tuning argument is not actually objectionable.
Roger White, in “Reasoning with Plentitude,” evaluates the epistemological ramifications of religious diversity in an infinite universe. Given the wide variety of religious opinion in the world, and the way these opinions conflict, at most only some fraction of them can be true. Some see this fact as raising a skeptical problem for religious belief: after all, given widespread religious disagreement, how can you tell that you are among the lucky few whose religious views are right? And some may naturally think that if the universe is infinitely large, this skeptical problem from disagreement only gets worse: in an infinitely large universe, there are an infinite number of very smart people out there somewhere who disagree with your views. Yet White argues that the epistemological impact from the problem of infinite religious diversity is in fact very small.
Max Baker-Hytch, in “Testimony amidst Diversity,” considers the epistemological credentials of religious beliefs based on testimony given the plurality of religious traditions. Testimony is a primary means by which many people hold their religious beliefs; but our world contains an array of mutually incompatible religious traditions each of which has been transmitted down the centuries chiefly by way of testimony. In light of the latter it is quite natural to think that there is something defective about holding religious beliefs primarily or solely on the basis of testimony from a particular tradition. Baker-Hytch takes up the question of in what that defect might consist: he first considers whether religious diversity entails that a religious believer’s testimonybased beliefs are not formed in a suitably epistemically reliable manner even conditional upon the truth of her religion. After casting doubt on this thought, he turns to the idea that testimony-based beliefs are subject to defeaters in light of awareness of religious diversity; but he suggests that many such beliefs are not obviously subject to defeaters. Baker-Hytch’s diagnosis of the problem, rather, is that believers who base
their religious beliefs merely on testimony will be very unlikely to have reflective (that is, second-order) knowledge even if they possess first-order knowledge; he then explains why this is a notable shortcoming.
Rachel Elizabeth Fraser, in “Testimonial Pessimism,” explores the varieties of testimonial pessimism that are often espoused when it comes to testimony about the moral, mathematical, aesthetic, or religious domains. Such testimonial pessimisms maintain that beliefs formed about these domains solely on the basis of testimony are somehow epistemically defective. Fraser calls testimonial pessimism about the religious domain—that certain ‘unprepared’ audiences are incapable of epistemically proper responses to religious testimony—epistemic calvinism. Fraser’s interest is in exploring (rather than defending) how the epistemic calvinist, and the testimonial pessimist more generally, might make theoretical space for her view. Fraser argues that looking at the tacit commitments of some mystical authors suggests a novel way of making sense of testimonial pessimism: that epistemic calvinism in particular results from tacit commitments in philosophy language, namely to ‘emotionism’ and to strong readings of the de re.
In “Experts and Peer Disagreement,” Jennifer Lackey considers the view that widespread disagreement among epistemic peers in a domain threatens expertise in that domain (arguably such a view that has telling consequences for the religious arena). Lackey sketches the expert-as-authority and the expert-as-advisor models of expertise, and then argues that the former approach, widely endorsed by philosophers, renders the problem posed by widespread peer disagreement intractable. Lackey provides independent reasons for rejecting both this model of expertise and the central argument offered on its behalf. She then develops the model of expertise in terms of advice, which not only avoids the problems afflicting the expert-as-authority model, but also has the resources for a much more satisfying response to the problem of widespread peer disagreement. The notion of expertise at work can affect the epistemic status of religious (or irreligious) beliefs acquired by treating experts as advisors rather than authorities.
Paulina Sliwa, in “Know-How and Acts on Faith,” suggests that practical knowledge is significant for our understanding of religious belief and the nature of faith more generally. When we have faith in others, Sliwa argues, we perform acts of faith: we share our secrets, rely on others’ judgment, refrain from going through our partner’s emails, or we let our children prepare for an important exam without our interference. Religious faith, too, is manifested in acts of faith: the practices of attending worship, singing the liturgy, fasting, embarking on a pilgrimage. Drawing on an analogy in moral philosophy between morally admirable actions and the nature of virtue, Sliwa argues that examining what makes a given action an act of faith can tell us about the nature of faith. This approach reveals that faith is a complex mental state whose elements go beyond doxastic states towards particular propositions. It also involves conative states and—perhaps more surprisingly—knowledge-how. Sliwa draws out the implications of such know-how for the epistemology of faith: the role of testimony
and experts, the importance of practices, and what we should make of Pascal’s advice for how to acquire faith.
Matthew Benton, in “Pragmatic Encroachment and Theistic Knowledge,” draws on pragmatic encroachment views in epistemology and evaluates their consequences for knowledge of whether theism or atheism is true. Philosophers endorsing pragmatic encroachment on knowledge suggest that knowledge is sensitive to practical stakes: that is, whether one knows can depend in part on the practical costs of being wrong. When considering religious belief, the practical costs of being wrong about theism may differ dramatically between the theist (if there is no God) and the atheist (if there is a God). Benton explores the prospects, on pragmatic encroachment, for knowledge of theism (if true) and of atheism (if true), given two types of practical costs, namely by holding a false belief, and by missing out on a true belief. These considerations set up a more general puzzle of epistemic preference when faced with the choice between two beliefs, only one of which could become knowledge.
