It’s not the thought that counts

Clayton Littlejohn
cmlittlejohn@gmail.com

The Refutation of Mentalism

(Mentalism) If A and B are in the same non-factive mental states from the cradle to
the grave, p is part of A’s evidence iff p is part of B’s evidence.

Here is the refutation of Mentalism:

(1) You have non-inferential knowledge of the external world including the proposition
that p is the case (Liberal Foundationalism).
(2) If you know p non-inferentially, p is part of your evidence (IKSE)
(3) If ∼p, p is not part of your evidence (EST)
(4) It is possible for someone to be in just the same non-factive mental states you are
and mistakenly believe p.
(C) It is possible for someone to be in just the same non-factive mental states as you are
and have different evidence than you do (i.e., p is part of your evidence, not theirs).

Knowing & Having

If you think of having evidence in non-normative terms, perhaps the idea is that p is part of your
evidence when p is evidence and it is part of your perspective, something you can rely on when
trying to settle a question. If that’s all it takes to have evidence, then it should not take more
than non-inferential knowledge. There is a normative way of understanding this talk of ‘having’
evidence. You have a piece of evidence when you can properly use that piece of evidence to settle
a question. On this normative reading, IKSE must be true if IJSE is:
If p is a piece of evidence and S’s belief that p is noninferentially justified, p is part of
S’s evidence (IJSE).

Evidence and Truth

Two reasons to endorse EST. First, it makes sense of the linguistic evidence:

(1) What evidence do they have? That he was the last one to see the victim alive and
that his prints were on the murder weapon. Of course, he wasn’t the last one to see
the victim alive and his prints weren’t on the weapon.
(2) What evidence do they have? That he was the last one to see the victim alive and
that his prints were on the murder weapon. That being said, I don’t know if his
prints were on the weapon or not.
Both seem defective, but it is hard to see why these would be defective unless evidence ascriptions
are factive in the way knowledge ascriptions are and beliefs ascriptions aren’t.1
Second, think about evidence and explanation. If you know p is part of your evidence and know
that p is not a brute fact, you know that there’s some q such that ’p because q’ is true. But,
you can’t know that unless p is true. If you know that p is part of your evidence and don’t know
whether p is a brute fact or not, you know that either p is a brute fact or there’s some q such that
’p because q’ is true. Either way, p is true.
1 Seems to work with reason ascriptions, too. As Unger noted, I can’t say “His reason for going to the store/believing

that it is a good idea to go to the store is that he is out of milk but he doesn’t know that he is out of milk”. Why
not? Obvious explanation–if p is S’s reason for V-ing, S knows p. So, p isn’t anyone’s reason for anything if ∼p.

1
Evidence and Justification
Objection: external evidence is idle at best. In the good case, the subject knows non-inferentially
that p is the case because it looks as if p is the case. What’s the subject’s evidence for believing
p? I would say that it is p itself. What about the bad case? The subject’s evidence for believing p
cannot be p because in the bad case, p is false. Is there something available to the subject in the
bad case that justifies believing p? Sure—that is seems/appears that p is the case. The problem
is that it seems that this will be the subject’s basis for believing p iff it is the subject’s basis for
believing p in the good case. But, the subject’s basis for believing p in the good case is not limited
to p-neutral propositions. So, it seems that we should say that the subject in the bad case forms a
belief that isn’t based on evidence. But, then how can we say that this subject is as justified in his
belief as the subject in the good case is justified?
Objection assumes:
S’s belief that p is justified only if it is based on (appropriate) evidence (Basing).
The contentful states or contents that provide the basis for the subject’s belief in the
good case are the same in good case and bad (Same Basis).

Here’s an argument against justificatory internalism:

(1) We could not form beliefs about the external world in the way that we actually
do simply by forming beliefs in e-propositions on a basis consisting entirely of i-
propositions.2
(2) This is true for the good case and bad.
(3) If the subject did not treat the false e-propositions as reasons for believing e-
propositions, the subject would not believe on the basis that we believe in the good
case.
(4) There’s a reason for the subject in the bad case not to form beliefs in that way.
(5) There’s no overriding reason for the subject to form beliefs in that way that demands,
inter alia, treating the e-proposition as a reason to believe some e-proposition.
(6) If there’s a reason not to treat some basis as a basis and no reason that requires you
to treat some basis for belief as a basis for that belief, you shouldn’t believe on that
basis.
(7) If you believe p on a basis that you shouldn’t believe p on, your belief that p is true
is not justified.
Rather than try to explain how subjects in bad case end up with justified beliefs based on different
evidence than we have in the good case, we should just deny that their beliefs are justified. They
can’t be justified because they aren’t based on appropriate evidence.

2 Whether an e-proposition is true depends (in part) upon external facts. Not so with i-propositions.