In “Delusions of Knowledge Concerning God’s Existence,” Keith DeRose suspects that very few people, including very few who would claim to know, actually do know whether God exists. More generally, according to DeRose, very few controversial philosophical positions are ones concerning which anyone knows whether they are true. These areas DeRose calls “knowledge deserts,” and he suggests that many people suffer from delusions of knowledge when they purport to know truths in these domains. But the religious domain brings special considerations of its own, and DeRose argues that a variety of factors particular to the religious context contribute support to his suspicion that few people know whether God exists.
Margot Strohminger and Juhani Yli-Vakkuri examine “Moderate Modal Skepticism,” a form of skepticism about metaphysical modality defended by Peter van Inwagen (1995, 1998) in order to blunt the force of certain modal arguments in the philosophy of religion. Van Inwagen’s argument for moderate modal skepticism assumes Stephen Yablo’s (1993) influential world-based epistemology of possibility. Strohminger and Yli-Vakkuri raise two problems for this epistemology of possibility that undermine van Inwagen’s argument. They then consider how one might motivate moderate modal skepticism by relying on a different epistemology of possibility, which does not face those problems: Williamson’s (2007: ch. 5) counterfactual-based epistemology. Strohminger and Yli-Vakkuri find that two ways of motivating moderate modal skepticism within that framework are unpromising; yet they also find a way of vindicating an epistemological thesis that, while weaker than moderate modal skepticism, is strong enough to support the methodological moral which van Inwagen wishes to draw.
Finally, the “principle of credulity” is the claim that every belief with which a person finds himself is a justified belief (one which the believer is justified in having) in the absence of any evidence that the belief is false (which might take the form of evidence that the belief has been produced by an unreliable process). Richard Swinburne, in “Phenomenal Conservatism and Religious Experience,” investigates the senses of ‘belief’, ‘justified’, and ‘evidence’, in which this principle of credulity is true, and the
senses in which it is false. He concentrates in particular on the many different senses in which a belief can be said to be ‘justified’ or ‘rational’; and he applies these results to religious claims concerning religious experience.
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1 Hume, Defeat, and Miracle Reports
Charity Anderson
No one believes every miracle report they hear. At least, no one I know. For religious and non-religious alike, it is common to disbelieve testimony to the miraculous; it is also common to dismiss such testimony outright. This chapter investigates the rationality of failing to believe miracle reports. Hume famously argued that it is irrational to believe that a miracle has occurred on the basis of testimony alone. While certain aspects of Hume’s argument have received extensive discussion, other features of his argument have been largely overlooked. After offering a reconstruction of Hume’s argument, I will argue that epistemic defeat plays a central role in the argument and explore the aptness of as well as some limitations to Hume’s reasoning. Section 1.1 is devoted to this task. In section 1.2, I discuss the relevance of the prior likelihood of an event when evaluating the evidential strength that testimony to such an event provides. Section 1.3 explores some ways the argument is altered if we adopt a non-traditional picture of evidence and defeat.
1.1 Hume’s Argument
1.1.1
Evaluation of miracle reports
To begin, we need a gloss on the notions of ‘miracle’ and ‘miracle report.’ I will follow Hume in taking a miracle to be a violation of a law of nature by a divine agent.1 I will also assume that in general miracles are unlikely events. Miracle reports, as I shall understand them, are reports that have two components as part of their content: that an event has occurred and that the event was a miracle. One could be mistaken about one part of the report without being mistaken about the other. For instance, one might
1 I am aware that there are difficulties involved in formulating a definition of ‘miracle.’ As this issue has been discussed at length in the literature, and as I have nothing new to add, I will not enter into the nuances of various conceptions here. Nothing in this chapter depends on any particular definition. For relevant discussion, see Earman (2000), Fogelin (2003), Flew (1961), and Swinburne (1970). Those concerned about Hume’s definition of a miracle as a violation of a law of nature may also want to consider Hume’s footnote (Hume 1975, Enquiries into Human Understanding (EHU), Sec. X, 90), where he claims that if a feather is raised to the ground with insufficient wind, this counts as a miracle.
report that a formerly deaf man can now hear, and this might be true, but the event may not have been the result of a divine agent (perhaps unknown to the reporter the man underwent ear surgery). Or, suppose a farmer reports an event such as rain in a far off field. And suppose further that the natural conditions were not right for rain; rather, God directly brought about the rain, though the farmer is insensitive to this fact. In the proposed terminology, his report is not a miracle report, even though he reports an event that is in fact miraculous.
Two lines of reasoning are often appealed to in support of dismissing miracle reports. The first proceeds along the lines of asking, ‘what are the chances of that happening?’ The second relies on an expectation that the testifier is either lying or mistaken. Both lines of reasoning play a role in Hume’s argument. In what follows, I outline Hume’s argument. In order to avoid getting caught up in interpretive details, I will not insist that my favored interpretation of Hume’s argument is the only coherent interpretation of the text. Hume is unclear on some points, and this leaves his argument open to multiple readings. Nevertheless, while I think there is some room for variation, certain reconstructions strike me as incorrect. For example, any reading of Hume that takes him to be defining his way to his conclusion (by assuming that miracles are by definition impossible and that it is therefore irrational to believe miracle reports) is a misreading of the text.2 Unfortunately, it is common to find such interpretations in the literature.3 A detailed defense of my favored reconstruction of the text is advanced by Robert Fogelin (2003). Alan Hájek (2008) also offers an excellent treatment, in my opinion, though neither consider the reasoning in terms of defeat, as I will here.
Towards the beginning of ‘Of Miracles,’ Hume draws attention to a number of factors we take into account when we evaluate testimony:
We entertain suspicion concerning any matter of fact, when the witnesses contradict each other; when they are but few, or of doubtful character; when they have an interest in what they affirm; when they deliver their testimony with hesitation, or on the contrary, with too violent asseverations. (EHU, Sec. X, 89)
This first set of considerations fall into what Fogelin calls the direct test. The direct test evaluates the quality of the report. The character of the testifier, the manner of his or her testimony, the number of witnesses, and so on, are all features of the testimony relevant to our assessment of it by the direct test.4 (While for the most part Hume’s remarks here could be thought to constitute plausible and rather mundane observations about our general sensitivity to particular bits of testimony, he is not altogether
2 As others have noted, if this were Hume’s strategy it is hard to make sense of why Hume even bothers to discuss testimony to the miraculous, and why he sees the need to argue that we ought to reject such testimony.
3 For a few examples, see Broad (1916–17), Colwell (1982), Fogelin (1990), and Johnson (1999)
4 One way to explicate the direct test is through ratio of likelihoods. The direct test is a result of comparing the Pr (S testifies that p | p) with Pr (S testifies that p | not-p). Thanks to an anonymous referee for this suggestion.
correct in his observations. It is not the case that we are suspicious of any testimony delivered by only one witness—quite often one witness suffices to establish an event.)
The second method of assessment Fogelin aptly calls the reverse test. This test considers how likely it is that the reported event occurred (the probability that it occurred apart from the testimony offered for it). A poor score on either test can diminish the evidential force of a particular instance of testimony.5
Evaluation of a miracle report will involve looking at both tests. As Hume recommends, we need to ‘weigh’ both kinds of considerations. At the end of part 1, Hume indicates that upon hearing a miracle report one ought to consider both types of evaluation:
When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. (EHU, X, 91)
Much of the literature on Hume’s essay concentrates on part I, and often ignores part II entirely.6 I will maintain that part II is essential to Hume’s argument. The goal of part I is to establish that in any case of testimony to the miraculous, the reverse test guarantees that the standard for rational belief is high due to the incredibly low prior probability of any miracle. However, in part I, Hume does not claim that the standard cannot be met.7 To establish his conclusion, the argument crucially depends on the reasoning in part II.
In part II, Hume evaluates miracle reports according to the direct test and offers various reasons for thinking that this kind of testimony dismally fails the direct test. According to Hume, no past testimony to the miraculous has been of sufficient force to warrant acceptance. No previous testimony to any miracle, he contends, has the qualities required to make the testimony trustworthy—no miracle has been attested to by a sufficient number of men of education, integrity, and reputation, who have a great deal to lose if found out to testify incorrectly.8, 9 Hume further points to a natural tendency in human nature to readily believe the absurd—a tendency he attributes to the agreeable passions of surprise and wonder. In light of this bad track record, Hume
5 Since most events have low prior probability, a poor score on the reverse test will require that the likelihood of the event be abnormally low.
6 That part I offers a self-contained argument appears to be the majority view, as Fogelin (2003) notes. In this regard, my reading is at odds with the mainstream interpretation.
7 This might be a tempting interpretation given Hume’s characterization of the situation as one in which we weigh ‘proof’ against ‘proof.’ As Hume indicates, a case of proof against proof does not always end in a stalemate. One side can prove stronger than the other, as he states plainly. For this reason, it strikes me as misguided to think that Hume takes a ‘proof’ to involve insurmountable evidence. Instead, I think Hume is better read as holding that a ‘proof’ consists of very strong and exceptionless evidence—but evidence that can nevertheless be outweighed by stronger evidence. See Hambourger (1980) and Millican (2011) for further discussion of this issue.
8 See Hume, Of Miracles, part II, 99.
9 McGrew and McGrew (2009) provide a useful discussion of this section of Hume’s essay.
